Modern Tokyo is an unusual but fitting setting for a thriller, and long-term resident Hugh Ashton is sufficiently familiar with its physical and cultural nooks and crannies to create an authentic fictional version of the city. Ashton’s use of an IT geek everyman, Kenneth Sharpe, as his protagonist is a successful choice, and At the Sharpe End nicely captures both life for a westerner in the Japanese capital and the sense of an ordinary person caught in events beyond his control.
The plot revolves around a Japanese IT genius who has made an invention desired by several national governments and the Japan-based Korean underworld. Sharpe is unwittingly drawn into this mess and retains an endearingly anti-establishment, phlegmatic approach as he moves step by step towards life-threatening danger. The other principal characters - Sharpe’s wife and the Indian couple who are their best friends - also work well, being clearly delineated and rounded figures. This reader at least still has the hots for Vishal’s wife Meema and would have found it difficult to be as restrained as Kenneth Sharpe. The secondary characters are perhaps less successful, with none of the gangsters, policeman or diplomats that feature quite finding their own voice, but they serve their purpose in keeping the plot moving.
As a former employee of the British Embassy in Tokyo I took particular pleasure in seeing its fictional diplomats embroiled in an international criminal conspiracy. My own spell at the Embassy pales into tedium in comparison.
The plot revolves around a Japanese IT genius who has made an invention desired by several national governments and the Japan-based Korean underworld. Sharpe is unwittingly drawn into this mess and retains an endearingly anti-establishment, phlegmatic approach as he moves step by step towards life-threatening danger. The other principal characters - Sharpe’s wife and the Indian couple who are their best friends - also work well, being clearly delineated and rounded figures. This reader at least still has the hots for Vishal’s wife Meema and would have found it difficult to be as restrained as Kenneth Sharpe. The secondary characters are perhaps less successful, with none of the gangsters, policeman or diplomats that feature quite finding their own voice, but they serve their purpose in keeping the plot moving.
As a former employee of the British Embassy in Tokyo I took particular pleasure in seeing its fictional diplomats embroiled in an international criminal conspiracy. My own spell at the Embassy pales into tedium in comparison.
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