A visit to a nude mixed-bathing Onsen revealed more than passing resemblance to the traditional Japanese dramatic stage.
Theatrics of Japanese Noh, Kabuki, and the mixed-bathing Onsen
Isham Cook
American essayist and novelist based in China since 1994. Writing philosophy: downmarket, big concept, provocative, discriminating, outrageous. Ballard, Beckett, Borges, Dick, Kafka, Hesse, Melville, Mishima, Sade are influences.
The Chinese-Japanese cultural chasm on display at Starbucks
Profound cultural differences epitomized by Chinese and Japanese Starbucks.
The high priests of medicine: U.S. and Chinese hospitals
The USA and China both bear the distinction of having the worst health care systems in the world not attributable to national poverty.
Black forest cake blues: The customer service problem
The idea of cake, a jokester’s cake for flinging in the customer’s face.
From struggle sessions to public dressing-downs: China’s continuity of psychological control
At the Revolutionary University, students vie with another to express how much they enjoy hauling night-soil feces.
The old Chinese bathhouse, circa 2000
That Chinese bathhouses draw families and their children while operating simultaneously as brothels is a phenomenon found nowhere else in the world.
Advanced love: An essay
We are taught not to be misers with our money. But when it comes to the body, we are misers through and through.
Newsex. A dramatic farce
X-rated dramatic farce set in a sexual re-education camp in a future Liberated California Republic.
Gu Cheng, selected poems (trans. Isham Cook & Zhao Shufen)
China’s mad poet who savagely murdered his wife.
August Stramm, poems (trans. Isham Cook)
Poems like teeth grinding away grammar: Germany’s Expressionist poet who died on the front in WWI.
Isham Cook, poems 1986-88
Bizarre experiments in poetry while under the influence of cannabis.
The Kitchens of Canton. A novel. Ch. 1: New Gary, IN
The protagonist discovers he’s a convicted pedophile incarcerated in the city-wide concentration camp of former Gary, Indiana.
The Kitchens of Canton. A novel. Ch. 2: Xinluoma
The protagonist finds himself enslaved in a full-scale replica of Ancient Rome in China.
The Kitchens of Canton. A novel. Ch. 3: Zigaago
The protagonist finds himself enslaved in a Cantonese-speaking Chicago 100 years in the future.
The Kitchens of Canton. A novel. Ch. 4: Chicago
A bullet removed from the protagonist’s brain is replaced with a pedophile-tracking nanochip.
ISHAM COOK 