Angry White Pyjamas

Description

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, guided by his flatmates Fat Frank and Chris, 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 nineties - to provide an entertaining and captivating glimpse of contemporary Japan.

Robert Twigger won the Newdigate prize for poetry in 1985. He is the author of Angry White Pyjamas, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, Big Snake, The Extinction Club, Being a Man and Voyageur.

A frantic, very funny, urban quest. - Mail on Sunday - Simon Garfield 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 - Patrick French His fine eye for eccentricities makes this an entertaining travelogue - The Observer A rattling good yarn and very funny into the bargain - Independent on Sunday - Tim Hulse This is a splendidly written adventure, something sane at last on the craziness of martial arts - Independent on Sunday 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 - Daily Mail - Ian Wooldridge Brilliant ... everyone should read it - Late Review - Tony Parsons 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 - Guardian - Frank Keating