The Pornographers
About
Subuyan Ogata is a small-time pornographer in 1960s Osaka who considers himself a man of principle. He produces and distributes illicit films with the earnest conviction that he is providing a vital public service. His clients are lonely, his business partners are unreliable, and his personal life — involving a widow, her disturbed son, and a carp — is heading somewhere no one anticipated. Akiyuki Nosaka's darkly comic novel treats the pornography trade as a lens for postwar Japanese society's relationship with desire, commerce, and self-deception. Ogata's delusions are funny until they aren't. A novel about a man who peddles fantasy for a living and can't stop applying it to his own life — with results that are equal parts hilarious and devastating.
