Salmonella Men on Planet Porno [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Rather surprisingly, this collection represents the first appearance in English of the amazingly prolific Japanese author of some 30+ novels and 40+ short story collections. According to his web site, Tsutsu's major influences are Darwin, Freud, and the Marx Brothers -- all of which are well in evidence in the somewhat uneven mix of thirteen short stories.

The mix of surreal and slapstick can be exceedingly successful, such as "Rumors About Me," in which a typical salaryman wakes up one morning to discover he is the topic of a TV news report. As the week goes on, his daily life becomes the subject of a rapidly escalating wave of media hype, in a sly poke at shallow celebrity culture. Another fine story with a touch of cultural critique is "Commuter Army," in which a salesman for a Japanese weapons manufacturer is forced to go to the front lines of a decades-long border war between two fictional small Asian countries. The war has dragged on to the point where the army is trying to entice people to commute to the front on a daily basis and there's an especially funny scene in which the Japanese man is trying to catch the train to the front so he won't be late his first day. Easily the best story in the collection is "Hello, Hello, Hello", which features a mysterious customer service rep from a bank, who pops (literally) in and out of the life of a financially strapped couple, to dictate what they shouldn't buy. It's a hilarious and scathing attack on consumerism.

However the uneven nature of the collection is such that other stories with similar sensibilities are somewhat less successful. For example, in "The Dabba Dabba Tree," a houseplant/tree blurs the line between sexy dreams and reality, resulting in mounting social chaos. It's a somewhat funny conceit, but is never taken anywhere beyond the obvious. Another blah one is "The Very Edge of Happiness" in which an unhappily married couple attempt to head to the beach one weekend morning only to see their trip slowly morph into a surreal mimicry of lemming behavior. Here the social commentary is so obvious and overt that it reads like something from a freshman writing class. "The Last Smoker" is another rather clunky and unsubtle piece, taking the rise of the anti-smoking movement to it's extreme end, as smokers are beaten to death on the streets by mobs, and a lone writer survives as the titular character. "The World is Tilting" is an equally clunky tale, and it's hard to know if some of this might have seemed much sharper when it was originally written and published 25 years ago.

In the end, like most short story collections, there are some gems, some duds, and a lot in between. It's definitely worth checking out by anyone interested in modern Japanese fiction, and it definitely makes me curious to sample some of his other work, especially his novels. Kudos to Alma Books for giving the English-reading world a taste of Tsutsui, and it's worth mentioning that Andrew Driver's translation is exceedingly smooth and readable.

I picked up this book after reading an article about literary trends in the new wave of Japanese magical realism authors. Unsure of what to expect, I was delighted to find that the author possesses both a sense of whimsy and a morbid sense of humor. I was occasionally reminded of O. Henry short stories -- there are similar "aha" moments regarding the bizarre fruits of blind desire and irrational drives. Still, it's often hard to see the twist coming, even when there is one. The first two stories are considerably more light than the rest of the collection, but the author's snappy characterization and witty turns of phrase keep even the depressing stories from collapsing under their own weight. I was delighted to come across such an unexpected gem, and am only sorry that there's not more of the author's work available in English.

Salmonella Men on Planet Porno" is the sort of book you often come across by accident and start reading because it has a title that promises more in the way of titillation than the title of the book you were originally planning to read, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" by C.G. Jung. Its a collection of short stories by Yasutaka Tsutsui, a Japanese author of sci-fi and metafiction, not well-known, or much-translated here in the U.S.--and now in his seventies, he's no spring chicken.

I'd say these stories are satire more than they are sci-fi--the kind of biting (and bracing) although sometimes heavy-handed satire (think bludgeon as opposed to scalpel) once practiced by the likes of Jonathan Swift. Tsutsui usually sets these tales in some undefined future but the worlds that his characters characteristically inhabit are just as often grotesquely and comically absurd as they are futuristic, as they might be in an Ionesco play, for instance.

Tsutsui's surreal fantasies, however, are almost uniformly dark, even when they are "funny." Bonsai trees that promote lifelike erotic dreams, anti-smoking regulation that leads to the literal exinction of smokers, a planet (planet Porno) whose inhabitants, descended from hippies, have managed to create a world where everything makes peace not war...this is a sampling of the sort of "what-ifs" in which Tsutsui engages. He doesnt seem to like government much, nor marriage, nor the human race, taken as a whole. In one grim little shocker, he has a family on vacation marching off into the sea, like lemmings, along with the rest of the beach crowd.

Hmm, its likely that this sort of dystopian point of view is what has kept Tsutsui a relatively untranslated secret here in the good ole USA where we prefer happy, humanistic, generally upbeat Japanese authors, like Haruki Murakami.

The translation in this case was done by a Brit, I suppose, judging by all the distinctly British phrases in the text. Its rather jarring, and unintentionally funny, to hear Japanese characters repeatedly calling each other "mate" and exclaiming "oy!" I know its a translation and you're trying to capture the demotic of the original in the home language and all, but come on!

Well, the fact is, that in spite of its great title, the title story is a bit of an extended bore, which, luckily I read last since otherwise I might have put the book down altogether and not read far better stories, like "Bad for the Heart." As in most collections of stories, you'll have some clunkers, and "Salmonella Men on Planet Porno" is no exception. Of the 13 tales gathered here, there are two or three that are so good while the rest fall variously on a scale from so-so to so-what.

I guess that about does it. At four in the morning, I havent got much else to say, but that silly sort of sleep-talk that strikes one as incredibly hilarious or deeply profound, but only at 4 a.m. Either that, or its the dream I woke up from in a sweat, or the disturbing fantasy I had of being alone at 4 a.m. in the morgue which was holding Michael Jackson's corpse. Would I, for instance, open the steel drawer and have a look at the body of this famous man, all gray and bald and emaciated? How weird would that be? Yet, how could I resist sharing such a moment, catching a glimpse of a dead god, and thereby experiencing the "truth" of immortality.

Well, unable to sleep after having such thoughts, maybe even to escape having such thoughts, I wrote this review. Now the review is finished and the thoughts have returned. I suppose I'll get up and make some coffee. It looks like I'm snowed-in again. I figure I'll start reading the CG Jung book today.