Here we go again. Police in Tokyo are investigating the death of an unnamed forty-nine-year-old man who was found, in his home in the city’s west, on his own bed in fact, with his genitals sliced off....

It all depends on how you choose to view it: Fatale is a crime comic. It features square-jawed tough guys making goo-goo eyes at beautiful dames with curling, jet-black tresses and fine suits and shotguns and embittered, trench-coat...

“Women commit crimes because of men.” - Spoken by the ghost in Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 We left off last column with a run-down on the first of actress/singer Meiko Kaji’s Female Prisoner Scorpion series and a hint that...

If you’re female, living in Osaka and haven’t yet bought yourself a mask to keep out the germs hothousing on overheated trains, you might want to get on to it. No, there’s no new Japanese super-flu, but...

She sold over a million albums, her films inspired much of Kill Bill, and when she didn’t want to do what she was asked of by executives, she said uh-uh and split for greener pastures. Her name is Meiko Kaji....

“Oishi sausage des!” –Sion Sono, Guilty of Romance Okay, hands up if you know what a love hotel is? Yeah, right, feel free to skip ahead. For those who don’t: A love hotel is basically a venue that...

I’ll admit it, I was worried this one wasn’t for me. I cracked open The End of Everything earlier this year, and its first chapters, with their immediate plunge into the early adolescent headspace of Lizzie Hood, had me slightly...

Once again proving that they are peerless when it comes to off-the-wall, weirdo crime, Japan has hit us with a double-header of typically bizarre, kinky shit in the last couple of weeks. Firstly, on October 12, it was...

Back in my days teaching English in Japan, I raised the topic of murders and why they were so frequently extreme in Japan. One student actually said in reply, “It’s not the quantity, it’s the quality.” Kind...

It’s a role of intense emotional shifts frequently conveyed internally. It’s a portrayal of severe emotional and psychological damage created with such subtlety and intelligence it’s hard to imagine any healthy twenty-two year old pulling it off,...