The Thousands

Monster Men is Japanese manga gone septic. Sex with foetuses still in their wombs. Nun rape. A mutated sperm who has daddy issues. Takeshi Nemoto’s Monster Men: Bureiko Lullaby, is a squalid cartoon collection, finally translated into English.

The book’s central tale takes in the life of a transvestite sperm who, after being ejaculated to life by a masturbating sailor off the deck of a ship into the nuclear burn of an A-bomb test, embarks on a Henry Miller-esque voyage of discovery. Ridicule, sexual abuse, and giddy schoolboy puppy love all scar our pure-hearted sperm, who flops and slops his way across Nemoto’s filthy pages.

Takeshi Nemoto is justifiably the bad boy of Japanese manga. Originally featured in the underground Garo manga in the mid-1980s, Nemoto’s work is, on the surface, shamefully putrid and offensive, guaranteed to electrocute any jaded manga-phile. Monster Men, Nemoto’s masterpiece, looks like something your fucked-in-the-head 13 y.o. brother would doodle on his maths book, yet tells poetic stories that are all at once satirical, poignant and (and you won’t believe this) freakishly beautiful. I cried.