Ebisu Bridge: A Tale of Modern Japan

By Alex Shishin

Homeless and disabled, Motoshima Saburo, 58, sells The Big Issue on Osaka’s colorful Ebisu Bridge, a short pedestrian thoroughfare filled with tourists, lovers, artists and hustlers of every stripe. Constantly struggling with both destitution and loneliness, which he compares to a jail where one is both prisoner and warden, Saburo falls into a moral battle with Ken, an aging toy boy and “dating club” tout, for the soul of “The Waif,” a tranquilizer addicted 17-year-old runaway, whom Ken has used for a haywire robbery. Saburo assumes the role of father and lover, though he cannot be either to the confused girl who will not tell him or anyone else her name. The story is set in 2009, in the midst of the Great Recession, which adds to the desperation that the three main characters face and casts an ominous shadow over the daily buoyancy on Ebisu Bridge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Shishin
• Release date: Mar 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310703287

Alex Shishin

Alex Shishin has published fiction, non-fiction and photography in Japan, North America, and Europe in print and online. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Shishin is a permanent resident of Japan. Shishin is the author “Nippon 2357:A Utopian Ecological Tale,” and five other ebooks published exclusively by Smashwords and available for free. He is co-author with Stephan F. Politzer of “Four Parallel Lives of Eight Notable Individuals,” also published by Smashwords. Shishin's short story "Mr. Eggplant Goes Home," first published in “Prairie Schooner” received an O. Henry Award Honorable Mention and was anthologized in “Student Body: Stories About Students and Professors” (University of Wisconsin Press). His short story "Shades," originally published in “Sunday Afternoon” (Kobe) was anthologized in The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan (Stone Bridge Press) and reprinted by invitation in “The East” (Tokyo).  Shishin’s book “Rossiya: Voices from the Brezhnev Era” (a Russian-American memoir of a train odyssey through the Soviet Union and Poland) was published by iUniverse. It is available as a print-on-demand book and an ebook. Shishin has also published a collection of photographs entitled “Ordinary Strangeness” with Viovio in conjunction with his joint exhibition at the Twenty-first Century Museum of Art, Kanazawa, Japan. It is available from the publisher online. Alex Shishin holds degrees in English from the University of California, Berkeley (BA, Phi Beta Kappa) the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (MFA) and the Union Institute and University (PhD).

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