dare reviewed Angry white pyjamas by Robert Twigger
Aikido for the toxically male
3 stars
Occasionally I get the feeling I might like to do martial arts again. Then I remember everything I disliked about doing martial arts, and stick to my climbing.
Angry White Pyjamas is evertything I disliked about doing martial arts, taken to absurd extremes. The narrator decides to enroll in a SRS XTRM aikido class in Tokyo, while making observations about Japan and the Japanese. The narrator is English. The observations are uncomfortable to read, the class is worse.
The whole book is a treatise on how people turn themselves into tools for the powerful in search of machismo. I have no idea if it was intended, but that was how it read to me. It wasn't a bad book in itself, I was never bored, only somewhat repulsed.