I Am Not Sanpaku
Carrie.Anne Murphy and I were going to write a play together about the life of George Ohsawa, the man who took Macrobiotics from Japanese history and updated it for semi-modern times (mostly by adding cigarette smoking and lots and lots of salt). It was to open with George Ohsawa on his deathbed as a teenager, with Westernized Japanese doctors singing to him that he has mere days to live, and Ohsawa singing back about the principals of Macrobiotics and how chewing 50 times a mouthful is what will save him.
The book Ohsawa wrote to make Macrobiotics famous was called “You Are All Sanpaku,” so I thought a good title for this musical would be “I Am Not Sanpaku.” The musical would follow his life to its untimely end, due to a salt addiction.
Non-Fiction self-improvement books are a mostly untapped source for movies and plays, because most writers are too lazy to adapt abstract philosophical points and assertions of fact into a story you can watch. Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Fast Food Nation was a rare exception, and by most accounts, a total disaster.
A couple of non-story books that could also be turned into movies are Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness - about the randomness of life and the folly of looking for patterns in it - and William Dufty’s Sugar Blues, about the evils of sugar (it causes every disease, including the Bubonic Plague).
4 years ago