What do you get when you combine sex, drugs, techno, bar hostessing, manga and a warped, perverted revisioning of Buddhism?
Apparently you get I LOVE LORD BUDDHA, Hillary Raphael’s avant-garde, postmodernist first novel.
Heather Peterson, a native of New York, using her adopted name HIYOKO, leads a group of foreign-born bar hostesses in Tokyo to murder their clients and commit suicide en masse, all in the name of enlightenment. But how did she get to that point, and how did she amass so many followers?
Short answer, by being a whore. Long answer? It takes nearly 200 pages to get there, but all signs point to being a charismatic whore. There’s a difference, you see.
I’m getting ahead of myself here, though.
Heather Peterson, A.K.A. Tiffany (her hostess name), Spiky (due to her short, theatrical blonde hair) and HIYOKO (her Neo-Geisha name), starts off as a somewhat subpar hostess. She doesn’t empty ashtrays, take drink orders or wear a skirt. But she’s an excellent conversationalist, very seductive and gorgeous in a plastic-and-comic-book way. Because of this, she never loses her job, and winds up one of Tokyo’s best foreign-born hostesses, with lovers and admirers in all facets of Japanese society.
“Tiffany” changes her name, at least outside of the bar in Neo-Geisha capacity, to HIYOKO, and begins reworking Buddhist philosophy into what she deems a “new-new religion,” one of vehement anti-consumerism, the use of sex and narcotics a straight path to what are called “Limit” experiences. The Neo-Geisha are all beautiful women, courtesans of foreign birth, who entertain and arouse the gentlemen that come to their bars. And now they will save the world through their manga, proselytizing, homicidal actions and deaths.
I LOVE LORD BUDDHA is the second epistolary novel I have read this summer. The events depicted take place in late 1996 and early 1997, though the narrative does not begin until after the mass murder and suicide have been in the news and the bodies buried. Because of this, news articles, eye witness accounts, personal letters and haiku are used to shed light on the Organization, as well as the main narrative thread created by one of HIYOKO’s cousins, gathering information in order to publish an academic paper on the massacre.
Stylistically, the novel is very strange. There are few, if any, capitalizations in the narrative. All sentences begin with the lowercase, though punctuation is used. Because of this, I sometimes had difficulty differentiating between a long sentence and a new sentence while reading at a fast clip. Dialogue is also atypical, with several different styles being utilized. In places, dialogue will be denoted with quotations for one character and greater-than and less-than symbols for another, usually HIYOKO. In other instances, dialogue will be listed with a name or alphabetic character followed by a colon in a list style not unlike interrogation records.
I’ll come out and admit it. I love bizarre fiction, either in subject matter or format. I LOVE LORD BUDDHA was both, a strange tale part AUM, part techno, part comic book, all pornographic, with the look and feel of something I’d never seen before. It was an interesting read, for sure, and I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in Japan, if only for the bizarro characters living and dying within its pages.
4/5
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