Exit A

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Jarhead comes an unforgettable novel about the legacies of war and the dangers of love. Seventeen-year-old Severin Boxx lives on Yokota, an enormous American Air Force base on the outskirts of Tokyo. Like most of the other young American men on the airbase, Severin is mad for Virginia Kindwall, the base general's daughter, who is a hafu-half American and half Japanese. Beautiful, smart, and utterly defiant of a father who wields godlike military power, Virginia has become a petty criminal in the Japanese underground that lurks in the mad neon netherworld just outside the base, around the nearby rail station's Exit A. Severin is soon caught up in Virginia's world. But their romance is short-lived as they find themselves in trouble way over their heads and subjected to the enormous, unforgiving tensions that remain between America and Japan in the wake of World War II. Years later, Severin and Virginia remain lost to each other -- until an emotionally frayed, thirty-something Severin embarks on a quest to find Virginia, and reclaim the part of himself taken from him when his boyhood abruptly ended. Like Jarhead before it, Anthony Swofford's Exit A is darkly irreverent, frankly erotic, and more than a little wicked, a tale told in a brooding, pained voice filled with the simple human fury of being alive.