The Second Life of Professor Takahashi

When Professor Takahashi accepts a visiting post in a quiet English university town, he imagines a year of research and solitude, hoping to close the widening gulf he feels with his teenage daughter, Kaori. Instead, he finds himself adrift: a single father far from Tokyo, struggling to comprehend this strange land which he’s long idolised.

Recently, Kaori has found refuge in a new videogame: its worlds dazzling, its logic unsettling. As she plays, the borders between reality and the virtual blur, drawing her closer to a story she doesn’t yet understand. She feels disconnected from her father, and has begun to wonder if she should, instead, embark on a quest to search for her long-lost mother. Might this fix everything?

Meanwhile, a trench-coated Technician navigates a futuristic cyberpunk city with his robotic sidekick cat. They inhabit a world where ordinary people have chosen to live in their fantasies over reality, but even the Technician is blind as to what fate has in store for him.

And then there is Elena: a young and gifted computer scientist; brilliant, bruised and searching for connection in all the wrong places.

Told across four intertwining strands – a lonely professor, his restless daughter, the game she can’t stop playing, and the woman who draws them together – The Second Life of Professor Takahashi explores the fault lines between cultures and generations. Bold and playful, it is a novel about what it means to be seen, and what it costs to reach for someone across the silence.