Customer Reviews

I Love Lord Buddha

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"Karmic Relief"

10/01/2004

Clients. Can't live with them, can't light them on fire.

They bombard you incessantly with insipid questions and jerky

demands. You answer every one with apparent delight. They tell

inane jokes and chew with their mouths open. You laugh

uproariously through all five courses.

"They'll get theirs in the next life," you reassure yourself

after that "accidental" ass grab at the last brainstorm. But

what if someone sped up the process? Enter Hiyoko, the ballsy,

hyper-cool heroine of "I Love Lord Buddha," first-time novelist

Hillary Raphael's breathtaking romp through Tokyo in the '90s.

Equal parts insatiable nymphomaniac, mesmerizing guru, and self-

destructive firebrand, Hiyoko leads a revolt against the karmic

drain that is Japan's adult-entertainment industry.

The tale of Hiyoko's transformation from jaded American wanderer

to ethereal neo-geisha revolutionary spurts piecemeal from the

mouths of delicious characters like her sensible cousin, her

love-struck shrink, her fellow hostess followers, and the

Tokyo police.

Written entirely in lowercase and often a bit ... racy (read: NC-

17), the hypnotic story barrels along at breakneck pace until

the clients of Tokyo get their (karmic) just desserts.

If only this would befall your clients before they could order

their chocolate ones.

DailyCandy.com

Funny, sexy, outrageous, fast-paced, mystical, and riveting, you must read this book in one sitting! No beginning, middle, or end, only non-stop hallucinated action frenzy, punctuated by saturated gorgeous scenes. My only regret is that the actual Tokyo I know is nowhere near as wild and hypnotic as Raphael depicts it.

As a practicing Buddhist, I connected on a personal level to the tenets so playfully explored in this work of (quasi-)fiction. The story weaves its way through many of the central contradictions facing Buddhists in a consumer society. At the same time, it is essentially a "comedy" in the sense that absurdity pervades every page of this episodic novel. Characters are more like caricatures-- however, the reader is never condescended to, but always compicit with "the joke". I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to engage in the contemporary urban spiritual dialogue.

The setting for I Love Lord Buddha is the hostess bars of Tokyo in 1997. The main characters are western hostesses who spend their nights socializing and drinking with men in these bars. Amongst them is a charismatic leader from New York who takes the name HIYOKO and starts recruiting these displaced women into a new-Buddhist group called the Neo-Geisha Organization. Reinterpreting Buddhist philosophy through her cultish mind, HIYOKO plans for a cataclysmic event that will shake humanity into exercising Buddhist values so as to avoid a larger global catastrophy. It is a lively story with lots of sex, drugs, and Buddhist theory, which portrays the lack of spiritual values in modern commercial Tokyo.

The plot unfolds as HIYOKO's cousin Heidi Peterson, a sociology grad student from the States, arrives and starts doing her research on the Neo-Geishas and their enigmatic leader. It takes the form of Heidi's notes, interviews, police reports, and pages from various documents following each other in brief chapters, many only one page long.

Fast pacing and an interesting structure give the novel a unique look and feel. Very little is capitalized. which makes reading a bit hard since the break between sentences is only the tiny period. Without a leading capital letter new sentences can be hard to find at times. However this typographic style contrasts well with the fact that HIYOKO is always in all caps.

Well written and plotted the novel does a good job of creating the world of the characters and the moral dilemma of our times.

"Hillary Raphael aspirates the drug fetus's brain cell of Japanese acid and Neo-Geisha gene-dub." - Kenji Siratori, author Blood Electric

a first novel that once i started reading seemed to have to have come from the san francisco sixties. but it wasn't, it's new. i'm not quite sure, after just one reading rather i like it or not. the strange capitalization takes a little while to get used to. the story doesn't exactly flow, there are a series of vinyettes that go in all directions but come together here and there to make a story.

the story is loosely about HIYOKO a westerner in tokyo who builds a cult religion with followers coming from young women who work in tokyo's hostess bars. with images coming from the AUM cult of subway gas fame, HIYOKO's cult flows through the neon lit world of sex and drugs.

i suggest that you read the sample chapter first. it's available at neogeisha.org.

This holiday season Raphael sweeps you into the "in" crowd and you feel as if you are HIYOKO's right hand woman waiting for the moment the men are transfixed by your collaborative beauty to redesign the world under her vision. This novel with remind you why you dress the way you do. Why you walk the way you do. And why you make love the way you do.