Books featuring Japanese wise guys in tacky suits and Hawaiian shirts, ideally something like The Friends of Eddy Coyle where its a dialogue heavy window into the world and the strange characters who inhabit the margins of society.

(Unrelated but I never understood this cover art, I spearfish myself and you can't eat parrotfish. They feed off the reef and carry ciguatera toxin that will paralyze you. They're trivial to catch as well, so I assume there is some /lit/ meaning to it.)

I liked Natsuo Kirino's Out. The main cast are middle-aged wives stuck in dead ends though and it's none too expository. It did give me a peak at Tokyo's underbelly and I particularly liked the intensely stifling air, the soullessness of human interaction, and the mechanism of everyday and life-or-death struggles the characters have to push through.

>>24525762 (OP)
>Yakuza and strange characters who inhabit the margins of society.
You might enjoy Speed Tribes. It's an anthology series with each chapter giving a first person fictionalized account of different subcultures from 90s Japan. A couple chapters feature yakuza but there are also bosozoku, motorcycle thieves, wannabe thugs, drug addicts, right wing nationalists, a real cross section of bottom feeders. Some of the stories veer away from what you're looking for but they're all pretty good.

there's yakuza in mishima's "life for sale", which is a goofy little romp of a book.

>>24525762 (OP)
>>>/jp/