• Home
• About
• Dark Fiction
• Haikyo Photography
• Ruins Gallery
• Strange Japan

The Guardian reviews this site

About an hour ago the Guardian newspaper put a review of this site online. It was written by Johnny Dee in the `This week`s internet previews` section, and was very positive. As you can imagine, I`m very surprised and pleased at this development. The Guardian!

It`s a short review, and in it he talks mostly about the haikyo galleries, but he also mentions my fiction, reviews, and highlights the nuclear blast craters article. Click the paper to go to the review.

Lost Japan

Lost Japan is an ode to an idealized, forgotten, and headily cultural past, written by an inveterate literati to whom pure artistic beauty is one of the loftiest goals imaginable. In this book we see the gentle beginnings of bugbears for the author that in time would evolve into the strident arguments of his masterwork- ‘Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan’. But where that book is fiercely angry and relevant, this one is reverent, gushing, and more than a little soft around the edges.

Lost Japan was first published in 1993 in Japanese, a collection of biographical shorts concerning the author’s life in Japan. It won the prestigious Shincho Gakugei literature award in 1994, the first time for a foreigner. In 1996 it came out in English from lonely planet, and was met with positive criticism, with numerous reviewers falling over themselves to espouse Kerr’s view of Japan as ‘unique’ and ‘brilliantly informed’.

Kerr first came to Japan in 1964 as the son of a US Navy family, and has been back and forth numerous times, living here for extended periods, buying a house in a remote valley, getting involved in cultural teachings, kabuki, calligraphy, and art collecting. The book is a series of vignettes about all these various aspects of Kerr’s life, with lavish detail poured upon the art of kabuki, interesting facts shared about the thatching of traditional Japanese houses, and an insider’s guide to the world of Asian art dealers. Throughout are the seeds of what will become the latter book ‘Dogs and Demons’, as he first considers the meaning of Japan’s concreted hillsides, the slow asphyxiation of kabuki under the weight of its own pomp and circumstance, and the ugly unorganized power line-striped morass of big cities like Tokyo. These are the things destroying the Japan that he loves.

Read more

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.

Read more

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: ∫.

Read more

Doomsday – 0.5/5

What a load of garbage.

Doomsday is an adolescent male’s mash-up fantasy of a bunch of other post-apocalypse SF-type
movies, executed abysmally, with some of the worst writing I’ve seen.  Take large chunks of 28 weeks later and Escape from New York, mix liberally with dashes of Mad Max, Resident Evil, and Lara Croft, throw in a little Alien- set the whole thing in some 80’s vision of the future (2023) with both cannibal hedonist street punks AND medieval knights living in castles, and this is what you get.

We open with a lot of voice-over, similar to 28 weeks later, explaining how the virus occurred, and how it was mismanaged. This section was quite slick, and I thought I might be in for a decent rip-off. But no. Every line is hackneyed and a cliche and from another movie. Every shot is a shot I’ve seen before. Every plot thread is unoriginal. Every character is a shell. Every attempt to put us in some SF future world is laughable- she has a video camera eye! Data storage is on little discs! They have poly-fiber carbon flexible body-shells (that just make them look like dudes wearing skating kneepads all over their bodies)!

I can’t believe how much money got thrown at such a juvenile script. How can we make intelligent and reasoned movies like 28 weeks later- then produce this garbage? Did none of the actors (Bob Hoskins, Malcolm Mcdowell) realize they were reading lines from a script written by a 13-year old who’s hopped up on smarties and his first glass of Special Brew? Or were they just in it for the money? I can only think the second option, because the whole thing is a wanton waste of energy, lazy manipulative directing (the girls can’t really fight? So quick-hash cut the fight scenes together so they seem to be high-energy and vicious).

Or the third option. This is the writer/director (Neil Marshall) who did Dog Soldiers and The Descent. The Descent was excellent, and Dog Soldiers was a good laugh. So the actors/producers thought- I don’t see what’s great about it, but his other movies were great, so this one must be too. But this is not great. I think Neil Marshall has Shyamalan-ed himself and used up all his skill on his first two movies.

What a joke. I should be making these movies. I think I’ll write a script.

The Mist – 1/5

Frank Darabont directed the Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and now The Mist.　It’s a story about a dense white mist that rolls down on a small American (Canadian?) town, bearing all kinds of nasty critters within it.

Well- I didn’t like it. I didn’t believe it. It wasn’t so much the SF- though the spouting of garbage like ‘interdimensional rifts’ should only be done with proper preparation, and only if necessary, and in this it wasn’t either. Rather it was the characters acting like idiots, wimps, and cowards.

The hero starts off like a hero. He takes fairly fast action, he does some cool stuff. But it’s the slow and stupid delays that kill me. I’m thinking- get a damn axe! I’m thinking- what are you, fighting with a mop? Are you really lighting the mop inside a wooden store? Are you just gonna wait while the psycho religious nut whips everyone up into a sacrificial frenzy? Again, and again, and again? Did you really just sleep a whole day away while she drove everyone to fever pitch?

If I’d been there I would have sorted those people out. Gag the nutter from the start, tie her up, lock her in a room. Talk to people, calm them down. They spend like 10 minutes just convincing people there’s a monster outside! For God’s sake, just bring the severed tentacle in for them to see!

Too many shots of people crying and talking quietly. Too much ineptitude. You’re in a hard-ware store. Weapon up! Use shelves to block the windows. What the hell is dog food stacked waist-high going to do?

If I can’t believe the people in the movie are smart, reasoning people, then I can’t believe in the movie. I just got manipulated. The final whipping up scene that ends in a sacrifice, where the ‘hero’ is getting held back by his own people- I was going nuts. Just kill her! Stop her whipping them up and they’ll just calm themselves down again!

Then the ending- as dark as can be. What can we take from that? All we can take from it is- these people were really stupid. And impatient! Hang out, play some gin rummy. What’s the rush?

I feel a little ill. An exercise in serious pointless waste. I’d give it 0 out of 5 but for some of the creature designs, and the unsettling effect of the Mist itself.

Next Page »