A Brief Study of the Dissolute Properties of Comedy When You're Propelled Off Your Speeding Motorcycle Into A Sharp Asphalt Road, And Your Name Is Takeshi Kitano

by Kirk Marshall

A Brief Study of the Dissolute Properties of Comedy... is an alternative history for contemporary Japanese comic-cum-filmmaker Takeshi Kitano's real-world motorcycle accident, and it suggests ways of reckoning with such celebrity trauma.

New special-edition chapbook novelette published by Dynatox Ministries. Limited to 25 copies.

37 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2013

About the author

Kirk Marshall is a Brisbane-born writer and teacher living in Melbourne, Australia. He was a sessional academic / adjunct teacher in Creative Writing, English, Literature and Media (Film & T.V. Studies) at RMIT University for two years, and has held various teaching positions in Queensland, Victoria and Tokyo, Japan.

He is the author of an illustrated miscellany ("A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953"); a fiction chapbook ("A Brief Study of the Dissolute Properties of Comedy When You're Propelled Off Your Speeding Motorcycle Into A Sharp Asphalt Road, And Your Name Is Takeshi Kitano") published by Dynatox Ministries; a novella ("The Signatory") published by Skylight Press; and two collections of fiction: "Carnivalesque, And: Other Stories" published by Black Rider Press, and "Popcorn In the Barrel: Stories" published by KUBOA Press. His début photostory/poetry chapbook ("Ghostyawp: Overshares from an Autopsy") is forthcoming from Corona/Samizdat Books (Slovenia, EU; 2025).

He has written for more than eighty publications, both in Australia and overseas, including "Award Winning Australian Writing", "Island", "Wet Ink", "Going Down Swinging", "Voiceworks", "Verandah", "Visible Ink", "fourW", "Cordite", "Mascara Literary Review" and "The Grapple Annual" (Grapple Publishing; 2014).

Kirk is also the coauthor of a Creative Writing textbook for ESL students enrolled at the RMIT International College in Indonesia.

He is currently working on a new novella entitled, "Vampire Drive", which is perhaps synopsised as an amalgam of Dick Tracy’s freaks and Barry Hannah’s fire.

Kirk is also the writer-director of the 2005 independent Australian feature film, "About 8" (promoted by Prodany Entertainment). He was editor and publisher of "Red Leaves / 紅葉", the world's first English-language / Japanese bi-lingual literary journal. He now suffers migraines in two languages.