The Hotel Hokusai

By (author) T. Y. Garner

It is 1893: Yokohama is a melting pot of international influence and opportunity as well as Japan’s portal to the world. Its air hangs thick with an intoxicating miasma of loneliness and desire, but fails to mask the emerging stench of death.

When a young woman is found drowned in Yokohama Harbour under suspicious circumstances, downtrodden Korean eel salesboy Han compels the eccentric Glaswegian artist Archie Nith to seek the truth, though it requires more of them than just naïve integrity to paint a picture of what actually happened. Written from the perspectives of both Han and Nith, The Hotel Hokusai follows their twisting journey as it snakes all the way from Yokohama’s harbour to its red-light district. Can they grasp reality when the truth is as slippery as a basket of eels?