THE PORNOGRAPHERS

The pornographers, Subuyan and his partner Banteki, work out of Osaka where they conduct a bustling business in pictures, aphrodisiacs, artifacts, live call girls whom Subuyan monitors, and finally an almost live human doll which warms up and wiggles but blows a fuse. The latter seems to be the effect of pornography since both our gentlemen become impotent, lending a cautionary moral? Subuyan has other problems too -- his pregnant wife is also dying of cancer; he must bury the baby taken from her; and when she dies, she leaves him with the difficult distraction of her seventeen year old daughter. In between, there are quizzical, funny moments -- i.e. Subuyan's arrangements for ""veteran virgins"" only. The book closes with the death of Hack, their hack writer, from autoerotic activities which would seem to be an occupational disease. A sweetsour, wiry comic talent, proving among other things that all this concupiscent concubinage, however pornographic, is never really erotic. Just special.