Review: ESCAPE FROM YOKAI LAND [THE LAUNDRY FILES 7.5]

I've read many of Charles Stross's THE LAUNDRY FILES Series, finding each suffused with wry British (perhaps Scottish) humor, combined delightfully with Urban Fantasy in an overpopulated modern London metropolis, set into the Lovecraft Mythos . Possibly the Master himself might even approve. As good fiction often does, THE LAUNDRY FILES enables the author to examine contemporary Society and its many themes and foils. In ESCAPE FROM YOKAI LAND, author Stross takes on the hefty topics of Japanese Folklore and mythology, current Japanese society, the Japanese workplace culture, sexism, corporate profiteering at the expense of Innocence [and innocents], and the friction of Japanese-British political relations since 1931.

One needs look closely though, to discover these themes, as agent Bob Howard of the British government's Capitol Laundry Service is immensely occupied with battling severe jet lag, cultural dissonance, and an intense incursion of entities previously encountered only in Japanese Folklore.