Table of Contents and Synopsis:
Prologue: Metal Machine Music
Part 2: Songs From A Room
Chapter 1 – Bird on a Wire
Chapter 2 – Story of Isaac
Chapter 3 – A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes
Chapter 4 – The Partisan
Chapter 5 – Seems So Long Ago, Nancy
Chapter 6 – The Old Revolution
Chapter 7 – The Butcher
Chapter 8 – You Know Who I Am
Chapter 9 – Lady Midnight
Chapter 10 – Tonight Will Be Fine
Part 3: Trompe Le Monde
Chapter 1 – Trompe Le Monde
Chapter 2 – Planet of Sound
Chapter 3 – Alec Eiffel
Chapter 4 – The Sad Punk
Chapter 5 – Head On
Chapter 6 – U-Mass
Chapter 7 – Palace of the Brine
Chapter 8 – Letter to Memphis
Chapter 9 – Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons
Chapter 10 – Space (I Believe In)
Chapter 11 – Subbachultcha
Chapter 12 – Distance Equals Rate Times Time
Chapter 13 – Lovely Day
Chapter 14 – Motorway to Roswell
Chapter 15 – The Navajo Know
Part 4: Candy Apple Gray
Chapter 1 – Crystal
Chapter 2 – Don’t Want to Know If You Are Lonely
Chapter 3 – I Don’t Know For Sure
Chapter 4 – Sorry Somehow
Chapter 5 – Too Far Down
Chapter 6 – Hardly Getting Over It
Chapter 7 – Dead Set on Destruction
Chapter 8 – Eiffel Tower High
Chapter 9 – No Promises Have I made
Chapter 10 – All This I’ve Done For You
Part 5: Jerusalem
Isaac Palmer, a Canadian drifter/backpacker, is in Australia when he wakes up next to a dead woman and a pile of money. Panicking, he flees the scene and rushes to the airport and hops on a plane. Knowing the police will soon be on his trail, he chooses Japan as a country large enough to lay low in boards a plane.
Arriving in Tokyo where he doesn’t know a soul, he falls in with a group of college kids camped out in front of Tokyo Station. Rock ‘n’ roll groupies, they listen to CDs from vast music libraries by day and watch indie bands in live houses at night. After his first night out with his new friends, Palmer returns to their pad to find intruders have entered. Fleeing the scene again, Palmer heads to Osaka.
Over a few uneventful but fear-fraught months, during which he picks up passable Japanese and finds work in a very small night club that hosts an endless supply of indie bands, Palmer relaxes enough to begin to reassemble his life and forms a band of his own. To hide his identity in public appearances, he plays with a mask on and gets his bandmates to do the same. He also experiences a broad cross-section of Japan’s vibrant indie band scene, and the book is peppered with descriptions of the bands and their live shows.
Palmer forms a relationship with a mysterious Japanese woman he nicknames Sheherezade. A budding rock star, he also enjoys a series of casual relationships, but is also haunted by images of the dead woman in Sydney.
Despite his many affairs, the one person he’s serious about turns out to be Sheherezade. When she finally disappears from his life mysterious things begin to happen, and he gets word of people he has slept with since arriving in Japan coming to horrible ends—is this a repetition of what happened in Australia? Is he the one committing the murders? Why can’t he remember anything?
With his sanity fraying, there’s another disaster—fans have taken a picture of him unmasked and posted it to their fansite. He decides to break into their apartment and delete the material, but is discovered and in a blind rage destroys the apartment and its inhabitants. With his world now officially crumbled, he decides to resolve the situation; but this time instead of fleeing he sends a signal to his pursuers and is apprehended.
The final section of the book—told in a suggestive collection of dream-like fantasies—follows Palmer’s deprogramming from a period of heightened paranoid dementia through a series of surreal visions that hint that Isaac’s rich fantasy life has led him to believe that he is an assassin with Sheherezade as his minder; Isaac eventually recovers and is returned to his former life in the US Midwest where, in a daze, he is reunited with his wife and young son.
