Winner of the 1998 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. If a
travel book is meant to give a sense of place, Robert Twigger comes
very close to understanding the core of Tokyo life. After drifting
through life as an award-winning poet from Oxford University and a
struggling dilettante in the Tokyo slums, Twigger finally resorts
to the physical and mental discipline of aikido. His description of
the physical torture and spiritual transformation undergone through
training is always lively and detailed. But Twigger's quirky,
succesful portrayal of large, over-muscled expatriates from around
the world training and living in Tokyo truly distinguishes his
book. Though he does not understand the depth of the Japanese
psyche, he is suprisingly insightful about the way of life. By
approaching Japanese life through the narrow scope of aikido
training, Twigger manages to unearth the extreme contradictions of
Tokyo: a city of peace, violence, modernity and tradition.
Simultaneously, his humourous and ironic anecdotes about
expatriates in Tokyo acknowledge his own awkward status as an
outsider not completely accepted but privileged to observe. Tahir
Shah, author of Beyond the Devil's Teeth, adds: What's the cure for
smoking too much, being a caffeine junkie, never exercising, and
hitting the big 3-0? Most people would slouch into their seat at
the pub and stare deep into their pint. But Twigger, a
self-confessed pacifist in appalling physical shape, decided that a
full life-shift was in order. The accomplished poet and winner of
Oxford's Newdigate Prize, working in the Land of the Rising Sun,
embarked on the hardest martial-arts course in the world. Written
with a poet's pen and with a good deal of humour, it touches on the
inhuman levels of pain and harsh codes of discipline by which every
samurai was bound. (Kirkus UK)
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.
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