As you are still here, I’m going to open up a little about my health. I’m sure more than a few people have now just logged out of my substack post, because your health is quite similar to your indie novel. NO ONE CARES ABOUT IT QUITE AS MUCH AS YOU DO. Or so I’ve learned. Anyway, I’ll give you a quick summary just so you know where I’ve been at the last few months and years. Perhaps if you’re going through something similar, you can relate.

At the end of 2019, when I was writing ALWAYS THE DEAD — a story about a guy suffering from Tuberculosis — I was hit with what I thought was a bad chest infection. Cough. Fever. Chest ache. Breathlessness. And strangely pins and needles in my hands and feet (which comes snd goes even today.) I seriously felt as though I was the main protag of my novel.

I got better. The covid pandemic hit a few months later. I suspect what I had was a very early variant of that damned sickness. I would go on to get it three more times over the next few years. With the loss of smell that’s never really recovered either.

From the autumn 2023 I developed a wheezy cough, which I assumed was a smoker’s cough. I started smoking at the age of 16 and barring the most hard-core stuff I’ve smoked pretty much everything there is to smoke. Even banana peel. I used to smoke cigars like cigarettes too. Why? Because I was a fucking idiot, thats why. I absolutely loved my Lucky Strikes though and every time I was coughing my lungs out with covid or a chest cold I (stupidly) continued smoking. However, around 2022, I developed serious shortness of breath. Which I assumed was seasonal allergies, asthma or having to wear a mask all the time.

Despite all this I continued to go to the boxing gym at least twice a week. Even having to wear a mask while soft-sparring and doing the pad-work. I was extremely breathless but assumed I was just smoking too much. I pushed myself extremely hard and dropped from 82kg down to 72kg which I thought was due to diet and exercise not because I was ill.

At around the end of 2023 early 2024 I decided to go to the hospital for a CT scan because the cough and breathlessness hadn’t gotten any better, I had passed out and fainted a couple of times and I had also noticed some of my toes had gone blue and had become clubbed. My fingernails too were looking a little weird. Wider. All this I assumed was asthma and long covid.

However, when my hospital contacted me to come in for further tests because they suspected I had lung disease, I was dumbstruck and shitting myself. Something made worse when I googled the disease and the survival rates. Anyway, I won’t bore you with all that jazz because I think I’ve written about it previously. It’s shit. And you can’t talk to anyone about it because most folks don’t want to hear about it. Even those who love you can only listen to your health woes so many times. I got pretty depressed at one point, to be frank.

I really have a huge respect for people who have serious illnesses and continue to stay upbeat and positive. They’re real heroes. True hard cases.

Over the last two years I’ve been in and out of the hospital doing tests of all kinds.

If you’ve ever had to do Pulmonary Tests over and over again until your eyes are streaming and your chest aches, I salute you. I’ve had to do all those tests at least five times over the last two years since my diagnosis and I really fucking hate them.

I actually passed all the tests pretty well and learned that although they’re somewhat badly scarred I have the lungs of an athletic swimmer. This was probably caused by doing boxing regularly at a time my oxygen saturation would have been in the low nineties. Boxing quite literally saved my life, I believe. Without the Sweet Science my lungs would be struggling to supply my blood with enough oxygen to properly function. So the extra 20% lung capacity I have gained cancels out the scarring in a way, although my lungs are hypersensitive and my airways constrict with the slightest provocation.

I had to give up smoking. Which I miss everyday single day. That early morning cigarette and coffee. The after dinner smoke. But giving up is easy when it’s a case of buying yourself a few more years.

The good news is my lung scarring hasn’t changed over the last two years which means it is currently stable. Or as my doctor poetically described it, ‘the smouldering ashes of a fire that’s burned itself out.’

I still have to go to the hospital every six months for a CT, blood tests and the breathing tests just in case the scarring begins to increase again, but for the time being I’m all good with that.

Hopefully this will be the last substack where I drone on about my health and I can go back to trying to sell my novels ha!

My third daughter Riona Nora was born in February of this year. She’s almost crawling now and is laughing every day.

I’m currently working six or seven days a week because I’m the main breadwinner for the time being while my wife looks after the baby. Hence, the reason I haven’t been writing so much or publishing so much. Needs when needs must. I do miss it. I miss the community. I miss some of the great friends I made, like you reading this. Because if you are still reading this all these months later then you’re definitely a mate. And a good one at that. Thank you.

Writing is the only thing in my life I’ve ever been good at. I am never going to give it up. I’ve worked way too hard at it. Sometimes you do have to step away to get your life in order before you can settle down infront of the keyboard again.

The ideas are all still in my head though. Am currently writing a crime caper in my mind that will no doubt find itself into book form yet.

Again, I just want to say thank you. I’m not selling anything or promoting my books. I’m not even really writing anything entertaining, but you’re still here and that means a lot to me.

Wishing you all the best always,

Steve

P.S

If you ever feel like you’ve got no one to talk to, feel free to hit me up anytime. I’m aware I’m annoyingly slow at replies but I’ll try my best.

First and foremost Happy New Year.

I hope this year brings you Good Health, Good Luck and Good Times.

I spent December in the woods gramping with my wife and dog Boo.

For those of you who don’t know what that is — it’s Glamorous Camping hahaha

Hemingway would be disgusted, I know. I know.

We stayed in this large fabric igloo like structure that was kitted out like a hotel room and had an adjoining inside bbq area with a killer view of Fuji.

Check it out.

Had a great time.

Christmas Day was spent playing monopoly with my daughters and eating too much food.

An author buddy from London and his family also came out to visit us in Japan so we spent a few days showing them around, which was fun.

According to my fortune at the local Shinto shrine this year marks the end of a 3 year run of misfortune for me. Hell, it better be. The last three years saw:

My publisher Red Dog go out of business.

My books go out of print.

I lost employment and a large part of my monthly paycheck.

I was diagnosed with COPD.

And a whole bunch of those other little misfortunes that sting us on the ass on some random Wednesday afternoon when we just get our wind back.

BUT

There was a hell of a lot of great things too, much bigger than any of the misfortunes. So I shouldn’t complain too much.

There’ll be other publishers and they’ll be other revenue streams.

I am still breathing.

One thing I’ve learned in the last few years is this:

Life is surviving until the 12th round and that broken down old guy shuffling onto the bus in front of you most mornings is one of life’s heavyweight champions.

Live for today. Plan for tomorrow.

But what about the past?

Back to the Past: What follows is an unedited, unplanned rant… Feel free to hit the emergency escape hatch here, if you dont want to peruse these words which are the written equivalent to the rainy day garage sale taking place in my mind.

Recently, I’ve found myself yearning for the past more than usual.

Am I just becoming a grumpy old bastard or is everything really as shite as I suspect it is? I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.

You may be feeling the same twinges lately in this, the prequel to Orwell’s 1984 that we are living in most days.

So, I’m considering giving up my cellphone the same way I gave up cigarettes.

For good.

Yeah, it’ll be inconvenient, but I feel like the Road to Hell isn’t paved with Good Intentions but with CONVENIENCE.

So much of my time is wasted on my phone. And nothing I see on it is even worth the time I’ve wasted. Especially with so much AI slop these days. You’re never sure what’s real or not and in the future that’s going to be the daily norm. What a shit way to live. If it isn’t AI crap, it’s either propaganda or hate of some kind. Or shallow and empty attempts at virtue signaling. Brain washed folks regurgitated phrases and talking points.

I’m tired of all of it.

Although, no, I’m not leaving Twitter. It’s still my main means of seeing what people, like you my friend, are up to nowadays.

I just miss the old days.

It’s not nostalgia.

And that’s the reason I am spending less and less time on twitter and my cellphone.

I’m going back to PC and emailing people.

Substack is still a good way to reach out once in a while but I’m not really interested in making it some kind of a ‘thing’ like some folks are.

It sure beats tweets though.

In the future will people read “The Collected Tweets of ______”?

I doubt it.

No, actually I don’t. Let’s face it, people are getting dumber and dumber.

IQ is dropping faster than testosterone is.

I’d like to bring back letter writing but postal prices are a rip off nowadays.

Talking of modern ripoffs: have you seen the price of some kindle books?

I’m going to pay big $$$ for something that exists only so long as the electricity/battery does? Get the fuck out of here Amazon!

I’ve always loved the way a book feels in my hands anyway. The smell of the pages. Besides, you can’t loan a kindle download to a friend can you?

I know it sounds daft, but the last few years I have been attempting to transform my apartment into an old fashioned kind of place. Record player. Books. Old style coffee pot and heater. I have a television but haven’t watched ‘tv’ for over a decade. Yes, I do cheat and watch DVDs. In Japan we still have DVD rental stores and there’s one around the corner from my apartment, so I go there once in a while. Have just started watching Game of Thrones. Very late to the party.

I can’t live in the past but hell, I can try.

Next purchase may be a typewriter Ha!

How about you? Do you ever feel that you’d like to go back in time a decade or two?

Anyway, like I said, Happy New Year and thanks for your friendship and support.

All the best,

Steve

How the hell are you?

It’s been a long time. I know.

I am Ray Liotta at the end of Goodfellas lately. Looking back at my writing output 2020-2023.

“See, the hardest thing for me was leaving the life. I still love the life...

And now it’s all over. And that’s the hardest part. Today, everything is different. There’s no action… I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”

It really feels that way right now. I’m really walking a fine line along the edge of the abyss recently. In danger of going back to just being a reader. Or saying fuck it and just writing the novels that will see me cancelled and vilified as the kind of person who puts canned tuna on his rice and calls it sushi.

Seeing how difficult it has become for some of my favorite writers who I always deemed as crazy talented and successful, now struggling… Well, it is certainly freeing to think ‘well, fuck it, let’s just go back to writing what I enjoyed reading’. Take that manuscript that I sent to that clean-cut publisher and put back in all the curse words and all the other non- PC stuff. In my heart, I never wanted to write for that audience anyway. Truly.

The Japanese crime manuscript is in the slush pile of an indie press I dig, so fingers crossed. Wish me luck.

Am going to start writing my Japanese memoirs, I think.

It’ll read like the British Sit-Com PEEP-SHOW probably. Hopefully.

I AM NOT OUT OF THE GAME YET!

Anyway…

What else?

Yeah, I’m still sick but now that I have quit smoking, yes, I miss it everyday, things are a little better.

If only I could go back to that kid in his early twenties and tell him smoking cigars like cigarettes isn’t cool, it’s just going to fuck up your lungs. What do folks say about hindsight?

If I haven’t contacted you recently, I’m sorry. I haven’t contacted anyone. Have hardly been on the net. Am seriously attempting to live my life like it’s the early 2010’s again. Right before the world ended and everything became a shitty SIMS simulation.

It’s not nostalgia, everything really is shittier.

BUT SOME LOVELY NEWS

My third daughter will be born in March, so I am so excited and happy about that. We have chosen a name that is Irish and Japanese so it’s perfect, I think.

Christmas is on the way so I’ll be having a KFC feast with my nearest and dearest.

That’s about it, I reckon.

Just an Update because I haven’t written anything on here since March. That’s crazy. Thanks for hanging in there.

I hope you’re well. I am cheering you on and wishing you the best as always.

Stay warm, stay healthy, stay happy.

All the best,

Steve

The bar was called the BITTER END.

I’d drunk there more than a few times, many years before when I was living down the street with my first wife. In the days I was still drinking. Almost four years sober now.

The name of the place caught my attention as soon as I glimpsed it and if you’re a music fan or from NYC maybe it caught your attention too. Anyway, the place was a small, simple two-story building. Bar on the first floor. One room apartment on the second. It was on the corner of a side street next to a derelict florist and a dirty looking ramen shop. A little different to the hundreds of other bars dotted around the suburbs. Unique. See, it wasn’t just a bar. It was also a record and vintage store. You could go in there for a few drinks on a Friday night and come out a few hours later half cut with a Cal-Neva Hotel and Casino ashtray and a couple of Beatles LPs. The place was quite literally — Down My Street. (The ashtray is still on my coffee table.)

The owner was an old guy, in his seventies, I guessed. He wore English-style tailored jackets and a black beret. Smoked cigarillos that stank of damp hay and spoke English in a series of clipped catchphrases that I found endearing. He told me his name was Takeru but to call him ‘John’. Bad at names. I don’t think I called him either in the handful of occasions I drank there.

The place was empty most evenings and I would wave to Takeru as I passed by on my way home from the subway station. He was always perched behind the bar reading a newspaper, one of those foul-smelling cigarillos constantly clenched between his teeth. The melodies of Chet Baker’s trumpet drifting out into the night. He would hold his hand up in a kind of indifferent salutation as I passed. His eyes darting back to the newspaper.

On the nights I did stop in to have a beer or five and peruse the overpriced LPs and vintage items, Takeru would take music requests and no matter what random music I asked for, if it was before the 1980’s, he would have it. Frantically rummaging through shelves of records until he found it. Or something like it. He was the person who first introduced me to The Ink Spots. Trippy as hell to be sat at a bar in the Japanese suburbs listening to music that was at its heyday in America over sixty years before with a bartender that is dressed as an English gentlemen from the same time period talking about how he went to London in the Swinging Sixties. It was like a bar at the end of the world.

Sometimes his wife would be in there too. She was around the same age as him, but had kept the beauty and playfulness I imagine had broken a hundred hearts in her youth. She certainly would’ve broken mine. Her name was Naomi and she berated her husband in a teasing way they both seemed to get a kick out of.

A little while later, my first wife got pregnant and we decided to move away from that neighborhood, across the city, to the richer side of town because she wanted to be closer to her parents when the baby came. Besides we needed a larger apartment than the one room apartment we were living in above a laundromat at the time.

I drank in the Bitter End one last time before we left.

Never mentioned I was leaving. I bought a vintage lamp shaped like a white goose for some drunken reason that escapes me now. Knocked it off the shelf a decade later and broke it. I broke too many things at that time in my life. Priceless things. My word. Promises. Things that can’t be stuck back together with Super Glue. Things that still bother me now. Many years later.

I left the Bitter End that last time much like I leave most events in my life. The Irish Way.

Over the years I often wondered about the bar and the old man who ran it. After seeing a lot of my favorite restaurants and bars not survive Covid I hoped they had made it and were doing well. Hell, I hoped the old guy was still alive. Always feeling a strange kind of nostalgia to go back there. I never did.

Fast forward fifteen years.

I moved back to the neighborhood with my second wife and a pet dog called Boo. That first night, surrounded by cardboard boxes and bubble wrap I clipped Boo’s lead to his collar and took him for a stroll down to where The Bitter End had been. Hoping it was still there. Dreading the idea that it had been made into yet another hair salon or dog groomers. What I saw there though broke my heart a little and haunted me for weeks but it did also give me an idea for the novel I’m attempting to write now…

The place was…

To be continued…

Hello my friend,

I hope these words find you today in a warm, dry place with a full stomach and a happy heart.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

I’ve got a lot of things to talk about: there’s the recent trip to Nara and a hike up into the snow-covered hills where I found an abandoned hot spring hotel and shrine…

Or there’s the recent incident concerning a jinxed taxidermied pine martin that is still fucking with me, or I could talk about a strange meeting with a very cool guy who seemingly lost his battle with OCD, a meeting which has haunted me ever since as I feel I’m only a few mishaps away from ending up the same way… Sanity is a very thin line we all walk along.

I could talk about all those things, but today, right now, I’m going to talk about…

The wonders of eating ramen after twelve o’clock on a bitterly cold night?

Unfortunately no. Guess again…

drum roll…

Okay, you got it!

That’s right!

Writing!

The good thing about talking to you about writing is that I know you’ll understand what I’m saying. The likelihood is if you’re one of the few who read this newsletter you’re a writer too and at the chance of sounding like the drunk at the bar after last call, “no one understands me, but, you, you, you really get me…”

Writing is a god damned rollercoaster. Well, no, not the writing as such, it’s the publishing aspect, isn’t it? It’s a rollercoaster we ride until we vomit and then we get off, stretch our legs a minute and then get back on.

I’m a writer, you’re a writer, we’re writers and we fucking love writing. That’s a given. We have to love writing to put ourselves through what we do. The waiting and the rejection and the frustrations and the disappointments. Hell, the writing is the easiest part of all.

I finished my Japanese thriller in February of 2024 and sent it to my dream publisher, who told me they’d like to look at it. Every so often I’ll hit them up to see if they’ve read it yet and they’ll reply it’s still under consideration. A year of waiting… Obviously, I should start sending it elsewhere, but I’m hoping my patience will pay off. Stupid, I know. But with recent developments in my private life I’m not sure I have the energy to run the agent gauntlet right now…

See, for the last year I haven’t really written anything. Even though the will is there, the drive is gone, because last year I got another one of life’s kicks in the gonads in the way of a health diagnosis. When you’re worrying that you may not get to see your kids graduate high school it really puts things in perspective. Not getting a short story published in an indie mag that gets read by fifty people, or the latest in a long line of indie twitt/lit dogpiles... Those things don’t seem so important at all anymore. Neither does spending hours of my free time in front of a computer pouring my life and soul into something that will probably end up in a publishers unread emails for the next nine months before being replied to with a form rejection…

And there’s also the shock discovery of learning most of your literary heroes who are crushing it, (in your mind anyway) are just as disappointed and dissatisfied as you are sometimes. It seems the literary ladder, is just that, a literary ladder. You’re never going to be truly satisfied with where you’re at. You’ll always want more.

So where the hell am I going with all of this?

I woke up this morning after a very strange dream with a great idea for a novel.

It isn’t a crime fiction novel. I don’t know what genre it is yet. All I know is, it’s a story my heart is telling me to write, one I want to tell others and I’m going to write it because after all the pissing and the moaning that’s what I am. A writer. And after so much time away it’s time to clean the vomit away from my lips and get back on that rollercoaster because it’s the only ride in town I want to be on. Will I be satisfied? Probably not, but it’s a race to the end, isn’t it?

As I mentioned above, my shitty health diagnosis even took the wind out of my sails when it came to my first love: reading. I haven’t read a book in almost a year. Crazy, I know.

But I do have some diamonds on my To Be Read shelf: If you haven’t read these, please do pick them up as they’re written by some of the best.

I have been listening to a lot of Audible novels lately though. I forgot what a masterful storyteller Michael Crichton was. Back on board with him now though.

One of my loves that wasn’t stripped away by the funk I’ve been in the last year was editing PUNK NOIR MAGAZINE (which has its own Substack too now). To be honest, publishing others this last year has kept me sane and I thank everyone for contributing to my raggedy little zine which actually received over 35,000 visitors in 2024. Pretty damned cool and I’m proud as hell of it. It makes my day when I receive emails from people telling me that getting into Punk Noir made them feel happy. That’s what it’s all about really. Giving someone a lift up when I can.

Anyways, thats me for today. Spelling mistakes and typos be damned.

Until next time my friend.

Thanks for reading.

All the best,

Steve

“I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been.”

Billie Holiday said that and reading her quote made me think about writing and publishing and where I am right now. Nobody tells me where I’ve been and I’ve no damned idea where I’m going. But there it is.

Happy New Year by the way, I hope this year brings you much love, good health and lots of fortune.

I spent the winter holidays in London and Iceland. Met old and new friends. Sometimes meeting the people who knew you when you were a kid helps put shit back into perspective. Helps remind you who you are and who you were.

Came back to Japan to a burst water pipe in the apartment above mine, so my place needs to be completely renovated. Was so stressed, I could taste stomach acid. It could’ve been worse, I suppose. The damage is confined to the ceilings and the bathroom. Silver linings. You have to seek it out.

I got a dog called Boo. He’s a miniature Schnauzer. He’s brought some sunshine into my life. I love waking up at six in the morning and taking him for a walk when it’s that dark blue of morning leaving the night. The streets are dead. It’s peaceful. I used to enjoy smoking cigarettes and drinking a coffee at this time, but I have had to quit smoking. A 25 year habit. I miss it. I miss those quiet tobacco moments of contemplation. It’s almost as though cigarettes have broken my heart, the way I miss them.

I haven’t read any fiction in months. Haven’t written any fiction in months. Have been a bad literary friend, I know. I am sorry.

After my shitty health diagnosis last year I lost all will and drive to write fiction or even hang around in those circles. I focused on Punk Noir Magazine but developments on that side of things are going to have to take a backseat to my life at the moment. But I am still enjoying doing it, and that’s all that matters at the moment. Bear with me. Punk Noir will have a Substack soon too. You know, 2024 was the magazine’s biggest year yet. Almost 35,000 visitors from all over the globe. So many awesome stories published last year. Pretty damn proud truth be told.

The good thing about taking a step back from the ‘the lit scene’ is you realize who all your real pals are. And there are a lot of cool genuine folks out there. Like you.

What else?

Oh yeah, Twitter is now a ghost town but I think I like it like that. It suits my mindset at the moment. Bleak, junked up and looking for the spark out there. I think Social Media brings the worst out in all of us.

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s ability to sit quietly in a room alone… without feeling the need to virtue signal on social media…

Pascal was right.

Anyways, this update is tentative attempt at lifting some weight, building a little muscle back in my flabby brain. I need to get back to writing. I want to get back into writing. I’m hanging around in the doorway right now. Can you hear me over the noise of the party? There are a lot of people I want to talk to in there. Like you. Give me a moment will you? I’ll be back inside soon. I just needed some fresh air.

Cheers

Steve

All my life I’ve flirted somewhat with the idea of death. Dark minded, like most writers are, I guess. I always believed I’d die young. That belief was what pushed me to be as productive as I could be writing wise. I always had that impending sense of doom. I wasn’t long for this world.

And after years of admiring that sultry and sexy woman from afar, she came and sat down across from me and looked me dead in the eyes and all I could see was a cold darkness and it terrified me. Still does. Just when I had finally gotten to a good place in my life… I had one of those shitty moments where I thought she wanted to take me home with her before the party had ended.

It seems I have had a moment of clarity. Getting a CT scan of your lungs with yellow circles drawn all over it with the recommendation you go to see a lung specialist as soon as possible will do that, I reckon. Translating the Japanese and googling what they were suspicious I had sent me tumbling down into a place that was very dark indeed. Scarring of the lungs. Lung disease. DO NOT EVER GOOGLE YOUR HEALTH CONCERNS, PEOPLE. It’ll only make you feel worse. See for the last few years I’ve had what I thought was long covid, breathing difficulties. But recently it’s gotten worse. Not bad enough to stop me from boxing or enjoying life but bad enough to notice. So, I promised my wife I’d go for a CT scan just to be safe.

And then the clinic called and asked us to go back in.

My heart dropped. My balls shriveled.  

I always thought I’d face death bravely. I’m an Englishman, I’ll bloody-well die like one. However, the thought of dying broke and leaving both of my daughters so young, of leaving my wife had me scared. It led me to actually really think about death and my own mortality as a concrete reality and not just an abstract image. I will cease to exist, and the world will continue onwards as though I had never really been here at all. Made me realize that nothing matters in life except today and what you leave behind. Who you leave behind. Made me realize that family and friends are all that really matter at the end of the day.

Although I’ve been told that I look like a younger Bryan Cranston, no, this wasn’t a crime novel or crime series. I wasn’t going to come up with some kind of zany robbery scheme to pay off my medical bills. I wasn’t going to suddenly become a hitman for the yakuza to leave a wealth of cash to my kids. I was going to excuse myself from the table while eating dinner with my kids to sob in the bathroom so they wouldn’t know anything was wrong.

Made me realize you never appreciate your health until it’s gone.

Also, hospital stuff in Japan is hard as hell. My Japanese is good, but not good enough to talk about biological stuff. I could hardly understand a thing the doctor said to me, my wife who doesn’t speak English had to basically translate it into simple Japanese for me. Luckily, I’m not dying soon. What the doctors initially suspected, it isn’t. It’s not a death sentence. I still need more tests to find out exactly what’s wrong though. The hospital bills hurt the most. God, I miss the NHS. In Japan you have to pay 30% but the bills are still pretty huge.

All this stuff was going on whilst I was editing the Betrayal theme at Punk Noir. That helped to distract me.

I have had a reprieve, I hope. It’s nothing serious, I hope. More tests are needed.

But what have I learned?  

There’s nothing beautiful in death and while she’s sitting down across from me, I’ll avoid eye-contact and pretend to be reading the menu. A cunning plan, in the words of Baldrick.

Although I believe in Ghost World, I don’t want to go there yet.

I want to die as a grandfather on a beach in Okinawa.

I’ve learned to appreciate every single moment with my loved ones.

To smile at strangers.

Enjoy the sunshine. Enjoy the rain.

I’ve been waiting for four months for an indie publisher I’ve been in love with for years to get back to me about my Japanese thriller. I know 4 months is nothing in publishing but still, maybe it’s time to move on and try other places. We waste so much time just waiting on responses…

I should quit smoking. Been smoking a pack a day since 16. Down to three or four a day now… It’s a start.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. Worry will kill you faster than a bullet.

So, try not to worry so much about my writing. I’ve already accomplished a lot. Enough to be proud of, I think.

Appreciate every single day.

Life is truly beautiful.

And you, I appreciate you too!

Cheers

Steve

We all love a quickie, but I believe the early morning hours are for taking things slowly. For savoring.

I’m talking about Substack, obviously, so please forgive these corny 1960’s innuendos.

This isn’t going to be long. It’s just a quick letter to you. No edits. No spell check. Typos be damned.

My apartment is quiet. Just the ticking of my antique mantel clocks and the hum of traffic outside the open balcony doors. It’s a cool night. I just finished writing some non-fiction and felt a compulsion to write this…

I’m currently reading a book about the history of the British Isles by Neil Oliver and there’s a chapter in the beginning of the book that really hit me hard. He writes of the discovery of 5 pairs of Neanderthal footprints in sediment off the coast of Cornwall. The footprints were washed away by the tides before archeologists could protect them. They got photographs and concrete imprints, but still those 5 sets of footprints were again lost forever to time. Oliver goes on to theorize the Neanderthals were probably searching for food along the coastline. Two adults and three kids.

I read this passage and put the book down and stared at the wall for a time. Taken over by a strange mixture of feelings. Hopelessness and freedom. These things I concern myself with. My worries. My searching in the wet sand as the tide comes in. It’s just a fleeting moment lost in time. My whole life. Everything. Reminds me of the saying, you only truly die when someone utters your name for the final time… But that time WILL come.

It should depress the hell out of me, but it doesn’t.

Yesterday I sat by a waterfall and felt the cold water rush over my feet and hands. Water has a memory. I believe that. A memory that lasts longer than anything else on earth. But I had a moment of something there, sat next to that waterfall, the woman I love next to me. The sound of water rushing and her laughter. My soul, or whatever it is inside me, felt momentarily purified. For a moment. And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? These moments that make up our lives. Living for the moment and in the moment because one day you’ll just be a set of footprints washed away from the sediments of time and all your struggles and achievements will be unknown. Everything is transient. The shitty moments and the good ones. A few years ago I got stuck in a moment and it almost killed me. Now I try to remind myself everyday that I live in a work of art and try to act accordingly.

John Lennon said “living is easy with eyes closed.” But maybe it’s easier when you know everything is transient and just temporary.

I like that.

“Find what you love and let it kill you,” Bukowski said that. I have it tattooed across my collarbones. I like that more.

What the hell has this Substack been about?

I dont rightly know, but I felt the compulsion to say it.

Enjoy each moment as if it’ll never come again, because it wont. Remember that at the shit times too. It’s only temporary. And this is how life has always been since we first crawled out of the primordial swamp.

It’s now 12:15 am. I can hear a car alarm and a pair of cats bitching about something in the neighbors yard. The clocks ticking fill the air. I’m going to have a cigarette and enjoy the sounds of early morning.

Goodnight and be well!

Much Love,

Steve

Great!

As you may already know I’ve been busy reading submissions for Punk Noir’s May theme — BETRAYAL. Nearly 240 submissions in 3 or 4 days. Thank God there’s a 200-word limit, huh? Haven’t felt this inspired since I put the GONE Anthology together though.  And, reading a lot of the replies to the acceptances I’ve sent out reconfirm why I even edit a magazine in the first place.

                  You see, it’s all down to two people: Laura Hird and Brian Fuggett. Brian ran a webzine similar to Punk Noir called Zygote in My Coffee and Laura Hird ran a literary showcase on her website promoting one new writer and their short story a month. These two people literally changed my life with their encouragement and support at a time when I was 19 years old, poor, miserable and lacking in confidence. I haven’t spoken to them in over 20 years because they don’t run their zines anymore and aren’t online, but they’ll always be special to me and I appreciate them very much.

                  I can only hope that I may have that kind of encouraging affect on someone’s life and writing one day. Besides, it really does feel good putting out some positivity and showcasing talent, even if it is only on my ragtag punk webzine. There’s a lot of heart involved. I do fucking love the written word. Live, breathe and dream literature.

                  Now, at the age of 40, I strongly believe what you put out in the world comes back to you at some point. The Universe does have machinations click, click, clicking away somewhere like a Ticker Tape machine hidden behind a black velvet cloth. Two lotteries running simultaneously. The Good Lottery and the Shit Out of Luck Lotto. Maybe we win both multiple times throughout our lives. In the last 4 years, I’ve found out that being a good person is a hell of lot easier than being a shitty person. I’m happy lately. Satisfied. Content. Sure, I have my woes, but they’re the kind of woes people have been having since time immemorial. Health. Money. Those kinds of things. The rises and falls. Yeah, I still have my dark days, but I’m rolling with the punches and I’ve got that darkness well and truly on the back foot now.

                  As for writing, I’m hanging in there. The Dead, the Dying and the Gone Trilogy is still selling pretty well all these years later and occasionally getting a great review.

My Japanese Thriller is in the hands of a person whose work I love, they’re considering it, so please send me some of your good vibes. Like I said, the universe is clicking away. Haha.

Will start work on the sequel soon and am writing a lot of nonfiction at the moment. No longer beating the crap out of myself every day about breaking through to the “mainstream”. It’ll come. Hard work, perseverance, talent and that bald, old bastard Good Fortune. I believe I’ve got 3 out of the 4… Good things come to those who wait. Fate is fate and she’s looked after me pretty well for the last 40 years, I reckon. I’ll go down the road with her a while longer, see where she leaves me.

Talking about positivity, I recently, did an interview with the poet and editor Aubri Kaufman over on Punk Noir and she said, “We’re all just doing this because we love it, so we should be having fun.” She’s right, you know.

Like, just for example, I lost 15 or so followers on twitter in the last few days and feel it’s probably gotta have something to do with me sending out rejections.  A couple of years ago that would have irked the hell out of me, but lately I just don’t care. I accepted the fickleness of some writers a long time ago, and nowadays am thankful those kinds of people do me the favor of showing themselves out of the door. Those that’ll try and use you like a stepping stone and then disappear as soon as you’re not useful anymore. Played out, they’ll fade out. You’ll know them when you see them. Ditto the people who constantly tweet out virtue signals. Ditto the writers of passive aggressive tweets. Or thinly-veiled self-congratulatory tweets. But the flip side to all that jazz is the really cool and genuine people shine through all the brighter from that vapid smog of grayness. Tone down the noise.

Someone used to tell me as a kid to stop sweating the small stuff. They were right. I wish I listened to them thirty years ago. Have been telling my teenage daughter too. She isn’t listening to me. The young never do, I guess.

Anyway, so what I’m trying to say is: I’m writing, editing and not taking myself so seriously. Or twitter. Or the writing community. I’m good. The party is still good, I’m just chilling out in the corner and drinking with the folks who are in the corner with me.

How about you? Are you staying positive? Are you still at the same party?

This time of year is a good time to stop and smell the roses, I think.

Next month (May) will mark the 18th Anniversary of my arrival in Japan with just a suitcase, my leather jacket and 300 bucks to my name. I made out all right. But, 18 years though. Damn. In a few years I would have lived here longer than I did in the country of my birth. 日本 really does feel like my home now. Or like the home I’m haunting. London, like the past, feels like a foreign country. That makes me feel sad sometimes. But it can’t be helped. It is what it is. I wouldn’t change a single thing from my life. Again, I believe Fate has been looking after me the same way God looks after drunks and fools.

Hopefully in the next few weeks and months, I’ll have some cool news to announce personally and with Punk Noir. A podcast with a good friend and something related to one of my noir heroes and favorite indie authors also. Stay tuned.

I do appreciate you reading my rambled thoughts. If you read this whole thing, throw me a like so I know who is actually reading these things or if I’m just scribbling graffiti on the toilet wall.

Love to you, my friend. Be well.

Steve

Recently Watching:

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Stephen J. Golds

[…Also, more breaking news this morning: the husband of Kate Haines has reportedly been found dead in a hotel in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. Kate Haines was the Boston lawyer who went missing during the couple’s honeymoon in Honolulu, Hawaii — September of last year. We have since learned U.S Marshals were searching for Nick Haines in connection to…]

Two Days Previously

THE KID BEHIND the cash register cast a glance over the photograph, the translation card, and shook his head. Nodded at the space over Nick’s shoulder to the line of customers gathered there.

“No. No, please, look properly. Look again.” Nick thrust the photograph of his wife up into the guy’s line of vision, stammering out the words on the laminated translation card once more.

“Kono josei mita kota ga arimasuka? Have you seen this woman? Please, please.”

The clerk shook his head again. Leaned back and away. Mumbled something about speaking no English. Nick cursed, stepped aside as an old man in a shirt and tie pushed towards the counter with a six-pack of beers, bitching underneath his breath. Nick paid no attention. Stood gazing down at the picture of his wife. The photograph, the last he’d ever taken of her, on their honeymoon. It had become frayed over the last year. Worn around the edges. Creased. Exhausted. Nick appeared the same way to the people around him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d given a damn about how he might look. When he’d last shaved. His jacket radiated stale sweat and he’d been wearing the same shirt and slacks since he’d gotten on the plane at Daniel K. Airport. That had been two days ago. Or was it three? He didn’t know. He hadn’t slept and the time difference had him all fucked up. Turned around and confused. It didn’t matter though. Nothing mattered anymore but finding Kate.

Under the harsh lights of the convenience store his eyes darted and danced over the photograph taking in every minute aspect of his wife. Her face radiant. The crooked smile with the slightly chipped tooth. The dimples. The small turquoise butterfly tattoo on her slender shoulder he’d run his tongue and lips over as they made love the morning of the day she vanished.

The slight fading of colors in the picture had done nothing to dim Kate’s beauty. Her eyes still stopped his heart. Eyes the deepest blue. Eyes so blue they were almost black. Nick grinned at the photograph. Her smile had always been contagious. But she was gone now. The grin died stillborn. He bit down a scream. A man long ago awakened from a nightmare into a reality much worse. Swallowed the scream back down his throat with nicotine and exhaustion saliva. Sighed, slipped the picture back into his breast pocket next to his heart, and pushed his palms painfully into his eyes. Yanked the bottle of pills from his side pocket, unscrewed the cap and dry swallowed a couple.

Turned around and shuffled out of the store into another night-damp and neon- soaked street of downtown Tokyo.

Kabukicho, Shinjuku, was Tokyo’s red light district — the Lonely Planet Guide he’d grabbed at a Narita airport bookstore on arrival had taught him.

Of course, he’d gone to the Japanese cops first.

They were less help than the cops back home and in Hawaii had been after Kate disappeared from their hotel. Even the Feds finally believed Kate had simply drowned or changed her mind about the marriage and deserted him. Vanishing of her own accord. The only time the authorities had ever shown any kind of interest in really solving the case was in the first few months, when they’d wanted to pin it on Nick. Case closed. And they would have, if over twenty witnesses and security footage at the hotel hadn’t backed him up.

The Japanese cops stuttered, stared, fidgeted and clucked their tongues. Speaking a language Nick couldn’t understand. They pushed a dozen different forms in front of him with a ballpoint pen and an English to Japanese dictionary.

Nick lost his temper, threw the papers in the air and left.

He was completely finished with the authorities in two countries now.

After, he caught a taxi to Kabukicho and remained there. Rented a small room in a cheap business hotel above a run-down and dark noodle shop.

Something on the air, in his guts told him, shrieked at him, he was on the right track this time. Kate was here. He could feel her there. Screaming out his name. Being held against her will in one of the faceless, neon pulsing buildings. The buildings with their own photographs of women. Their faces blacked out and pasted to the exterior walls as some kind of crude advertising billboard. Breasts exposed, short skirts hiked all the way up their thighs. The images caused arousal and disgust simultaneously whenever Nick examined them for any likeliness of his wife.

After leaving the last convenience store, he let himself drift aimlessly like a ghost within the riptides of swarming pedestrians for a little while, then stepped out of the crowds into the dim of an alleyway at the side of the street. Slid the folded piece of paper from the pocket of his slacks, needing to feel it between his fingertips again. To convince himself once more it was real. The print-out of an anonymous email he’d received in Hawaii four days ago. He’d read the damn thing so many times he knew it by heart. A single sentence:

‘I’m so sorry your wife is alive in the basement of a whorehouse in Tokyo. X.’

At first, fleetingly, he didn’t know if he should believe it. Could believe it.

He called his parents from a payphone in the departure lounge of the airport. They’d told him it was just another crank. Another hoax pulled by some sicko. Begged him to leave Hawaii. To give up the search. It had been a year. Accept she was gone. Come to terms with it. Grieve. Move on. Too many people had been hurt already. Too many others had questions needing to be answered. The Press. The Feds. The Cops. People wanted to know why he’d quit his job. Emptied their joint bank accounts. Fled Boston. That was the word his own parents had used; ‘Fled’. He was wanted by the cops in Hawaii. They tried to convince him to come home. Said he needed ‘mental’ help. Counseling. Therapy. Nick hung up on them.

He was alone.

It was the way the sender had apologized in the brief email that had convinced Nick. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Something in those three words had sped up the maddening ticking clock in his skull. Something that had made him rush from the public library he’d made his headquarters in downtown Honolulu. Quickly selling the old Ford Bronco he’d been living in, traveling around in for the last eight months. He gathered every last cent he had and he had ran. He didn’t flee. He wasn’t running away. He was running towards Kate. Towards her.

For Nick, she was all there was and all there ever would be. He couldn’t live the rest of his life with the rotting wound of her absence never healing. The daily irrevocable fact that she was gone wrapped so tightly around his throat like a noose. He couldn’t breathe. The utter and complete pitch-black of the unknowing. That’s what his parents couldn’t understand. No one could understand. There was no coming to terms with it. No moving on. No acceptance. There never would be.

In the alley, back against a pile of stacked plastic beer crates, his eyes swung slowly back and forth over the greasy piece of paper repetitively, murmuring the words underneath his breath as though it were a Hail Mary— a mantra—and then he slipped it carefully back into his pocket. Pushed the plastic med bottle to his mouth and gagged down more of the pills he’d been steadily upping the dosage of for the last few months.

‘I’m so sorry your wife is alive in the basement of a whorehouse in Tokyo. X.’

Kate was alive. Kate was here.

Kabukicho was a madman with a split personality. Nick struggled to become aquatinted to both. Worlds apart from the red light districts of Hawaii, he’d frantically ripped apart searching for his wife in the months after her disappearance. Following up on every last tip, sighting or rumor.

In the daytime, the place was a dull grey wash of commercialism. The scents of miso soup, popcorn, exhaust fumes and green tea a fusion jabbing at the back of the throat. Game arcades blasting inane tunes. The flow of heavy traffic a constant rattling hum in the background. Cracked pavements streaming with shoppers, clusters of laughing school kids and rushing businessmen. Most establishments waiting in eager anticipation for the hungry darkness to take a chokehold of the streets.

As the night fell like a heavy winter rain, the place scurried to life like a cockroach infested kitchen. Traffic roared. Music blasted, rattling the fillings in the back teeth. Kanji neon lights flashed, pulsed, blazed, blinded. The senses assaulted. Concussed. Battered into submission.

Touts touted. Hawks hawked. Pushers pushed. Hookers hooked.

Looped announcements over a speaker somewhere slurring warnings of rip-off bars and credit card fraud in English and Japanese were drowned out by a woman faking high-pitched orgasms on repeat from another. Young women posed outside pink neon illuminated doorways dressed up as high school girls, rabbits, French maids, and leather clad dominatrix, unenthusiastically chanting the same words over and over at passers-by. “Asobou! Play with me! Asobou! Play with me!”

The last few nights had been the same. Repetitive. Nick wasn’t sure if it was the pills or the atmosphere of Tokyo’s underbelly. Jarring. Disorientating. As though he were being slowly asphyxiated. Drowned.

His breath stinking and ragged. He stumbled up to groups of girls waving Kate’s photograph and the laminated translation card. The women placed their hands to their lips, shaking their heads. Avoiding eye contact. He staggered, culture-shocked and punch drunk, down the three main strips trying every group of women, every seedy storefront he came across. None of the girls would talk. Seemed scared. Not of Nick, but frightened if they were seen speaking with him. Their eyes darting everywhere but Nick’s face. The strange foreigner. He felt as though he were being watched. A sickening feeling of rusty acupuncture needles to the spine. He snatched glimpses of greasy characters standing apart from the crowds. Watching. Waiting. Predators. Pimps. Security. Nick didn’t know. Paranoia prickled his flesh akin to a fever sweat. Mouth cotton-ball dry. He popped pills like breath mints attempting to zone himself out. Trying to appear casual. Just another drunken tourist. Pausing, he fumbled with a pack of cigarettes and finally got one lit. The blue smoke drifting demented in the toxic neon. He took a right into another alleyway, telling himself he’d try a street over. The vaporous stench of piss and garbage in the alley was overpowering. Nick’s head swam. He gagged and ditched the cigarette. A figure stepped out in front of him from the darkness blocking his way. He startled. Clenched his calloused fists.

“Sex?”

An older woman awash in shadow. Dyed blonde hair and a halter neck top cut low, revealing a deep scar of cleavage. Face intensely, darkly lined. Not Japanese. A foreigner like him. A cluster of raw sores around her mouth wept glistening in the lone street light. Dark bruises or makeup or both smothered around her eyes.

“What?” Nick stuttered.

“Sex and massage?” She grinned faux-shy, teeth chipped and nicotine yellow. Casting quick, cautious glances around them both.

“You speak English?” Nick said.

“Yeah, I speak English,” she shrugged her boney shoulders. “You want sex and massage?”

“Where are you from?”

“Columbia, you know? I’ve already got hotel room, over there,” she

pointed to a dimly lit small building with a purple neon sign flashing erratically above what looked like a security door further down the alley. “We can kiss, shower together. Sex and massage. I can suck you. Ten thousand yen. Hotel charge extra. Hotel tax, you know?” She grinned again. Her eyes were black, worn stones embedded cruelly in her face. Nothing alive moved in them.

“No, no, I’m sorry. I just want to talk with you,” Nick reached for the photograph and card in his chest pocket and the woman took a few steps back. Wary. “No, wait. Please. Have you seen this woman? She’s my wife. She’s an American like me. She’s thirty years old.”

On hearing the word wife, the woman seemed to completely lose interest in Nick. Her shoulders sagged. Looking blankly through him down the alley for the next potential customer. Nick momentarily felt like a ghost again. As though he’d been dead since Kate disappeared and was still desperately trying to communicate with the living.

“Please, just take a look at the photograph.”

She took a few more steps back. Turning away from him slightly.

He pulled a few crumpled cash notes from the inside pocket of his leather jacket, held them out. The woman snatched the bills and the photograph out of his fingertips before he’d even seen her move towards him. Frowned down at the photograph, sucking at her swollen bottom lip. “Yeah. I see this woman, maybe. Six, seven months before. When I first come,” she said tonelessly, squinting down at the photograph.

Nick’s breath left him. He tapped at the picture frantically, “This woman? You’ve definitely seen her?” He wheezed.

“Maybe, I say. I don’t know. Her hair was color black, cut very short like boy. Not blonde and long like in photograph, but this,” she scratched a long, sharp, blood-red fingernail against the turquoise butterfly tattoo on Kate’s shoulder. “I remember this. This butterfly tattoo. And her eyes. I remember very blue. Very beautiful.”

“It was an American woman? You’re sure.”

“I don’t know. This woman they call her ‘moku moku’.”

“Moku moku? What does it mean?”

“Muda. Mute. She never no speak. Nothing. She adicta. Trouble.”

“Adicta?” Nick frowned.

The woman tapped at her forearm with a finger. Syringe sign language.

Nick cursed. That cold beating started to throb behind his eyes. He gripped at his knees, sucked in the dirty air. Trying to calm himself. The woman giggled and tutted.

“Where did you meet her?” He asked as he unscrewed the pill bottle and shook a few quickly onto his tongue.

She tutted again. “I can’t remember. Always they move the women. Customers bored same girls, same girls, same girls. They change. Always moving, always changing. They sell us on. Each time cheap, cheap, cheap. Each time bad, bad, bad. I here eight months only. Now put out on street like dog. I’m still the best, you know? They don’t cut me like some. Hey, you waste my time. You want fuck or no?”

Nick breathed slowly. Wiped a sick sweat from his face. Attempted to compose himself. “Did you see her around here? Nearby here? Please.”

She thrust the photograph quickly back at his chest, “I say six or seven months ago. Now? I don’t know. You go to hotel with me now?”

“Please, are you sure? I need to know. I’ll pay more,” he pulled out a few more crumpled bills and she wrenched them away like a starving animal accepting scraps. Looked him up and down. Examining. Scrutinizing. “You come with me to hotel. Private place. I tell you much more.”

“Okay,” Nick said.

He followed her further down the alley. Her perfume stinging his eyes. The echoes of her high heels hitting the concrete like gunshots. His heart beating so damn fast he wondered if he was having a heart attack. Trembling. Mouth dust dry. The Columbian placed two fingers in her lips and let out a shrill whistle and giggled again, this time there was something nervous in it. That feeling like rusty needles aching in his spine again. Nick brushed the sensation away. Kate’s photograph scorching hot through the cotton of his shirt and into his flesh. Throbbing like a heartbeat. Kate. Kate. Kate. Her name over and over. He would take her away from this fucking place. Far away. Save her. Make everything better for her again. He didn’t care what it took. They’d get over all this shit together. He should’ve protected her. Should’ve been there for her. He would never leave her side again. Everything would be okay. Everything was going to be alright once they were together again.

As they got closer to the hotel, Nick realized the woman had quickened her pace away from him. The hotel wasn’t a hotel at all. It looked as though it was some kind of Chinese medicine store and it was closed. Graffiti scrawled shutters pulled down. Two of the upper windows smashed- in.

Pain exploded at the base of his neck. He tumbled hard into the rusted shutters. Angry voices cursing in indecipherable tongues. Metal shook and rattled. Fists rained down. Fireworks flashing in starless skies. A heavy blow to the face. Another. Another. His nose ruptured, sending brutal currents of pain to the center of his brain. The Columbian woman giggling again. Shrieking something in Japanese. He swallowed blood. On his hands and knees. The concrete hot and damp. Slick. Two or three sharp kicks in the side put him on his back. Something inside his rib cage snapped like the overwound string on a guitar. Shoes scraping over pavement in a mad, frenzied dance. Hands tore at his pockets. He held his fist tightly over his breast pocket. Begging them not to take Kate away from him again. Take the money, but please just leave Kate. Leave her alone.

A voice bellowed from the other end of the alley. A world away. Another kick snapped his head back.

“Yes, you fucking were, Nick.”

“Okay, so what if I was talking to the waitresses? They’re the waitresses!”

“Not waitresses. The waitress. Just one. Her.”

“Come on! She was just being nice, Katie.”

“Every time I turned my back, or went to the bar or something, she was sniffing around you, shoving those gross plastic tits in your face, acting like some kind of fucking bitch in heat. Did you tell her we were on our honeymoon?”

“No, come on, that would’ve just been weird. You’re overreacting, babe.”

“No, I am not and no, it wouldn’t have. I bet you just loved the attention, didn’t you?”

“Do you want me to tell everyone I meet that we’re on our honeymoon? Hi, I’m Nick, we’re on our honeymoon. Hi, I’m Nick, I’m on my honeymoon. Hi, I’m Nick, we’re on our honeymoon. You want me to sound like some kind of fucking Stepford Husband now that we’re hitched, that it?”

“You were fucking flirting again!”

“Oh, please. No, I wasn’t. You’re drunk, Katie. I told you we shouldn’t be drinking so heavy.”

“I know I’m drunk, but I also know you’re a piece of shit who fucks everything that walks or crawls. I know it! Know it all too well by now!”

“I married you, didn’t I? When are you going to forgive me and forget about my mistakes? It’s like you want to punish me all the time.”

“It was my best friend, Nick!”

“Do we really need to have this conversation again? On our fucking honeymoon too.”

“I want to be on my own for a little while. I really need to think. I’m going out for a walk.”

“On the beach? Now?!”

“Maybe. I don’t know. But I want a little space.”

“Are you serious? It’s pitch-black out and you can hardly walk straight. Don’t be crazy.”

“I’m fine! I’m fine! You can stay here and call that little whore up for room service.”

“This is crazy. Go and fucking sober yourself up then, Katie!”

A door slammed.

Kate. Katie…

Nick coughed up something boiling and bitter, swallowed it back down with the aftertaste of blood. Rubbed at his breast pocket, sighing deeply at the outline of her photograph. They’d left him with that at least.

His fingers slowly found their way to the cool metals of his Rolex and his wedding ring. Still had those too. The pockets of his jacket had been torn open. Billfold and cash gone. He cursed, prodded at his nose and hissed. Cursed again. Broken. Couldn’t open his eyes. Swollen. Stuck shut with blood. He used his index finger and thumb to pry them open. Tender as hell.

Yellow light on dim. A single unslept in bed. A desk. A television. A chair. Slumped in the entrance of his motel room. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten back there. It didn’t matter. He pushed himself up the wall slowly. Locked the door and pulled the chain across it. Agony to move. Every muscle and joint screamed. Touching the ribs on his right side made him scream through gritted teeth. Breath coming out in a jagged, wheezed panting.

The Columbian had recognized Kate. That hadn’t been a con. He was sure of it. He’d seen it in her eyes. Recognition. Real recognition. Kate was here. Knowing that he was finally a few steps closer to her was worth a thousand beat downs and every last red cent he had.

He undressed slowly, dropping his clothes to the floor and staggered into the shower. The water flowed warm and soothing and pink down the plughole. He let it run over his body for a long time before he attempted to wash himself.

The time on his Rolex Submariner illuminated twenty past eleven. Too much damn time gone. Wasted. He yanked on the same damp, blood-stained clothing. Groaning and hissing with each small movement. Avoiding the reflection in the mirror above the sink, he swallowed a handful of pain killers with the remnants of the other pills and the half-drunk bottle of whiskey next to the bed.

After, he wrapped the empty liquor bottle in a moist bath towel and stamped on it several times. Picked through the broken shards. He examined the jagged neck, pushing the pad of his thumb against the sharp points. Stabbed at the air with it and then slipped it into his side pocket. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than nothing. This wasn’t home. There were no guns in this country, but he wasn’t about to let anyone else steal anymore of his time. He pulled the last rolls of bills from their hiding place underneath the mattress, and counted them out on the duvet. Five hundred thousand yen. He didn’t know what that meant in dollars, but he did know it was the very last of his cash. It was return to Boston with Kate or bust-out. He wasn’t leaving without her this time. He swore it to God and the empty hotel room.

Back outside on the street another light rainfall had thinned the crowds. Puddles reflecting illuminated street signs and storefronts made the whole place a twisted hall of mirrors. Nick’s head throbbed. The pills had him hyperaware and coasting simultaneously. He wiped a trickle of something warm from his upper lip and tried to enter one of the first places he came across. A narrow, white plastic-looking building on the corner of the block. A luminous sign shaped like a pair of lips pulsed out its name—The Love Palace. He shoved his way through the PVC garbed girls clustered outside the doorway and plunged through the entrance. Bass thick music pounding, shadows and cigarette smoke permeated. A coatroom to the left. An elderly woman hunched behind something akin to a bank teller’s cage on the right. A sumo wrestler with his hair tied in a top-knot and obese frame barely contained within a tight-fitting tuxedo flanked by a wiry, younger man with gold chains and a punch-perm stood in front of an extra set of interior doors blocking his way. They grappled him, and threw him back out the entrance hard onto his ass. The broken bottle neck jabbing painfully into his hip.

The girls scattered, tittered, tutted and giggled.

“I’m an American. I’m an American looking for an American woman,” he pleaded with the two men.

They sneered. Cursing at him in words Nick didn’t understand and didn’t need to.

“Japanese customer only. No foreigners here,” the sumo wrestler held out his meaty arms crossed in front of his chest in an X gesture, then turned around and shuffled back into the smoky, sickly sweet aroma of the club laughing.

Punch-perm grinned around the cigarette he was lighting. Nick noticed the pinky and ring finger on his right hand were missing. Just smooth, fleshy stumps. He spat on the concrete and spoke in perfect English, “Why did you come to Japan if you want to fuck American girls? You should go back home, huh?” He helped Nick back up on his feet. A car honked its horn repetitively down the block.

“I’m looking for someone,” Nick said.

“This club is just for Japanese; you can only come in here if you have a Japanese friend with you. You have no Japanese friends with you, so you need to go to the place with the foreign girls. Foreigners can go inside okay there.”

“You have foreigners in there?” Nick pointed back into the doorway.

“No foreigner girls here. Just Japanese. Japanese kyabakura, you know? Hostess club.”

“Where are they? The places with American girls?”

“The foreign places are the cheapest or the most expensive clubs in Kabukicho. You need to go up or you need to go down. Depending on what you like. What you want to pay,” punch-perm shrugged, blew smoke at the night sky. “What happened to your face, American? You look like Bruce Willis! Die Hard, huh? I love American Hollywood movies.”

Nick ignored the question, asked his own, “How do I find them? The places with American girls?”

“Don’t worry,” he sniggered with a grin like a broken bottle. “They will find you.”

“Wait, please, have you seen this woman?” Nick pulled his wife’s photograph from his breast pocket holding it up to the moldy yellow light of a street lamp.

Punch-perm frowned at the picture, waved the hand with the missing digits in front of Nick’s eyes, “I’ve seen too many like her. Looking for women around this place can sometimes get you in trouble.” He bowed very slightly, “Good luck, Die Hard, you will need it.” He tossed his cigarette into the gutter and turned back inside.

The next place Nick tried was a small basement club a Nigerian tout dressed as a New York rapper guided him to with the promise of “cheap white pussy and cheaper drinks.”

Electric blue lighting. Wall-to-wall mirrors and a stifling atmosphere pregnant with cigarette smoke and perfume greeted him like a hammer blow to the synapses.

He limped past two businessmen bickering at the bar and slid into the booth nearest the door. Scanning faces. His eyes stung. Couldn’t see his wife. That old feeling of bitter disappointment crushing guts.

He clamped his throbbing eyes shut. Massaged his brow.

More time wasted. He swallowed another handful of pick and mix pills.

Girls were scattered around the room, two to a booth. Blondes. Eastern European features. They looked happy enough. Dressed in stilettos and tight, bright dresses. Pouring drinks and fawning over the drunken Japanese clientele. At the far end of the bar, a redhead was over-enthusiastically singing Fantasy by Mariah Carey on a karaoke machine.

Nick was about to get up and leave when two of the women squeezed into the booth either side of him blocking his departure. One held a bottle of champagne, the other dangled three champagne flutes from her fingers.

“No, no, no. No champagne for me, please. I was just leaving. I was supposed to meet a friend, but it looks as though I’ve made a mistake and have the wrong bar. Very sorry,” he waved his palms in front of himself in the international gesture of NO.

One of the women poured the champagne and the other started rubbing at his thigh as though they hadn’t heard a single word he’d said. Their hungry eyes locked onto his and smiling with teeth glowing florescent in the blue hazy lighting. A ruddy faced, white man wearing a green Fighting Irish baseball cap and a black polo shirt sat across the room on his own grinned at Nick and raised a bottle of Budweiser in salutation.

“Stay with us a little while, please. We haven’t spoken to anyone interesting all night, especially foreign man,” the champagne pourer looked as though she was in her early twenties, but had the voice of a fifty-year-old heavy smoker. Russian accented.

The one on Nick’s right side moved her hand higher up his thigh to squeeze his prick.

The human contact made him ache. He closed his eyes briefly and thought of Kate. The last couple of months, whenever he thought of his wife, the memories were restricted to the photograph version of her. He found himself willing the static image into some kind of fraudulent reanimation. It felt profane and Nick despised himself for struggling to remember her and how she really was. He wasn’t even sure which of his memories of Kate were genuine or which ones were the guilty creations of his own desperate, tortured mind.

The greasy prickling sensation of being observed. The red-faced man across the room watching him. Grinning.

Nick pulled the girl’s hand away and dropped it onto the fake leather seating. She pouted across the table at her friend, but said nothing. Nick pushed the glass of flat looking champagne away and placed Kate’s picture in front of the Russian girl on his left.

“I’m looking for this woman. Have you seen her?”

She sipped at her drink, crossed her legs high and croaked out a tired bark of laughter.

“Are you some kind of policeman?”

“Do I look like a cop?”

“No, you don’t, but you are acting like one, yes? An American cop on

vacation, yes?”

“What happened to your face? Someone beat you bad?” the one on the

right asked in a polish accent. Nick ignored her, keeping his focus on the older Russian.

“Have you seen this woman or not?” he said.

“Why you waste our time? We should go to another table. We want fun talk. Drink the champagne, it’s so yummy. Let’s have fun. Party, party, party.” She held out the glass to Nick and he slapped it out of her hand. It smashed on the tabletop. The girls shrieked. Struggled out of the booth, screeching and squawking towards the barman.

Two skinheads appeared from behind a black curtain. White. Probable Russians. Little Putins on steroids.

One of them grabbed Nick by the lapels of his leather jacket, dragging him out of the booth towards the cash register. The strength of the man shocked and awed Nick.

“You fucking pay, man. You fucking pay now.”

Nick grappled with the thick, tattooed fists biting down on him. His feet slipping on the tiled flooring. Another girl started warbling TLC’s Waterfalls on the karaoke machine which had been turned up full volume. The speakers vibrated. Sound distorted.

All the patrons found things of fascination at the bottoms of their glasses. All heads down. All eyes unseeing. Un-witnessing.

Except the guy in the green baseball cap. He was still watching intently. Amused. The blue lights flickering gleefully in his dark eyes. Thick lips turned up slightly at the ends in a near sneer or smile.

Thug number two sucker punched Nick hard in the guts. Nick collapsed onto his knees, choking on Smokey air. Lungs burning. Hand in the pocket of his jacket squeezing down on the neck of the broken bottle. He didn’t want to use it, but it was starting to look as though he would be forced to. Hurting people had caused his search in Hawaii to get out of control. More difficult. Fucked up. He didn’t want that to happen again. Not in Japan where everything was already complex. Alien. Not when he was so close to finally finding Kate.

Two pairs of scuffed army boots were joined by a pair of brown, expensive looking loafers. Harsh, murmured conversation. Nick kept his head down, choking for oxygen. Fingers wrapped even tighter now around the broken neck of Jim Bean. He twisted his body slightly towards the door. Glanced at it. Seemed far away.

The boots shuffled out of his line of vision. The loafers remained. Nick was pulled to his feet by invisible hands for the second time in an hour and moved gently out of the door. He released his grip on the makeshift weapon in his jacket pocket.

Nick collapsed on the damp steps leading back up to the streets and sucked in the bitter night air. Pop music from the bar still vibrating sickly through the soles of his feet. He vomited.

“What’s the matter, kid? Russian broads don’t do it for you or something?”

Nick squinted up at the large silhouette casting a thick shadow like an oil slick over him. The bones in his neck cracked audibly. The guy in the green Notre Dame cap smiling down at him.

“Thanks for helping me get out of there.” Nick nodded.

“You look like you’ve been getting a raw deal of it lately, judging by your face. Your nose is broken. In case you didn’t know it. Besides it weren’t nothing. Those little pricks know not to fuck around with me. Bring a lot of business their way. Fucking Russians though, am I right or am I right? Fucking pricks.”

“You’re not wrong. You’re an American too?”

“I was certainly born one. Chicago. But I haven’t been back there for a long, long time. The world is my playground now. Name’s Grover. Grover Cleveland.” He stuck his hand out to shake and Nick took it. The man’s palm was dry ice. The grip too tight.

“Grover Cleveland? The twenty-fourth president? You giving me a fake name?” Nick squinted at the three scars etched into the side of the man’s flabby neck.

“The twenty second and the twenty fourth president to be precise. Besides, does it really matter if it’s my real name or it ain’t? We’re all strangers when we die anyhow.”

Nick shrugged. A pain ripped down his arm. “No, I guess you’re right. It doesn’t matter. Name’s Nick. That’s my real name though.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t doubt it for a second, Nick. Pleased to make your acquaintance, pal.”

“Pleased to meet you too, Grover Cleveland.”

The man with the fake name readjusted the baseball cap on his head, wiped the sweat from his face with his forearm and started up the stairs. “Come on, Nick. Let’s go and get a real fucking drink, shall we?”

Nick glanced at his wristwatch. Twelve fifty-five. “I’m sorry, I appreciate you helping me out and all, but I don’t have the time.”

“Nice watch, that’s a real Rolex, right?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve really got somewhere I need to be.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that for a second either, buddy. However, you’re in

one of the biggest red-light districts in the whole wide world, and it looks to me, kind of like you don’t know a pussy hole from a sushi roll. I think, just maybe, you’re in desperate need of a tour guide, my friend.”

Nick used the metal stair railing to pull himself groaning to his feet and followed after Grover clutching at his side.

Grover gulped down his third Sambuca, slammed the glass down on the bar, and nodded to the barman for the same again. Gazing at Nick with eyes red raw from alcohol or heartbreak.

“I fucking knew I recognized you,” he wiped at his mouth with a paper napkin and chuckled. Nick sipped at a beer, lit up his fifth cigarette and checked his wristwatch.

“Your wifey, she ran off on your honeymoon and you took a baseball bat to a whole bunch of whorehouses in Honolulu or some shit, right? I saw the news. You even made the Japan Times. Just a small column though. I keep track.”

“My wife didn’t run off,” Nick spat, fist drained white on the beer bottle.

“All right, buddy. Jesus. Don’t get all testy now. I’m just saying what the news was saying is all,” Grover shrugged. Chuckled again.

“She’s here. I know it,” Nick said, stubbing his cigarette out in the ashtray. Orange sparks flew.

“How could you know a thing like that? She’s probably still in Hawaii shacked up with another asshole. Looky here; I go to Hawaii all the time on my buddy’s private plane and, each time, leaving gets that little more harder. Paradise on earth. Pussy to die for. What the hell makes you believe she’s here in Japan of all places? The whole things for the birds.” He licked his blue-tinged lips.

“No, I know she’s here. Know it in my heart. I don’t know why Japan. None of it makes any sense. And I got this email. Here, see,” Nick unfolded and smoothed out the printed email on the sticky bar top. Read the words out loud in a voice that wavered and croaked, “I’m so sorry your wife is alive in the basement of a whorehouse in Tokyo. Kiss.”

Grover’s eyebrows knitted together. The muscle in his jaw pulsed. “Who sent that to you?”

“I don’t know,” Nick shrugged. “It was anonymous. But if I got an email like this saying she was in Timbuktu, I’d catch a plane there.”

Grover scoffed and downed another drink. “Well, first of all, that ain’t a kiss.”

“What do you mean?” Nick shook pills into his palm and washed them down with warm Heineken. Lit another smoke. His hands trembled.

“I’m so sorry your wife is alive in the basement of a whorehouse in Tokyo.

X. See, the X mark? It ain’t a kiss mark like you think it is. It’s the name of a club. Club X. A very special kind of club catering to a very special kind of clientele.”

Nick coughed up beer and smoke. “What?! Have you been there?”

Grover shrugged hos thick shoulder, “sure, a few times. Not really my bag, but what sells sells.”

“You’ve got to take me there now.”

“Woah, woah, buddy. You need to forget about all this. Go home. Move on with your life. I’m trying to save you from a lot more fucking pain here. I’m trying to be a nice guy. Trying to get some good karma over here.”

“Just show me where the place is then.”

“Doesn’t work like that, buddy. You need to be a member or accompanied by a member to even get a foot in the door. They got security up the fucking wazoo. Then there’s the entrance fee, that’s two and a half thousand fucking bucks a head. For thirty fucking minutes! This ain’t your usual cathouse is what I’m trying to say here. We’re talking fucked up VIP cathouse.”

“Are you a member?”

“I’m a member of a lot of places.” He shrugged again, stared down into his empty glass. “That’s part and parcel of being Grover Cleveland.”

Nick slapped the last two rolls of cash on the bar. “There’s over five hundred thousand yen there.”

Grover raised his eyebrows and licked his lips. Took off the baseball cap and wiped at his bald and scarred head with another napkin. “I can see that, but it’s still a no from me, I’m afraid. There are some places that shouldn’t be gone to.”

“You’re a fucking member!”

“Like I said before, that’s something else entirely, buddy. I felt bad for you, so I’m trying to help you out.”

Nick unclasped the Rolex from his wrist, held it dangling in front of Grover’s face for a moment and then pushed it into the man’s moist palm. “So help me! Take me there now. Get me in. That’s all I want. All I need. Please, I’m begging you.”

Grover threw another Sambuca to the back of his throat and licked his lips again. Something reptilian flashed in his eyes for a split second.

The rain came heavy like tears from the eyes of screaming children. The streets dead. Haunted. The dark blue of early morning birthed like a premature infant.

Nick stood swaying, glaring at the three story building in front of him. “What the fuck is this, Grover? Why’d you bring me to a fucking parking garage.”

Grover laughed heartedly. The sound of it carried booming out into the silence like a dysfunctional car alarm.

“Don’t be so god damned naïve, buddy. It just looks like a parking garage. You think places like this survive operating out in the open? It’s kind of like that secret VIP bar they got in DisneyLand. Sort of like an urban legend but not. Come on,” he waved Nick to follow him up to the empty cashier booth. They both peered through the cloudy Plexiglas. The booth was sparse. Just a phone and a paper calendar on an empty desk. Grover waved into a single security camera above their heads and grinned teeth stained bright yellow by spotlights. He held up two fingers in the peace sign and then fingered a code into a security lock embedded in the structure next to the window. Then an electric whining as a small alcove slid open to reveal a pneumatic tube and a cylindrical container. Nick watched as Grover counted out the bills and pushed them into the tube.

“Watch this shit. Gets me every time. So fucking cool. Wish I could pay for everything this way. The future is now.”

There was a harsh sucking sound as the capsule disappeared down the tube and into a hole in the wall. “Thing reminds me of my ex-wife,” Grover elbowed Nick. Nick wiped sweat from his eyes. Heartbeat jacked. Reached for the pills in his side pocket. Shook the container. Empty. He cursed and tossed it.

After a few moments, there was another high-pitched electric whine as a thick metal door to the side of the men automatically unlocked and creaked ajar.

Red light the color of emergency sirens leaked out like a splash of blood. Music. Nick knew the song. Schubert—Ave Maria. One of Kate’s favorites, it had been played at their wedding. He closed his eyes and was dancing with her again. Her white wedding dress underneath his fingertips. Eyes the deepest blue.

“Wakey-wakey, Romeo.” Grover bowed and waved an arm theatrically towards the door.

“All the answers to your needless questions await. Welcome to Club X, buddy. I tried to warn you. I really did. This ain’t a Honolulu whorehouse. Remember, Grover tried.”

Nick stumbled up to the door. Breathless. Hyperventilating. Bathed in scarlet. The door clanked shut and automatically locked behind them.

“How do we get out later?” Nick asked.

Grover looked like the devil in the spotlights. Drenched in crimson and full of sin.

He snorted. “Well, we won’t be leaving this way, buddy. That’s for sure.”

A long, wine-red corridor led steadily down to another door. Nick staggered and limped along quickly, his right palm pressed to the hot, smooth wall for support. A sweet smell, something like almonds on the air crawled down his air passages to settle at the back of his throat. In his lungs. He vomited into his hands again as he elbowed open the second door onto darkness and light.

He remembered once going to a night aquarium show with Kate when they’d first started dating. The huge tanks of brightly colored tropical fish lit up blue as the only source of light. The audience moving slowly in the darkness, peering through the glass at the beautiful flailing creatures. It was so damn similar he thought. Except the smell. The stench. Medicinal aromas mixed with the stink of blood and semen.

Small groups of people, shapes made grotesque by jerking movements and gestures, crowded in front of murky glass windows. He turned around to look for Grover but saw only dark twisted shapes resembling monsters from childhood nightmares. Pushed his way a little closer to the nearest window. Hand palsied, shoved deeply in pocket. Fingers tight around the bottle shard. Trembling hard enough to make his teeth chatter. Swaying on tiptoes trying to get a better look at what it was the audience were so enraptured with.

Ave Maria reaching crescendo.

Inside the aquarium, blood and shit puddled on the light blue floor tiling.

A pink and blurred shape convulsing.

Nick wiped the sweat from his burning eyes. Blinked. Gagged. Through the glass—a naked thing like a broken store mannequin sprawled on a surgical table writhing. Little more than a torso. Its arms and legs removed at the joints. Amputated. Crudely wrapped in rotten brown bandages. Breasts gone, puckered, pink scars. Mouth cut into an everlasting grin. Nick gagged down vomit again and forced his face closer to the glass.

The thing’s shaved, scarred, and scabbed head lolled semi-consciously towards the audience.

A glimpse of what remained of a shoulder—a small turquoise butterfly tattoo.

The tortured thing opened its swollen eyes, catching his.

Eyes the deepest blue. Eyes so blue they were almost black.

Nick screamed.

(This story originally appeared in the now out of print Gone Crime Anthology edited by Stephen J. Golds and published by Red Dog Press.

Wikipedia says that “Transgressive fiction is a genre of literature which focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual or illicit ways.”

A good friend of mine, and a probable literary genius, once told me it’s debatable if transgressive literature even exists anymore. What’s transgressive nowadays? He calls it “Alternative Literature”.

Maybe, he’s right. I don’t know.

What I do know is “Transgressive” literature is certainly hard to define.

Everyone has their own definition.

For me “transgressive” authors are writers who write how they want to write, without worrying about what genre or box they may fit into. They have a story to tell and they bleed their words onto the page until the story is done. They’re artists who blend poetry and prose effortlessly whilst writing about things that could/would still be considered taboo in today’s society. Mental health, suicide, sexuality, poverty, addiction, abuse and trauma being just a few prime examples.

You’ll never see these books on a supermarket shelf, but you’ll likely see them on the shelves of readers who live and breathe books. These books never made the New York Times Bestseller lists, but they’ve remained cult favorites and probably always will do.

These are my top 13 “Transgressive” books to read before you die. NOTE: I’ve stayed away from the more mainstream “transgressive” novels, to give love to the more unknown and dirty diamonds out there. So there’s no Palahnuik or Ellis. No Transgressive novels that Google or Amazon is likely to suggest.

And yeah, I know, I missed out a few. But these are just 13 of mine. Feel free to add your own in the comments below. There’s nothing better than discovering a great book you never knew existed.

Okay, so here we go. My top 13. Chosen because they’ve remained with me, carved into the very fabric of my soul like the drunken tattoo I woke up with that one long, crazy weekend in Osaka…

13: Digging the Vein by Tony O’Neill

A pitch black ode to heroin addiction and hopelessness.

12: Hating Olivia by Mark SaFranko

A no holds barred recounting of a fucked-up love affair. Brutally honest and well-written.

11: So the Wind Won’t Blow it All Away by Richard Brautigan

A bitter-sweet and tragic story about loss. Loss of everything that matters: Youth, Love and Life.

10: Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

Madness and non-conformity and beauty.

9: Chump Change by Dan Fante

The brutal tell-all of a lost soul and drifter. Sometimes humorous. Often dark. Always real.

8: When I was Five I Killed Myself by Howard Buten

A truly beautiful novel that I can’t even begin to explain. This should be at the top of all literary lists. If you haven’t read it, start today!

7: Nothing Important Happened Today by Will Carver

It’s crime, but crime like you’ve never read before. A scathing attack on modern society as much as it is an interesting and very well-written crime novel.

6: Suicide Casanova by Arthur Nersesian

Nersesian is funny, fucked up, poetic and quite possibly a literary genius. Read this and then read all of his other novels.

5: My Fault by Billy Childish

Talking of genius. READ Billy Childish. Read his poetry. Admire his paintings. Drown yourself in all of his novels. Listen to his music. Revel in his lyrics. He’s the UK punk Bukowski and an English literary gem.

4: Leaving Las Vegas by John O’Brien

When I wrote my own transgressive novel Shadows Slow Dancing in Derelict Rooms, I hoped it would have 10% of the heartbreaking poetry of O’Brien’s masterpiece about an alcoholic going to Las Vegas to drink himself to death. O’Brien died too young and is missed.

3: Ask the Dust by John Fante

Love and poetry and poverty. Prose like punches. If you’re into transgressive novels, I’m guessing you’ve already read it.

2: Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski

Adolescent angst. Humorous. Sad. Poetic prose. One of Bukowski’s more sentimental and introspective novels. I take it everywhere with me.

1: 4:48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane

This isn’t a book or play or script. It’s one long poem about mental illness, isolation, lost love, hopelessness and the oft brutal passing of days. The last thing Kane wrote before taking her own life and it really shows in the prose. RIP Sarah Kane.

#

I hope I’ve been able to introduce you to some cool new novels and authors.

If you’ve read most of these masterpieces already and are looking for some transgressive crime novels inspired by the works above, please give my novels a read! They’re dark, but they’ve got a lot of heart.

Buy Transgressive Crime Noir Here

Stephen J. Golds was born in North London, U.K, but has lived in Japan for most of his life. He speaks the language pretty well and makes great takoyaki.

He writes primarily in the noir and dirty realism genres and is the editor-in-chief of Punk Noir Press. Some of his writing influences are Charles Bukowski, John Fante, James M. Cain, Tobias Wolff, Sarah Kane and Jim Thompson. 

He enjoys spending time with his daughters, reading books, traveling the world, boxing and listening to old Soul LPs. His books are Say Goodbye When I’m Gone, I’ll Pray When I’m Dying, Always the Dead, and Shadows Slow Dancing in Derelict Rooms. His poetry collections are Poems for Ghosts in Empty Tenement Windows I Thought I Saw Once, and Half-Empty Doorways and Other Injuries. He also has a short story and poetry collection titled Love Like Bleeding Out With an Empty Gun in Your Hand.

Check Out Stephen’s Website Here

PRAISE FOR STEPHEN J. GOLDS

“And again we ask ourselves, what is noir? You’ll know it when you see it. The stories of the defeated and downtrodden, the songs of the fallen. The poetry of apprehension. The oasis of horror in a desert of ennui. Or maybe it simply comes down to this, as James Ellroy succinctly put it – you’re fucked. 

Were we to canonize such things, Stephen J Golds would be the patron saint of the fallen and the fucked. Out there in the dark wash, up to his knees panning for gold in a placer rich with alluvial deposits of misery and last legs.”— Dom Nolan, Author of Vine Street 

“[Golds] had something that everyone in this weird industry says they are looking for but rarely commit to: A VOICE. A tone. A style. Free and poetic. Something that, no matter what the story is, you can tell from the first page it is a Stephen J. Golds novel.” – Will Carver, Cult Crime Author of Nothing Important Happened Today

“Stephen J. Golds is a promising new talent that the world should be reading!” — Awais Khan, Author of In the Company of Strangers

“With every new word he writes, I’m further convinced: Golds is a once-in-a-generation literary talent.” – Rob Parker, Author of Audible Bestseller Far From the Tree

“Golds’ writing is exceptional – powerful, compelling and beautifully dark.” – Sarah Moorhead, Author of The Treatment

“A serious new talent has come to town.” — Judith O’Reilly, Author of Curse The Day

I don’t watch television. I rarely watch YouTube. I’m a listener. My apartment has a Bluetooth speaker in each room which connects to my iPhone and if I’m at home there’s either music or a Spotify podcast playing in the background. I love podcasts. If I’m riding the subway or the Shinkansen 🚄 I’m listening to a podcast. Ditto long car journeys. For me, there’s nothing more satisfying than listening to people tell stories or talk about something that fascinates the hell out of me. A love, no doubt, inspired in childhood from hours sitting on my grandparents’ living room floor listening to my grandfather, Sonny wax lyrical on all kinds of subjects. He was a gregarious man and one hell of a storyteller. RIP.

But what makes a great podcast? Well, first off is the content, obviously. It has to be interesting or something that catches my imagination. It has to be well-researched, well-written and/or insightful. Being a crime writer, most of these 14 choices are related to my interests. Crime. Literature. Writing. Mystery. If you’re reading Punk Noir, they’re possibly your interests too, I reckon.

Next up on the list of importance is voice and tone. Some people are blessed with melody in their intonations. Unfortunately, I’m not one of these people. My slurred and stumbling vernacular would have most people reaching for the OFF button. However, all of the folks on this list here have voices that flow smoothly from speakers and earphones in such a way as to make even the most crowded of rush hour trains pleasant.

Lastly on the list of factors that make a great podcast is production. The high end production that goes into the following podcasts rival any Netflix show. Hands down.

So, here are 14 of my favorites. If you enjoy chilling out at home listening to a Bluetooth speaker like it’s a 1940’s wireless or if you’ve got a long trip planned, please do check them out.

Truly Criminal Podcast

I first discovered this podcast/youtube channel at the start of the pandemic and binged every single episode. Covering a wide array of true crimes from the sensational to the lesser known, each harrowing case is produced with care, respect and deeply researched attention. The narration is beautiful and the production values are great. A new case is released each week and the team bring a warm light to old cases as well as more recent ones. An absolute must for fans of True Crime.

Listen to Truly Criminal here

The Why Files

The Why Files investigate mysteries and the supernatural with intellect and humor. Interested in UFOs? Ancient aliens? Myths? Legends? They’ve got them all covered on this intriguing podcast. Each episode lasts well over an hour and is dealt with impartially. A must for fans of the weird and the unknown. My daughters and wife groan when they hear this one on the speakers as they don’t like the goldfish sidekick’s voice. Yes, there’s a goldfish sidekick.

Listen to Why Files Here

Crime Time FM

The presenter Paul has a voice that reminds me of every favorite uncle or teacher I’ve ever had. He interviews writers, mostly crime, with in-depth, original and insightful questions and is a constant supporter of small indie authors as well as the more well-known Lit stars. Sounds like a great radio show of old. Awesome.

Listen to Crime Time FM Here

Unsolved Murders

This podcast was like an addiction for me. A cocktail containing every liqueur I (used to) love to imbibe in. Mystery. Unsolved cold cases. Movie like production. Great narration. Sadly it’s now finished but there are years and years of cases set out like the great radio dramas of old to lose yourself in. Another must for True Crime fans. Especially if you’re addicted to cold-cases as I am.

Listen to Unsolved Murders Here

This Is Horror Podcast

This is Horror Podcast has interviewed some of the biggest names in the genre. Take a scroll through their episodes and you’ll see the names of legends next to indie scene up and comers (yours truly included). I’ve spent hours listening to interviews and always come away having learned something new about the art of writing each and every time.

Listen to This Is Horror Here

Faceless

Faceless is a podcast series covering the brutal and unsolved massacre of The Miyazawa family in Tokyo on New Year’s Eve, 2000. Butchered in their home with no apparent motive. The killer sat around for hours after the murders eating ice cream and surfing the internet on the family’s computer. A crazy case. Production isn’t great, but the narration and research make up for it. I listened to this podcast to get some info on the case as it’s mentioned in the Japanese thriller I just finished writing.

Listen to Faceless Here

Let’s get lit

I love the rapport between Carver and Watson and they always cover topics/issues that aren’t talked about all that much on writing shows. Envy. Luck. Imposter Syndrome. And they do it all with wit and humor. Also alcohol.

Listen to Let’s get lit Here

The Writing Community Chat Show

Another great writing show. Chris and Chris interview a wide variety of authors and the atmosphere is that of a chat with mates down the pub. Insightful, informative and inclusive. Awesome stuff by a couple of great fellows in the indie writing community.

Listen to The Writing Community Chat Show Here

The Blood Brothers Crime Writing Podcast

This was probably the first writing based podcast I ever listened to. Again, the rapport between Chris, Rob and Sean makes for a hilarious listening experience. They interview a host of authors about their success stories and writing techniques. This podcast, sadly came to an end in 2023, however I’ve heard rumors it’s coming back! Nice!

Listen to Blood Brothers Here

Roughneck Dispatch

The esteemed indie crime writer Matt Philips interviews other authors about their life experiences and writing techniques. A must listen for any up and coming writer looking for advice or tips on how to get ahead.

Listen to Roughneck Dispatch Here

The Hobcast Book Show

Adrian and Rebecca have their own indie press Hobeck Books and this is what makes their podcast so interesting. They give insights into indie publishing and the business side of things whilst interviewing authors and writers big and small. Love Rebecca and Adrian’s banter with each other too.

Listen to Hobcast Here

Unsolved Mysteries

Unsolved Mysteries doesn’t really need an introduction, does it. The music that put ice in the veins of every single one of us as kids when we heard it playing on the television in the living room. The podcast is as good as its 1980’s counterpart, but came to an end in 2023. Damn. I was gutted but have listened to a lot of the episodes twice over they’re that good.

Here’s a strange nugget of trivia about me, I always kind of wanted to be featured on the show. Wanted Robert Stack to appear in some darkened alley, speaking sternly into the camera like “Stephen J. Golds was a crime writer living in Japan. He disappeared in a baffling case…”

Weird, I know.

Listen to Unsolved Mysteries Here

Conspiracy Theories

Speaking of weird. If you sometimes like to spend hours covering your house in tinfoil like I do, you’ll enjoy this podcast a lot. There are rabbit holes aplenty to fall down and the research, writing and production is top class. They cover lesser known conspiracies as well as the more infamous ones. Highly recommended.

Listen to Conspiracy Theories Here

The History Podcast with Neil Oliver

I love history. Especially British history and Neil Oliver is a British historian with an accented narration that pulls you in like a hot cup of tea on a rainy Sunday in Scotland. He’s a helluva story weaver and approaches history with an eye to the present. History doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. Fascinating stuff.

Listen to The History Podcast with Neil Oliver Here

There you have it. My Top 14 Podcasts. I hope I’ve been able to introduce you to some new places you’ll get hours of enjoyment out of.

Cheers

Bio:

Stephen J. Golds was born in North London, U.K, but has lived in Japan for most of his life. He speaks the language pretty well and makes great takoyaki.

He writes primarily in the noir and dirty realism genres and is the editor-in-chief of Punk Noir Press. Some of his writing influences are Charles Bukowski, John Fante, James M. Cain, Tobias Wolff, Sarah Kane and Jim Thompson. 

He enjoys spending time with his daughters, reading books, traveling the world, boxing and listening to old Soul LPs. His books are Say Goodbye When I’m Gone, I’ll Pray When I’m Dying, Always the Dead, and Shadows Slow Dancing in Derelict Rooms. His poetry collections are Poems for Ghosts in Empty Tenement Windows I Thought I Saw Once, and Half-Empty Doorways and Other Injuries. He also has a short story and poetry collection titled Love Like Bleeding Out With an Empty Gun in Your Hand.

Check Out Stephen’s Website Here

Today, I wanted to write about a little piece of Japanese culture that is pretty much unknown to the average Westerner and is the setting for the opening chapters of my Japanese thriller: The Love Hotel.

Love Hotels in Japan are a thriving industry that have survived decades of zombified economics, recessions and more recently the devastating Covid pandemic.

But what the hell is a love hotel?

Well, it’s exactly what it says it is.   

A hotel for love… Cue sexy music 🎵

Love hotels are EVERYWHERE in Japan. There are probably more than ten in any small town. Sometimes situated right next to each other and often next to train stations, and especially clustered together downtown.

They’re small to medium sized motels/hotels open 24/7. Offering rooms that can be rented for a few hours (rest) or even longer (stay).

You walk in the entrance and choose what room you want from an anonymous vending machine that spits out your room key, or you murmur your preferred room number through a slot in the wall where an equally anonymous hand passes you the key.

You pay after in equally conspiratorial ways. I once sent payment for my room down to the front desk via a 1950s Pneumatic tube. Which I thought was completely awesome at the time. And still do. That girl ghosted me after, obviously.

No one sees you. You see no one, except, the small army of cleaners who are always wiping and mopping the hallways. The whole thing is very hush-hush. That’s the point. I’m sure most of the cars in the parking lots don’t belong to married couples.

Sounds kind of seedy, maybe. But it isn’t.

Love hotel rooms are catered to lovers and some of them are pretty damn luxurious. Each hotel has its own style and vibe. Ever been to a hotel shaped like a UFO? Or themed as a medieval castle? No? What better way to spend a few discreet hours with your lover than a hotel decorated as a jungle?

My favorite hotel I used with an ex was next to a major railway station and was designed to be like an old-fashioned 1920s hotel. We liked it because we were both big fans of The Shining and it was like banging in The Overlook Hotel.

Another hotel I liked had the theme of Christmas, so was decorated for Christmas every day of the year.

Love hotel rooms are not your usual hotel rooms. You don’t walk into a simple room like you would if you were on a business trip. We’re talking about huge wide-screen televisions with PlayStation 4 and karaoke systems hooked up. Huge beds. Jacuzzis. Massage oils. Wall to floor mirrors, (sometimes the mirrors are on the ceilings too.) Fruit machines and small refrigerator vending machines. You can even order food to your room from outside. Basically, there is everything that any couple of lovers would want or need. (There are lots of other things on offer that I won’t go into here. You can imagine, I`m sure.)

To be honest, I really don’t know why Love Hotels are such a huge and thriving industry here in Japan. People have told me it’s because Japanese towns are crowded and people live on top of each other for the most part (pun intended). The walls are thin and you can hear EVERYTHING. Which I can vouch for. Other people have explained away the popularity of Love Hotels to me as Japanese families also living together longer than in The West. You don’t want the in-laws to hear.

Love Hotels are pretty cool, if sometimes expensive. No ONS is overly impressed if they see you guiding them towards the cheapest Love Hotel on the block. Or one that has beds themed like 1950’s race cars… (if any of my exes read this: I’m sorry.)

Anyway, I think that’s it for this installment. If you ever make it out here to Japan, give a Love Hotel some love.

読んでくれてありがとう 

Thanks for reading!

Originally published at Punk Noir Magazine

The Style of Sydney Poitier

If you’ve seen my twitter, you’ve probably noticed I’m interested in men’s fashion from the 1920’s to 1960’s.

I love kicking back in a tracksuit as much as the next guy but I also do like to dress up for work or hanging out. Especially in a time when folks can be seen wearing their pajamas at the supermarket.

I’m a big fan of Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack, however I think Sidney Poitier was one cool cat. Here’s an article I wrote about his style.

Very different to my usual riffs, so please enjoy.

The Style of Sydney Poitier

With a legendary acting career spanning over half a century and such films as Deadly Pursuit, In the Heat of the Night and The Defiant Ones underneath his belt, Sydney Poitier is without a doubt one of the most important leading men to ever grace the silver screen.

At a time when the United States of America was still struggling with racial tension and inequality, Sydney Poitier elegantly fought to bring down racial segregation in Hollywood, whilst also setting cinema screens alight with his subtle and powerful performances.

The first African American to win an Academy Award for Best Actor, Sydney Poitier was of course known for his important social activism, just as much as his acting ability, but today I’m going to be discussing one of the lesser highlighted aspects of the great man: His style.

From an overall overview of Poitier’s style, the foundations of which were set in an unpretentious, simple and low-key chic that won the hearts of the movie-going public and caught the attention of the style conscious gentleman everywhere, simplicity was key. Rather than wearing vogue and haute couture fashions, Poitier constructed a style completely based on earthy colors and a subtle Everyday Gent look which he accentuated with certain flourishes and modes of pattern and prints, the main ones we’re going to be running down today. Laura Jacobs of Vanity Fair was quoted as saying “Poitier ‘wears a gray flannel suit as if it were a form of lightweight knight’s armor.”

So, lets talk a little about how Poitier achieved that knight in shining armor look.

First let's take a look at Poitier’s use of laying his outfits.

Layering

One of the key aspects to Poitier’s individual style was in his layering. Whatever the season, be it the cooler months of Spring, the hotter months of Summer, or the bitterly cold months of winter, Poitier layered his outfits in a way which caught the eye and always impressed.

Whether it was a cotton undershirt underneath a casual, unbuttoned linen shirt, a cashmere knit cardigan over an unbuttoned dress shirt, or a woolen shawl-neck sweater worn over a dress shirt and underneath a heavy tweed and fur-lined Chester Coat, Poitier always layered his outfits in an unsubtle, sedate yet masterful way. Utilizing the positive aspects of each garment’s fabric, color and weight to create an overall look and aesthetic that was pleasing to the eye and worked harmoniously in ensemble.  Another interesting aspect to Poitier’s layering technique was his use of a single item in the ensemble that worked as an anchor to the entire outfit. For example, using the pre mentioned cashmere sweater to make a point, we can see Poitier has chosen a color of a rich, darker baby blue that frames the entire outfit of the light blue dress shirt and grey wool slacks.

Bold Patterns

Poitier famously said, “Every new fashion is a form of rebellion.” And While being known for his more classical understated styling conventions, he also knew how to use bold patterns and prints in a way that rebelled whilst remaining conventional. A great example of this styling technique can be seen in one of his most famous movies — Lilies of the Field.

Here Poitier don’s a lightweight, shortsleeved cotton camp shirt adorned in a Hawaiiesque leafy green print over a simple white crew-neck undershirt that is made all the bolder by his choice of a more subdued pair of brown wool slacks and chocolate colored penny loafers.

Poitier really mastered the technique of pairing bolder prints and patterns with more subdued colors and crisp lines to highlight and frame the strengths of both.

Another great example of this pairing technique of the bold and the subdued can be seen in the movie A Warm December. Here Poitier wears a single-breasted camel jacket with wide notched lapels and a wide collared shirt with an autumn leaf pattern. Instead of this contrast of styles clashing, the earthy colors of the jacket frame and accentuate the shirt’s Autumn leave tones of red, gold and green in a way that integrates the entire outfit harmoniously while strongly keeping its more bold, more defiant overall statement.

Although Poitier tended towards the more established and traditional fashions of the day such as an array of blue blazers, grey flannel suits, button down shirts, knit ties and other more ubiquitous outfits, the most important style technique that Poitier can teach us is this: whatever you wear, make it your own. Don’t be afraid to experiment with contrasting prints and earthy tones or conflicting styles that can be merged with the correct choice of a base color. After all its you who is wearing the suit, it isn’t the suit that is wearing you, so make sure your personality can shine through whatever outfit you choose to wear. This can be easily achieved by laying, choosing colors that work well together of accentuated your outfit with an eye-catching necktie, or pocket square.

These are some reasons why I believe Sydney Poitier is one of the best style icons of the twentieth century.

If you’ve ever read any of my novels, short stories or poems, you’ve probably guessed that I’ve dealt with problems with my mental health. Though, I’ve never really spoken about it all that much (in a non-fiction sense) because I come from an old school environment/culture that still says to a lot of us, “stop your whining,” “pull your socks up,” “man up!”, “just get on with it.” Talking about how you feel is taboo for a lot folks and unfortunately, some still equate having problems with your mental health as a sign of weakness. Well, fuck that. We can’t all be Michael Madsen.

Lately, I’ve been cycling in and out and up and down. Currently trying to surf a mental tsunami, so what better time to talk about mental health. Today I wanted to write some quick tips that have helped me a lot. If this short article can help just one of my readers, it'll be worth it.

NOTE: When I say depression or mental health, I’m not talking about feeling a little gloomy or down in the dumps for a day or two, I’m talking about the kinds of problems that seriously impact your personal relationships, your working life and your daily life in cycles that last months or years.

So here’s the list. If you’ve been suffering lately, I hope these can help you.

1.     Accept you have a problem as part of who you are. Accept it and try to incorporate it into your life instead of constantly fighting it.

2.     Admit that you have a problem to your loved ones and explain how it sometimes affects your behavior/mood. Ask them to be patient and understanding. Open and honest communication is key.

3.     Talk to someone about how you’re feeling. Whether that’s a therapist or a trusted friend, in person or over the phone. Sometimes just venting out all the black bile to someone who is genuinely listening helps a lot. However, know (and everyone always bullshits about this) you ARE pretty much alone with your sickness except a diehard few loved ones and professionals. Associates and casual friends will not understand your behavior and will not really want to hear about your problems. It’s on you to save yourself. No one’s going to do it for you.

4.     Know that all things are transient and so is the way you’re feeling. Things DO get BETTER. Accept the cycles for what they are. Cycles. You wont always feel like this.

5.     Stop drinking alcohol or other such things, if you find they’re exacerbating the problems (as they very likely are).

6.     Get out of your house. DO NOT just sit at home. Even if you only go out for an hour walk around the neighborhood or to a coffee shop, it will help.

7.     Go to the gym. Trust me on this. Even if it's only an hour workout or a forty-five-minute swim. Exercise. It’s hard to start and get out of the rut, but once you’re there in the gym, you’ve already made a huge improvement.

8.     Cut negative people and negative things out of your life, if you find they only make you feel worse. Some people thrive on any kind of negativity. Get them the hell away from you.

9.     Learn to identify self-sabotaging/destructive/delusional behaviors, realize what you’re doing and take some time before acting out on those behaviors.

10.  Know that you’re not alone and nearly everyone at some point in their lives deals with some kind of mental illness. You’re not weak. You’re not malfunctioning. You just have an illness, you’re not defined by an illness.

11.  List 5 things you can be grateful for EVERYDAY. Force yourself to do that. Even if it's only basics to start with.

12.  Write. Even if it's only a sentence or two a day, it's something.

13.  Plan something in your future you can look forward to, be it a short trip or something else.

14.  Choose a new hobby that gets you out of the house and try and do it at least once a month.

15.  Study your illness so you can identify parts of it as they’re happening and thus be partly in control of them.

These are 15 things that have helped me. Please take what you like and throw away the rest. No one person is the same, but I really hope if you’re ever struggling, at least one of these can help you.

Anyway, love to all.

Steve

Known for their full-body tattoos, an adherence to the Bushido way of life, and with a startling 25,900 members active in Japan, the Yakuza is one of the largest organized crime groups in the world today. Unlike the American mafia, the Yakuza often operate openly in Japanese society with crime families having their own signed headquarters in cities across Japan. With some soldiers or Kyodai, as they are known, even going so far as to have their own business cards.

However, the 1997 assassination of yakuza underboss Masaru Takumi and a case of mistaken identity that left an innocent bystander dead would trigger the start of a dramatic decline of the crime group’s power in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Let’s take a quick look at how a very public slaying of a Yakuza Underboss and a case of mistaken identity turned the Japanese public against the Yakuza and caused massive legal crackdowns on the organized crime group.

The third largest city in Japan, Osaka is famous for its castle, Universal Studios, baked octopus balls (takoyaki) and its buzzing nightlife. It is, however, also the home of the most powerful and dangerous Yakuza family in Japan — the Yamaguchi Gumi.

Very much similar to the American Mafia’s structure, the Japanese Yakuza have a large number of associated crime families spread out across Japan following similar hierarchies and structures. The largest of these families is the Yamaguchi Gumi, or the Yamaguchi Group. Headed by the Godfather or Oyabun, each family also has three underbosses. The Saiko-Komon, Administarator, the Wakagashira, First Lieutenant and the Sateigashira, Second Lieutenant.

            In 1997, the Wakagashira, First Lieutenant of the Yamaguchi Gumi was 61-year-old Masaru Takumi, known at the time of his rise to power as the “man who never sleeps.” Picked as a likely successor to then Godfather Yoshinori Watanabe, Takumi was a widely respected and feared boss in his own right, heading a sub-group of the Yamaguchi Gumi with a membership of over 1000 soldiers named the Takumi Gumi.

In the humid summer of 1997, a violent breakaway faction of the Yamaguchi Gumi, the Nakano-Kai, had declared war on the Yamaguchi gumi and all of its affiliates due to a bitter inner-family dispute. By mid-August of that year, three soldiers had been gunned down, including the boss of a Nakano-Kai affiliated group, Dojin-Kai.

            At around 3:20 in the afternoon of August 29th, Masaru Takumi was sat at a table with two other men, one of which was another powerful underboss Saizo Kishimoto, eating lunch in the bustling fourth floor coffee shop of the stylish New Kobe Oriental hotel when four members of the Nakano-Kai burst in and opened fire on the table.

            Takumi raised his left hand in defense and attempted to stand up but was hit a total of seven times including in the neck and head. Luckily, the two other men seated with Takumi escaped unharmed. However, unfortunately, the assailants mistook a 69-year-old dentist sat near Takumi’s table as a bodyguard and shot him. He later died in the hospital, as did Takumi.

The four assassins, two of which were later named in the press as ringleader Harutoshi Zaitsu and Kiyoteru Toriyabara,fled the scene in a white passenger car with number plates registered to an Osaka company affiliated with the Yamaguchi Gumi.

After the very public gangland hit in one of Kobe’s largest luxury hotels and the murder of innocent dentist Hiroshi Hirai there was a massive police crackdown on the yakuza with over 3200 police officers in Osaka and surrounding areas being put on high alert and with mounting pressure from an outraged public the Japanese government instituted policies which would restrict the gang's power, influence and reach.

As for the shooters: two of the assailants were arrested soon after the murders, but Toriyama and Zaitsu escaped to Tokyo where they lived under the radar for years.

In 2006, Toriyabara’s body was found stuffed in a suitcase and dumped in a Kobe warehouse and in March of 2014, after 16 years on the run, the lead shooter in the hit, Zaitsu was finally arrested and sentenced to life in prison. The disheveled and exhausted looking gangster telling police detectives at the time of his arrest, “the last three years have been very tough. Honestly, I feel a sense of relief in being arrested.”

He later told the court he didn’t want to kill Takumi, but said it was impossible to disobey the orders of his boss, stating “A gang order is absolute. There is no choice but to carry it out.”

And the Nakano Kai boss who gave Zaitsu the order to kill Takumi? What happened to him?

Mysteriously he was found dead in an apartment in Seoul, South Korea in July of 1998. Police believe he was poisoned.

Sources

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yakuza_syndicates

https://www.tokyoreporter.com/crime/yakuza/arrest-for-kobe-murder-ends-a-yakuzas-16-years-on-the-run/

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/1997/08/29/national/kansai-police-braced-for-gang-war/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dojin-kai

https://www.tokyoreporter.com/crime/yakuza/ex-yamaguchi-gumi-boss-saizo-kishimoto-dies/

They’re not comics! They’re graphic novels!

Being a fan of great art and great writing it’s probably natural that I have just as many graphic novels on my bookshelves as I do literary novels.

I remember going to the public library on Saturday mornings as a kid and borrowing as many as my card would allow.

I never caught any flack at home for reading “comics” either, because my father was the person who introduced me to the form.

A veteran infantry soldier, he wasn’t big into literary novels and the like, but he was always reading pulps and war comics which he would toss at me when he’d finished.

Graphic Novels are one of my loves and I have found them hugely influential in my writing. Today I wanted to share my favorites.

Some will probably be obvious to anyone with the most superficial knowledge of GN, but I hope there will be a few surprises in here too.

If you like great art and great writing go and check them out today!

20: BUTTON MAN: GET HARRY EX

This was originally a strip from 2000 AD. The British version of DC comics. Known for Judge Dredd and some other greats.

Harry is an ex-mercenary who joins a competition of kill or be killed funded by wealthy elite types. Think Hard Target but better.

19: LIKE A VELVET GLOVE CAST IN IRON

A snuff movie, evil cops, cults, nymphomaniacs and a dog with no orifices. It’s Clowes so you know what to expect, this is one of his weirder, darker ones though.

18: HAPPY

A drunken ex-cop working as a hit man makes an imaginary friend.

Loved this and the series on Netflix is pretty damn great too.

17: SLEEPER

A mix of superheroes and grimy noir characters. Think — the movie The Departed mixed with The DC universe.

16: SIN CITY – THAT YELLOW BASTARD

Miller reinvented comics. Hartigan a cop with a bad heart tries to save a girl from an evil child killer. A perfect crime story in my opinion.

15: HELLBOY

I love HELLBOY for the deep mythological storytelling and, of course, Mignola’s art work. I was gutted when it had to come to an end.

14: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS

Another Frank Miller masterpiece. A much older and broken down Batman must don the cape one last time. Masterful storytelling.

13: BATMAN AND SON

For me, Grant Morrison is THE Batman writer. He weaves a rich tapestry of Batman lore and history into his modern narrative so you notice something new on every read. It’s deep as hell is what I’m saying. This is easily the best Batman run. Easily.

12: THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN

Alan Moore is an absolute genius. Literary characters from yesteryear are brought together like The Dirty Dozen to save the world. This isn’t a light read. It may look like it, but it isn’t. I spent just as much time on Wikipedia researching throw away sentences than I did the actual volumes.

11: WATCHMAN

This graphic novel was so groundbreaking because it raised comics to a whole new level of thinking. A deeper, darker and more philosophical take on graphic narratives.

10: RICHARD STARK’S PARKER

I love Darwyn Cooke’s artwork. It’s truly a thing of beauty and pairs perfectly with Stark’s dark writing.

9: THE KILLING JOKE

If Morrison wrote the best Batman series, Moore easily wrote the best Batman story.

8: FABLES

Fables by Bill Willingham and cover art by Jesse James is truly awesome.

Willingham threw together all of the fairytale characters from across the globe and gave them modern personalities, flaws and addictions. Then threw in some crime. And then a huge Lord of the Rings style war with a surprise evil overlord. Highly recommended series that took me all the way through the 2000’s.

7: STRAY BULLETS

Lapham is a genius when it comes to writing short interconnected stories across a spectrum of characters and crimes. Think Pulp Fiction but, dare I say it, better. The art work here is perfect pulp art.

6: Maus

Maus by Spiegelman is a heartbreaking story told beautifully. Probably as important today as it’s ever been. The fact some places tried to ban it recently is absolute madness. This should be a part of all school curriculums.

5: V FOR VENDETTA

1984 meets Batman. The scariest thing about this graphic novel is I sometimes think we are heading into the future depicted within its pages.

4: THE PUSH MAN AND OTHER STORIES

I was surprised when I first came to japan because no one here knows the legendary Tatsumi. He is massive in Europe and Canada but lives a quiet, reclusive life in Tokyo pretty much unknown.

Tatsumi’s stories are Bukowski-esque. But it’s the art work that really punches the most. The back alleys of Tokyo drawn in dark, thick lines and shades. Beautiful.

Warning: some of the stories are quite fucked up and even I had to skip one or two in his later story collections. So, if you love fucked up, dive in!

3: FROM HELL

Alan Moore is a genius, I repeat, Alan Moore is a genius.

This isn’t a graphic novel. It’s an illustrated case study of The Ripper Slayings in Victorian London. An absolute tome of a book, thicker than a phone directory.

2: CRIMINAL

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are the perfect pairing. Perfect writing. Perfect art. These stories within the Criminal universe shit all over most modern crime novels and movies. If you haven’t read this series yet, you’re not a fan of graphic novels or crime fiction, I guess.

1: FATALE

Brubaker and Phillips again.

Pulp crime, hard-boiled detective, old-Hollywood, horror, gangsters, cults, Lovecraftian monsters, love, murder, multiple timelines, sex.

Yeah, Fatale pretty much has it all, and it does it all very well indeed.

I loved Phillips’ artwork from Fatale so much that I have had a couple of his front covers tattooed on my body.

Highly recommended to all.

Honorable Mentions:

Batman vs Predator

Yes, yes it is as awesome as it sounds.

Batman: Dracula

Batman vs Dracula? Hell yes!

Predator vs Judge Dredd vs Aliens

So there you have it, folks. My top 20 graphic novels written on my lunch break.

This is an opinion piece long in the making.

It’s been at the back of mind for a while and has pushed and elbowed its way to the front of the line like an angry drunk in the kebab shop on a Friday night.

It may trigger a few folks, but only the ones I’m talking about.

It’s more of a question really. Where have all the real writers gone?

Perhaps I have been laboring under the wrong assumptions, but I always believed writers were brave, honest innovators, anti-establishment, constantly pushing the written word towards a place of beautiful/ugly truth. I believed real writers created trends and didn’t just follow them.

I believed writers stood by their convictions and weren’t easily swayed by the opinions of the masses.

That last one is the real kicker. Since joining twitter, a little over three years ago, I have disappointingly learned how fickle and easily swayed the majority of writers are. I’m sure you’ve experienced this kind of shit yourself. Loyalties and relationships are less fickle in an elementary school playground.

“You shouldn’t like that person.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t. And if you like that person, I’ll dislike you.”

That shit’s embarrassing to even think about, let alone write. But it happens A LOT on Twitter. If your opinion is swayed by the opinion of others, you’ve got to be pretty weak sauce IMO.

(For me, I judge people by their actions and by their words, you’re a good person until you show me you aren’t. It takes me a while to weed out negative people naturally. But when I do, they’re gone. Usually, I can tell by the negative, attention seeking shite they tweet though.)

We’ve also seen this kind of fickle trend with countless small press publications. One mag/press puts out an interview/story that a few people don’t like and once the retweets come flowing, editors, writers and readers abandon ship like it’s the RMS Titanic. Literally abandoning years of hard work, effort and friendships over the whims of the masses. The masses… If there is any animal uglier and more dangerous than a crowd of sheeple, I don’t know what it is.

Everyone seems so desperate to be liked and accepted nowadays, don’t they? Worried about what they can write and what they can’t. What they can say and what they can’t. Twitter has amplified these desperations and these fears. Don’t believe me? How many times have you drafted or deleted a tweet because you were worried someone may take it the wrong way? I’m guessing more than a few times. Worried about who you follow, who you publish with and who you associate with, God forbid you lose a few followers or God forbid it could hurt your chances of securing an agent or publisher. An agent or publisher, who 80% of the time, are just looking for that book that ticks all the commercial boxes and could sell well on the shelf at the supermarket for a few months before it is forgotten forever.

Most folks following the same old tired formulas. Even making sure they only have three words in their title, because marketing trends say that’s the most popular for any kind of novel. I used to feel a little like that, now I don’t really give a shit, because I’ve realized that everything is so damn fickle, and people have the shortest attention spans nowadays anyway. Those that’ll like you, will like you and to hell with the others. Those that will publish you, will publish you based on your talent alone, to hell with the others. Do you really want to be associated with someone who will unfollow you or dislike you at the drop of a hat anyway. These kinds of folks have little or no conviction, which means they probably have the personality of a wet rag anyway.

The current debacles with twitter are another great example. You’ve got folks saying they hate Elon, they hate twitter, they’re leaving the app, but they’re still tweeting six or seven times a day. Months later! If you can’t follow through on your statements, don’t say anything at all. Whatever happened to “do what you say, say what you do”?  Convictions. Some people seem to tweet shit, just to try and get some kind of interaction. Any interaction. Not realizing how embarrassing that shit is when they’re seen not to follow through.

I’ve given it a lot of thought and can't imagine Camus, Sartre, Carver, Childish, Bukowski, Fante, Kane, Celine, Angelou, Brautigan, Kerouac, Plath, Thompson, Ellison, or any and all other writers that have transcended genres and cultures tweeting some of the stuff others do. Myself included.

Where is the next lost generation or the next beat generation, or the punks?

Are we all lost in this swamp of bland conformity now as we seek momentary acceptance?

Again, maybe I’m wrong and perhaps the majority of writers have always been the same way, just now with twitter it’s easier to see.

There are a lot of real writers and editors out there, struggling daily, putting the beautiful works out there and I see you.

I see you standing there and I raise my glass to you.  

This month (June) over at Punk Noir Magazine, I've been running a conspiracy theory theme. Been getting a lot of great submissions, a lot of great prose and poems, which has been awesome. Thanks to everyone who submitted.

Anyway, it got me thinking about writing something for my Substack. Which hasn’t been updated in months. So here we go. Conspiracies.

Conspiracy theories have long been a fascination of mine. The interesting and the ridiculous. The JFK and RFK assassinations. Diana Princess of Wales. UFOs. The New World Order. The illuminati. Chem Trails. Reptilians. Hollow Earth. Hollow Moon. Etc etc etc. Let’s face it, a lot of them are just entertaining for their sheer craziness. The moon is a alien spaceship? … Though, some of them, if you stare at the picture long enough, like a 1980s Magic Eye painting, you’ll see something.

In the last couple of years a few conspiracy theories have leaked somewhat into my daily life. No longer the fringe theories of some crazy guy wearing a tinfoil hat but things you can see slowly developing like a well played chess game in front of your very eyes on a daily basis. Perhaps these are the scariest conspiracy theories of all. The ones that are coming true all around us. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you probably won’t. The big conspiracy I’m talking about here is people’s seemingly gradual loss of freedoms.

It seems nowadays so many people are giving up their individual rights and their individual freedoms for the sake of convenience…I’m not going to go through a long laundry list of every single theory out there that jives with this, but here’s one simple example I feel pretty strongly about: Electrical Currency.

I don't have any electrical currency; I deal strictly in cash. For me, the idea of having all of your daily purchases going through and being recorded on your phone and controlled by an app is for the birds. When I went back to London, there were a quite few shops and eateries that didn’t even accept cash at all. WTF?

Am I the only person who this scares the shit out of?

It doesn’t matter what side of the politic arena you’re on, this could go badly for everyone and anyone.

Imagine a future where you're not in control of your own money. Not in control of what you can buy. For example — there's something that the government wants to restrict the purchase of, let's say for the sake of argument, gasoline. There's only so much gasoline you can buy a month the government decide. You go up to the cashier at the gas stand, you try and purchase some gas and you can't — you've reached your limit in gasoline purchases that month. The transaction won't go through the app. Looks as though you’ll be walking everywhere that month. This is only a simple example. I don’t even drive. But hopefully you get my point.

Now imagine this kind of restriction for anything and everything. Flights. Steaks. Eggs. Bread. Water. Books. Once you give up controlling your own money for the sake of convenience you've given away one of your most important freedoms. And forget about making some extra cash on the side. What happens if you oppose the government somehow or just simply jaywalk a few times? Your currency app could be switched off. Behave and shut your mouth or we’ll just switch you off. Sounds extreme, I know, but these kinds of things are already happening.

Within a few years you’ll probably have to use your phone just to gain entry into stores and supermarkets. You’ll be tracked every waking second. What about all the old folks or just people who can’t or don’t want to use a phone for everything?

It’s a scary future. Hell, its not even the future. It’s already started.

And that’s just electrical currency as one example.

I haven’t even touched on the restrictions of speech that are slowly evolving. The new laws that have been pushed through silently in congress and other governing bodies to limit your right to protest.

Other conspiracies are coming true right now. The obesity epidemics across the developed world. The chemicals in foods. Big Pharma. The massive drops in male and female fertility in the last forty years. A.I. The surveillance states. This all-encompassing addiction people have to their cellphones. Ride any subway and everyone’s transfixed by the screens. Restaurants too. It’s depressing and like being surrounded by semi-functioning crack heads on a daily basis.

Are people less genuine these days too? More selfish? More immature? More quick too temper? More likely to shout down any narrative that doesn’t suit what they’ve had shoved into their heads by the mainstream media outlet of their choice?

This isn’t a political problem, as I believe the people have been failed by everyone they’ve voted for. Left or right. It seems that politicians aren’t here to make things better, but to make themselves richer whilst they facilitate the decline of modern society. I’m not asking you to agree with me but to just open your eyes a little and have a look around for yourself.

Ask yourself, are things really, honestly getting better for everyone or just the 1%?

I’d argue the case, people are, seemingly, the most unhappy they’ve ever been. Mental illnesses are at an all-time high. As are suicides.

People are the unhealthiest they’ve ever been. Don’t believe me? Just check out any kind of health statistics in the Western World. The governments say they care about our health, but they haven’t really done anything at all to curb unhealthy eating. Why? It seems an easy fix.

People are the most divided they’ve ever been and both sides are just as rabid and hateful as the side they say they oppose.

It’s a bleak future and one with little freedom or love…

It’s the zombie apocalypse, the invasion of the body snatchers and 1984 all rolled into one.

I, for one, am standing apart, observing the sad demise whilst trying my best to keep my loved ones close and continue to be as contrarian as I can. It’s too late to do anything else. Recently I’ve decided to limit my cellphone usage, hence why my Sub stack and Twitter are a lot quieter these days.

Bear with me, folks.

Hope everyone is well.

Thank you for reading this confused and jumbled rant about modern society.

COMING SOON From OUTCAST PRESS

In Shadows Slow Dancing in Derelict Rooms Stephen Golds rachets up the tension and explores the darkness with an immaculately paced novel seemingly always teetering on the edge. A literary page-turner pulling tricks from classic noir and erotic thrillers to dissect the inner lives of these terrifically cast characters. Stephen is always in full control of this immersive experience, and readers will delight in the nightmarish trance of his creation.

-- Derek Maine, Author of "Characters"

"Raw and smarting as a flesh wound, Shadows Slow Dancing in Derelict Rooms simmers with a melancholic ecstasy that lingers long after the last of its mournful pages have been turned."

- Chandler Morrison, author of #thighgap and Dead

“Stephen J. Golds hits all the right steps and delivers a devastatingly beautiful love story. Raw, intimate, poetic, and haunting, Shadows Slow Dancing in Derelict Rooms will show you the darkest parts of the heart and bring light to every surface. This is one dance you don't want to miss."

• Grant Wamack, author of Black Gypsies.

Stephen J. Golds was born in North London, U.K, but has lived in Japan for most of his adult life.

He writes in the noir/crime genres, though is heavily influenced by transgressive fiction and dirty realism.

His three novels are a trilogy of connected but stand alone novels that deal in themes of mental illness, trauma, betrayal and twisted love.

He enjoys spending time with his daughters, reading books, traveling the world, boxing and listening to old Soul LPs. His books are Say Goodbye When I’m Gone, I’ll Pray When I’m Dying, Always the Dead, the poetry collections Poems for Ghosts in Empty Tenement Windows I Thought I Saw Once, Half-Empty Doorways and Other Injuries and the short story and poetry collection Love Like Bleeding Out With an Empty Gun in Your Hand.

Nah, it's not a line from one of my poems, though if you’ve read any of my work, it’s an easy mistake to make.

When I say I saw a ghost of a beautiful woman, I’m not talking in the romantic, poetic sense — the memory of a woman I loved, who hates me now. Neither am I riffing on the Japanese Marilyn Monroe who was bloody karma personified.

No, I’m literally talking about a real ghost. The Halloween or Hollywood kind.

But before I go on, let me state — I do not believe in the spirits of the dead strolling about and watching us while we screw or shower…

When I first came to Japan, one of my hobbies was photography. It still is. In every country I’ve been/go to, I take photographs of the sunrise/sunset in key locations.

My first year in Japan I traveled extensively around the country, staying in cheap motels, getting up very early and going out to hit the sights before they became too crowded, snapping photographs of the rising sun.

Kyoto, Mount Fuji, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Osaka, Hiroshima… well, basically everywhere.

16 years and I’ve only got a few cities left to visit.

If you’re into photography, I honestly believe Japan is one of the best countries in the world to live in, visit.

Anyway, Ise a picturesque coastal city in Mie is famous for its large shrine and there’s a nice little street leading up to a bridge and a huge torii (gate) outside the shrine. (See below)

One early morning, I was on this same street, smoking a cigarette, looking towards the gate and waiting for the sun to rise fully to hit that sweet spot over the gate for the photographs.

The street was completely empty. Quiet. It was just me and some pigeons. I waited. I smoked. The sun hit that spot perfectly. I stubbed out my cigarette on the curb and dropped the butt down into the gutter to prepare to get my camera out of my backpack. When I looked up again, a woman was standing underneath the torii (gate). She was wearing a bright red kimono, her back to me. Jet black hair tied up. She was beautiful. She was swaying slightly and seemed to be waiting for someone.

“Oh, hell, this is a bloody perfect shot. A beautiful girl in a kimono, on a bridge, underneath the gate to the temple with the sun rising next to her casting everything in a golden orange,” I thought.

As though hearing my thoughts the woman turned slightly and cast a long glance behind her. Her complexion was a healthy olive. Eyes very dark. Lips very red. Face expressionless.

She looked right through me as though I wasn’t there. A little rude, I thought, but I wanted this photograph bad.

I slung my backpack off my shoulder, down to the ground, yanked out my Nikon and when I looked through the viewfinder, the woman was no longer there. I took the camera away from my face and she still wasn’t there. I glanced around. She hadn’t walked over the bridge. The temple was closed. There was no way in. Nowhere for her to go. There was no way she had walked back passed me. No way. I looked up and down the street. I walked over to where she’d been standing to see if she’d climbed over the bridge and jumped into the lake beneath. Nope. No ripples. No sounds. NOTHING. Nothing but birdsong and the soft hum of traffic on a freeway far off. The girl was gone. I didn’t feel weird. The only thing I felt stood there was a strong sense of sadness. I didn’t know why. I went back to where I had been smoking, sat down on the curb and lit another cigarette. I remember a light rain started out of nowhere.

After a little while, I went back to the motel and packed up my things to check out. I never took any photographs that day.

It was a ghost I’d seen and yet I don’t believe in ghosts.

So what the hell was it?

The Theory:

I believe ghosts are echoes in time. When you see a ghost, what you’re really seeing is something or someone from some point in the past. Perhaps, some kind of emotional image that has been captured within certain inanimate objects. A time slip. That‘s why ghosts are always reported as walking through walls. They’re not walking through walls. They’re walking through doorways that aren’t there anymore. Maybe one day, in fifty years, someone will see me writing this Substack post when this building I am currently in is abandoned and derelict and I’m long dead. They’ll think I’m a ghost, but it’ll just be a moment snagged in time like a raindrop on a spiderweb.

That’s why the woman looked right through me. She wasn’t seeing me. I wasn’t there in the time period she was glancing around in. Or perhaps I was her ghost. Or perhaps this is all just a simulation of a simulation of a simulation we’re all living in. Or perhaps I was still drunk from the night before…

Who knows?

And that’s my opinion on ghosts. What’s yours?

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