shashasha

The book before you contains five of the seventeen essays that make up Life on the Wrong Side of Town: Sports Edition, which orginally appeared as a series in the magazine Mondai Shosetsu ("Problem Novels", published by Tokuma Shoten) in 1975 and was then published as a single volume by Shinyosha in 1982, the year before Terayama passed away. By adding Moriyama-san's photographs to the text we have constructed a new edition.

While putting this project together, I went back to Terayama's words as expressed in many literary forms - haiku, tanka, poetry, ruminations, essays, novels, scripts, theatrical productions and dramas. The enormous volume and quality of his output was overwhelming, but I eventually settled on this work, Life on the Wrong Side of Town: Sports Edition. The reason lay in this passage form the Afterword.

"This book is a kind of rear window view of the life of what we call sportsmen. From the rear window you can see the river. Sometimes you can see people saying goodbye. But however miserable the view is, you have to keep the rear window open."

-Excerpt from Satoshi Machiguchi's afterword The Spell Moves On, published in Daido Moriyama: Terayama (2015)

Shuji Terayama related book
TERAYAMA Shuji, Japanese Dream