<DIV><i>The Method Actors</i> is set in Japan, New York, and New Zealand?places in an age of the global village and pervasive internationalism where many young people find themselves in transit. The story traces the disappearance of a young military historian named Michael Edwards from his desk in Tokyo. His sister Meredith returns to the city in search of him and there she meets up with old friends and acquaintances from all over the world: ex-JET exchange teachers from Canada, ex-drug addicts from Australia, drug dealers from the Netherlands, young American women with Japanese husbands, French kitchen hands, young Japanese mushroom growers, and wealthy young Chinese-Americans living the high life.<BR><BR>Meredith begins to encounter increasing evidence that Michael has been involved in a secret history going back through Japanese war crimes in China in World War II to the quarantining of Dutch merchants on manmade islands during Japan's period of isolationism in the seventeenth century. The secret history works as a juxtaposition to the moral ambiguity of modern gaijin life in Tokyo.<BR><BR>Stylistically daring, this multilevel narrative and cutting-edge debut novel questions no less than the moral framework of our modern world.</div>