A brilliant and captivating insight into the bizarre nature of contemporary Japan.
Adrift in Tokyo, teaching giggling Japanese highschool girls how to pronounce Tennyson correctly, Robert Twigger came to a revelation about himself: he’d never been fit. In a bid to escape the cockroach infestation and sweaty squalor of a cramped apartment in Fuji Heights, Twigger sets out to cleanse his body and his mind. Not knowing his fist from his elbow the author is sucked into the world of Japanese martial arts, and the brutally demanding course of budo training taken by the Tokyo Riot Police, where any ascetic motivation soon comes up against blood-stained dogis and fractured collarbones.
In Angry White Pyjamas Robert Twigger skilfully blends the ancient with the modern – the ultra-traditionalism, ritual and violence of the dojo (training academy) with the shopping malls, nightclubs and scenes of everyday Tokyo life in the twenty-first century – to provide an entertaining and captivating glimpse of contemporary Japan.
Adrift in Tokyo, teaching giggling Japanese highschool girls how to pronounce Tennyson correctly, Robert Twigger came to a revelation about himself: he’d never been fit. In a bid to escape the cockroach infestation and sweaty squalor of a cramped apartment in Fuji Heights, Twigger sets out to cleanse his body and his mind. Not knowing his fist from his elbow the author is sucked into the world of Japanese martial arts, and the brutally demanding course of budo training taken by the Tokyo Riot Police, where any ascetic motivation soon comes up against blood-stained dogis and fractured collarbones.
In Angry White Pyjamas Robert Twigger skilfully blends the ancient with the modern – the ultra-traditionalism, ritual and violence of the dojo (training academy) with the shopping malls, nightclubs and scenes of everyday Tokyo life in the twenty-first century – to provide an entertaining and captivating glimpse of contemporary Japan.
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Reviews
Twigger vividly captures the wince-inducing physical and emotional trials endured by those who would wear the black belt. But he also offers a rare insight in aikido's peculiarly Darwinian group dynamic and how it fits into modern Japanese society. After this marvellously insightful account I will snigger no more at Steven Segal's po-faced chop-sockey
The most intriguing sports book ever to win the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award
Wonderfully oddball ... Here is a cult book all right, which could do for Japan and the martial arts what Hornby did for Highbury and the football terraces
A book of unexpected brilliance. It is subtle, funny, stimulating and original - a rites-of-passage story, an explanation of an alien culture, and an inspiring work of philosophy
A frantic, very funny, urban quest
Brilliant ... everyone should read it
Poetry in motion
A rattling good yarn and very funny into the bargain
Communicates the existential purity of his elective regime with irrepressible passion ... it also has the unmistakable stamp of authentic experience
This is a splendidly written adventure, something sane at last on the craziness of martial arts
His fine eye for eccentricities makes this an entertaining travelogue
His explanation of how to come to terms with intense pain should be read to every footballer who has ever writhed about in agony after a kick on the shin... It is a clever, enthralling book