[Blog Tour] 'Shadow Shinjuku' By Ryu Takeshi #UrbanFantasy #CrimeThriller

Shadow Shinjuku - Book Tour Poster

The Book:

Shadow Shinjuku 

By Ryu Takeshi

• Publication Day: 5th August 2021 
• Publisher: Purple Crow Press
• Page Count: 358 pages
• Genre: Urban Fantasy/Crime Thriller

The Blurb:

The streets of Tokyo are different at night.

There is darkness behind the glitter and the neon lights, and people who prefer to stay in the shadows, to dwell in the underworld – whores, gangsters, the homeless, the lost.

People like Sato.

He’s part of this world, he always has been, but a feeling of change is lingering in the heavy air of the bustling city. A feeling brought to life by fateful encounters of solitary souls.

Shadow Shinjuku is a dark, yet magical journey into the depths of Tokyo’s nightlife and the depths of the human soul.

Ryu Takeshi’s first novel is both a crime thriller and urban fantasy. It's a unique and mesmerizing blend of the imagery of Japanese animation and film, the colors and details of street photography, and the mystical lyricism of soulful music.

But above everything, it is a gripping story that doesn’t let go.

• Buying Links: Amazon UK ✔ Amazon US ✔  

Shadow Shinjuku - Book Cover

'Shadow Shinjuku' - Excerpt:

I took a shower after practice and then made a simple dinner. I had an omelet with three eggs, tofu, and green peppers. A typical dinner of mine – I would have it three or four times a week. Simple, light, tasty. And I liked the combination of colors. The yellow, the green, and the white went really well together. For a while, I had thought it was only me with this strange attraction to this particular set of colors, but then I learned that people over in Europe love preparing eggs with spinach and goat cheese. Of course, you prepare a dish because you want to eat something good, but it can’t be good enough if it doesn’t have the looks. Even before the tongue gets to decide whether the food is good or bad or somewhere in between the nose and the eyes give the first impression. And the first impression is crucial. It creates an idea of how the food will taste, and it’s almost impossible to ignore. Like planting a seed inside the mind, for small veins to then grow out of it in the blink of an eye. These veins run wide, run deep, and attach themselves to all kinds of other veins from other seeds of other ideas. And it requires precision surgery to detach and untangle them. As I said, it’s almost impossible. But there is a way. Kei once told me about a person who can fully remove one idea from the mind while leaving everything else intact. The “Cleaner”, he called him.

According to Kei, artificially removing ideas is risky. When you remove them, they don’t disappear, die, or self-destruct. No, they stay. More precisely, they go back to the “Sea of Thought” – the source of all ideas. The Sea of Thought is usually not visible to us humans. It resides in a different dimension. It’s hard to describe, but a simple version would be to think of it as the outer layer of space. The one up there, with all the planets and stars. The infinite one. You take the space, then turn it inside out, like a sweater, and that’s where you find the Sea of Thought.

Ryu Takeshi 

Author Bio:

Ryu Takeshi loves to write. It’s a way for him to find and explore new worlds, both inner ones and those way outside. And this process is spontaneous and instinctive, his stories born out of a single image, following a path Ryu himself never fully understands – not its origin, nor its end -, immersed in the magic of the moment, and the magic of everything that surrounds us, the visible and the invisible.

Ryu is a daydreamer, a believer in the magic of humanity, a friend to all the mystical creatures of the night, and a sucker for the visual beauty of anime. But above all else, Ryu is just a human being, like yourself.

Ryu was born in 1983, has a beautiful wife, a funny little dog, and a lovely daughter. He adores sumo, practices traditional kenjutsu, sometimes plays basketball (Go Denver Nuggets!), relaxes playing video games, watching anime and reading books.

Oh, and he loves to eat! But who doesn’t…

Connect With Ryu Takeshi:

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