See the Roppongi website and LIKE the Roppongi Facebook page for more info/updates.
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‘Roppongi’ popped my Kindle cherry – and what a way to go! I read the book in one weekend and was delivered into a fantasy world far removed from my current reality of N’Djamena, Chad, Africa. But it wasn’t so far from a past reality, because Nick and I were friends in Japan back in the day. ‘Roppongi’ is indeed weird and wonderful and fantastically real. At first it was hard to disassociate myself with the Roppongi I knew but I quickly became caught up in the story. Zack is a bit all knowing at first but the voyage of discovery he goes on draws you in and you like him a lot more at the end than the beginning. I can only recommend ‘Roppongi’ highly, and have and will be buying it for friends – though maybe not for the Mammy! 🙂
About Nick Vasey
Nick Vasey was born in 1968, raised in various parts of Australia, and completed a Commerce degree in accounting, marketing and law in 1989 at Murdoch University, in Perth, Western Australia. Thereafter, one year of working in a multinational accounting practice was all it took to convince him to quit the typical career-path, and go travelling instead. Wise choice!
Over the next fifteen years Nick had a variety of adventures in over forty countries around the world. It would be safe to say that travelling itself became his primary passion. These experiences have confirmed in Nick a profoundly anarchic streak, and repeatedly proved to him that governments rarely have their citizens' best interests at heart, and by default, should therefore be regarded with extreme scepticism.
Two of these years of global gallivanting (94/95 & 97/98) were very joyously spent living, working and partying in the nightlife industry, or mizu-shobai (water-trade), of Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan. The purpose each time was simple; to save as much money as possible in order to fund further travelling adventures. Suffice to say these two years in Roppongi proved to be more than sufficient in terms of providing both the material and the motivation for writing his first novel, 'Roppongi'.
Out of curiosity, in 2004 Nick briefly returned to Australia and plugged back into the 'Matrix' for a while, but found he still had no use for it. Dumbfounded and disappointed by people's mindless pursuit of material wealth, AFL Football and reality-TV, in 2008 he quit the first-world altogether, for a more tranquil life in the Southern-Sierran township of Vilcabamba, Ecuador ... where he now lives simply with his menagerie of animals, in the mountain-top sanctuary 'Motu-Iti'.
In 2008 Nick also founded the real-estate consultancy "Vilcabamba Real Estate Company" (VREC Properties) ... which helped many people relocate to Vilcabamba and find their dream property. In 2016 he and his VREC business partner Santiago moved on to their new project, InstaCasa (www.instacasa.biz). InstaCasa is based in Ecuador, and manufactures state of the art prefabricated modular housing.
So, currently, Nick is pretty busy, but he is still writing! If you'd like to get in touch, please email him directly via: nick AT nickvasey DOT com
Roppongi - the Novel
Roppongi is an 'adventure-travel-fiction' story, exploring the crazy and often dangerous world which is living and working as a foreigner in the Roppongi nightlife industry of Tokyo, Japan. The novel follows the (mis)adventures of its travel-addicted protagonist Zack, and in that respect is similar thematically to Alex Garland's 'The Beach' or Gregory David Roberts' 'Shantaram.' Accordingly, the reader is viscerally transported into the surreal realms of Roppongi, as Zack attempts to come to terms with a series of life-changing events unfolding at rapid pace. In the process, the novel punches through the impossibly glamorous surface of Roppongi and plunges the reader deep into its seedy underbelly ... showing a disturbing side of Japan not often written about in the English language.
See the Roppongi website and LIKE the Roppongi Facebook page for more info/updates.
Roppongi the Novel by Nick Vasey 