I LOVE LORD BUDDHA
by Hillary Raphael
“Hillary Raphael's devastating first novel delicately incises the raw sensorial material that makes Tokyo the most compelling contemporary city: sex, obsession, digital excess and religious terrorism. Haunting and innovative, it's a brilliantly multi-vocal debut that will leave its readers begging for more of its intense and aberrant pleasures. Intoxicating.” –Stephen Barber
I LOVE LORD BUDDHA is the transgressive, transcendent first novel that some are calling the future of literature, and others are calling a post-pornographic revolution. Set in late-90's Tokyo, it recounts the history of the Neo-Geisha Organization, a sex-and-death cult with an anti-consumerist, pro-hedonist, sub-Buddhist ideology. The cult is led by HIYOKO, a leggy Westerner with a penchant for Eastern philosophy and drug-fuelled sex binges. Her followers are the young women whose curiosity and perfect bodies have taken them thousands of miles from home to work in Tokyo's neon-lit network of hostess bars.
I LOVE LORD BUDDHA takes its inspiration from the classical Japanese literature of the first millennium, the AUM Shinrikyo subway-gas cult, and the esoteric texts of Buddhism, while recalling the ultra-modern iconography of films like Kill Bill Vol 1. Reading like manga, sounding like hard techno, feeling like fetish, I LOVE LORD BUDDHA paves the way for a new literature of undiluted aesthetics and ecstasy.
Published by Creation Books, October 2004!