Going Down With Getting It Up

Lala Pipo
By Hideo Okuda

Sex sells.

That is the theme of the masterfully crafted intertwining stories that make up Lala Pipo. However those two words do not always go together as simply as our brains associate them, and the complexity, and simplicity, of sex and selling is what carries the daring reader who dives into this story. Both instigator and victim, Lala Pipo stimulates and also disgusts, sending its own genre under the proverbial bus. Shallow and deep at the same time Okuda plays the reader like the idiotic johns we are reading about, but we end up more satisfied in the end.

Lala Pipo is a criss-cross story intertwining six modern Tokyo residents (the seemingly meaningless title is properly explained near the end). We start out meeting shut-in writer and all-around loser Sugiyama who has inflated dreams of his own abilities (a recurring theme), but until opportunity knocks, he occupies himself by buying surveillance equipment to hear the sexual escapades of his cabaret-club scout neighbor living above him. Sugiyama's self-satisfying lonely sessions are detailed just enough until his neighbor suddenly moves. Sugiyama's complicated masturbatory ritual has been destroyed.

The story then shifts to perspective of Kenji Kurino, and up-and-coming scout who has gotten enough good breaks to allow him to move to nicer digs...

To say any more would ruin the genuine sticky fun of Lala Pipo. What follows is and rich mix of genuinely sad people presented with humor, eroticism and morose irony. We meet an erotic novel writer who wishes he was a more respected author, a karaoke box employee who finds himself to be an accessory to prostitution and a reclusive chubby woman who has not only discovered her masochistic and sadistic sides, but has one more important secret.

And these aren't even the most extreme characters the intertwisted yarns Lala Pipo spins.

This book is a lot of dark and sexy fun. It reminded me of one of my favorite films, "Requiem for a Dream" but had a bit more of a sense of humor, and was about sexuality, not drug addiction. We find people that are experts at finding what they want physically, but are intellectual infants at finding what they need emotionally. Modern Japanese society is skewered often in the stories, and non-communication and sexless marriages on one side versus cheap and risk-free sex with nubile and money-grubbing high-schoolers on the other paints a picture of a lost world that isn't only the fault of delusional individuals. Tokyo isn't completely a mess, but has some very messed up people that feed off each other like parasites.

Despite the lascivious nature of the story, what makes Lala Pipo a success is the dexterous sewing of these stories together. The tale isn't linear, but a patchwork, and is one that is entertaining like amateur porn and slow-motion car crashes. If the characters were completely despicable, this wouldn't be a book. The warm pull is that the reader can connect in some way with all of these fractured spirits, and that's what makes the results so memorable.