Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash

Ajo Kawir has the worst imaginable problem for a teenage boy: he cannot get an erection. But Indonesian writer Kurniawan, who came to prominence here and worldwide with the sensational Beauty Is a Wound, isn't delivering a smarmy sex comedy. Instead, he links his protagonist's impotence to pervasive male violence. Joining a friend to spy on a crazy woman with a beautiful body, Ajo Kawir witnesses her horrific rape by two policemen and thereafter cannot get it up, philosophically discussing the situation with his limp member and wondering what it's trying to teach him. He sublimates his rage by fighting, for which he becomes renowned—he's even contracted to kill the notorious thug, the Tiger—but on one mission he meets Iteung, a young woman who learned martial arts to stave off sexual predation and proves to be as spectacular a fighter as he is. They fall deeply in love, though the road to happiness isn't easy, and Iteung demonstrates her fighting worth in a propulsive narrative that unsparingly, almost jauntily, describes how men pound one another as a way to live.