Book Review: Hotel Lucky Seven by Kotaro Isaka

If your favorite installment of Kotaro Isaka’s Assassins series so far has been Bullet Train, then you’re in for a treat with Hotel Lucky Seven, his latest novel available in the English language! Translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom, this rollicking tale of murder and misfortune brings back the hapless hero of that first blockbuster novel – that was subsequently turned into a movie of the same name that I, for one, was thoroughly entertained by – for more of Nanao’s trademark unlucky hijinks:

Anxiety washes over Nanao again, making him want to crawl out of his own skin to get away, but another voice inside speaks up reassuringly, telling him that everything will work out fine if he just calms down. Leaving a hotel is no hard task. Regular people, guests of the hotel, do it all the time. All he needs to do is avoid complicating things unnecessarily – all he needs to do is make conversation […] for a little bit, then leave.

 

And try not to think about the time when all he needed to do was get off a bullet train at a particular station and couldn’t.

This time Nanao has been tasked by his handler Maria to deliver a gift from a loving daughter to her businessman father in the luxurious Winton Palace Hotel. Dad is constantly on the move for work, so his daughter wants to make sure that he receives, on his actual birthday, the very personal, thoughtful present that she made for him. It should be an easy task, especially for a former assassin-for-hire who only quit because he doesn’t want to do violent work anymore.

Of course, things go wrong almost from the start, when Nanao ends up handing over the parcel to someone who subsequently tries to kill him. When he learns shortly afterwards that Maria is in mortal danger, he sets his mind to escaping the hotel in order to save her. The trouble is, one thing after another keeps popping up to trap him there.

Some of those things include the machinations of a team of assassins known as The Six, a group of sociopaths who believe that their natural physical gifts make them better than everyone else:

The moment he meets anyone, Kamakura [of The Six] makes an assessment[.] His head whirring with calculations, he makes his initial decision: would it be more effective to be dominant, or submissive? And if they’re a woman, he makes another assessment: how susceptible to seduction might she be?

 

We’re so lucky to have our looks. Both Kamakura and [his teammate] Asuka say this a lot. They’re half-joking, of course, but they know there’s truth to the sentiment as well. Or rather, Kamakura feels that his well-balanced features, his tall, trim frame, and his natural athletic ability are less things that make him ‘lucky’ than things that confer power.

Nanao’s path will cross not only The Six’s, but also the paths of several other teams of criminals, often working at cross-purposes to one another. He’ll also encounter a well-respected politician, a woman with an eidetic memory, and a senior citizen who has found a new purpose in using the hacking skills she developed in her golden years to help others find a fresh start. As Nanao tries to do good while not getting himself killed, he’ll keep striving to escape the hotel. But will he be able to do so in time to save perhaps the most important person in his life?

Fresh, funny, and filled with kinetic energy, Hotel Lucky Seven is a twisty romp of a novel that masterfully weaves a web of mayhem around its colorful and (perhaps surprisingly) endearing cast. It does feel rather like Bullet-Train-in-a-hotel, with a slightly smaller cast and a meatier role for Maria, but in a way that feels satisfying for fans rather than derivative. While it eschews the melancholy of Three Assassins and The Mantis, the other two books in the series so far, it still maintains that depth of insight into human nature, both at its best and worst, that Mr. Isaka’s writing is consistently known for.