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Killin Jack the Malakite

This is the second time Killin’ Jack has been published, such that any of my longer-term readers have probably already read it. Its publication came as quite a surprise in the latest Aoiffe’s Kiss- I sent it in to them about 18 months ago, in January 2008. In February 2008 it sold to the online zine AtomJack for $10, and I was pleased. I did the proper thing and sent a follow-up email to samsdotpublishing (who print Aoiffe’s Kiss) to withdraw it from consideration. I heard nothing back, but then that wasn’t unusual.

And now, in the past several months, samsdot have plucked up two of my stories, both of which got published elsewhere in the 12+ months since submission, and published them in their print zines despite withdrawal emails I sent to them. One was Caterpillar Man in their April 2009 edition of ‘Shelter of Daylight’, and the other now.

I’m not complaining though. Now I have three print credits, wazaaaa!

If you’d like to buy a copy of Aoiffe’s Kiss, do it right here. I don’t get any cashola from it though, I was paid with a contributor’s copy.

Unfortunately I didn’t make the front page . I’m not a big enough name I suppose.

Haikyo Roundup

There’s been a lot of haikyoing action happening round the Kanto plain recently, with some new faces (to me) and new info on old locations- here’s the round-up:

Tokyo Times- Lee’s been busy since I last updated here, going to the Underground Vault I found at Yamanakako lake and solving its mystery with the revelation that it was a Sanyo Securities hide-away. He managed to identify one of the vault symbols in the banner of a Sanyo magazine left lying around- keen eyes! Though I think he told me it wasn’t actually him that spotted it. Very honest! After that, he went to a recently abandoned Love Hotel- still hoping to hear the location of it from him (Lee….?)

Swifty- A chap called Edmund Yeo headed with some of his friends out to see the Hotel Royale and Sun Hills Car Park (these links to my posts). They reported, as others have recently, that the Hotel Royale is impossible to get access to. Sun Hills was fine though. He added some details on about Sun Hills, which either he Googled (more skilled than me) or read about it in a haikyo book I don’t have:

“[Sun Hills is] a ‘cursed’ hotel that was recently demolished. Its tale was a sad and tragic one. A hotel guest set the place on fire to kill himself and took down parts of the hotel. The owners, debt-ridden, and desperate by the damage caused, hung themselves in the hotel as well.”

Dark. I hadn’t known that when we were there. Edmund is also a short film director with some success- kudos.

Cousin Macho- Tom sent me the email that let me know about Swifty above, and also his own exploration of the Toyo Bowl in Kanagawa recently. He’s got his photos on Flickr.

Misuterareta- This was the first haikyo trip I went on with someone I didn’t really know. Paul and I hooked up over the net, and he suggested a shared haikyo. It was great cos he brought a location to the table I knew nothing of, and likewise did I. We had a good time chatting about the hobby on the long drive into Chiba- but you can read all about that on my post. Together we hit up the Namegawa Island Theme Park, I can’t even remember who tipped me off to it, and to the Yui Grand Love Hotel that Paul’s family tipped him off to.

Terrifying tales of the Yui love hotel

The Yui Grand Love Hotel is an abandonment with a more sordid past than usual, if urban legend is to be believed. According to the story, a gang of bosozoku riders (noisy yakuza-ish motorcyclists) kidnapped a schoolgirl into one of its rooms, where they abused and killed her. I’ve no idea if that is true, but stories of her haunting of the place are apparently so rife that people actually queue up outside at night to go into the room where she died, to hear her ghostly wails. All in very poor taste, and again I’ve no idea if there’s any truth to it, it sounds like the kind of thing another haikyo writer might invent to jazz up an otherwise fairly normal location.

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Mandragora’s Laws

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 all her skin had been removed. Mandragora poked the man’s blotchy pink flesh.

“Was I not clear last time? I posted the laws all over.”

“Yes yes,” nodded the skulls, “you were very clear. No cannibals and no human-skinning.”

Image from here.

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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 book begins with Booth headed for Tsugaru, a little town at the ‘North Pole’ of Honshu in Aomori prefecture, tramping in the footsteps of a 1944 journey made by the poet Osamu Dazai, for whom it was a return to the land of his childhood. As ever, Booth is beset by rain and heavy winds as he ploughs up narrow valleys towards the Tsugaru Straits. He admires little Buddhist statues, faces worn away by long years of protecting the roadside, at the same time as he dispassionately recounts the details of huge newly constructed bridges, roads, and the exorbitant undersea tunnel project to connect Honshu to Hokkaido beneath the Tsugaru Straits.

The legend-tripping concept allows for a deeper and fuller understanding of the place than otherwise possible. We see the land through not only Booth’s eyes, but also through those of his predecessor. For Dazai, his travels in Tsugaru and the resultant book formed the apex of a career and life filled with drunken histrionics, imprisonment, and bed-ridden sickness, in search of a nursemaid he felt he was in love with.

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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 book that wants to be more than it is is, or more than you think it is, an ambitious Rorschach Test of a book that wants to discern something about its reader even as its reader discerns the truth (?) about it.

We begin in media res. Our hero Eric Sanderson spends a few pages waking up; flutter-rolling, bang-rattling, and coughing coughing coughing. When he’s awake, he realizes he doesn’t know who he is. A cryptic note from ‘the First Eric Sanderson’ sets him off on a rollicking quest to find out his own identity, leading him deeper into the world of slipstream metaphor, where conceptual fish live in the tidal wash of informational flow, nibbling away at words, ideas, and in particular those old style letter-S’s that were written like this: ∫.

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