Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Season of Violence by Shintaro Ishihara

I bought this book over the summer at a great used bookstore in Northampton, MA. I picked it up based on the cover (which is incredible), and then was sold after reading the cover flap: "Violent, sensual, and seemingly un-Japanese, the stories in Season of Violence nevertheless depict Japanese teenagers of the present* in compulsive but often unconscious revolt against the moral codes of "old Japan." Yet these stories tell of youth who offer no real, modern morality to replace the old--only the anti-morality of indiscriminate sex, brutality, and living for today's pleasures and sensations. These are stories of teenagers who came to be known as Taiyozoku--the Sun Tribe."

Part of what interested me is that I was reminded quite a bit of some of the films coming out of Japan at that time. And with good reason, as I later discovered that the author wrote the screenplays for many of those films, including the classic Crazed Fruit.


I love the title page.

And the cloth cover with the embossing (maybe hard to see from the scan) is absolutely beautiful.

*"The present" being the 50s.

No comments:

Post a Comment