Angry White Pyjamas: An Oxford Poet Trains with the Tokyo Riot Police - Softcover

Robert Twigger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0575401249 ISBN 13: 9780575401242

Publisher: Indigo, 1997

Synopsis

A brilliant and captivating insight into the bizarre nature of contemporary Japan.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 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 twenty-first century - to provide an entertaining and captivating glimpse of contemporary Japan.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Twigger is a British author, poet and adventurer. After attending Oxford University he trained with the Tokyo Riot Police, which became the subject of his bestselling book Angry White Pyjamas. He has been awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry, the Somerset Maugham Award for Literature and the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. He led the expedition that was the first to cross the Great Sand Sea of the Egyptian Sahara solely on foot, and another that was the first to cross Western Canada in a birchbark canoe since 1793. He is the author of eight books, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as several collections of poetry. Big Snake was filmed for Channel 4.

Review:

The most intriguing sports book ever to win the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award * Daily Mail * Twigger vividly captures the wince-inducing physical and emotional trails endured by those who would wear the black belt. But he also offers a rare insight in aikido's peculiarly Darwinian group dynamic and how it fits into modern Japanese society. After this marvellously insightful account I will snigger no more at Steven Segal's po-faced chop-sockey -- Ben Farrington * Literary Review * Communicates the existential purity of his elective regime with irrepressible passion ... it also has the unmistakable stamp of authentic experience * Daily Telegraph * Poetry in motion -- Sue Townsend * Sunday Times * 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 -- Frank Keating * Guardian * Brilliant ... everyone should read it -- Tony Parsons * Late Review * 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 -- Ian Wooldridge * Daily Mail * This is a splendidly written adventure, something sane at last on the craziness of martial arts * Independent on Sunday * A rattling good yarn and very funny into the bargain -- Tim Hulse * Independent on Sunday * His fine eye for eccentricities makes this an entertaining travelogue * The Observer * 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 A frantic, very funny, urban quest. -- Simon Garfield * Mail on Sunday *

About this edition

• Publisher: Indigo
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0575401249
• ISBN 13: 9780575401242
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320