Customer Reviews

Salmonella Men on Planet Porno: Stories

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In this dazzling collection of thirteen short stories, ordinary reality quickly changes into something very different. A little bonsai tree at the foot of a couples's bed gives them erotic dreams--in which their neighbors become involved (really). A corporate drone finds his smallest actions reported in the newspaper. The last smoker finds himself an endangered species, as society turns against tobacco. Each story begins with a somewhat believable premise and quickly descends to absurdity and way, way beyond.

The stories are amazing, amusing, shocking, and erotic. Author Tsutsui writes brilliantly in crisp, lucid prose. I enjoyed the collection thoroughly. There is some unevenness among the stories--the title story being a little less engaging than the others. Still, these are great short stories and I recommend them highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

Not well written (or translated). It reads like first draft from a high school creative writing class. I found the stories unimaginative and weak.

I kept reading thinking it would get better, but each story was a bigger disappointment than the last.

I can't stress enough how poorly written it was. Read the first five pages and you'll get a good taste of bland slop that follows.

This was my first exposure to Yasutaka Tsutsui, but I'm glad that his work is being translated into English -- it won't be the last! "Salmonella Men" is a collection of shorts that you'd expect if O. Henry were a salaryman, vignettes of the everyday that become profoundly disturbing in short order. There's experimentation with dream worlds and alternate realities, and the character studies are vivid if occasionally baffling. There's an unexpected bawdiness to some of the stories (okay, so you got that from the title, but it can be shocking if you've read more straightlaced Japanese literature), but it's so funny that you really don't stop to think much about it being pornographic. As the "Publisher's Weekly" review suggests, the novelty of his approach rubs off about halfway through the book and it does start to feel a touch self-similar, but there's enough literary merit to carry the rest regardless. Fans of literature of the fantastic and magical realism in particular will be entertained.