In Serenade of Souls, the final instalment of The Tokyo Trilogy, most of the love stories started in the previous volumes reach their suspenseful conclusions. Another five years have passed, and Shoko is now the Hashimoto family's oyabun or clan head. Her attempts to revamp and rebrand the crime syndicate as a slick and modern corporation meets with resistance, and unrest is brewing within her organization as a conspiracy to topple her is unfolding. Linda, for her part, is back in Tokyo, but she now faces competition in her attempts to win back Tanaka's heart. She confides in Ai, her old colleague from The Library, who gets back in touch with her ex-boyfriend, Ryo, whom she broke up with in volume one. Finally, Shoko faces an insurrection, and she has to choose between her two former roommates, Kenji and Masayoshi, who are both vying for her romantic attention.
About the author:
Jakob Halskov has a university degree in Japanese and has also studied Korean. After visiting Japan and Korea in 1995, he has travelled extensively in both countries and is deeply fascinated by their cultures and languages. He has even lived in Tokyo for a couple of years, working for a Japanese company on a local contract. These experiences and interests have propelled him and provided the inspiration and motivation for writing novels set in the Far East. As his day job, Jakob works as an IT specialist in a larger Danish company. He is married, has two kids and lives in the Copenhagen area.According to reliable sources, Jakob started typing everything from train timetables to Donald Duck's dialogues on the old family typewriter when he was only seven years old in the early 80s. In the late 90s, he struggled hard to learn how to write the almost 2,000 Chinese characters used in modern Japanese ("kanji") and experienced a bit of a breakthrough when he was finally able to read his first Murakami Haruki novel in the original language at the end of his university language training.
Since 2022 he has been writing his fiction, making his debut with "Ripples in the Waters by Lake Kawaguchi", the first volume in The Tokyo Trilogy, a cross-cultural romance starring four strong women whose suspenseful adventures we follow across the period of ten years. The plots and characters are synergistically intertwined, and the story is told from multiple points of view. Volumes two and three of the trilogy are scheduled for publication in the first months of 2023.
