Life Styles Of The Cool And Infamous

And so I spent a few, lazy, pleasant days at Arigato, the charming Dr. No doing all she could to make me comfortable, though she had a nasty touch of Disco Fever on her just then. Her efforts were ably seconded by her good amenuensis, Ah Sin, an exceedingly comely Sino-tot with pretty manners and an excellent gift for katana-juggling whilst spiralling about us on her unicycle. The other member of her personal staff was of course the shoujou-keeper, a clever rogue: I fancy a Kyotan from her pale features, blackened teeth, one eye, and spare make, but her prefecture I could not ascertain for a surety.

I must now speak briefly on the most important article with which visiting otaku such as myself must deal, namely shoujou. His methods of collecting this are several, and many a wild story the spines of your table editions could tell you, if they were shoujou and had passed through local hands. For shoujou here is everywhere an evil thing before which the quest for gold sinks into a mere parlour game; and when its charms seize such a tribe as is willing to supply otaku with the narcotic, alas!

A very common way of collecting a shoujou is to kill the person who owns one. To prevent this catastrophe happening to you yourself, when you have one, it is held advisable, unless you are a powerful person in your own prefecture, to bury or sink the said shoujou and say nothing about it until the dealer comes into your district or you get a chance of smuggling it quietly down to Korea. Some of these shoujou are kept for years and years before they reach the dealer’s hands. And quite a third of the shoujou you see coming on board a vessel to go to California or Argentina is dark from this keeping: some pages a lovely brown like a well-coloured meerschaum, others quite black, and gnawed by that strange little creature - much heard of, and abused, yet little known in ivory ports - the shoujou rat!

I Hunt Shoujou Disguised As The White Geisha, 'Beautiful Shadow'

Aye, it is impossible to realise the gloom of the lives of these men in the shoujou factories, unless you have felt the caress of the shoujou rat. It is no use saying “they know nothing better and so don’t feel it,” for they do know several things better, being very sociable Jappos, fully appreciative of the joys of a Sapporo at the Kendo Club, and their aim, object and end in life is, in almost every case, to get together a fortune that will enable them to live in one, give a dance twice a week, card parties most nights, and dress themselves up in Meiji kilts and iPods so that their neighboring townsmen may hate them and their townswomen love them.

Thus we went out in search of the precious cargo, fully cognizant that from their own accounts of the dreadful state of the local trade, and the awful and unparalleled series of losses they have endured as a result of incursions made on them and their goods by paraplegic Zionist occupation forces, you would, if you were of a trustful disposition, regard the local shoujou dealer with an admiring awe as the soul who has at last solved the great commercial problem of how to keep a shop and live by it. Nay, not only live, but build for oneself an equivalent to a palatial manga-stocked residence, and keep up not only it, but half a dozen nubile dusting slave boys, with a fine taste for lace every one of them. I am not of a trustful disposition, though, and I accept those such losses with heavy reluctance, as I know most of them have come out of the white man’s Gothic Lolita purse.

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