Word: akira
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...latest literary genre. As early as 2000, keitai shosetsu were appearing on the website Maho i-Rando, which offered MySpace-style homepages, to which readers posted diary entries via their cell phones. But "people wrote in asking for a place where they could be expressive and creative," says Akira Tanii, the site's founder. "We gave them a tool that allowed them to publish novels, short stories and poems, chapter by chapter, just like a real book." Many of the early titles were collaborative products: site members would post reactions to stories while they were being written, and writers would...
...spaghetti western changed that. Sergio Leone filched the plot from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (Hollywood had already remade Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) for his 1964 Fistful of Dollars. Clint ambles into a rotten town commandeered by rival miscreants and takes both gangs down. In Fistful and the Leone-Eastwood followups For a Few Dollars More (surely the most honest title every slapped on a sequel) and The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, society was run by outlaws. The moral choice was among various shades of black. Anarchy ran riot, and the only recourse was martial...
...foreigners, it's different. The American West is a fantasyland, a place of endless plains, quaint towns and tough men settling scores. Akira Kurosawa transposed the genre's tropes to medieval Japan, then saw his Eastern westerns remade in Hollywood (The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) and Europe (Yojimbo as Leone's Fistful of Dollars). Leone followed up with For a Few Dollars More--surely the most honest title ever given a sequel--and the spaghetti western craze was born. Django, director Sergio Corbucci's bleak riff on Fistful, with its hero lugging a coffin that has a machine...
...certain kind of baseball fan who comes to a meaningless exhibition game on a frigid Thursday afternoon in March, and Akira Koike, 33, is that kind...
...unofficial world record is held by Akira Haraguchi, who recited pi to 100,000 decimal places in Japan last fall, but did not register his feat with Guinness...