If you review novels set in Asia, as this writer does, it follows that you read a lot of books. To call some of them "terrible" may be putting it kindly.
Long before "The Karate Kid" made his film debut, martial artists in books had become increasingly exoticized. Once it was enough to snap boards with a swipe of the hand. Now, you're expected to become invisible, defy gravity and breathe underwater.
Author Eric Van Lustbader, whose novels feature a murderous Ninja who crawls up the sides of New York skyscrapers, once boasted in an interview in People magazine that he did not want to visit Japan, because seeing the country as it really was would cramp his writing style.