Residents of Tauranga in New Zealand were surprised to see a man bringing in the New Year by careering down their road at 50 m.p.h. on the back of a motorized bar stool. The oddness of the scene was only increased by the fact that the man, John Sullivan, was also half-naked and had smoke coming out of his backside. This latter phenomenon came thanks to the newspaper he had rolled up, wedged between his buttocks and set alight. Sullivan later confessed in court to having ‘had a few’ and admitted that a public road wasn’t the best place for a high-speed bar stool.
An exclusive extract from Sam Jordison’s hilarious Annus Horribilis.
The stereotype of Japan’s anime producers as insular, cloistered and sealed off to foreigners was not what Tekkon screenwriter Weintraub encountered when he arrived in 2001. “I found the openness with which people treated me in Japan refreshing,” he tells me from New York, where he runs a film production company with his wife. “Especially within the context of what is supposedly such a closed industry. I felt that everyone I encountered, from Taiyo Matsumoto to the animators to the distributors, treated me the same as they would any writer.”
What I have seen, and only very recently, is a blossoming of coverage in Western media of Japan’s cell phone novel phenomenon. Some of them, when published and sold as text-based novels, sell in the hundreds of thousands; one title sold up to half a million books. These are astounding figures for what we still call ‘the novel’, a narrative conveyed in prose, in whatever language, and generally without visual enticements. They are even more dramatic when text-based anythings—novels, newspapers, short stories—are spiraling into irrelevance.
Preheat the oven to 375F/190C/Gas Mark 5. In a medium pan, sauté the onion and garlic in the oil until soft. Pour this into a large casserole dish and place the chicken on top. Add the beer, stock, tomato, chillies, allspice, cinnamon and a pinch of salt.
I ran towards my baby’s cries and I screamed and people stared as if I was mad, and in that moment I was mad, grief-stricken even though the loss was too great to contemplate. I didn’t know what I was doing I couldn’t be held responsible for my actions.
The spread of Japan’s popular culture in the West is predicated upon such misreadings. During my book tour in the United States, I was constantly barraged by young Americans who insisted that they were “otaku,” as if the very term conferred upon them a sense of cool, cutting edge, irrefutable intelligence. Meanwhile, in Japan, I am reminded that no self-respecting citizen of the country self-identifies as an otaku. This dissonance has complicated roots, the beginnings of which I’ll try to trace here.
Never does the world seem so freshly painted, so brightly enamelled, so new, for heaven’s sake, as after the best sex. But, alas, depending on where you’re up to in life, it may be full of new complications too. A lesser authority than Brahma’s would have issued a health-warning.
Throughout the 1960s in Tokyo, Hijikata’s Ankoku Butoh embodied what was known in the Japanese media as ‘the dirty avant-garde’ - the experimental art and film which, in exploring the extremes of the human body, of social power and of sexual acts, unearthed and revealed materials that were perceived as abject and reprehensible: anatomical detritus and illness, transsexuality and imageries of male homosexuality.
