Fatal aspiration of sardine fry in a patient with lung cancer

We report a fatal case of death due to unusual aspiration of sardine fry in an elderly Japanese man with lung cancer. The cause of death was sudden respiratory arrest while eating. Autopsy revealed peculiar materials with cell nests and pigmented particles, together with striated muscle and skin, in the ectatic bronchioles of the left lower lobe. Serial histologic sections suggested that the structures observed were the eyeballs of small animals that appeared to have been inhaled. The patient had habitually eaten sardine fry and rice gruel, which were also detected in the gastric contents. Therefore, the eyes were considered to be those of the fry, which is a popular food item in Japan. This was confirmed by histologic examination of fry that were obtained commercially.     

The end of literature and the beginning of praxis: Wagō Ryōichi's Pebbles of Poetry

Abstract

On 16 March 2011, shortly after the hydrogen explosion in the third nuclear block, Wagō Ryōichi (1968–), a poet who has lived in Fukushima for decades, started using Twitter as an alternative method for his action poetry. The tweets from his nearly desolate hometown immediately gained public reception, spreading all across the country and beyond, being compiled into an anthology titled Shi no tsubute (Pebbles of poetry). This study examines the flood of words he posted during the critical post-earthquake turmoil, aiming to conceive them as radically redefining (albeit temporarily) the quotidian that has long been institutionalized during the country's recent history. Despite their later publication in book forms, Wagō's tweets initially circulated more like graffiti than printed books, being a more fundamentally contingent form of writing than his previously printed letters. Epitomizing the bio-sociological conditions (or what Karatani Kōjin calls ‘singularities’) arising from the intensified experience immediately following the Fukushima incident, Wagō's scribbles on the internet bear much resemblance to Terayama Shūji's mobilization of street epic in the 1960s–70s, or, more theoretically, Bergson's conception of evolution as multiplicity arising from intense temporality. His graffiti praxis is itself a renewed ethics, sharing the spirit of the-end-of-literature discourses by Karatani and others since the 1980s.