Apocalyptic orgasms, feral abattoir gangs and the digitalization of Hitler's ghost rarely appear in mainstream literature, and Stephen Barber's "The Tokyo Trilogy" — comprising "Tokyo Sodom," "Tokyo Slaughterhouse" and "Tokyo Supernova" — would not sit comfortably on a shelf next to a John Grisham or a Dan Brown.
Barber's closest literary familiars are Dennis Cooper, Stewart Home and Peter Sotos. Barber's pared-down style — reminiscent of Richard Allen's skinhead novels of the 1970s — is cut with historical facts and poststructuralist theory, radical politics and pornography, and presented in a formulaic language as transgressional as its subject matter — a textual equivalent of the Japanese "Za Ginipiggu (Guinea Pig)" horror movies of the 1980s.
At times, the desire to shock becomes tiresome and unnecessary — an exponential overlapping of anal sex, fascism and violence — but Barber (unlike Sotos) dilutes the hysterical elements with storytelling panache. Eschewing censure, reading like a blue movie shot by Sam Peckinpah and scripted by Jean Genet on crystal meth, "Tokyo Sodom" relates how the beautiful Slovakian filmmaker Angeliko and her Japanese counterpart Junko attempt to destroy the hegemony of neocapitalism by projecting — on huge screens throughout Tokyo — a one-minute film depicting closeups of the physical aftermath of Angeliko's anal-sex encounters. Sexual partners include Buddhist monks, Kobo Daishi, salarymen commuters, and members of an Aum Shinrikyo-like death cult — all this funded by the Sato Corporation, a shadowy offshoot of the infamous World War II biochemical warfare research and development Unit 731.