What do You think about Salmonella Men On Planet Porno: Stories (2008)?
This was a different and interesting book. As I said several times before, I am enjoying a lot reading book from Japanese writers, or about Japan, as they are so different from ourselves and our culture that sometimes it doesn’t even seem we live on the same planet. And that’s why I feel we cannot appreciate these short story on the same frame of values as our occidental culture, we have to be more open minded. We can immediately see that on an opening line of the first short story: Yes, we were still using a double bed even after five years of marriage. Well, our bedroom was rather small. There wasn’t enough room for two beds.This already hinted me that I was in for a treat.Some of the stories were amazing, like the Daba Daba Tree, Rumours About Me, The Edge of Happiness, The Last Smoker, and the one that gives the title to this book. They had this surrealness about them, but at the same time we can see our day to day life being unfolded, and it’s amazing how they also have this timeless quality, as if they could apply to humanity as a whole on any given time of History.It is a book well worth reading and discovering. You need to like reading short stories, and you need to be prepared for some awkwardness, but if you pass all that, prepare to be amazed. “We lived through the horrors of war, survived post war austerity, and for what?” Asked Kusakabe. “The richer the world becomes, the more laws and regulations are imposed on us and the more discrimination grows. And now we are not free at all.”
—Sonia Almeida
I've often thought that if I placed my left foot forward first instead of my right or sneezed 3 times in a row and held in the 4th or hiccuped and coughed just right, reality would probably shift a little to the side revealing a parallel reality, a reality that would at first appear slightly screwed and skewed but then would feel just like any another humdrum reality. I often think of such silly things. I often get the hiccups.Tsutsui evidently hiccuped and coughed just right. This book of stories may at first seem absurd but when you stop and think about it, they could be the real thing. Isn't our reality absurd? Some of the stories though totally outlandish seemed familiar. Like any book of short stories some fall flat and some are just brilliant. The title story falls in between.And now as my little fingers peck at this keyboard creating symbols that appear as insults to a tribe of people living in the remote jungles of Borneo I'm thinking I should have released that 4th sneeze.
—Brian
Salmonella Men on Planet Porno is a collection of varied tales which all have a bizarre or surreal angle (some more than others). I actually hadn’t planned to read it yet, but couldn’t resist just trying the first story about a strange plant – the dibba-dabba plant - which, if placed at the foot of the bed, causes its owners to have erotic dreams. The dreams are so life-like the dreamers aren’t sure any more what’s a dream and what’s real, and even meet other dibba-dabba owners having dreams of their own. The story was sufficiently weird and amusing to hook me in and before I knew it I’d read the whole book.Despite the book’s name, most of the stories aren’t sexual in nature, and none of them are particularly explicit. The title story comes at the end of the book and is more of a theory of evolution couched in story form than anything else. It’s the longest tale – more of a novella actually – and concerns a group of scientists on a mission to a distant planet, nicknamed Planet Porno because all the flora and fauna seems more driven by sex than anything else. I found this story a little tedious, and in general found the stories towards the beginning of the book to be much stronger.My favourites included a war pastiche in which a soldier to commutes to the front daily, a poignant story about the drudgery of life in which a man and his family spend a bank holiday at the seaside and end up wading like lemmings out to sea with thousands of others who have chosen to do the same, and a strange tale of a man who takes a train to a hidden mountain village and takes part in some very unusual festivities there.As an introduction to Japanese weirdness, this was great and has definitely left me with an urge to dig deeper. I loved the slightly jokey style, and imagined the stories being read to me in gleeful tones by a grinning narrator. However, the stories themselves were very much hit and miss, and there were a few too many duds in amongst them for me to really rate the book highly. I’ll give it three stars, but I’d like to try a full-length novel by Tsutsui and see how he might develop some of his highly original ideas into something a big meatier
—Sophia
