Great title. I hadn’t heard about this novel before, but now that it’s being made into a film I’m all ears; especially since I now find that my new crush, Anne Hathaway, is involved.

According to Amazon (and other sources), this is a story about Billy Chaka, a popular writer who’s come to Tokyo to cover the 19 and Under Handicapped International Martial Arts Championship. While Chaka is waiting in a bar for the arrival of his old friend, filmmaker Sato Migusho, an apparently drunken woman enters and rushes for the ladies’ room. Immediately recognizing her as a geisha in disguise, on the lam from disgruntled clients, Chaka helps her escape. While on a quest to find the mysterious geisha, Chaka keeps stumbling over imponderables which begin to strangely resemble one of his own story plots; including a run-in with a yakuza leader named Kwaidan and an unnamed religious cult. Sort of like if you crossbred The Big Sleep with Memoirs of a Geisha and then took its offspring and crossed it with Chinatown you’d end up with Tokyo Suckerpunch–a tongue-in-bloody-cheek quasi-punk-noir tale of death and deception in the superfantastic Far East.

Sounds like quite the genre picture… with Anne Hathaway? For now, despite the casting of Tobey Maguire (also producing), you can count me in on this one.