Isaac Adamson

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Isaac Adamson, born in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1971, is the American author of a series of mystery novels set in Japan and featuring journalist and amateur detective Billy Chaka. Adamson currently lives in Chicago, Illinois. He is married to Chee-Soo Kim.

After graduating from Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins, Adamson attended UCLA briefly before graduating from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a degree in Film Studies.

All four of his Billy Chaka novels were published by HarperCollins. None of them are in print anymore.

Adamson's first novel, Tokyo Suckerpunch, is being made into a film by Sony Pictures Entertainment. The film, scheduled to be released in 2010, will star Tobey Maguire in the role of Billy Chaka.

[edit] List of Books

Tokyo Suckerpunch: A Billy Chaka Adventure (2000)
Hokkaido Popsicle (2002)
Dreaming Pachinko (2003)
Kinki Lullaby (2004)

[edit] Description of Books

From the Official website billychaka.com:

Tokyo Suckerpunch is described as the following "Meet Billy Chaka, ace reporter for Youth in Asia, Cleveland’s hottest selling Asian teen-rag. Chaka is in Tokyo to cover the Under-19 Handicapped World Martial Arts Championship and meet with his friend Sato Migusho, the renowned director of cult film classics like "Sex-Up the Hotrod, Baby!" But Sato never shows. Instead, a woman stumbles into a dive bar with tattooed yakuza in hot pursuit. Then Chaka discovers that Sato has been murdered, and the strange and beautiful woman just may have been a witness. As the mystery deepens, Billy will start brawls in swanky corporate sex clubs, be offered a golf membership by a secret religious order, meet a dog trained in the Way of the Samurai and race stolen motorcycles through the neon-choked streets of Tokyo."

Hokkaido Popsicle is described as the following "After an altercation with the director of Wildman for Geisha!—a movie loosely based on Billy Chaka’s life--Billy is in Hokkaido on mandatory vacation. He’s staying at the Hotel Kitty when the eldery Night Manager stumbles into Billy’s room one night and dies. Meanwhile, miles away in Tokyo, the lead singer of Saint Arrow, Japan’s most popular rock band, has just been found dead in sleazy love hotel. When Chaka goes to Tokyo to cover the story, he soon finds out there’s more to the rocker’s apparent drug overdose than meets the eye. A Beatles-obsessed record executive, a mute DJ, two giant kickboxing twins with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music, a Swedish stripper working at The Purloined Kitten club—all will play a part as Billy Chaka discovers that the rock star and the Night Manager just might share a very strange link."

Dreaming Pachinko is described as the following "Tokyo, July 2001 -- Hardboiled reporter Billy Chaka is back in the neon metropolis interviewing a has-been pop singer turned pachinko fanatic for a one page feature in Youth in Asia magazine. Looks like an easy assignment until he witnesses a beautiful young woman suffer a seizure in the Lucky Benten pachinko hall. When she is later found dead in murky canal beneath the expressway, Chaka becomes embroiled in an apparent blackmail plot involving a powerful Ministry of Construction official, a brash nineteen year-old girl, a shadowy entity known only as Mr. Bojangles and four silent figures who have a penchant for showing up uninvited inside Chaka's room at the bizarre Hotel Cerulean. As the bodies pile up and the mystery deepens, Chaka must untangle the lies, obsessions, and seemingly supernatural events that link the dead woman to a forgotten incident that occurred during the desperate closing days of WWII. Dreaming Pachinko is a tense, funny and often surreal thrill ride through the city of the future, a place where no one can escape the past."

Kinki Lullaby is described as the following "Wisecracking reporter and reluctant detective Billy Chaka is back, his latest misadventure bringing him to Osaka to accept an award for an article he’d written about a teenage bunraku puppet prodigy named Tetsuo. Billy quickly learns, however, that Tetsuo has been expelled from Osaka’s most prestigious theatre company following a bloody, unexplained incident involving a fellow puppeteer. While Billy tries to unravel that mystery, an American man in the hotel room next door is found brutally murdered. Investigating the homicide and its bizarre link to the young puppeteer plunges Billy into a shadowy world where dreams and reality violently intermingle and people are never who they seem – a world not far removed from that of the bunraku theatre that flourished in Osaka hundreds of years ago, stylishly recast for the neon stage with decrepit gangsters, clueless expatriates, dangerous women, and one seriously deranged hotel employee. Two parts noir and one part playful irreverence, Kinki Lullaby is a sly whodunit that unfolds with the twisted charm of a fever dream."