It was a bright spring morning when Mandragora came upon the sweet little cottage with the two dead bodies hanging from its eaves. “What’s all this then?” he asked his skulls, rattling out behind him on their 100 leather tethers. “Looks like a violation,” they called, bobbing and jostling to see. “A clear violation. Bodies from the eaves, what else could that be?” Mandragora walked over and studied the bodies. One was a man and he had his skin intact, though one of his legs was gone, and the other was a woman but it wasn’t easy to tell because …
Looking for the Lost
Looking for the Lost is one man’s swansong for the ancient vestiges of rural Japan, a multi-threaded tramp through history and culture in search of something perhaps impossible to find. Our narrator Alan Booth rambles on foot through some of the remotest hills and valleys in the country, legend-tripping the paths taken by various historical figures. He is invariably exhausted, blistered, and sodden with rain, mocked by school-children and construction workers, set upon by alternatingly fierce and friendly mama-sans, in whose company he is witty, gently drunk, erudite, and hailed as a bit of a celebrity in the karaoke booth. …
The Raw Shark Texts
The Raw Shark Texts is an experimental idea of a story in book form. The raw ingredients encompass just about every sizzling modern experiment of a story that preceded it: a pinch of Fight Club, two sprigs of the Matrix finely chopped, three cupfuls of House of Leaves, a smattering of Cryptonomicon, a generous dose (at least 6oz) of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind infused with essence of Memento, all whirl-chopped in a blender, salted with textual decoration, baked in a easter-egg kiln and served up à la mode. What am I talking about? Well, I’m talking about a …
Long-gone memories of the BE lab
The BE labs haikyo in Shizuoka is mis-representing itself somewhat by posing as a lab; at best it was a spa-resort for people who worked at a lab, somewhere far off and long ago. It sits in the crook of some distinctly un-Japanese rolling hills, looking rather like a bunker with its zig-zag concrete front-eave and fence-wires on the flat-slab roof.
Bathsheba
(Advisory- this is a graphic story, X-rated really.) Mad Noah can’t give me what I want. No. Mad Noah stands in his tent and shouts at me in the doorway- “Incubus of Satan! If you had SEEN the holy holy holy as I have, if you had SEEN!” And I leave. Mad Noah comes to me at night and between his whisperings of a world gone mad he slips his fingers between my thighs, and while he tells the story of the one eyed fox that learnt to fly above the second flood, he strokes me, and I do what? …
Kabuki-za, Kyobashi
The Kabuki-za is a fancy-pants theater in Ginza for the screening of Kabuki- a highly stylized and traditional (read ‘boring to most people’) form of storied stage performance. The Kabuki-za is famous as the principal theater for this kind of show in Tokyo- with a long and varied history dating all the way back to 1924.
Infiltrating the Rojin home
The Rojin (old folks) Home we stumbled across in Shizuoka was a happy accident, one of those random call-outs from the back seat of the car that normally go unheeded. We were searching for an abandoned hospital and having little luck- so the mere sight of anything remotely fenced-off fired up our blood and got us out there investigating.
Freya 13
Delathon Rent, a 28 year old technician on the Freya 13 space station, sits slumped in the Outer rim command pod with a gas hatch sealed behind him, video-phone in his lap, waiting for it to ring. He’s been waiting for about 10 minutes now, after intermittently placing calls himself to the Freya Commune for the last hour. He has an awkward itch in the corner of his right eye. He wants to scratch it with the machined tip of his blue biro, but he doesn’t. He’s afraid to even touch his eyes. Instead, he taps the pen against the …
Sanyo and BE haikyos, the move
Tokyo Times went to the underground bunker in Yamanashi and managed to de-bunk some of the mystery surrounding it. He found a Sanyo magazine which featured a little icon of one of the odd logos from inside the bunker. It doesn’t explain everything, but it goes some distance to removing the thought it might have belonged to a cult. Mike and I went to the BE lab in Shizuoka- I was going to post my version tomorrow but may go with something else instead- give his a bit more time to breathe before I clog the airwaves with yet more …
Shizuoka Shimbun Building, Shimbashi
The headquarters of the Shizuoka newspaper in Shimbashi, Tokyo, is another Kenzo Tange building- he of Fuji Terebi and the Tocho. It resembles nothing so much as a giant mutated baobab tree, vivid rust-colored and sprouting fat boughs that elide in stubby endings, on one side its groping knubs reaching out to latch onto the closest building.