100 Years of Underpinnings

This week my new novel surfaced on Amazon USA, and will be out shortly via Amazon UK and Amazon Japan.

After the big earthquake and tsunami in the Tōhoku region north of Tokyo last year, I felt like I very much wanted to give something back to Japan, my home for the past 11 years – a place that’s equal parts inspiring and puzzling, a fascinating collusion of kitsch and cool, with a history ten times longer than that of my home town, Melbourne.



One Hundred Years of Vicissitude was originally an idea I toyed with in 2007, and then shelved while I finished off Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat.


Some of the original notes did make it through to the final version, but at least 98 percent was written between September 2011, and April 2012 – and the tone is completely different.

The novel was swayed as much by family (my late grandfather Les, my wife Yoko and my six-year-old daughter Cocoa figured significantly in its composition) as it is by my two ‘home’ towns of Tokyo and Melbourne.

Aside the essential story of identical twin geisha, war, death and saké, other things weighed in on the mix and I’ve decided to outline some of these here – as they deserve all the kudos they can get – so, if you’re curious at all, read on at the website of esteemed noir/crime/mystery reviewer/journalist Elizabeth A. White.

100 Years of Vicissitude (published)

Hey, mates,

Yep, it's now confirmed – my second novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude has just been published and is available as a paperback through new imprint Perfect Edge Books.

The novel is available here via Amazon USA – only $12 @ the moment (a $6 discount) in case anyone is… er… vaguely curious.

The Kindle version isn’t yet available, and orders through Amazon UK and Amazon Japan take a little longer. Still, friends of mine in Scotland and San Francisco already have a copy – though I haven’t seen one yet.

What’s the synopsis?

Roughly-speaking, this is the story of identical twin centenarians born on the first day of the Great Depression, one of whom loathes the other; it’s a purgatorial tour through twentieth-century Japanese history, with a ghostly geisha who has seen it all as a guide and a corrupt millionaire as her reluctant companion. Thrown into the milieu are saké, B-29s, Lewis Carroll, Sir Thomas Malory, Melbourne, The Wizard of Oz, and a dirigible – along with the allusion that Red Riding Hood might just be involved…

Some of the action also takes place in Melbourne as this is 5% a sequel/prequel to Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, which is actually available as a free PDF/epub.

Anyway, if you're bored, take a look-see. And the pretentious-sounding title is tongue-in-cheek, fear not...

Incredible Zorori

He's a fox, he wears a Zorro mask, has 'Zoro' as part of his name (we'll forgive the missing 'r'), the blighter gets up to mischief, he unleashes belches and farts, and even has his nose shot off by a laser...

How was I ever going to be able to resist Kaiketsu Zorori, aka Incredible Zorori, a character created by Japanese writer/illustrator Yukata Hara, a man who also apparently wrote a tome called The Famous Fried Chicken Primary School.

To be honest, I was all set to do something this month that segued into a surreal Japan, the twisted lives of geisha and/or a warped afterlife, to coincide with the publication on October 16th of my new novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude.  

But my daughter Cocoa just got back from the public library with her latest batch of the adventures of her hero Zorori, and I of course sat down to read over her shoulder. Surreal it is - comic adventures through a world populated by madcap animals and oddball beasties.

Cocoa has a lot to get through, and you can read more about Zorori @ Forces Of Geek.

Hard Labour & Other So-Called Travails

Bloody brilliant news for me – since I’m an Aussie, albeit currently an expat stuck in Tokyo – is that the fellow Melburnians @ Crime Factory are publishing their first anthology (Hard Labour) of Australian writers involved with the crime, noir and hardboiled genres.

This book is coming out on Oct. 8th, with sublime pulp cover art by Erik Lundy.

The line-up here is pretty mad – think Leigh Redhead, Helen FitzGerald, David Whish-Wilson, Garry Disher, JJ DeCeglie, Deborah Sheldon and more, including the Crime Factory crew themselves. I also have a story in the anthology, an unpublished prequel yarn featuring Floyd Maquina and Laurel Canyon from Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat.

By the way, if you’re interested at all in Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, the paperback is still just $4.74 from the publishers Another Sky Press, and they also offer the epub/pdf versions for FREE.

Otherwise, I’m hanging out for the publication of my 2nd novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude next month (Oct. 26th) through Perfect Edge Books. This is where the Japan references hit hard. We just received a wunderbar review by very cool writer Raymond Embrack.

Recently I’ve done a couple of wayward interviews with some very nice people. I chatted with Lloyd Paige first up @ Today’s Paige, mostly about life in Japan, how it’s affected my writing, and specifics about character development in the upcoming novel.

I also just had gas-bagged with author Jeff Shear at The Six-Degree Conspiracy about both writing and making muzak (mostly my side-project Little Nobody) – hence allowing me to waffle on ’bout both passions – and did an interview in the latest (September) issue of WQ Magazine @ the Queensland Writers Centre, thanks to Jason Nahrung.

At the moment I have my head pretty much entrenched in novel #3, which I’ve blabbed about before in this blog. It’s titled Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? and is now sitting round the 60,000 word mark. There’s a lot more editing and reappraisal to go – but I’m pretty damned happy with progress here. Fingers crossed.

Other stuff coming up include a short story I’m lucky enough to have included in the charity-oriented Off the Record 2 – At the Movies, edited by Luca Veste and Paul D. Brazill and out at the end of this month. This actually features an all-star-cast of currently active pen-pushers I really, really dig – check out the line-up here. For this one I went with a kind of old-school, fun, Biggles-style.

I have more noir/horror aligned stories in Weird Noir (edited by K.A. Laity) and Crime Factory’s horror collection in the suitably titled Horror Factory, put together by Liam José.

Okay, personal rant out. Back to Japan-related stuff next entry.

Pulp Ink 2 & other stuff

OK, been a bit el slacko on the updates department here, prob'ly due to an array of factors:

(a) I just had a quick vacation and gig in Sydney, (b) other social media drains my time, (c) I'm working too much, and (d) I've been focused on polishing off the new novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude - which should be out in late July or August - as well as a batch of short stories.

In fact the short stories have been a great romp for me, since I hadn't worked with this kind of thing since my early 20s.

Luckily, some of 'em are going to see the light of day away from my Mac.

One is being published in the Pulp Ink 2 anthology through Snubnose Press, which focuses on a playful horror/noir vibe - other contributors include Heath Lowrance, Julia Madeleine, Patti Abbott, Eric Beetner and Matthew C. Funk.

Another is the upcoming Crime Factory Hard Labour collection of Australian-made noir/crime yarns. I also have stories coming out via Shotgun Honey and Solarcide (more news about these later), and we're currently developing the post-apocalyptic noir anthology The Tobacco-Stained Sky.

But this blog is s'posed to focus on Japan, so let's get back to the novel.

One Hundred Years of Vicissitude focuses on Japan from 1929 on into the near future. A mix of surrealism, mystery, a smattering of dystopia/steampunk, a tad noir/hard-boiled, and there's sci-fi/fantasy in there as well.

Included in the mix are nods and references to classic movies by Akira Kurosawa, Kon Ichikawa, Seijun Suzuki, Masahiro Makino, Mikio Naruse, Satoshi Kon, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. Some manga-ka you might know also get the homage thing - including Osamu Tezuka - along with the only visit to Tokyo by the Graf Zeppelin, sake, sumo, The Tale of Genji, James Bond, and the 1945 fire-bombing of this city.

There's some background guff about the whole caboodle now online @ the Pandragon Dan site.

The Rabbit Hole

Wunderbar early feedback to the upcoming novel, from the great, super-cool reviewer Elizabeth A. White (ta, mate!!):

"When Andrez Bergen burst onto the scene in 2011 with Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, one of the most wonderfully creative and unique books I’ve had the pleasure to read, I wondered how he could ever possibly top it. 

"Well hold on, ladies and gentlemen, because with One Hundred Years of Vicissitude Bergen is once again taking readers on a wildly enchanting journey down the rabbit hole to an ethereal world rich with Japanese and pop culture, one which seamlessly melds history and the hereafter. Prepare to have your mind opened… then blown."


Check out Elizabeth's site here - well worth bookmarking for her taste in literature (and I'm not talking up mine!):
http://www.elizabethawhite.com/tag/one-hundred-years-of-vicissitude/

Eight Isn't Enough

Last weekend — after nearly driving myself to madness — I finished off my second novel (as I crowed about in undignified fashion below!) and on Tuesday, signed it to a new, rather cool publisher called Perfect Edge Books.

Yep, it goes without saying that I’m still over-the-moon at the present time, if somewhat exhausted, and to celebrate I quaffed a little saké.

Just a smidgeon, I promise.

Which brings me in a celebratory mood to this month’s Flash in Japan over @ Forces of Geek, and thereby to one of my favourite Japanese myths - which also revolves around saké, as all the good ones do.

I actually did the research on this subject a few years back, for an article on nihonshu (saké) in the pages of the late, lamented magazine Geek Monthly.

That was how I stumbled upon the tale of a monster with a taste for the hard stuff, especially rice wine.

In my new novel, One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, I decided to nick some bits of my old research and stick them into the story, albeit padded out with dialogue, and (hopefully) a bit more fun.

The monster myth was one of them.

So, let’s jump straight into the unedited, raw manuscript I just finished - there might be a typo or two at this stage.

Just click HERE to go to Forces Of Geek.

One Hundred Years of Vicissitude

OK, I'm relatively over the moon, and a few kilometres beyond that. Last Sunday morning, at 7:09am precisely (I'm going by the time-tag on the email I sent), I finished off my second novel.

It's titled One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, and this time the focus is... JAPAN.

Strange, that, since I've lived here eleven years.

Here's the current promo-teaser we're using:

Narrated by a man we suspect to be dead, One Hundred Years of Vicissitude tells the story of identical twin geisha born on the first day of the Great Depression - and one of whom harbours an Iago complex toward the other. Thrown into the resulting concoction are zeppelins, A-bombs, 1940s Tokyo, 1970s Melbourne, King Arthur, Red Riding Hood, saké, and comic books.

I'll mention more here as things unravel, but in the meantime I'm heavily smitten with Damian Stephens' mock-up artwork - see picture.

The Flawed Mountain Goat

Just got a GREAT review from Marcus Baumgart @ The Flawed Mind. Here's a taste:

"Andrez offers us one imagined future for Melbourne, and it has to be said that things don’t look so good. The dystopian Melbourne of Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, pitched at some distance into the future, has the unique distinction of being the only city left in the world. Unfortunately, things are not going terribly well in terms of civil liberties, the political climate or the environment. In fact, things are comprehensively fucked up on all fronts, and the portrait painted is of an overcrowded, polluted metropolis groaning under the control of a government vested in corporate interests and busy herding non-conformists and misfits into extramural death camps styled as ‘hospitals’.

"Despite this undeniable grimness, the novel is also pretty amusing, and it mines the noir vein with gay abandon, to use an old-fashioned phrase. Andrez wears his pop-culture influences on his sleeve, and the result is a compote that mashes up a plethora of fictional frameworks into a believable, seamless whole. Readers who know Melbourne will enjoy seeing the geography of the city rezoned and remapped, polarised by the presence of a dome over the CBD that shelters the wealthy elite. And god help you if you find yourself in Richmond, which Bergen transforms into a demilitarised wasteland; Abbotsford and other inner suburbs don’t fare much better.

"I for one appreciate someone taking the time to imagine an Australia of the future, as it is a welcome change to the ubiquitous North American setting of much popular fiction, and science fiction. Nevertheless, that wouldn’t be enough to recommend it. Happily, TSMG is also a ripping yarn in the best dystopian, gumshoe tradition.

"Oh, and on a final note, you will thoroughly enjoy the company of the protagonist, Floyd Maquina – he is ruggedly handsome and generally ruined; witty, self destructive and self-effacing with his air of gracious defeat..."

You can check out more at Marcus' website.

We have a swag of other review and interviews up at the Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat website HERE.

Personally speaking, this is wunderbar encouragement since I'm currently in the middle of writing the next novel, which goes under the acting title of One Hundred Years of Vicissitude. More about that shortly, or you can check out the Facebook page (I got in early) here.

Genji: Modish Millennium Man?

As outlined here a couple of entries back, I recently slunk back to Tokyo after three of the most über-intensive days’ traveling in my life, down in the grand old capital city of Kyoto.

Despite a decade living in the newer capital (Tokyo) I'd never actually been to Kyoto before - as inexcusable as that sounds—and it was one of the best jaunts I’ve had in recent years.

At the same time I’d also started to attack a new novel, which has the current title of One Hundred Years of Vicissitude. This is, I stress, the interim title only and - yes - it is partially a cheeky reference to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (shhh), though the main character in the novel is a centenarian and there’s a lot of change going on. If I get a letter from Señor Márquez or his lawyers I’ll probably consider also changing the name of the bugger.

Concurrently in my other job (teaching English) I’ve been yacking with a lot with students and friends about a famous 1,000-year-old Japanese tome called The Tale of Genji (源氏物語 Genji Monogatari), and have been itching to run something about it with my mates at Forces of Geek.

Anyway, as they conspire to do, these various things got together and chewed out my brain a bit, resulting in a novel that’s shaping up - in the early stages at least; I’m only up to page 67 - as partially an inane travelogue.

I’ll probably shaft some of the passages, ditch others, find a ghostwriter, and rewrite the remainder. By the way the ghostwriter reference is a pun since a dead man narrates the story. One Hundred Years of Vicissitude is possibly going to be a five percent sequel/prequel of my other novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat - and 95 percent something else entirely.


At the moment, in the existing manuscript, this is a section/riff that gets across the whole background of The Tale of Genji so I thought I’d snatch that and share it with you, instead of writing up a fresh article from a journalistic perspective.

To be honest I also hope you don’t mind plodding through to uncover the historical morsels. This is barely edited and unnaturally long-winded stuff at times, plus I’ll probably toss out some of the dialogue/asides if I end up using it in the novel - at all.

If curious and/or at all interested, you can read more @ FOG.