My Cultural Diet

In keeping with my renewed interest in ninja-themed material… Oh, who am I kidding, my interest in ninja-themed material has never needed renewing. But I digress… Originally published in 1980, Eric Van Lustbader’s The Ninja helped kick off the ninja craze that swept American pop culture in the ’80s. Unfortunately, however, it hasn’t aged very well in the ensuing four decades. Lustbader’s writing is ponderous and rambling, and though I’m all for angst-ridden heroes haunted by the ghosts of their past, The Ninja’s Nicholas Linnear is far less interesting than I expected for a novel about a globe-trotting ninja-turned-advertising executive. (For what it’s worth, I naturally pictured him as Richard Harrison in all of his mustachioed glory.) What’s more, The Ninja contains ridiculously raunchy sex scenes that might’ve made it seem mature and exotic in the early ’80s, but now, they just read as egregiously juvenile fantasies. Did not finish.

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