Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins

What? It’s been three decades since I’ve read Tom Robbins? That has been my oversight and I mean not to repeat that blunder, one way or another.
This is a hard book to summarize, so I’ve entirely plagiarized the following paragraph from Wikipedia: “Villa Incognito begins with the story of Tanuki, a raccoon-like Asian creature with a reputation as a shapeshifter and trickster with a lust for sake and women. Tanuki is a tanuki; a member of the species named for him. The cast also includes a beautiful young woman who has unconfirmed Tanuki-blood in her veins (but definitely has a chrysanthemum seed embedded in the roof of her mouth), and three American MIAs who have chosen to be "lost" in Laos, long after U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ended. Typical Robbins-esque debacles ensue when one of the MIAs is arrested with heroin taped to his body, while dressed as a priest. Meanwhile, two sisters of one of the missing American soldiers are still searching for their lost relative, unfolding bizarre plot twists that paint a caricature of life in a Post-9/11 America.”
As always, Robbins’ prose is remarkably captivating, and as he tells his allegory about life from the era of the Vietnam War to 9/11, he mixes in occasional direct comments about the lives we lead in our complex society. He oft repeated, “It is what it is, you are what you it, and there are no mistakes.” In reference to life, one of his main characters, the Vietnam MIA Maj. Mars Albert Stubblefield, says: “In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine a joke: a long joke that’s being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke, my friends. The soul is its punch line.” Or there’s the line from Capt. Dern V. Foley: “We only rise above mediocrity when there’s something at stake, and I mean something more consequential than money or reputation.” Madame Lisa Ko writes, “One cannot arrive at no-mind unless one has a mind to start from. The brighter the mind gleams, the softer the silence of the eventual no-mind, just as the overturned bucket that once brimming seems so much emptier than the bucket that never held milk in the first place.”
Finally, I now realize that in my next life, I want to be a tanuki. Madame Ko, from Laos, explained, “Tanuki never work. He for fun. Eat drink, dance, make sex. Alla time big fun.” It was the fox, Kitsune, who reminded Tanuki, “As the humans say, only time will tell.” Tanuki responded, “Time has a big mouth and a small brain.”