Word: yu
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...mountain spring, you can take the plunge even in the steel-and-glass capital of Tokyo. Like the best public baths, my favorite is a neighborhood secret. Hidden on the seventh floor of a department store building in old Asakusa, Matsuri-yu is frequented by locals who come in the morning and stay all day. That's because it's more a spa than a tub. For starters, each of the many baths boasts different mineral infusions for a variety of benefits. There are Jacuzzis, outdoor baths, aromatherapy saunas, massage rooms, facialists, darkened resting rooms, even a vast tatami...
...gritty Gold Rush, Akutagawa prizewinner Miri Yu uncovers the psychic machinery linking wealth and violence, ennui and petty crime, boredom and murder in a tale of a teen who commits patricide, hiding the corpse in a basement vault filled with gold. In Yu's Japan, the kids are definitely not all right?but society is far too screwed up to notice...
...Gold and death: Yu links Kazuki's personal meltdown to the decay of a Japanese society in which money is all that matters. Tellingly, Kazuki's dad owes his fortune to pachinko, an utterly mindless form of low-stakes gambling that annually rakes in some $250 billion, is linked to organized crime and sometimes inspires zombie-like trances that have caused Japanese mothers to leave their babies to suffocate in overheated cars. As in real life, the cops in the novel enjoy a cozy relationship with the gaming industry, routinely looking the other way in exchange for high-paying post...
...Even if Japan recovers economically, Yu suggests, the darkness gripping it may not lift. "The thing that would actually destroy the human race was not money," her young killer reflects. "It was the threat of losing our very reason for existence." Somehow Japan lost that mooring during the bubble: unless it gets it back, there will be plenty more lurid stories, both in fiction and, even more frightening, on the front pages of the newspapers...
...three different pseudonyms. Then he set about defining the Hong Kong action movie. Such swaggering epics as The Savage 5, Shaolin Avengers and The Five Venoms filled theater and TV screens around the world, schooling a generation in the intricacies of righteous machismo. He made stars of Jimmy Wang Yu, Ti Lung, David Chiang and Alexander Fu Sheng, and mentored his assistant director (later action master) John Woo. When Chang died June 22, at 79, from pneumonia, the Shaw Brothers studios paid for the funeral of its most prolific, pioneering auteur. In Hong Kong, movie spirits are at half-mast...