“In Hoshino’s dystopia, identities are fluid and any one is as good as another . . . Hoshino’s ambitious novel is pleasingly uncomfortable.”
—Publishers Weekly

“The premise of this funny and ultimately disturbing novel hinges on a telephone scam rife in Japan: someone – typically elderly and ill-accustomed to cellphones – gets a call from somebody saying only ‘it’s me’ and frantically pleading for help, usually in the form of wired cash. But when the novel’s main character tries the scam, he’s drawn into a bizarrely warped reality in which the scam itself seems to be cloning and scrambling the identities of the scammers – a reality in which it really is ‘me.’ I was quietly thrilled throughout.”
—Open Letters Monthly, included in Best Books of 2017: Science Fiction and Fantasy

“Hoshino’s latest-in-translation (rendered by De Wolf) begins as black comedy and devolves into an antisolipsistic treatise on the impossibility of individual identity.”
—Booklist

“Part existential fable, part Night of the Living Dead, Mr. Hoshino’s inventive novel, accessibly translated by Charles De Wolf, paints a nightmare vision of Japan’s rootless millennials, who work grinding dead-end jobs that leave them little time for family or individual passions . . . At first Hitoshi and his fellow MEs are happy to band together against an uncaring world. But the camaraderie doesn’t last, since every time one reveals a character flaw the others take it as an indictment of themselves. As the MEs’ failures and weaknesses become intolerably magnified onto the ‘living but useless rabble’ they’re gripped by a suicidal impulse that unleashes a crazed murder spree. The frenetic, knife-wielding finale reaches its climax in—a McDonald’s, of course. None of them can think of any place else to eat.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“A Kafkaesque journey of a lonely narrator being absorbed by an impersonal system.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“ME is a searing critique of how the individual’s sense of self erodes under the weight of modern urban culture in Japan. As Hoshino tilts the reader into a schizophrenic questioning of identity, it is easy to forget how the story started: a common, two-bit crime in a McDonald’s. The ease with which Hoshino leads Hitoshi—and the reader—into a vertiginous alternate reality is so seamless that the novel requires a second read to fully appreciate its nuances. A testament to Hoshino’s imagination and ambition, ME is a delightfully surprising and bizarre story which develops into a masterful interrogation of how individuals and families come to terms with themselves in an ever-evolving society that is often just as confused as the people themselves.”
—Harvard Review Online

“A cell phone stolen on a whim turns into a full-blown scam when Hitoshi pretends to be someone else to line his own pockets, but he quickly finds his deception is unnecessary—everybody, even his own mother, sees him as the man whose identity he stole. In this reflective novel, Tomoyuki Hoshino explores the nature of identity while providing commentary on Japanese society as a whole.”
—World Literature Today, included as a Nota Bene selection

“An eerie exploration of the comforts and terrors of conformity, ME is part parable, part nightmare, part slapstick comedy, and part something I’m not sure has any label at all.
—The Weekly Standard, included in the Winter Books 2017 Roundup

“There’s speculative fiction that imagines other worlds and alternate realities, and then there’s the kind that unsettles us precisely by its slight tweaking of everyday situations. ME is the perfect example of the latter. When the narrator engages in a common telephone scam, he suddenly finds himself inhabiting a new identity. No one seems to notice that he and others have switched families, as if the switch itself had never happened. A strange, unnerving story set in contemporary Japan.”
—Tor.com

“The imaginative story of a rather unimaginative camera salesman, ME features Hitoshi Nagano; his troubles begin with his impulsive theft of a cell phone from another customer at a McDonalds. They end with a post-apocalyptic future for everyone in Japan.”
—New York Journal of Books

“It’s an excellent take on the problems of Japanese society, looking at what it means to play your role in the community while keeping a sense of individuality. However, in Hoshino’s trademark style, what starts off as a story based in reality very quickly pushes the envelope in terms of everyday life, soon taking us into far more speculative territory.”
—Tony’s Reading List

“Mr. Hoshino’s superb talent allows for a development of the richly imaginative details that is completely natural, without any hint of forced contrivances . . . There is a clear distinction to be seen here between ME and the sort of television drama or potboiler fiction already available that take up telephone fraud as a social topic. Nor does the novel allow itself to slip into simplistic allegory. The weight of reality it creates reflects the substantiality of the author’s prowess. [Chapters 3 and 4] surpass even Kōbō Abe, Japan’s great forerunner in the power of literary thought. The author has leaped to a higher level.”
—Kenzaburō Ōe, Nobel Prize–winning author of The Silent Cry, from the afterword

“Tomoyuki Hoshino’s ME is a daring literary triumph, unlike any book you’re likely to read this year or any other. Inventive, absurd, and thrilling, Hoshino draws upon the work of a wide array of literary masters—Abe, Camus, Vonnegut, and Chandler—to create a character and world that’s wholly unique. A thoughtful, somewhat surreal exploration of the darkest self-reflexive tendencies of this modern moment. I strongly recommend it.”
—Joe Meno, author of Marvel and a Wonder

“There is more than a little of a great episode of Black Mirror in Tomoyuki Hoshino’s funny, frightening ME. But ME is considerably more than a clever premise, and as I moved deeper into mental and physical dislocation alongside its hero, I felt my own sense of reality being pulled apart. Hoshino’s sharp, understated prose, in Charles De Wolf’s excellent translation, is what makes this incredible journey possible. The whole is both pleasurable and profound.”
—Laird Hunt, author of The Evening Road