Book excerpt: Creatively employing song lyrics of that genre as segues, the reader is hopefully guided to and experiences reading on multiple levels. Life’s events unfold from Louisiana, to California, and ultimately culminate in Okinawa, Japan. Wild Tales from the East is a suspenseful emotional thriller that chronicles the travels and encounters of a black twenty-one-year-old recent college graduate (1968). About to be drafted, he enlists for four years in the US Navy as a medic. Hurling headlong into a turbulent transitional period in our nation’s history, the narrator’s inner journey, in many ways, reflects the upheavals of that day. He soon finds himself in Southern California and discovers there that the simplistic world of rural Louisiana has ill prepared him for the waves of change heading his way. With the war in Vietnam dividing loyalties, conflicts also abound within the narrator as he searches for self-identity, his place in the sun, and that elusive thing called love. Experiencing a metamorphosis of kind, his gradual inculcation into the counterculture movement often places him in conflict with himself and the military’s ideals. He struggles to bridge two worlds: one of the status quo and the other of a world that reflects his emerging sense of independence and freedom. Although he still harbors emotional attachment to a doomed illicit affair, he opts to marry a hometown girl and thus maintain normalcy. Shattered, all wedding plans are off when he unexpectedly receives orders to Okinawa. With all familial supports abandoned and an inner renunciation of the so-called American values, arriving in the Oriental world of the East, he presents himself essentially as a man without a country. The narrator finds the world of the East to be mysterious, seductive, and populated by warm and open people. A yearlong sojourn ensues. It is a world that he becomes intimately one with. The warm, balmy, tropical island of Okinawa is tailor made for him. Likened to a fantasy island, it is also one ideally suited for the raucous and outrageous times of that era. He finds Okinawa to be a place that caters to the desires and appetites of those who would dare pursue them. It’s a place where eroticism and mysticism meet. Into this Wild West–like cauldron, much like the biblical prodigal son, the author submerses himself. With his “old self” disintegrating, barriers that hinder total interaction in the moment, for him, no longer exist. Along with a “band” of associates often fueled by psychedelics and other contraband, he and they plow fearlessly into the nights and heights of exhilarating extremes, and thus comes Wild Tales from the East. The narrator’s nights and days are relentlessly driven by a deeper inner longing created by his ill-fated but defining love affair. His personal search for unification and fulfillment is haunted by that ever-present undertow. Often tortuously painful, his search for redemption is played out against the backdrop of an ancient culture that is also confronting the arrival of a “new age.” A walking wayfarer in a strange land, he uncovers hidden mysteries and secrets of the universe from unanticipated sources. Along his path, varied individuals present themselves and their individual struggles for survival. En route, he also stumbles across travelers of the night; and casting his lot among these sojourners and seekers of truth, he severs ties with his land of birth. Aside from his bosom buddy RL, a Southern white kid, he lives deeply inside his own head. He discovers that in many ways, the Okinawan people are also oppressed. Aided by cross-cultural relationships that he establishes, he identifies deeply with them and their circumstance. Unaware, in the process, he is gradually immersed in the Okinawan way of life. In the hazy aftermath of self-medicating, the narrator descends into a harrowing self-destructive vortex. As the accumulated “road” fatigue takes