Aside from the sight of middle-age Japanese businessmen happily reading comic books, the Tokyo train commute also features the contrast of prim, sober-looking commuters sitting under advertising posters of busty babes falling out of their bikini tops. These are the lurid ads for Japan's tabloid magazines, and their black and red kanji headlines scream of celebrity news, scandal, sex and crime. Sanitized mainstream newspapers often play catch-up with tabloids that readers turn to for the scoop on political corruption scandals or the reigning sumo champ's philandering.
They rip the mask from the face of an outwardly orderly society of conformists to reveal its secret peccadilloes and addictions, warts and eccentricities. They can be as journalistically believable as a respected broadsheet or as yellow as the worst Bigfoot-obsessed supermarket rag. They can also be very funny: men who fall in love with their life-size sex dolls, a thief whose fetish for uniforms filled his house with purloined company duds, and a club for women who enjoy baking pies and then hurling them at others.
These are only a few of the translated magazine gems found in "Tabloid Tokyo," a collection of pulp offerings originally printed in Sunday's popular Tokyo Confidential column of the Japan Times and the naughtier WaiWai page of the online Mainichi Daily News. Following up on their superb 2001 anthology also called "Tokyo Confidential," translators Geoff Botting, Mark Schreiber, Michael Hoffman and Ryann Connell present such irresistible reports from the front lines of the bizarre as "Humans Cloned By Con Artists," "Believers Worship Giant Penis" and "Moms Mistake Kids for Pets."
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