If you love your novels being a creation of part-story, part-art, then Kuzma Vostrikov and Ajuan Song’s Just to Land in Tokyo will be something you may well be enormously enamoured to climb inside of.  

With a book dressed in bright pink, the visual artists have combined their talents of storytelling through a fictional narrative that’s juxtaposed with bright photographic, surreal and suggestive images, which sightsee unusual situations – and the images respond to the words on the page, and other times enhance it. And in the centre of the swirl of the fictitious tale is a love story, which may be faintly based on the life and experiences (in some contexts) of the creators themselves.

Dual authors Vostrikov and Song are multimedia visual artists whose practices here embrace the role of writing, digital photography, and surrealism within an efficiently simple thematic: that of obsession. Just to Land in Tokyo is principally in New York, and tells us of the love story of German photojournalist Hans and a Japanese singer and musician named Yuma. On one night out, Hans is captivated by Yuma’s performance (as is the entire street at one point) after watching and meeting her at The Blue Note Jazz Club.

They connect, they collaborate through thoughts and feelings but, you see, this is actually a setup that may or may not fully have happened. In reality, or is it, Han’s creative and inventive mind might be all about a girl who might not even exist… with the story most definitely from his viewpoint, introducing the prospect of an unreliable narrator but maybe even he doesn’t exist either – like a wisp in the wind, or like a cold breath on a warm mirror.

Despite the unknown, Just to Land in Tokyo certainly revels in the bliss of early love, and the fantasies we’re all prone to at one point or another in your life, depending on situations – of course. While I did enjoy the adventure of escapism, alongside a photographic gallery that pops up at different points of the book – to prompt us of the surrealism of the tale, which is fashionably laced with hints of Andy Warhol and Dali that echoes the story told – I would have loved further experimentation with the use of text and typography as the book progresses, and maybe when the stories and sanity levels ostensibly unravel. I relished the paragraph of ‘I love you!’ in a sizable selection of languages, but found myself wondering if there was room for further word play across the pages, quite literally, as if leaves falling across a wintery wood, almost in the distant realms of House of Leaves.

Saying this, you do feel the nature of longing for a connection throughout, and it’s displaced with mental health highs and lows, something that’s utterly understandable in not only a major city like New York or Tokyo, but in any situation in day-to-day life. It could be said that Just to Land in Tokyo also explores the efforts someone would go to find a way to plug into a lonely city, whilst you try to find your place within it, and this is something I definitely have first-hand experience of as well, when I moved to London, and before that to Belfast.

One thing that’s also definitely true is the authentic scale of the setting, there’s almost the smell of the streets and the characters, like Martin Scorsese’s odyssey in After Hours, the strange goings on there are reflected here as you try to work out the reality from the fiction, or is that the other way around, or at all? You get a slight sense of Ulysses, and Hans own expedition through fixation, love, dreaming and erotic reveries, flanking every traipse and trudge down the finest alleys, as well as the darkest ones.

The book does open with texts from Rosa J. H. Berland, Anthony Haden-Guest, and Jonathan Goodman, yet I’d suggest reading those after you conclude the book, and just dive off into Ajuan and Kuzma’s Just to Land in Tokyo as it entices you into its eccentric ecosphere with a rippling deep, affecting love that, even at its lowest moment, encourages you as the reader to soar a little higher.

Just to Land in Toyko is out now from Orange Art Foundation: https://amzn.to/3Tqxfii