Beautiful Shining People

Book excerpt: A damaged young man meets an enigmatic waitress in a Tokyo cafÉ, and they embark on a journey that will change everything ... an emotive speculative literary novel set in a near-future Japan It's our world, but decades into the future ... an ordinary world, where cars drive themselves, drones glide across the sky, and robots work in burger shops. There are two superpowers and a digital Cold War, but all conflicts are safely oceans away. People get up, work, and have dinner. Everything is as it should be... Except for seventeen-year-old John, a tech prodigy from a damaged family, who hides a deeply personal secret. But everything starts to change for him when he enters a tiny cafÉ on a cold Tokyo night. A cafÉ run by a disgraced sumo wrestler, where a peculiar dog with a spherical head lives, alongside its owner, enigmatic waitress Neotnia... But Neotnia hides a secret of her own – a secret that will turn John's unhappy life upside down. A secret that will take them from the neon streets of Tokyo to Hiroshima's tragic past to the snowy mountains of Nagano. A secret that reveals that this world is anything ordinary – and it's about to change forever...