REVOLUTION’S END: THE PATTY HEARST KIDNAPPING, MIND CONTROL, AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF DONALD DEFREEZE AND THE SLA

This one was wild. As I continue my slog through a handful of longer books, I decided to take a minute and read something quicker and easier to digest. The whole SLA, Patty Hearst thing is not something I knew a lot about. I knew the basic outlines, I knew about the kidnapping and the bank robbery. I knew a little about the SLA dying in a shoot-out with the LAPD. I’m half-Californian, on my Mom’s side, and I’ve been to Hearst Castle and know something about the Hearst family. I knew about the very cool SLA logo and the general sense that there is something sus about the whole situation. This book really filled in lots of the blanks. It connected really well to the larger story about US conter-insurgency/Domestic GLADIO/CHAOS that I’ve been following and putting together from a number of different books over the past year or so. It helps if you’re already familiar with what was going on with Phoenix during this same period and characters like Colston Westbrook, Jolly West, Karanga and the various Panthers (both LA and Oakland). It contains a lot of good information about the Prison movement and the attempts to derail this movement. The book makes a strong case that DeFreeze, a life-long snitch and informant, was manipulated, through drugs and other MKULTRA/MKSEARCH tactics into forming a radical group that could be nudged and controlled to act in a way that would further the ends of the state. Firstly, by killing someone like Marcus Foster, the Oakland Public Schools superintendent  who was friendly with and sympathetic to the Panthers. Secondly, by acting as a sort of trap for YT radicals who were willing to commit violence and, finally, by committing acts so outrageous it would push the general public to distrust left-wing militancy. On that level it seems somewhat analogous to the operation that seems to have gone on with Manson (who has a cameo in this book, DeFreeze snitched on him in LA) that O’Neil outlined. The stuff about the US organization was also useful and interesting; Kwanzaa remains a profoundly sus institution. Overall, the book is a helpful addition to the para-histoircal (or deep-history) project I’ve undertaken the last few years to understand the history of the United States. I don’t think we can move forward until we understand what’s really happened and gone on here, especially since the end of WWII. In terms of domestic ops, the SLA was one of the most brazen and clear-cut. Put in the pantheon with OKC, 9/11, the 60’s assassinations, and Epestin. I would definitely recommend reading in alongside CHAOS. 

DEATH’S END - CIXIN LIU (trans. Ken Liu)

Well, I finally did it, I’ve made it through the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series. I’ll cut to the chase, this last volume is by far my favorite. In general, I come to Sci-Fi or Fantasy or whatever genre for far-out plot and mind-bending concepts. This series of books really ramped it up over the three volumes. The first, THREE-BODY PROBLEM is very grounded and, by comparison, normal seeming, it’s basically a mystery with some sci-fi elements that mostly play out at the end of the book. The second book starts from a more sci-fi place, with a futuristic setting, but really gets exciting and introduces some strange, cool concepts in the last portion of the book. This final novel follows that format as well. It starts fairly normally for a book set hundreds of years in the future. It plays with the same dynamics and ideas that Liu had established in the early novels. However, by the end of this 700 page book, in the last third, it really goes wild and speculates into the far, far future. The book does a good job constantly increasing the scale and scope of what it is talking about and considering until the end when the nature and fate of the universe itself are the main driving plot points. Like the second book, alien weapons are some of the most innovate and interesting concepts the Liu plays with, he clearly has thought about this a lot. Like the Solar Cycle, there is a portion of the book that revolves around interpreting an allegorical story told by a character, which makes me wonder if that series (which, ultimately, for me, remains the Sci-Fi high water mark) is available in Chinese. Like the first, book, this volume includes a single section written from the point of view of an alien civilization which was pretty engaging and interesting. I wish Liu had gone deeper into these parts, they were quite cool but could have been weirder. As for the humans, well, it’s not really what I come to sci-fi for but even so, I found them pretty weak. I appreciate the most driven and psychotic character is a former CIA director but towards the end he acts in a way that seems uncharacteristic. Most of the other characters, including the main one, mostly seem to observe and deep freeze themselves, then thaw out and observe more, they clearly aren’t Liu’s main concern. It was interesting, when considered as a Chinese novel, how un-communistic and unconcerned with politics these novels were. Like the human character, the political questions seemed somewhat half-baked. In the future, the government seems like the US now, to a large extent, with powerful corporations and very wealthy people. There seems to be a much more robust social safety net but Liu seems pretty uninterested in exploring that part of his story. On another note, there seems to be several misogynistic passages and ideas, he frequently notes how feminized and weak future mankind becomes and how a woman is unable to make the hard but necessary choices for our long-term survival. He paints a pretty grim and dog-eat-dog picture of the universe as a whole. Either way, I quite enjoyed it, consistently engaging and surprising.

TRANS GIRL SUICIDE MUSEUM - HANNAH BAER

This is the second book I’ve read in the last months that comes from a meme-account admin. Perhaps I’ll seek out one more and make it a trifecta sometime soon. That being said, this book is much more famous in its own right, as well as much better, than THE LIFESTYLE ZOO. Both books are mostly memoir with some musing on modern online life and contemporary lifeways thrown in for good measure, which seems to be the dominant genre of book these days. TGSM is, as you might expect from the title, largely about the author’s life and experiences as a young trans woman. As a very specific type of young trans woman. The book opens with a sort of disclaimer, about how rich and privileged Baer is and how her experience is not like the experience of the vast, vast majority of trans people, either in the US or abroad, but it still reads, to me, as quite shocking throughout the book. I’m guessing it came off that way to Baer as well, and she put in the disclaimer after reading a draft and seeing how she comes off. Baer is the child of two rich YT people, a “marxist” college professor at a ivy league school and a professional of some type (I forgot what exactly), they aren’t transphobic in any traditional since, they come off as confused and clueless and Baer does a good job rendering the tension she has with being annoyed with them while also being aware how much worse the majority of trans people have with their parents (of all the trans people I’ve known or know in my life well enough to know what their relationship is with their parents, a sample size of about half a dozen, I only know one who even speaks with their parents). Baer travels around the US, from Philly to NYC to New Orleans and beyond and parties and fucks people and does lots of drugs. She’s smart enough, and socialized in the right ways, to get into grad school (business school for organizations, which struck me as a supremely weird choice) off an interview she attends directly after a bender. She doesn’t seem worried about money at all, which again is different that literally every single trans person I’ve ever met (and, like, 90% of the people I know period) and seems really connected to and valued by this sort of rich kid-cool, queer, artsy, activist-y scene she’s built up. She comes off, to me, as pretty unlikable, which isn’t really a problem, I don’t mind an annoying or unlikable main character. The book was still pretty engaging. There is a long passage about wandering around, very high on K trying to find a Juul which is incredibly well written and vivid and one of the best things I’ve read in a while. In fact, all the stuff about K is good and engaging and insightful. The disconnect for me has to do with how quickly she shifts into self-loathing or feeling like she needs to kill herself since, from the evidence she’s given us in this book, her life seems objectively very cool and fun and without the sorts of issues that plague most young people, let alone most trans people. That aspect did not connect for me. Either way, she’s a good writer, the book was short and punchy, her memes are good and I hope she writes another book, just one where she isn’t the main character.

PIRATE ENLIGHTENMENT, OR, THE REAL LIBERTALIA - DAVID GRAEBER

The last of the Graeber stuff is slowly coming out. I have no idea how much stuff he left behind after his surprising and deeply tragic death 3 years ago, he was quite prolific so I imagine it is a lot, though I also do not know how much they intend to publish. It’s such a shame we were robbed of another 30 years worth of his insights and output. So it goes, I suppose. That being said, I’m quite excited that one of his last books centers on a topic near and dear to my heart, Madagascar. Having lived there for years, I’m always interested in any English language work on the Malagasy people (less so the wildlife, which gets most of the attention) and Graeber is one of the greatest and most interesting anthropologists of his generation so this was a real match made in heaven for me. This short book focuses on what is something of a legend in Madagascar, the Pirate Utopia of Libertalia. The basic idea is that in the golden age of Piracy, a number of pirates camped out on Ile St. Marie, a small island off of Madagascar's East coast where they hung out and established a sort of radically democratic quasi-state. Despite not being all-the-way true, this idea has been quite sticky and shown up in all sorts of places and there really were pirates on that Island, their graveyard is still there. Graeber uses this legend as a jumping off point for discussing what actually went down during the late 1600s and early 1700s on Madagascar’s East coast. He traces the enlightenment era ideas and values that some of these pirates held (see Marcus Rediker if you want to know more about that) and how they were understood and integrated into Malagasy society, especially the Betsimisaraka confederation that formed during this time. Graeber, as always, is great about centering the non-Europeans and treating them as real people with ideals and goals and intellect who are trying to figure out and shape their world. He makes sure to emphasize the back and forth of exchange and the ways that ideas move and change in the world. This book is sort a case-study for the thesis he lays out in his long essay, “There Never Was a West” which I recommend to people often. If you’re interested in Madagascar, I’d dive into this for sure. It’s a lesser Graeber but we’re only getting the leftovers at this point so I’ll take what I can get.

JAPANESE IMPERIALISM TODAY - JON HALLIDAY & GAVAN MCCORMACK

As Kuznets, a man who I’m not really a fan of, once said, “there are four types of economies in the world: Developed, Undeveloped, Argentina and Japan” which, while simplistic, is a pithy way to explain how weird the Japanese economy and political system can seem to an outsider. As someone who now lives in Japan, I’ve really been trying to understand the country and history more and when I found this book in a bookstore here, it seemed like a real blessing. McCormack and Halliday are Marxists and thorough, this book is full of tables and charts and real, materialistic analysis. It draws political conclusions and highlights implications while grounding itself in actual facts and figures. In this way, it really reminded me of Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Beyond their shared commitment to deep analysis, both books were also written in the period between the end of WWII and the neoliberal turn in the 70s and 80s, so while both are excellent, they are missing a more current piece. JIT came out in ‘72, so it’s out of date in many ways but still quite fascinating. It was very telling to read how quickly Japan fell under US control was was used as a tool for American imperialism post WWII. It was telling to see how important Japan was in backing up Indonesia and South Korea, both major American projects (and both sites of enormous American-lead genocides). It was fascinating to see how Japan collaborated on the Vietnam war as well as “aid” schemes that trapped East Asia in conditions favorable to Japan and the US. It was illuminating to see the ways Imperial Japanese bureaucrats were folded into the new political order, like the Nazis of West Germany. The book is very clear-eyed and informative about Japanese Imperialism from Korea to Okinawa and beyond. It’s good at showing how this type of imperialism has a long history in Japan and how it functions today. It’s always so devastatingly sad to read about the early decades of the Cold War, to see how brutal and monsterous the US and its allies were and to imagine what sort of world we could have had if some of our leaders weren’t so committed to a political and economic reality that demands so much of the world live terrible conditions. It’s interesting to think about where Japan went after this book was finished. This book focuses on the time after WWII and the ways Japan rebuilt itself politically and economically. Shortly after the book was published, by the 80’s Japan was so strong economically that people in the US were afraid they would become the world’s superpower. In the decades since then, for the last 30 years or so, they’ve basically been stagnant and experienced no growth. Likewise, these days it appears that US global hegemony is weakening and we’re moving to a multi-polar world, in terms of power. If that happens Japan will be an interesting case, given its ties to both the United States and China. I can’t pretend to know what will happen there, I would love an updated version of this book to help me think through how this might go down. Tho, until I find that book, I will remain thankful to Halliday and McCormack for providing clear material analysis of the place I live.

THE SANDMAN (book one) - NEIL GAIMAN (artists, SAM KIETH, MIKE DRINGENBERG, MALCOLM JONES III, KELLEY JONES)

I got this for my wife since she’d never read the Sandman series. She likes Gaiman’s other stuff, I’ve read American Gods but I wouldn’t call myself a real Gaiman-head, and this seemed very up her alley. I remember reading these books maybe 20 years ago at this point, in the early 2000’s when I first started reading comics, especially “adult” comics, and this, along with the Alan Moore stuff, had all the buzz in the world among the comic-book guy demographic who were helping me find the good stuff. I read these originally in the trade paperback versions, this book seems to be a collection of the first three of those and seems connected to the Netflix series that is currently airing. I’m not sure the TV show could be very good, I haven’t seen it but the comics themselves are very vibes-based, it’s basically all about the world and milieu of the characters and the “plot” elements of the book are pretty slow and unimportant. For instance, dream visits hell early in the comic, the purpose of this isn’t really important (why does he need a special helmet to do his job?), what’s cool about it is seeing the depiction of hell with the Mick Jagger Lucifer and the crazy vistas and demons. Likewise with the chapters around the serial killer convention. Nothing all that important “happens” at this setting, the appeal of the comic is Gaiman’s imagination in rendering these scenarios and the incredible illustrations. Like the Alan Moore stuff that this series so clearly draws from (Dream is a real Dr. Manhattan-type) what’s so cool about this is how totally it utilizes comics as a form, doing things that wouldn’t really be possible in any other medium, from straight literature to cinema/TV. I was surprised at how much of this I remembered from my original reading over a decade ago. The serial killer convention, the part in hell, the opening arch about Dream being imprisoned by an occultist, the guy who lives forever that we meet every 100 years, the Shakespere thing. I’m wondering if that means I remember more than I think I do or that Gaiman’s most memorable episodes are all towards the beginning of this series. We’ll see. It’s been a nice break from the longer stuff I’ve been working through, I’ll have to wait to start volume 2 until my wife finishes it first, they are technically gifts for her.

THE DARK FOREST - CIXIN LIU

Now this is what I’m talking about. The first book in this series, the shorter THREE BODY PROBLEM, was definitely sold as sci-fi but was, for most of the book, a mystery. Sure, the mystery had an alien solution and set up the rest of the series to be much more sci-fi-y but that book itself mostly took place in our recognizable world and did not involve too much of the far-out trappings of the genre. This book corrects that. As always with these reviews, spoilers will be included. Most of this volume takes place about 250 years before the present day. The books are still building towards the final climactic battle between the Trisolarians and Earth, but this volume manages to throw in an interesting handful of twists to keep it interesting. First, we get to see what Earth is like 250 years in the future and get an abbreviated history of the time in-between. We learn that things went to shit right after our era, when Earth was convinced they were fucked. Things got really bad and tragic, but then humanity sort of snapped itself out of it and focused on creating a better world and better weapons for the Doomsday battle. By 250, the pendulum has swung the other way and Earth is cocky. They have massive cities underground, they have a space-fleet and stations around Jupiter. They have the ability to cure most diseases and a seemingly excellent living standard and government. These portions of the books were among my favorites. I liked the concept of giant tree buildings where each “leaf” is an apartment. I liked the everything is a touch-screen aspect. He briefly hints at the way social relations have changed, i.e. there seems to no longer be families in our 21st century sense, but Lui doesn’t dwell on that and seems much more interested in the science-y stuff. I wish there had been more of that, but what can you do? He was smart to use the concept that the alien Sophons were preventing any major breakthroughs on a physics-level so all of the tech is what we have taken to its outer extreme. Liu clearly loves thinking about this stuff and it really shows. After this sort of exploration of the future, we get a sort of preview battle as the real heart of the book. The humans are arrogant and expecting victory. The main Trisolarian fleet is still about 200 years away but they send out a probe. Predictably, the probe is actually a weapon and it easily destroys everything. We then get the sort of twist of the novel, where we find out why the main character, Luo, is so important. He’s been a sort of hapless layabout for 2 books now, but the Trisolarians really want to kill him (not clear why the Sophons can’t just give him cancer) and he’s the main character so something must be going on. Turns out he invents the idea of a “Dark Forest” universe where there are dozens of super-advanced civilizations and, due to a sort of grim game theory, they have to destroy any other intelligent life they discover, to prevent said life from destroying them. As such, Earth can pursue a sort of Mutually Assured Destruction tactic with the Trisolarians by threatening to broadcast their cosmic location, ensuring that a race more powerful than them discovers and destroys their civilization. This idea seems fairly obvious to me, I’m not totally convinced that it makes sense that Luo would be the only one who could think it up, but it’s an interesting twist that sets up the last, even longer book, to be interesting. I hope we go further into the future, since that sort of speculation is the most engaging to me. I’m expecting a handful of new twists. I enjoyed the brief diversion onto a generational ship, and wish that would have stayed part of the novel. Basically, as the middle book in the trilogy, I think it did a good job setting up the next one but how I ultimately feel about it will depend on Liu’s ability to stick the landing. Lots of promise.

THE LIFESTYLE ZOO - ACADEMIC FRAUD

Man oh man, does Tao Lin deserve more respect. This man, who writes under the pseudonym Academic Fraud and is “famous” for running a meme account, basically wrote a worse version of Tao Lin’s recent books. I downloaded this book based on the title; I assumed it would be about the way lifestyles are on display on social media and a more theoretical or philosophical breakdown of what that sort of scrolling does to people. Instead, I got some weak auto-fiction/memoir. I guess the book does have the distinction of being the first full book I’ve read completely on my phone, which, I imagine is the way the author intended it. Basically, the author drinks and smokes, jerks off, talks about differnt memes he’s seen, does drugs, gets into lifting weights and making memes and being online. Sadly, when he tries to connect this life to bigger ideas and issues but falls short. He comes off very cringe by using “gay” and “retarded” ostentatiously to freak-out the normies and ape Cumtown. He briefly touches on authors and thinkers like Mishima and Fisher but has a meme-level understanding of them and their work. He seems to vaguely understand that the interplay between his lifestyle larping and social media consumption is making him sad and that this is a common problem but he never brings any clarity to the issue, never renders this dilemmain a compelling way, offers a compelling explanination or theory as to why this is so common these days, or suggests actual solutions. Even his despair is half-hearted. I think Tao Lin’s stuff is better at rendering this sort of quagmire and offers real, if very kooky solutions. I think that book “COMING UP SHORT” has a much sharper analysis of the sort of cultural dead-end this represents, why people are acting this way online and actually engages in material critique. Not sure what else to say, at least it was short? Very disappointing, but a fine enough way to spend a few train rides. This guy should stick to making memes.

IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS - JUN’ICHIRŌ TANIZAKI (trans. THOMAS HARPER & EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER)

Breaking my rule a bit here, this book was quite short, about 80 pages that I breezed through in an afternoon. I got this physical copy at a bookstore/British pub here in Shimokitazawa, which was quite a boon, and it allowed me to learn some more about Japanese aesthetics. Tanizaki frames the book, in classic old-guy fashion, by complaining about the way things are today and lamenting the passage of the old ways. Written in ‘33, this book looks at the ways Japan is changing and becoming more Westernized, especially in its designs and aesthetics and registers some complaints. Tanizaki’s major complaint seems to be the Western drive for clarity and progress and light and ostentation while Japan used to value darkness and subtlety and slowness. He ranges over a dozen or so subjects in a brief span of pages. He complains that Western style toilets are too bright and white. Actually, he complains that everything is too bright, that Japanese food and temples and traditional clothing are all best seen in mutated natural light and that Japanese design is traditionally centered around these dark, mysterious places while Westernism focuses on brightness and clarity. He goes far enough to extend this argument to women. “Our ancestors made of woman an object inseparable from darkness, like lacquerware decorated in gold or mother-of-pearl.” Arguing that even Japanese women look better cloaked in darkness with only their face showing. He engages in some interesting speculation about the skintone of the Japanese looking best in low light and complains about moon-watching parties and a Kabuki plays now featuring electric lights. It’s a pretty compelling and interesting argument, he is worried that Japan is too focused on modernizing and trying to be like Westerners instead of sticking to Japanese ideals and ideas. It’s fascinating to think about how he wrote this during Japan’s imperial expansion and right before WWII, one wonders what he would think about Japan now. I know there is constant ongoing debate here, I see it on TV, about how to preserve “Japanese-ness” but still be a modern, globally relevant country. In many ways Japan, in my experience, is doing better than a lot of places in preserving distinctively Japanese things, given the Americanizing globalization that everywhere, even the USA itself, is subjected to. But Tanizaki was born not long after Japan was visited by the Perry’s Black Ships and were forced to open up to the rest of the world. He would have grown up around people who lived their whole lives in that other world and would have been astounded by the change. It’s not hard to understand why that experience would lead one to lament the loss of the old ways. I’ll remember this book the next time I eat a fancy old Japanese meal; I'll ask them to lower the lights down.

THE THREE BODY PROBLEM - CIXIN LIU (trans. KEN LIU

I’m a bit late on this but after finishing the 12 part Solar Cycle, I had the desire for some longer form sci-fi/speculative fiction. TT-BP comes quite highly recommended, again, I think I’m a few years late but this series of books certainly had a moment. I believe Obama himself endorsed them when they first dropped in English some years back. My copy has the coveted, “Soon to be a Netflix” series sticker on the front, so clearly the hype lives on. In some ways it’s interesting that this is the first major Chinese cultural product I can think of  that is popular in the United States (and even then, I suppose it’s not that popular, all things considered; it is still a sci-fi book that isn’t targeted at children). None of their movies or music or anything else China has to offer has broken through over here yet, despite (and perhaps because of) an ever-deepening economic relationship between our two nations and an ever-growing call for war. Hopefully we’ll get to see more Chinese stuff. This was interesting and cool, it makes me wonder what the rest of Chinese sci-fi is like and I’m intrinsically against this drumbeat to hate, fear and be perplexed by the Chinese. Anyway, the book itself is pretty fascinating if somewhat straightforward sci-fi. The basic plot (spoilers, obviously) of the novel revolves around mysterious deaths in the scientific world. Wang Miao, a nanotech guy in Beijing is tasked with trying to get to the bottom of this which eventually leads him to discover a virtual reality game called Three-Body. The game sequences take place in a world designed to look like ancient China, then ancient Europe, and characters in the game have historical names like King Wen or Newton, and depict an alien world that we eventually learn has three suns, which gives the planet itself a very unstable existence. Thus, we learn the “three-body problem” is fundamentally chaotic, will never resolve and will, eventually, lead to the planet being drug into one of the suns and consumed. The twist turns out to be that game depicts a real world, called Trisolaris, where aliens are looking for a way to escape their chaotic planet and settle somewhere more stable. They eventually settle on Earth, where a woman who has grown cynical due to the Cultural Revolution in China has essentially invited the Trisolarians to Earth in the hopes that they will destroy humanity. It turns out that several people have been working together to hasten the arrival of the aliens, who, by the end of the novel, are on their way, in ships that will take 400+ years to reach Earth. Presumably, the other two books in this series are about what mankind does in the interim. The last section of the novel tries to tell the story from the perspective of the Trisolarians themselves. I think Liu could have done more to make the Trisolarians seem alien, they come off as very human and recognizable. I liked their plan to send 11-dimensional supercomputers folded into 2 dimensions in order to be tiny, which was strange and bizarre enough to seem alien. A lot of this book seemed like place-setting of this larger story that I hope really goes crazy in these next two volumes.

STELLA MARIS - CORMAC MCCARTHY

Perhaps the last McCarthy book we’ll ever get. Then man is in his mid-80’s so it doesn’t seem a stretch to theorize that this is the last piece of prose we’ll get, at least until his estate publishes all of his unfinished stuff when he passes. It’s fitting then that the last line of the book comes after a character asks another to hold her hand, saying, “because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.” Let me back up, that line is spoken by one of the books two characters, Alicia Western, who we were introduced to, via flashbacks, in The Passenger. By the time of the events in The Passenger, Alicia has killed herself and the book mostly deals with how her brother, Bobby, deals with his grief surrounding her death. In this book, Bobby is in a coma and Alicia thinks he is going to die. She is twenty and has checked herself into a mental hospital in Wisconsin. The book could easily be a play, there is nothing in it but 7 long dialogues between her and Dr. Cohen, her psychiatrist. There’s no exposition or descriptions or even quotation marks, just the back and forth dialogue, and even that is one-sided, it’s mostly Alicia ranting. She’s a math genius and profoundly depressed and disturbed. McCarthy has been spending the last decade plus of his life at the Santa Fe institute, talking with mathematicians and it shows. She goes on and on about the nature of math, and name-drops dozens of mathematicians, most of whom (outside of Gӧdel, Whitehead and Russell) were unfamiliar to me. She talks about wanting to die and elaborates her fantasies about the ways in which she’s planned her death. We know, from the Passenger, that she does end up killing herself, if I’ve got the timeline right, it would have been shortly after the events of this book, so these sections are given more pathos and sorrow. The most shocking part is the graphic nature of her relationship with her brother. In The Passenger, it is made clear that Bobby loves Alicia, they make explicit that the love is very deep, perhaps too deep for a normal brother and sister, something on the edge of incest. This book goes much further. Alicia makes it quite clear she’s trying to fuck her brother, she wants to be, “entered like a cathedral” and has prolonged graphic dreams involving her “girljuice.” I’m not sure what to make of that part, I’m not sure what it adds to their relationship, especially since Bobby backs out. I suppose it’s supposed to make us feel bad for Alicia, since she’s got a sort of doomed love, but the incest taboo is pretty strong in most people (myself included) so it made her seem less pitable and more alien. It’s fascinating to see McCarthy write a woman, his books can be fairly criticized for being no-girls-allowed-Boyz-clubs, and he said in 2009 that he’s been planning on writing a woman for 50 years. It’s fascinating that his woman character is a sad genius that no one understands who doesn’t really exist in the world, she only talks with one doctor, and doesn’t have any recognizable desires, outside of her brother. It’s an intriguing dialogue but McCarthy seems afraid to really try to inhabit a female character. It’s certainly one big book, this and The Passenger, broken into two parts. Though I found The Passenger more interesting and think this book could have been interspersed into The Passenger to create one 500 page book that would have been excellent. There’s some interesting ideas in here about language and the subconscious, a theme of McCarthy’s, though now he’s on the Burroughs language-is-a-virus kick which is fascinating. As always the writing is beautiful and sad and haunting. I’d place this one book behind The Passenger and both of them together in the second tier of his writing.

ONE NATION UNDER BLACKMAIL pt. 2 - WHITNEY WEBB

First and foremost, hats off to Whitney Webb. She did it. When Epstien died in 2019 there seemed to be pretty universal agreement, in a way that is suprising in our hyper-partisan era, that something very fucked up had been going on with that guy. It was a clear if quick glimpse into a much darker world that supports and undergirds our world and one we’re not supposed to know about. Well, it’s almost 4 years later and there’s basically been no follow up in the mainstream media. No hard questions for the deeply implicated like Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton, or the administration of Harvard, or Dershowitz or any number of silicon valley ghouls, the list is really endless. No investigations from any part of our government into very serious and credible allegations of blackmail and intelligence ties (and this isn’t just from internet kooks, remember that that truly unbelievable statement from Trump Labor secretary Alex Acosta who admitted to Trumps transition team that he went easy on Epstien when he was the prosecuting attorney in Florida because he was told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence”), no follow-up on the thousands of nude photos of underage girls, presumably with the rich and famous, seized from his NYC home by police. Hell, they even conducted the Maxwell trail in such a way as to not reveal who she was trafficking these girls too. In a less corrupt world, even if the government wasn’t interested in this story, since, presumably, it involves a lot of them, perhaps the mainstream media, with vastly more resources than Webb, who conducted this research largely alone, would be interested in pulling some of these threads or a least keep bringing it up so it doesn’t get memory hole’d which seems likely to be the ultimate fate of this story. Just another wacky thing that happened long ago. But Webb did it. She really went wild, connecting dots and doing here best to show a larger system of corruption and blackmail, where business and intelligence and criminal syndicates overlap to make money and shape power. Like the last book, this volume goes far beyond Epstein. He really only features heavily in about 4 of the chapters. Webb does a good job tracing his life and giving us as thorough a biography as exists yet, but her ultimate aim is the system and structure around Epstein, the one that his bizarre death and the lurid details of his life brought attention to and that we’re being told to ignore. There is a ton in this book about suslord Leslie Wexner, including several quotes his given over the years w/r/t his belief that he’s possessed by a Dybbuk, as well as some murders he seems to have been involved in. A couple chapters about the various Clinton scandals that aren’t BJ based and are thus ignored by even the right-wing press (there’s some actually interesting Vince Foster info that goes beyond the typical right-wing screaming when his name comes up). 

There is some very interesting stuff about how Epstein seemed to be moving toward Silicon Valley before his downfall and his very tight relationship with Bill Gates. There’s some information about his apparent “two-tier” system for women, one that seemed to involve simply underage sex and disposal and other where he groomed women to become wives and girlfriends for the wealthy and powerful. There’s an excellent final chapter on Palatir, an under-discussed super-evil project of Thiel’s that has a large building here in Japan near my house. Overall, the book is a great resource. I’m going to keep it and anytime someone comes up in various “spooky” news stories, I’ll hit the index real quick to see what Webb has dug up on them. I hope that people keep digging into the Epstein issue, I would read another book more narrowly focused on him. Webb has set the bar quite high.

THE PASSENGER - CORMAC MCCARTHY

I wasn’t going to read this one, the first in a two part series, until I came across a review claiming the book was “too bleak” which piqued my interest. McCarthy is just about the bleakest contemporary writer I know of, so if one of his books is bumming out a professional reviewer, it’s probably up my alley. I would say I’m a medium to strong McCarthy fan. I’ve read Blood Meridian and Suttre, both of which I consider perfect classics (BM is one of the top 20 books I’ve ever read and the ultimate Western, I agree with Bloom that it basically renders the genre “finished”), as well as The Road, No Country for Old Men and part of Child of God (which I should revisit) so I think I’ve read enough to definitely say that you don’t go to McCarthy for feel-good vibes. And The Passenger fits firmly in this camp, it is certainly gloomy and a bummer. As a late work, and McCarthy is in his mid-80s so who knows how many more we’re going to get, The Passenger does a great job merging the two major strains of his work. Much of the early McCarthy takes place in Appalachia or the south and has more of a Southern Gothic and at times funny-in-a-grotesque-way feel while the later stuff takes place in the America West on the Border with Mexico and features the tropes and themes you’d expect from that landscape. The Passenger has a main character named Billy Western who spends most of his time in Tennessee and New Orleans, and who, like the main character is NCfOM, gets himself involved in something malevolent that is much larger than him. In this case, Billy is a salvage diver who finds a downed plane in the Gulf of Mexico that seems to be missing a passenger and appears to have been tampered with. He’s then followed by government agents of some sort who think he knows something he’s not supposed to. His father helped create the atomic bomb, which seems to put him under extra scrutiny and he spends most of the book fleeing (ending up in Ibiza, before it’s a rich people party island) these shadowy forces. He spends his time speaking with his dead-beat buddies (including a trans figure who, I found, very sympathetically drawn and well-conceived. You hear that an 80-something year old YT guy author is going to try to write a trans character and you hold your breath) in sections that really reminded me of the best parts of Suttre. Like in Suttre, they bluster and joke, but ultimately commiserate that they don’t understand life at all. He also spends his time missing his dead sister, who he is clearly in love with, Alicia, who was beautiful, a physics genius and profoundly mentally unwell. The book is interspersed with all italics sections that recreated the sister’s hallucinations, which involve grotesque “entertainments” and spectacles but largely revolve around her conversations with a character called “The Thalidomide Kid” or just “The Kid.” This is significant for two reasons, first, “The Kid” is the only name given to the main character in Blood Meridian, so it seems insane to not consider that McCarthy is asking us to connect them (added to this, at one point the book directly calls him a Djinn, which is often how the other main character in Blood Meridian, The Judge, is described). Additionally, the book is partially obsessed with the power of science to do evil, Billy and Alicia’s father’s work on the Atomic bomb comes up often and at one point McCarthy refers to “Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.” So naming a demonic figure after a drug, Thalidomide, that was developed by Nazi war-criminals who had escaped justice since they were deemed “useful” to the West and went on to hideously deformed 10,000-20,000 people seems very much in keeping with this theme. McCarthy is famous for spending all of his time these days at the Santa Fe institute, talking to scientists so he seems particularly tuned into their capacity for evil. As a final aside, I was also intrigued that this book contains a large, ~20pg section about the Kennedy assassination. His take isn’t wild or anything, he blames the Mafia, especially Carlos Marcello, and the CIA but it does strike me as interesting that, like Bob Dylan, he’s bringing up that killing at the end of his life. Prehaps people of that age have a good sense now of what was lost and how badly we, the USA, have fucked ourselves and the rest of the world by not really getting to the bottom of that event. Overall, I really enjoyed it, where else are you going to get lines like, “Life. What can you say? It’s not for everyone.”

ONE NATION UNDER BLACKMAIL pt. 1 - WHITNEY WEBB

Alright, now we’re talking. Getting into a year of long books, this one was 450 pages and is only part 1 of a series. And, really, this is an intro volume. The nominal topic of these books, Jeffery Epstein, doesn't really appear in this volume at all. After Epstein’s bizarre death in 2019 I, like many people, was deeply interested in what was going on with that guy, the deeper you looked into him, the stranger and stranger it got. His involvement with both Clinton and Trump are on the surface, but when you’d look further you’d find connections to Bill Barr and his father, Alan Dershowitz, basically all of Harvard and MIT, Chris Tucker, Adnan Khashoggi, Victoria’s Secret and the Limited, Too (big brands from the malls of my childhood), The Mossad and CIA, the list got longer and longer the more you looked into it the weirder and darker it got. Sadly, the whole affair has been basically ignored and shit-coated with right-wing conspiracy stuff that just adds his death to the #clintonbodycount and this gets non-right wingers to dismiss the whole thing, but I think there is a general consensus that something fucked up was going on with him that, briefly, gave us a window into the parts of the world we’re not supposed to see or understand. One was always hoping that someone would try to make sense of the whole thing, put all the pieces together into one place. Well, Whitney Webb is the first to try and, boy, did she come out swinging. Like I said, this book doesn't even really get into the Epstein stuff directly, instead, it begins around WWII and tries to trace various networks and overlaps between intelligence, both national intelligence agencies as well as private firms (which, as we see, significantly overlap), and organized crime. She starts with opium dealers who supported the KMT in China and the help they received along with Operation Underworld and the wartime collaboration with the Jewish and Italian Mafias to fight the Axis powers. The book follows these threads through Iran/Contra, the Inslaw affair, various drug running schemes, the Franklin Scandal and much more. Most importantly, it shows how these various scandals include the same interlocking cast of characters and, given the Epstein focus, it pays special attention to sexual blackmail. The stuff about various parties, from the Mafia to Trump Mentor Cohn having photos of FBI director Hoover sucking dick in a dress is a good example of this. There was a lot in the book that I knew about but much, much more that I did not. It is basically an encyclopedia of deep politics, and almost too handspinning to read straight through. The number of characters to keep straight and interlocking plots is tricky to handle, the book is constantly mentioning someone then saying that they will be discussed further in chapter so-and-so which makes the whole picture tricky to put together. However, that seems to be the point, all of this stuff can go on precisely because it is so complex and inter-locked, there’s a fantasy that there’s a grand-boss at the top pulling all the strings and if we could just understand them we’d have the whole thing figured out. Sadly, the truth is that there are hundreds of people and institutions all with competing interests and outlooks, all fighting and teaming up and backstabbing and blackmailing and scheming to increase their power and wealth. Webb has done a great service here, this book will be great to use as a resource to look up folks whenever one comes across a news story that seems “deeper” so to speak. Like I said, as a stand-alone book it’s a bit unfocused, jumps around a lot. As I understand it, it was supposed to be only one book but it would have been too long at ~900+ pages so this part is basically the background, giving a hint at the milieu that Epstein arose from. So maybe it will be possible to just read part 2 by itself, we shall see. Either way, I’m excited to read part 2 and get into the actual Epstein stuff.

WITCHES, WITCH-HUNTING, AND WOMEN - SILVIA FEDERICI

2023 was supposed to be the year of longer books, and it will be, I swear, but I decided to start it off with something quick I could get through while I work my way through some doorstops. Its hard to believe that Caliban and the Witch came out in 2004, something about it seems so timeless and monumental that the idea that it was published when I was in high school (tho, this really might just be a comment about how old I am) is sort of mind-blowing, given how fundamental the framework Federici presents is. This book is a sort of extra chapter to Caliban and the Witch, which if you haven’t read, is absolutely mandatory. It’s a study of the European witch-hunts and its main thesis might best be boiled down to a quote from this book: “What remains unacknowledged is that, like the slave trade and the extermination of the indigenous populations of the “new world” the witch hunt stands at a crossroads of a cluster of social processes that paved the way for the rise of the modern capitalist world. Thus there is much that can be learned from it concerning the preconditions for the capitalist takeoff.” (italics in original). This book rehashes and sharpens these insights then seeks to take these findings abroad. The last few parts of this quite short book are about the rise of witch-hunting in parts of Africa and India as well as the monstrous femicides in Mexico and Central America. In both cases, Federici is able to resist the common, racist, mistake of saying this is “just part of their culture” and instead show how the social changes wrought by capitalism are creating the conditions where women are being accused of witchcraft and violently murdered. Further, she shows how these exact same changes, the social dissolution and increased exploitation required and produced by capitalism, created the exact same femicidal fury in Europe a few hundred years ago. Short, punchy and perfect. I’m not sure it would totally work without having read Caliban and the Witch, which goes much more into the European history and “proves” more of its theories, it, rather, provides sketches and insights into how this framework and understanding the the misogyny at the heart of capitalist transformation can be applied in locations beyond Europe. Each little chapter in this short book could become its own large work, and hopefully there are historians and theorists working on just such books as we speak. In the meantime, we can read and reread Federici and be amazed and horrified at her insights into how our world really works. 1271 Witches

“In other word, women were charged with witchcraft because the restructuring of rural Europea at the dawn of capitalism destroyed their means of livelihood and the basis of their social power, leaving them with no resort but dependency on the charity of the better-off at a time when the communal bonds were disintegrating and a new morality was taking hold that criminalized beggina and looked down upon charity, the reputed path to eternal salvation in the medieval world.”

“Capitalism was born out of the strategies that the field elite - the Church and the landed and merchant classes - implemented in response to the struggles of the rural and urban proletariat that by the fourteenth century were placing their rule in crisis. It was a “counterrevolution,” not only suffocating in blood the new demands for freedom but the turning the world upside down through the creation of a new system of production requiring a different conception of work, wealth and value that was useful for more intense forms of exploitation.”

THE CRYSTAL WORLD - J. G. BALLARD

Last book of the world, I think it’s an even 75 this year, with most coming from my time in Togo, where reading during leisure time was much easier. I decided to read this book now because it’s quite short, to get another one in just before the new year (I’m hoping to focus more on longer stuff next year), and because I’ve never read any J. G. Ballard novels before. I remember reading a short story of his in college about people forced to stay awake 24/7 as part of some experiment, who then go insane, and I remember liking the story but never picked up anything else of his, despite his stellar reputation. This book was only okay. It is about a swampy forest in Cameroon Africa crystallizing along with everyone and everything in it. Into this milieu we follow a doctor who is trying to reach a leprosy clinic in the jungle who gets involved with various YTs, a diamond miner, a priest, an architect, ect. We slowly learn more strange things, like the fact that jewels liquify the crystals for some reason, or that the crystals seem to preserve, perhaps eternally, whatever they encase, or that this process is also happening in the Everglades and the Soviet Union, and we never find out why. The crystal stuff is really excellent and the best part of the novel, Ballard’s descriptions of the crystallized jungle is consistently deeply evocative and striking. It was really easy to visualize these strange and other-worldly scenes. Likewise, I appreciate that while some characters tried to philosophize or speculate as to what the crystallization was happening, Ballard resisted the urge to answer these questions or turn the process into a clear metaphor for something else. That being said, sadly the stuff around the crystallization, namely the interactions between the characters, was boring and forgettable. All of the main characters are YTs in post-colonial Africa, and while there were many secondary African characters, I believe only one of them was named (and even then, only in the last 3rd of the book). But even the YT characters were pretty cookie-cutter and forgettable. None of them or their desires or plotlines ever affected me or made me feel anything besides a desire to get back to descriptions about the forest. There is a compelling motif where many of the characters (including many African characters, though we never are allowed to know there feelings on the matter) are drawn to the idea of purposefully going into the forest to be crystalized but the characters themselves never made me care about their individual fates. Either way, the images of a crystallized forest, my favorite probably being a partially-petrified snake with crystal eyes tho there are dozens to choose from, will stay with me for a while. 1960 Crystals.

PSYCHOPOLITICS: NEOLIBERALISM AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF POWER - BYUNG-CHUL HAN

Still on that short book kick described in the previous post, looking to get a couple more in at the end of the year before dedicating much of next year to some longer works. This time, instead of a short novel, I figured I’d knock out another Byung-Chul Han work, since all of his shit is short and sweet, almost aphoristic, which I very much appreciated. This book and THE BURNOUT SOCIETY, the last book of his I read could certainly have been one book, since he’s circling the same set of ideas. Namely, he’s trying to explain and account for the ways that capitalism has changed since the neoliberal turn in the 70’s and how this change affects our lives and alters the contours and effects of power in our society. His big insight is around the ways that power has moved inside of us. Now, instead of getting disciplined through school or the military or a corporate job, we’ve moved all of this inside and rethought ourselves as entrepreneurs, each responsible for fashing ourselves into the sorts of happy, productive, fulfilled people we’re told we can be if we just work hard enough. Once you think of the world this way, you see it everywhere, from the manosphere types imploring you to adapt a gorilla grind-set to crush your goals, to the yoga-prenur types coaching you on self-care journeys to really “find yourself,” to silicon-valley folks talking acid and gathering data to optimize their output, even to the HR racial sensitivity White Fragility types who see racism as a personal project that everyone must addressed individual (coincidentally, in the context of expensive seminars that they run), this mindset is everywhere, in every political direction and always leads to the same dead-end. Han has a bit of academic-brain when he suggests that, “In fact, no proletariat exists under neoliberal regimes at all. There is no working class being exploited by those who own the means of production,” obviously, these people do exist, they just live in the global South, this ideology came into prominence at exactly the moment they started moving these jobs away, a sort of ideology that makes solidarity and mass-action unthinkable. I’m very sympathetic to these ideas and thought this book was quite good, especially when paired with Burnout Society, I sort of wish he’d put them together, and expanded on his intriguing idea that the so-called Big Data movement of today is similar to the birth of statistics in the 18th century, which he throws out towards the end of the book but deserves a lot more consideration. It’s a great way to think about the way the world works now, I’ll keep this framework in mind for a long while, I suspect. 1 neoliberal regime

“Today we deem not ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: always refashioning and reinventing ourselves.”

“As a mutant form of capitalism, neoliberalism transforms workers into entrepreneurs.”

“Power relations are interiorized - and then interpreted as freedom. Self-optimization and submission, freedom and exploitation, fall into one.”

“Emotional capitalism is the gamifying of life and the working world…A person playing a game, being much more emotionally invested, is much more engaged than a worker who acts rationally or is simply functioning.”

THE BRAVE AFRICAN HUNTRESS - AMOS TUTUOLA

Finishing up a few small books before the end of the year, just to pad the end-of-year book count total, since I think I’ll concentrate on some longer things next year. Tutuola is great for this, his books are all short and punchy, wildly imaginative and one-of-a-kind. His stuff is very grounded in particular, Yoruba, folk-milieu but very much its own thing, in some ways, I think of him as Nigeria’s Calvino. Like the other novels of his I’ve read, this one is outside of typical novel structures. Nominally, it tells the story of Adebisi, the titular brave African huntress, who journeys into the jungle to prove her might and rescue her brothers who have gone missing in the preceding years on hunting trips. In practice the story is very episodic and strange. Each chapter is a sort of mini-adventure or set-piece. Like his other books, which also typically follow this same format of someone traveling to a strange land (like the Bush of Ghosts) and having weird adventures and meeting strange people and creatures, this one feels like the episodes and creatures in this book could have been put in basically any order and/or swapped out with chapters from other books of his. None of that’s to say that this book wasn’t exciting or fun to read. There’s a talking gourd (spelled “guord” in the book, is that a British/Nigerian thing?) and a creature with lights coming out of its eyes that Adebisi kills, decapitates and then uses the head as a sort of flashlight for the rest of the novel. There is the signature Tutuola style where he twists standard English into a more Nigerian shape, with lots of unusual usages and constructions (lots of -ing verbs, repetition, understatement, a very colloquial style that mimics being told this story in person, etc.). It is somewhat unique how aggressive and violent this protagonist is compared to the other Tutuola books I’ve read. Typically, in his stuff, the main character is sort of detached and, even if they have a quest, they sort of float by and take in these experiences and have things happen to them. Adebisi in this book, being a brave huntress, is constantly fighting and killing people and animals. By the end of the novel she has killed as many animals as she possible could have in this forest and almost totally whipped out the pigmies (spelled like that, without the “y,” also, some of them are described as quite tall, so perhaps pigmy in this sense means “person who lives deep in the forest”) in a borderline genocidal rampage. These pigmies were holding her brothers hostage and had killed others that had wondered into their forest, but still, it struck me as a bit of an overreaction. Overall, excellent, a great end-of-the-year read. Tutuola remains undefeated. I’ll get through his oeuvre at some point. 4 dark jungles.

DONUTS (33 ⅓ ) - Jordan Ferguson

Knocking out some shorter books right here at the end of the year, figured that since I read that long DILLA TIME biography it made sense to read what I believe to be the only other treatment of Dilla in book form, this 33 ⅓ addition about his magnum opus, Donuts. Obviously, this book suffers from having read the longer Dilla piece first. I don’t think Ferguson anticipated that someone would be writing a 400 page biography of Dila that really digs into every aspect of his sadly short life, so when he includes a 50 page version I’m sure it seemed like it would go down as the final word and he spends too much time on it. I would have preferred the book be just about Donuts, the album and music itself. Ferguson tries to place the album within the larger context of Dilla’s life, which is a good idea but is done much more exhaustively by DILLA TIME. Which is not to say that there wasn’t a few bits of info that were new to me. I didn’t know that Dilla’s very last recording was a flip of “America Eats its Own” by Funkadelic, or that Pete Rock was the first producer to use a producer tag. There is a much more in-depth discussion here of exactly where the samples in each record on Donuts are from and what techniques he’s using to bring them all together. This was the stuff I was really here for, and for the second part of the book, Ferguson delivers. He is also big on the “this record is about dying” theory which I hadn’t really considered before DILLA TIME. The case is pretty strong, given the circumstances of its creation. However, as a listener who went over a decade before hearing this theory, I find the album melancholy and laid back, more than morbid. If it’s about death it’s more in a “turn off your mind, relax and float downstream” sort of way, a melding with an afterlife where his perfectly selected and flipped samples live alongside one another forever. A musical Elysian fields, if you will. I think Ferguson oversells how much the album shifts moods, I find the vibe very consistent. Ferguson writes, “Each beat can be plotted with a graph with “skullkicking” on one axis and “heartbreaking” on the other; with each track containing both colors in varying opacities,” which seems strong to me. I don’t think of any of the beats as fully “skullkicking” or “heartbreaking” at all, they all seem blunted, ethereal and untouchably cool. Even the tracks he thinks of as harsh and challenging, like “Glazed,” I still get lost in and spaced out on. But that’s just me. Ferguson has a ton of interesting stuff to say about this album, which truly is the greatest beat tape of all time and is a top 10 hip-hop record. There deserves to be as much writing on this as there is on Dylan or Springsteen or Lou Reed. Obviously, DILLA TIME is the book to read if you wanna understand Dilla but if you’re not read for the 400 page commitment that that entails, this is more than an acceptable place to start. 31 perfect tunes

OUT - NATSUO KIRINO

Doing my best to read more Japanese stuff and decided to branch out from simply history into some crime fiction. My understanding is that Natsuo Kirino is pretty popular here, consistently wins awards and is considered a leading proponent of a wave of female crime-fiction writers. Since I’m reading in translation and as someone who lives in Japan I was as interested in the background stuff about Japanese life as I was in the story itself. Though, the story itself was quite engaging. The novel is about 4 women who live depressing lives as night-shift employees at a Bento box factory. They each have fucked up home lives in their own ways, from living indebted from being overly materialistic to having sons and husbands who don’t talk to them to having to look after a grandchild and a mother-in-law without a husband. All of the husbands in this book are absent or very shitty and the book is largely about how awful and impossible life as a Japanese woman is, with an incredible amount of obligations and expectations but with dwindling social support. Anyway, the crime part of the book revolves around one of these women impulsively killing her shitty husband, who has spent all of their savings on bar girls and baccarat, and then the other 3 eventually, either for money or a sense of obligation, helping cut up and dispose of the body. As you can imagine the plot thickens from there. They blackmail each other and wrestle with what they’ve done and try to keep it all secret from the police. At the same time the police start to suspect a gangster/pimp who got in a fight with the husband shortly before his death. This guy, who has his life ruined by the investigation, also starts to track the women down for vengeance. The plot itself is pretty interesting and exciting, it continues to provide new twist consistently. There is a B-plot about a Brazilian-Japanese coworker at the Bento factory who becomes infatuated with one of the women which doesn’t really go anywhere. It was interesting to see what life would be like for a not 100% Japanese person in Japan, there is a whole community of Brazilians in the book, but his particular arc wasn’t very satisfying. The stuff about the gangster was quite interesting to me, it touches on some Japanese underworld stuff that was very interesting, and it helped explain the Girls’ Bars that you see everywhere here. However, part of the novel centers around the fact that the gangster had committed a really gruesome rape/murder earlier in his life, served less than a decade and is back out, and it doesn’t seem to me that the Japanese penal system is that lenient. It’s also interesting to read crime fiction about a country where murder is so rare that it’s a big national event when one occurs. Despite a disappointing ending the novel was really engaging and interesting. The main women, and especially Masako, the leader of the group, were incredibly well drawn and fascinating. The sense of suffocation and dead-endedness in their lives was really compelling and sad. 2004 chopped up bodies.