chikansen

The Japanese rape fantasy:
 
I’d been working at Tokyo’s leading English magazine—Metropolis—for a good 6 months when I was approached to write a feature about the recently opened venue in Shinjuku– The chikansen.
 
The title being a play on words—a rarity in the Japanese language—a chikan is the colloquial term given to “train gropers”, men with a [...]

The Inheritence of Loss:

Digital Asset Management:
 
In addition to my mother and grandmother, my book is dedicated to the pricks that broke into my car one evening in Paddington and stole the MP3 recordings I had been annotating my novel on for the past 6 months. The notion of recording my thoughts was born of my frustrations with [...]

Is The New-Feminism Merely Glorified Soft Porn?

My book deals largely with feminist issues both in Japan and in the West.
Germaine Greer, who has long owned this issue, touched on it again recently in an essay titled “Why do so many female artists put themselves in their work—often with no clothes on?” In a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald written [...]

The Terrible Labor of Smiling:

Explorations of Defamation and 101 Ways to Lose a Friend:
In this post-modern world of imagined biography and fictional memoir, its harder than ever to tell what is made up from what is real. Of vast interest to me and my process is the ever increasing grey matter of defamation, fact, fiction, faction and fantasy.
In a [...]

The Death of the Novel: