Monterey, California. 1967? Yes, undoubtedly. Kensley Tremens, a young Japanese half-caste, uninterested in the Summer of Love and the Vietnam War, is wandering in search of his origins. His adoptive father, an alcoholic war veteran tormented with guilt, has revealed to him that his mother was raped by an escaped Japanese prisoner of war.

But what if Japan invaded the United States? What if phantom squadrons led by an imaginary samurai bombed a contemporary art installation deep in Death Valley on certain evenings at a specified time? And what if these raids coincided with the agitated dreams of a young man with his face in bandages and suffering from amnesia, all the time closely watched by the army? We wouldn't be in 1967, then. We would be elsewhere, in a world of quests where nothing is what it seems, where no holds are barred in the race towards madness and death and in finally exacting a just revenge.

A novel about pain and structural disintegration, Sayonara Baby recounts the irremediable damage caused to pure minds by war and lies, and traces the path of a possible redemption through oblivion, flight and schizophrenic rebirth.