Either by design or by accident, most English translations of
Japanese novelists tend to be books that don’t discuss sex.
Reviewers who have explored this believe that it is because Japanese
masochism can at times seem harsh compared to good old-fashioned
American exploitation. The conventional wisdom is that a general
audience could be repulsed.
And there’s much to find repulsive in Lala Pipo, the latest
offering from New York publisher Vertical Press, which has long done
fine, mostly thankless work reprinting the offerings of Japanese
authors and comics artists, including zippy translations of horror
novels and authoritative compilations of the manga of Osamu
Tezuka. Lala Pipo (the name comes from an unskilled verbal
translation of the English “lot of people”) is possibly the most
successful and literary translation that Vertical has published to
date, but, again, there’s a lot repellant within.
This is a novel in six parts, telling the story of six people who
are linked in distant ways. None of them are good people, and they’re
all hung up on their own weird sexual appetites. A man readjusts his
entire life so that he can more easily masturbate to his upstairs
neighbor’s enthusiastic sexual encounters. An older housewife with a
disgusting secret buried in the mounds of rotting garbage that fill her
house is lured into a lucrative career starring in pornographic films.
A stuffy writer can’t stop having sex with underage prostitutes.
Lala‘s worldview is dark, to say the least, and the wry humor
and masochism is not for the weak of heart, but as a portrait of sexual
despair and loneliness, Okuda has crafted a novel that feels groundbreaking. It successfully does the work begun by ambitious but
ultimately failed darkly erotic American novels like Nicholson Baker’s
The Fermata and Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and
Thin, perhaps because of Okuda’s resistance to sentimentality.
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.