“This sleazy novel is
not recommendable for ladies or gentlemen.”
So reads the jacket of the Japanese
edition of this collection of six dark, interrelated, tragicomic
chapters dealing with themes of desire, inadequacy, and failure,
using the underbelly of sex as its canvas. As misheard by one
of the characters, “a lot of people,” is “Lala
Pipo.”
Lala Pipo is an ingenius
tapestry of absurdity, whose cast of unlikable characters cross
the line of good taste that even those who have crossed the line
cannot help but notice. Each act pushes the envelope past the
one preceding it. It’s like an episode of Seinfeld
directed by Bob Guccione, all the story elements cleverly weaving
together, taking the reader from shock to gut-busting hilarity
with each tale. The main difference: these losers are X-rated.
Lala Pipo is being made into a
feature film to be released in Japan in 2009.
Click
here to read a free preview.
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“Lala
Pipo deftly
mixes satire with farce, comedy with tragedy, and eroticism with
social commentary. At times, the book reads like a fusion of The
Usual Suspects and Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “In
a Grove”... The subject matter is not used for titillation
and is not pornography, per se. Hideo Okuda gives us a fresh approach
to the sleazy side of Tokyo, showing us the seedy parts of Shibuya
beyond the shopping centers. Lala Pipo is a well-written,
humorous and timely book.”
—The Japan Times
“These
human monsters, it turns out, could be as American as you or I,
and their secret lives look distressingly familiar. Okuda successfully
taps into the creep inside us all.”
—The Stranger (Seattle)
“For
this sort of thing, really quite good.”
—The Complete Review
 Hideo
Okuda was born in 1959.
His first novel was published in 1998 after he worked as a magazine
editor, planner, and copywriter. He is now one of the most popular
author of entertainment novels in Japan, known for his comical
portrayals of people at all levels of society.
In 2002,
he won the Oyabu Haruhiko Award for hardboiled and adventure novels
for JAMA (Annoyance), and in 2004, he won the
Naoki Award (Japanese equivalent of the National Book Award) for
Kuchu Buranko (The Flying Trapeze).
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