Robert Twigger - Big Snake the Hunt for the Worlds Larges

Praise for Angry White Pyjamas

A book of unexpected brilliance. It is subtle, funny, stimulating and original a rites-of-passage story, an exploration of an alien culture, and an inspiring work of philosophy

Patrick French

Brilliant... everyone should read it

Tony Parsons, Late Review

This is a splendidly written adventure, something sane at last on the craziness of the martial arts

Independent on Sunday

Communicates the existential purity of his elective regime with irrepressible passion... it also has the umistakable stamp of authentic experience

Daily Telegraph

A rattling good yarn and very funny into the bargain

Tim Hulse, Independent on Sunday

Poetry in motion

Sue Townsend, Sunday Times

Wonderfully oddball... Here is a cult book all right, which could do for Japan and the martial arts what Hornby did for Highbury and the football terraces

Frank Keating, Guardian

His explanation of how to come to terms with intense pain should be read to every footballer who has writhed about in agony after a kick on the shin... It is a clever, enthralling book

Ian Wooldridge, Daily Mail

Twigger vividly captures the wince-inducing physical and emotional trials endured by those who would wear the black belt. But he also offers a rare insight in aikidos peculiarly Darwinian group dynamic and how it fits into modern Japanese society. After this marvellously insightful account I will snigger no more at Steven Seagals po-faced chop-sockey

Ben Farrington, Literary Review

Robert Twigger won the Newdigate prize for poetry whilst studying Philosophy and Politics at Oxford University. His first book, Angry White Pyjamas , the result of a year spent training with the Tokyo Riot Police, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award; he is also the author of Big Snake, The Extinction Club, Being a Man, Voyageur and Real Men Eat Pufferfish . Robert Twigger lives in New Cairo.

By Robert Twigger

Real Men Eat Pufferfish
Lost Oasis
Voyageur
Being a Man
The Extinction Club
Big Snake
Angry White Pyjamas

Robert Twigger

A WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON EBOOK

First published in Great Britain in 1997 as an Indigo paperback original
This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

Copyright Robert Twigger 1997

The moral right of Robert Twigger to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted
in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise
circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar
condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

eISBN: 978 0 2978 6389 2

This ebook produced by Jouve, France

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martins Lane
London WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

www.orionbooks.co.uk

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier

Dr Johnson

for Ikusan

In general ours is a civilization in which the very word poetry evokes a hostile snigger.

George Orwell

It is better to have some unhappiness when one is still young, for if a person does not experience some bitterness he will not settle down.

From the seventeenth-century Samurai manual Hagakure

I was walking to work when I noticed a shiny ball bearing in the gutter. It was a pachinko ball, used in a kind of Japanese slot machine as a prize. At the end of a pachinko session you cash in the steel balls, which can number thousands for a jackpot, for prizes of either household goods or money. Usually the balls stay in the pachinko parlours, so I was surprised to see another, and a little way off another, and then another. Following this treasure trail, I picked them up, dusted them off, smiling to myself in the warm sunshine. The sun glinted off the steel and I chinked them together like a small boy picking up pebbles on a beach.

The trail led up to the main road, which I needed to cross to reach the train station. I was bending down to pick up yet another ball when I heard the screech of tyres skidding and saw timber spill on to the road from the back of a small truck. A red Mazda sports car faced the truck as other cars went into the opposite lane to avoid the incident. I wasnt sure what had happened but I stopped to watch, clinking the pachinko balls together in my hand.

The truck driver was a young man with a punch perm hairstyle, the style preferred by Japanese men with thuggish tendencies, taking its inspiration from the hairdos of the yakuza, organized crime, mainly involved in gambling rackets. He picked up a piece of fallen timber from the back of his truck and swooped on the driver of the sports car. In guttural, macho Japanese he yelled: Whatre you doing? Who do you think you are?, interspersed with repeated threats of, Im gonna kill you!

The car driver, I could see, was very frightened. He was also a young man and wore a suit. The truck driver banged his 24 piece of wood down on the car windscreen, making as if to smash the glass. The driver shielded his face in automatic anticipation. This show of fear made things worse. The enraged truck driver banged the glass a few more times and the Mazda driver repeatedly apologized: Sumimasen. Gomen nasai. Gomen. Gomen nasai. Then the truck driver reached in and grabbed the man in the Mazda by his tie. This is it, I thought, violence time. I ought to intervene but how? There seemed no pause, no thoughtful gap, allowing me to interject a worthy comment, a restraining arm. I was frozen, immobile, fearful.

Bunching the tie into his fist and hauling on this makeshift rein, the truck man corralled the Mazda man, forcing him to drive to the side of the road. Then the truck man hit the Mazda on the hub caps and the driver, who was still apologizing, got out. He bowed to the truck driver, a 90 degree bow, a total apology. The truck driver ranted some more, bellowing, Buku-rossu (Im gonna kill you), and beat the bumper and hub caps to emphasize his dissatisfaction.

Then it happened. Something so strange and out of place in modern Tokyo I could never have predicted it. As cars winged past on the highway, the truck driver pushed the Mazda man down on to his knees on the grass verge. The besuited salaryman looked pathetic kneeling on the grass in front of the enraged truck driver and his big piece of wood. I thought perhaps he might cry. Instead, the professional executed a full emperor bow, arms outstretched, prostrating himself face-first into the dusty grass. His corporate head rose and fell several times as he spoke in the politest Japanese I had ever heard, literally begging forgiveness from the truck driver.

The apology worked. The truck driver reloaded his truck and the salaryman drove hurriedly off to work. Somehow the childlike innocence of finding the pachinko balls had been lost. I tossed them back into the gutter. Could I have intervened if things had taken a nasty turn? Perhaps I could have lobbed a pachinko ball if things had got really heavy. But I was never much good at throwing. I coolly noted my reactions: fear, curiosity, and a sense of being excluded, on the outside. I had seen certain precise rules of violence at work in a place where I hardly expected to see violence at all.