The Amorous Adventures of Ashida Kim

If I understand it correctly — and, given the somewhat impenetrable, turgid prose in which this booklet opens, there is no guarantee that I do — The Amorous Adventures of Ashida Kim begins with a meeting between the tale’s eponymous protagonist and several unnamed, robed figures, whom we are to infer are members of the Black Dragon Fighting Society (BDFS).  The BDFS, if you do not know, is the brotherhood of ninja — spies and martial arts masters descended from the tengu (trickster mountain demons) of feudal Japan — among whose august community the man calling himself Ashida Kim asserts membership.

I ordered this booklet, as well as a copy of Mr. Kim’s Mugei Mumei No Jitsu, directly from Dojo Press many years ago, mostly because the latter came with a free black belt certificate and I thought that was, well, pretty cool.  I could not say, in this modern era of print-on-demand, self-published books, whether the level of technology from Dojo Press has increased with the passage of time, but my copy of The Amorous Adventures of Ashida Kim is simply a pile of photocopied paper stapled together more or less along the fold.  The cover is of nice, heavy card stock, and the picture of a presumably naked Ashida Kim in the almost-embrace of a woman who is either shocked, pleasantly surprised, or nauseously dismayed is… God help us all… in full color.

“The Amorous Adventures of Ashida Kim,” reads the advertising copy on the Dojo Press website, “is the chronicle of his fifth trip to Africa in the service of Yudansha International as an intelligence operative. His ‘cover story’ at that time was being a ‘bouncer in a brothel.’ These are the tales of the ladies he met and helped during that turbulent period, that provide a glimpse into how the ‘real’ world works…  …As a first person narrative, it also provides a certain degree of insight into the mind of martial arts master and soldier of fortune- [sic] Ashida Kim.”

Again, if I interpret the opening of the “book” correctly, Kim (whose real name is widely believed online to be Radford W. Davis, not that this really matters) is relating to us, the wide-eyed and horrified readers, a story revolving around his deep and abiding outrage that a member of the BDFS who claimed to be running a Karate dojo was, in fact, running a whorehouse.  When he demands to be permitted to put a stop to this outrage, the robed BDFS masters, applying an odd sort of laissez-faire attitude to the immoral and illegal conduct of one of their secret society’s members, refuse permission to Mr. Kim.

Mr. Kim insists, so he is assigned by the Robotech Masters — excuse me, the BDFS masters — to work in a South African whorehouse as some sort of bodyguard, troubleshooter, and all-around action hero.  The logic seems to be that Mr. Kim must first prove himself  through ritual whorehouse combat at a different location and, if he returns from this dangerous mission, he will be presumed sufficiently righteous to deal with the first (second?) whorehouse as he deems appropriate.  The BDFS masters pause long enough to paraphrase Spock’s last words in Star Trek II, and then we’re off on the grand, stomach-churning, clearly fictional adventure that is The Amorous Adventures of Ashida Kim.

Mr. Kim meets, drinks tea, and generally pals around with the crew of malefactors, characters, petty criminals, personalities,  ne’er-do-wells, and hookers-with-hearts-of-gold who populate this particular South African brothel, where (unlike other brothels) the booze is all free and the girls are all volunteers who either love their work or just need a good talking-to from Ashida Kim to get their lives in order.  The setting is an exotic one; we are meant, of course, to be impressed by just how fascinating, endearing, potentially dangerous, and otherwise very, very impressive this novel’s other characters find Mr. Kim.  It actually reminds one of just how immediately enamored of the novel’s protagonist are the various teenagers in the novel Twilight, which has been roundly panned for its juvenile prose and infantile plotting.

Along the way we see the usual indicators that this booklet is completely made up.  There is a reference to the passing around of a “.45 Caliber Desert Eagle,” a gun that does not exist. Supporters of Ashida Kim have since tried to parse this by claiming the Baby Eagle in .45 ACP is the same thing, but it most certainly isn’t. The .45 Baby Eagle or “Jericho” has never been known as the “Desert Eagle” and is not a variant of that larger, gas-operated design.  This error, however, doesn’t begin to matter compared to the many other implausible claims in the booklet.

There is Kim telling his interrogators at the brothel that his real name is “Teruo,” or “Terry,” when of course it isn’t.  There is “Dave,” proprietor of a teapot shop at the local bazaar — excuse me, shopping mall — who is Chinese and who says to Kim’s associate, on laying eyeballs on Ashida Kim, “‘Your friend have very bad temper.'”  This last is only what one would expect, as anyone encountering Ashida Kim would of course be impressed by the mighty physical powers he somehow manages to keep just barely under control.  An Asian person of any nationality would, of course, be that much more quick to assess Mr. Kim’s martial virility and volatility, at least according to Mr. Kim.

Throughout the book, the reader is slapped in the face repeatedly with the dead herring that is Mr. Kim’s ponderous, incoherent, and pretentious writing style.  On the very first page of the book, we are treated to this improbable sentence:

Since I had eaten on the plane, a peculiar meat patty, shaped like chicken but tasting like fish owing to the fish meal fed to South African chickens, but tasty, we went straight on to work.

I did not make that up.  I did not alter the punctuation or sentence structure in any way.  The whole book reads like that.  It goes on, and on, and on, at what seems like great length for a relatively short “book.”  Ashida Kim drones on endlessly about the barely described, poorly characterized legion of nearly faceless names that populate his telling of this sordid tale.

In all seriousness, what you’re supposed to take away from this is that Ashida Kim is a badass.  He’s not just a badass; he is very wise, incredibly ingratiating, endlessly charming, and, of course, in the words of Jesse Ventura in Predator, a sexual tyrannosaurus.

Oh, and have sex he does, describing it not only in eyeball-hemorrhaging detail, but also with such supposed-to-be-flowing, alleged-to-be poetic elaboration that, if you’re not throwing up into the nearest waste basket by the time you get halfway through this literary abomination, you must subsist entirely on a diet of gas station hot dogs and vending machine sandwiches.  Ladies and gentlemen, send all the small children out of the room — for I am about to impart to you a brief quote from the book:

Pulling me over on top of her, she guided my erect member to her sacred chamber.

I didn’t let her take complete command, instead letting the ‘ambassador present his credentials’ according to the dual cultivation of energy, entering only slightly and massaging the lips of her [er, you know] with the tip of my instrument to stimulate lubrication.

…When I did enter her she was quite pleased and began in earnest to encourage me to orgasm.  But, having trained in these methods, I was able to extend the normal interval and help her to have a good time instead…

After this touching display, Kim tells his partner of his broken heart, relating the sad story of a young girl he met at a seminar in Maine who, for complicated and really boring reasons, eventually committed suicide, forcing Kim to watch, like Axl Rose in the video for November Rain, as his beloved’s body was lowered into the cold, frozen ground.  I’m not going to lie; I started to tear up a little, and might even have sobbed.  This was mostly because I was still only on page 44 of a 108 page booklet.

There’s a lot more hideously, awkwardly described sex-with-Ashida-Kim involved in this book.  The Food and Drug Administration has determined that the acceptable level of Ashida Kim-related sexual content is, well, zero, and I’m going to have to agree.  Frankly, the image of a randy Ashida Kim on the cover of the book is burned into my brain with as much throbbing discomfort as is the image of a naked, corpulent Jake Busey in the direct-to-video sequel to Road House.

I’m again not going to lie to you:  There is a lot of naked Jake Busey in Road House 2, more than any decent human being should abide.  But I would still rather sit through this movie time and again than even once more read through more of this from Ashida Kim’s libidinous keyboard:

I heard an old Paul Simon song ringing in my ears about ‘seek the breast of darkness and be suckled by the night’ and wasn’t quite sure if it was playing somewhere or if I imagined it, so surreal was the setting.

I slid my hands beneath her buttocks and lifted her off the floor, turning to place her back to the wall. She hooked her legs around my waist and raised her hips to accept my [well, you know]. In a moment we were wrapped in the throws of passion, driving, thrusting deeper and harder than before, reaping the complete joy of our union…

…We hammered away for a few more minutes, breathing and struggling together before I sensed the flood of her womb advancing. I let myself rise to the occasion and filled her Heavenly Chamber with my seed as she exploded in orgasm.

Eventually, blessedly, but none too quickly, The Amorous Adventures of Ashida Kim finally draws to a close. Before we’re done, there is some sitting in a horse stance dodging bullets, some intoning of dire words such as “The weed of crime bears bitter fruit,” some dislocating of skulls, some severing of spinal cords, and some leaving of broken corpses with their pants unzipped.  No, really, there is.  At last, though, the booklet is over, and we are left with only the raging desire to stare into the nearest light fixture until we can no longer visualize the cover.

Back in the United States, appearing once more before the robed masters of the Black Dragon Fighting Society, Ashida Kim has apparently determined that his experience in South Africa has not altered his desire to bring Sweet Ninja Justice to the fellow with the Karate whorehouse who I guess also caused his November Rain video-appearing girlfriend to kill herself, or something.

The last page of the book reads like a really long fortune cookie, and then Ashida Kim states that “90% of what is written here actually occurred.  Only those events which are prosecutable may be considered embellishments for the sake of drama.”  So, wink wink, nudge nudge, this booklet contains a true story, unless you think maybe Ashida Kim broke the law, in which case, that part isn’t true.  But the rest is all true, and believe me when I say, what’s truly important for you to take away from this experience is that Ashida Kim is really, really cool.  He’s also really, really dangerous.  And he’s really, really good in bed — I mean, like, Sting-and-Trudy-tantric-sex good in bed.  And he’s really sensitive and smart.  And he’s only the coolest ninja porno-star adventure hero Indiana Jones world traveling professorial mastermind of all things legendary and wise that has ever lived.

Excuse me now, for I feel another bout of projectile vomiting coming on, and it’s better if I get out onto the front porch and do it on the walkway than try to get to the bathroom.