This extraordinary first novel – noisy, hilarious, and tragic – falls somewhere between Thomas Wolfe and Monty Python. Rui Umezawa, a Japanese-born writer living in Toronto, tells the story of three generations of the Hayakawa family, beginning in Kitigawa, southeast of Tokyo. Their lives are shattered by Pearl Harbor and its aftermath; Yasujiro, a doctor with a penchant for pacifism and nudity, does not survive. His son Shoji, maimed physically and emotionally, becomes a physicist and moves his young family to Milwaukee. He dies of cancer, leaving an embittered wife and two sons – Toshi, the crazy one, and Kei, the lean, clever one, who takes off for Toronto and a career as a rock musician.

The story charges back and forth across decades, from a Led Zeppelin concert to a Shinto shrine. Umezawa zooms in and out of the consciousnesses of dozens of characters, from a club bouncer to a Holocaust survivor, but the dominant perspective is that of Toshi. His interior life is intense, his actions bizarre: he shouts in restaurants, lies face down in the school corridor.

The narrative is soaked with scatalogical outbursts and painful longings, and the imagery is both lyric and ludicrous, often in the same paragraph. Cultures collide: red bean-cake meets Twinkies and Ding Dongs that never go stale, “like vampires.” A scene of teenage boys feeding squid snacks to a dog in the back of a van is followed gruesomely by an academic colleague chainsawing off his foot while taking a Japanese visitor to a Christmas-tree farm: spurting blood transforms the snow “into the old Imperial Japanese flag.” Next scene: the family buys a fake tree from Sears and trims it. The reader is by turns horrified, amused, irritated, and saddened – and ultimately admiring.

True to his title, Umezawa follows several characters to the point of death. Death and dying, it seems, are very much like life: a flood of images, painful, sublime, oddly funny.