Genichiro Takahashi - A virtuoso blending of humor, nuance, and absurdity. All things are conceptually tangible and capable of independent acts: names battle and kill their owners; dreams deride the people having them; abstract ideas travel on conveyor belts through factories

Genichiro Takahashi, Sayonara, Gangsters, Trans. by Michael Emmerich, Vertical, 2004.

„No literal description of Sayonara, Gangsters’ plot could ever hope to do it justice. The narrator is a poetry teacher named “Sayonara, Gangsters”—he’s named after a gang that’s been knocking off U.S. Presidents one after another in the novel’s facetious near-future. Unfolding through short sketches that often read like poetry or philosophical meditations, Sayonara, Gangsters is a hilarious and inventive postmodernist novel about language, expression, and the creative process from Haruki Murakami’s way-more-out-there literary cousin.“

„If you've ever despaired of expressing yourself, you'll read Sayonara, Gangsters and understand. Set in a facetious near-future that is both mind-bendingly bizarre and achingly familiar. Sayonara, Gangsters is an inventive novel about language, expression and the creative process that unfolds through hilarious sketches. The peaceful if bizarre life of a poetry teacher is forever transformed by a group of terrorists called "the gangsters" in what is, incredibly, a semi-autobiographical novel.
On this literary gonzo trip in which a man of letters finds out, too late, that flirting with extremist politics can have unsavory conequences for one's mind, we encounter the likes of Virgil, the refrigerator (a memorable three-dimesional character) and "Henry IV" the feline aficionado of books. Endlessly resourceful, relentlessly erudite, but always accessible, Sayonara, Gangsters is a unique masterpiece of literary postmodernism that aims to entertain rather than to intimidate.
From the outrageous beginning, which reads like an oblique reference to the war on terror but is no such thing (it was written more than twenty years ago), to the sobering, devastating end, through the lyrical, poignant middle, Takahashi's legendary first novel is candy for your brain. Sayonara, Gangsters is a must-read for all fans of world literature, available for the first time in English.“

"The story happens in the future where gangster rules the world, where people barely have real name anymore. People are naming themselves now. The main character is a man who works in a poetry school, a poetry school like no other poetry school. This book has three parts.
Part one is In Search of “The Nakajima Miyuki Song Book”. “The Nakajima Miyuki Song Book” (it then shortens into Song Book) is the name of a woman given by the main character. The man himself is given name “Sayonara Gangster” by Song Book. The two of them meet after the main character lost his daughter. Song Book used to be a gangster.
Part two is The Poetry School. This part is about the main character’s job in the Poetry School. A school which usually consist of 1 student at a time. His job is more than teaching poetry, he is listening more than teaching. The students are ranging from small boy to incomprehensible thing, from old lady to ancient poet who turned into a refrigerator.
Part three is Sayonara Gangsters. This part is about what happen to Song Book when the gangsters finally find her. It is also about the life of the main character after he is left by Song Book.
What is my impression of this book???
It’s bizarre!! Unlike anything I have ever read before. But somehow I enjoy the weirdness of this book. It gives new essence in the whole literary I have ever read. Just like Jonathan Safran Foer said, this book is a bit difficult to describe…all you have to do is read it and find it out for yourself!!
The writing is also unusual, Genichiro Takahashi sometimes put only 1 sentence in a page and left the rest of the page blank. You can also find a lot of pages that only half page are filled. Although it’s a book with plot, I sometimes fell like reading poetry rather than a novel.
I guess the notion of “Don’t judge the book by its cover” rarely happen to me, because this book is one of many books that I picked only based on the cover or the recommendation on the cover and I have no regret of ever read this great book.“ – Novroz at Polychrome Interest

"College dropout, former student activist, veteran of the Japanese penal experience (one year in prison for aforementioned activism), one-time porn director, and poet, Genichiro Takahashi is the enfant terrible of Japanese letters. His Sayonara Gangsters is a wild, hysterical, and tender tale that almost defies description. The “action” takes place somewhere and sometime in the future in which people have no names. For lovers this presents a problem: what to call one another. The two main characters of Sayonara Gangsters decide upon Nakajima Miyuki Song Book for the woman, and Sayonara, Gangsters for the man and narrator, who is a teacher at a poetry school. Their milk-and-vodka loving cat is named Henry IV.
The first part of the novel is about Sayonara, Gangsters's former lover and their daughter, who is called both Caraway and Green Pinky. At a point in which the novel appears to be settling into something a reader might vaguely recognize as “normal” - couple have child, are happy, begin to build a life - they receive a postcard from City Hall informing them of the impending death of their daughter. Sayonara, Gangster then describes his daughter’s trip to the approved cemetery and burial therein - while Green Pinky talks to him throughout.
In the second section, Sayonara, Gangster talks about his "job" at the poetry school, admitting that he has essentially no idea what he is doing. That, moreover, if there were some secret to writing poems - what the students expect to be taught - he wouldn't tell anyone but would rather write poems and become a Nobel laureate. The final part of the novel revolves around three yakuza who enroll in the poetry school - and then are shot and killed by the police. As weird as it sounds, the scene is simultaneously funny and stunning and vivid. As is the entire work. Michael Emmerich's translation is lively and captures the maniacal and protean talents of Sayonara, Gangsters author Genichiro Takahashi. This book cannot be recommended highly enough. Read it!“ – Japan Visitor

„I confess I have no idea what really happened in this wacky novel, but it was nonetheless entertaining, if only because it’s so totally indescribably unpredictable. From what I gathered, there’s a love story going on of some sort between a poetry teacher and an ex-gangster and they live with a cat named Henry IV whose dying wish is to have Thomas Mann read to him. And, in case you wanted to know, gangsters never die, except if you shoot them in the head. One of the zany highlights is the resurrected return of Virgil (yes, that Virgil of Aeneid fame) halfway through the book, as he wakes up one morning to find that he’s metamorphosized into a refrigerator, but he can still do the existential BS with the best of them. Go figure.“ - BookDragon

"Takahashi's first novel to be translated into English can be amusing, sexy, moving, intelligent and maddeningly obtuse-often all at the same time. Which is exactly what Takahashi, acclaimed author of postmodernist romps and former porn director, intends. Somewhere in a future time and place, people have no names. Lovers find this inconvenient, so they begin naming each other. The two main characters settle on the following names: the woman is the Nakajima Miyuki Song Book, and the man, who teaches at a poetry school, is Sayonara, Gangsters. Their cat, who prefers milk-and-vodka and is a great fan of Aristotle, is named Henry IV. The first of the book's three parts tells the story of Sayonara, Gangsters's former lover, "the woman," and their daughter, named both Caraway and Green Pinky. One day the couple receive a postcard from City Hall that reads, "We Were So Sorry to Learn of the Death of Your Daughter." Sayonara, Gangster then describes Caraway's removal to the Children's Graveyard, where she is deposited in a cork-lined metal case. In the second section, Sayonara, Gangster explains his work at the poetry school, with a long disquisition on the death of poetry by the poet Virgil, who has metamorphosed into a refrigerator. The last section is an action-filled account of three gangsters who come to be taught poetry and who are killed after a gunfight with a detachment of armored police. Emmerich's playfully virtuosic translation makes all this more fun than work, rendering Takahashi's mischievous tale in candy-coated prose." - Publishers Weekly

“Part science fiction, part poetry, part philosophical treatise and noir thriller, with the odd graphic element tossed in, Sayonara, Gangsters is a playful blend, a true work of metafiction that never takes itself too seriously...Who says serious literature can't be fun?”— Grand Rapids Press

“Takahashi has dispensed with the commitment to realism that seems to inform most Japanese fiction, in favor of a richly playful style of storytelling that is fabulous… Think of Pynchon with an editor, Donald Barthelme but funnier, or Italo Calvino just as he is.”— The Japan Times

“The novel’s absurdities… neatly balance its tender, humane depictions of love and loss.”— The Washington Post

“Sayonara, Gangsters is one of those rare books that actually defies description… It’s funny, sure. And beautiful. And slightly insane. And haunting. And heart-breaking. But all those words miss the point. The point is you have to read it. So read it.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

"My brother, a NASCAR fan and weekend team roper, has his quirks, and one of them is he shoots skeet with a Perazzi shotgun that cost something like $20,000. The gun is worth more than both his vehicles combined, and looking at it, most of us might be a bit mystified by the price tag. Granted, it is finely made, but does all that Italian elegance make it shoot straighter than something he could buy for, say, $200? Maybe, maybe not; but he did find a reason, somewhere between aesthetics and voodoo, to justify owning the gun for what it is.
The Perazzi came to mind when I read Sayonara, Gangsters, the American debut of the acclaimed Japanese author Genichiro Takahashi. And when I say that Sayonara, Gangsters is a great novel, the statement is true, but it's true in the way that my brother's Perazzi is a great shotgun; on one level its appeal is fairly universal, but on another it is quite unapologetically addressing an audience with a certain degree of refinement.
Sayonara, Gangsters isn't exactly a crime novel; the title is actually the name of the narrator and protagonist, who teaches poetry in a four-seat classroom under a sign that reads "Those who write imaginatively must be prepared to face a firing squad." This is the poetry school where we're introduced to a Gila monster that mutates as it is described and a participant called Some Incomprehensible Thing who is exactly that, having "no shape, no color, no weight, and no odor; it just hung about expanding, contracting, and whirlpooling into itself."
I could back up, but why? This is a world where lovers name each other, where City Hall sends black-bordered postcards to residents scheduled for death, where rivers flow on the upper floors of buildings. One key character is a cat named "Henry IV" who favors human desserts, milk and vodka cocktails and the short stories of Thomas Mann. "Letter to the Corinthians" plays on the radio every day, a Ferris wheel commits suicide...but it's also about poetry and love and more metaphysical teasers like who defines what we are, the kind of book that can quote Kant and Foucault in the same joke.
It's hard to impose the idea of a singular "plot" on this novel, but it does follow the relationship between the narrator and his new lover, Song Book, living in the shadow of his previous lover and their daughter, Caraway, who received one of those City Hall postcards. It is Song Book who names Sayonara, Gangsters, and yes, the play on words does have significance, though it is revealed only at the end of a marvelously circuitous path. The novel abandons reality immediately and without reservation, but this isn't the cheap existential frivolity of Tom Robbins; it's more reminiscent of early Vonnegut, and to a greater degree, the works of Richard Brautigan. Sayonara, Gangsters exists in its own time zone, a place where metaphor matters and images, no matter how surreal, develop such resonance that they become their own figurative and literal reasons for being.
Takahashi throws in plenty of references to assure us he hasn't really strayed from the poetic arena. A catalogue of canonical guests make cameo appearances: Virgil, for example, is morphed in a neo-Ovidian way into a refrigerator and carries his own beer; one character spouts sentences from Finnegans Wake as she nears the point of sexual ecstasy; and another, a winged patron of a very peculiar bar, clings to a chandelier croaking "Nevermore." But we don't really need them, in the end; love it or not, a brilliant book is still a brilliant book, and no matter how far Takahashi's prose wanders from the status quo, there's no way in the world anyone could mistake its superiority.“ - John Ziebell

„Sayonara, Gangsters, the first novel to be translated into English by Japanese author Genichiro Takahashi, like most post-modernist fiction, defies description; you just can't sum it up with a synopsis and recommendation. I can't tell you what it is about. I can't tell you what it's supposed to mean. But, I can tell you that it is amazing. Sayonara, Gangsters is a virtuoso blending of humor, nuance, and absurdity. It's set in an unspecified future world where adults give each other names to save them from being murdered by the names they've chosen for themselves. It's a world where the government informs you of the upcoming death of your child; a world where gangsters and the violence they perpetrate run rampant, but... they're not too busy to learn about poetry. It is alternately hyper-violent, hysterically funny, and poignantly tender.
There is a scene in the beginning of Sayonara, Gangsters describing a string of presidential assassinations. One president is killed by an explosive piece of bubble gum that takes his head clean off of his shoulders. By the time I finished Sayonara, Gangsters, I felt very much like that ill-fated president. The only term that comes close to describing this book is mind-blowing. How mind-blowing is it? This is Naked Lunch, Trout Fishing in America, Breakfast of Champions mind-blowing.
What really makes Sayonara, Gangsters tick is its obliviousness to logic. Sure this is a place where dead children continue to ask their parents questions and Ferris wheels commit suicide, but after a few pages, all of this makes perfect sense. Takahashi is perfectly adept in creating his own free-floating world that dissolves and morphs. Scenes shift from idyllic to phantasmagoric without warning. In other words, the author has mastered the language of dreams. And just as in dreams, there is no narrative trajectory, just fleeting vignettes that spring from an unchecked subconscious.
If readers are capable of ignoring the voice inside that wants to yell out that none of this makes sense, they will be well rewarded. It's about feelings rather than rationality; it's about the journey not the destination. This is a novel that will immediately captivate daring readers.“ - Gerry Donaghy

"Sayonara, Gangsters, a thrillingly unhinged perpetual-motion machine full of absurd sex and violence, greased with the awesome confidence of a writer so committed to thumbing his nose at convention that he discovers caverns of wonder deep within said schnozz. (...) The least that can be said is that you never know what's coming next." - Ed Park

"And now, for something completely different: Genichiro Takahashi's Sayonara, Gangsters, in a sophisticated, eye-grabbing hardcover from Japanese pop-fiction powerhouse Vertical. Sayonara, Gangsters is a novel, but a novel in the same way its main character's employer is a poetry school. When you read the phrase "poetry school" you might imagine an institution with fees, hours, classes, texts, curricula or something beyond its name to designate it a poetry school. You might imagine there being poetry, or schooling. The noun "novel" similarly brings with it associations and expectations, but besides its generic physical reality - bound and numbered sheets of paper, largely inked with words - Sayonara, Gangsters has nothing in common with what a novel usually is. This isn't experimental writing, because there isn't experiment. It's just different from what we're used to.
The contents, loosely interrelated postmodern set-pieces, are wide-ranging in tone and subject. There's everything from the erudite interstellar goofiness of Douglas Adams to the grating egomaniacal popcult gobbledegook of Mark Leyner (My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.) There's something of Richard Brautigan's Willard and his Bowling Trophies, too, the sense that an accomplished storyteller has tired of trying to make sense and moved to a form in which the teller is the audience.
Your enjoyment of this book will hinge on your appetite for beautiful nonsense of the Edward Lear sort, nonsense that's a candy coating for melancholy alienation. Though it's hard to pin anything down, social bewilderment and missing identity are certainly the book's major preoccupations. There's an undercurrent of fogged anxiety, the anxiety of not knowing what's expected of you, what your duties are, who the people in your life are, even your name. It's the anxiety someone might feel trying to play-act and fake through an unrecognizable world. The book is shot through with ominous disapproval and the wearied disappointment of others. The degree to which looming opprobrium makes your palms sweat and the quality of pot you smoke while reading will decidedly influence how compelling you find Takahashi's universe.
Curious about gangsters? Sayonara's introductory page offers the oh-if-only New York Times headline "One After Another, Like Bowling Pins, U.S. Presidents Are Toppled by GANGSTERS." That word, "gangsters," is responsible for a lot of the book's excitement. When GANGSTERS do something, or say something, one is inclined to pay attention, and yet the appellation "gangster" is arbitrary. There's no reason this book couldn't be Sayonara, Software Developers or Sayonara, Wal-Mart Greeters. The gangsters wave machine guns, but they could as plausibly wave roofers' hatchets or short-order cooks' spatulas. The baggage a reader brings to the language -- Gangsters! Machine Guns! -- is what makes the stakes seem high enough to stake awake for.
When the gangsters do finally show up they interrogate the narrator, and implicitly the author, about the meaning and purpose of his poetry school. Samuel Beckett's play Eleutheria disrupts narrative stagnancy with something similar: a previously unseen character named "Chinese Torturer" emerges from the audience and begins maiming the play's characters, demanding they reveal what the point of the play is. The Torturer doesn't get any satisfactory answers, but the audience is at least passingly gratified to have such a frank meta-textual advocate for intelligibility. Like the Chinese Torturer, however, Sayonara's gangsters are ineffective champions and are quickly absorbed into the rush of plotless events.
In the end, Sayonara, Gangsters is different enough from a conventional work of fiction that it's tough not only to judge its merits but to settle on criteria by which to judge it. Is the book emotionally affecting? No, unless you're someone who cries at television commercials. Does it succeed on its own terms? Is it fun to read? The writing feels well-crafted, not a lazy put-on, not Dada, yet it's playful to the point of annoyance. Reading it can feel like sharing a tiny room with a manic kitten. Sayonara, Gangsters seems mostly interested in amusing itself, unfolding in accordance with private rules. Only you can decide whether this whimsical novel is worth your time, whether the emperor has clothes, whether or not he knows, and whether or not it matters." - Damien Weaver

„Chip Kidd's design for the first English translation of Genichiro Takahashi's award-winning 1982 debut novel Sayonara, Gangsters seems unusually telling: The book itself is covered with random black letters, which only cohere into a title when viewed through strategically placed holes in the book jacket. It's an apt metaphor for the book's content, except that Takahashi doesn't provide such a convenient decoder device. Sayonara, Gangsters is a series of absurdist, near-nonsensical vignettes, effectively a block of seemingly random letters. Takahashi makes these vignettes colorful and entertaining, but as with Rorschach blobs, their analysis may reveal more about any given reader than about their creator.
In the postmodern fantasy dystopia of Sayonara, Gangsters, virtually all things are conceptually tangible and capable of independent acts. Names battle and kill their owners. Dreams deride the people having them. Abstract ideas travel on conveyor belts through factories. Sunlight blows away in a high wind. A Ferris wheel commits suicide. Meanwhile, the nominal plot follows the narrator, a poetry teacher named "Sayonara, Gangsters," and his lover, "The Nakajima Miyuki Song Book"; they conceive and birth a daughter, who later obediently dies in response to a governmental death-alert postcard. Afterward, she chats with Sayonara, Gangsters as he disposes of her body, while Song Book goes on to a strange death of her own. Death is the most common of the many metaphors in Sayonara, Gangsters—it's ubiquitous and final, but its effects are unpredictable, and its scope isn't limited to corporeal, tangible, or even living things. It's easily read as forcible change, an unwelcome passing from one state into another, variable depending on its victim and its perpetrator.
But death is only one of Sayonara, Gangsters' broadest and clearest symbols. Other images are more opaque. At times, it's tempting to suspect that Takahashi is engaging in specific wordplay and cultural reference that gets lost in translation. At other times, he just seems coy, playful, deliberately dense, or simply goofy. In each mode, though, Sayonara, Gangsters is a light, poetic, enjoyable read, full of crafted imagery that can be emotionally devastating even as it lacks a coherent story-center.
And sometimes, Takahashi's message transcends any linguistic or imagistic barrier. In one beautifully executed scene, Sayonara, Gangsters and an old woman attempt to describe a creature that keeps defiantly changing form in reaction to their analysis. Ultimately, the woman finds a solution, by describing it in a way that cannot itself be described. Her method seems to sum up Takahashi's own approach to giving mutable, shifting moods a concrete form: He blithely writes his own rules.“ - Tasha Robinson

„I demand one of two things of a composer: invention, or that he astonish me. — Karlheinz Stockhausen
This is the third time, or maybe the fourth time, I have tried to write a review of Genichiro Takahashi’s Sayonara Gangsters. The first time, I couldn’t even think of anything coherent to say, and ended up with a thousand words of sub-Lester Bangs drivel that wasn’t even worth laughing at. The second time (and maybe the third as well), the document vanished completely from both computers where I had a copy. Either I’d stupidly never saved it in the first place, or Amanojaku had come along and talked my PC into dumping the drafts into the memory hole.
Each time I’ve sat down to write this thing, I run into the same issue anew: How does one talk about a book that is both quite cheerful and flabbergastingly strange, often right in the same sentences? It’s tempting to call the book critic-proof, but that’s an adjective usually reserved for works with a built-in fanbase who will buy the book no matter how savagely the critics treat it. It doesn’t really apply to something so merrily bonkers in its own way that a review threatens to not do it justice. And yet I suspect the mere fact that I can’t pigeonhole the book or even figure out where to begin describing it is, in its own way, praise. Few books resist classification that defiantly and come out the other side not only unscathed but all the more readable for it.
The surface of the book is actually quite simple, even if the events that unspool aren’t hidebound by anything as earthbound as logic or sense. It takes place in a vaguely dystopian future (although I’m not even sure if that’s a fitting description), where people choose their own names, ending up with such contorted concoctions as The Nakajima Miyuki Songbook and Sayonara, Gangsters. The latter is the hero/narrator’s chosen name; “Songbook” is his girlfriend — herself an ex-gangster. His occupation: poetry teacher and sometime father.
Gangsters isn’t just plotless, it’s an embodiment of Mark Twain’s warning that those attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. This isn’t a bad thing, since the book has been written as (and works best as) an accumulation of little details rather than as a conventional story. One of the poetry teacher’s students is Virgil, reincarnated as a refrigerator. Another is from Jupiter. At one point Thomas Mann vanishes completely from literary history, which creates terrible problems for one of his longtime fans. The titular Gangsters themselves show up, and make life (as such) very difficult for our hero and heroine. Characters die, but don’t stay dead, or discover they were never born to begin with. And then there’s that ending, which is really off the wall, but for it not to be like that would be even more bizarre.
The only other book I’ve read that comes remotely close to Gangsters in either style or manner is one I suspect most everyone here neither knows of nor has read, but here goes: Boris Vian’s Foam of the Daze. It has the same sprightly tone, and also the same anything-goes ethos. The pieces don’t merely fit together, they spontaneously self-assemble and then run off arm-in-arm to have a Las Vegas wedding and then a Mexican divorce. Describing it was likewise impossible, or at the very least a test of one’s own capacity to embrace strangeness for its own sake. But it was difficult to read it and not be amazed, on every page and most every line, with Vian’s omnivorous imagination.
The stock word to describe most of this is “post-modern”. Those of you familiar with DeLillo or Pynchon or especially Snow White-era Donald Bartheme probably read all of this and nodded with familiarity. It’s the same basic approach: the fractured non-narrative, the jokes that masquerade as meaning that masquerade as jokes, the way the work itself is its own initiation ritual to a member of the elect. If you read it and get it, congratulations: you’re one of the club. If not, you can go hang back with the rest of the losers still clutching their weatherbeaten copies of Walpole and Tolstoy.
Thing is, Gangsters never feels that snobbish or forbidding. The charm of the story is on every level, from the playful surface down to the underpinnings. It’s not just a Great Big Metaphor by itself, but a cheerful razz at the way things are turned into Great Big Metaphors by Artists, and then horribly misinterpreted by everyone else. Open mouth already a mistake, as the Zen masters are wont to say. Takahashi does an end-run around all that by committing the mistake first and then opening his mouth. He invents and astonishes, and not always in that order. Why restrict yourself?“ – Serdar at Genji Press

„Have you ever read a novel that wasn’t a novel? Have you ever considered what a novel is for that matter?
Michel Foucault in his preface to The Order of Things talks about a moment of epiphany he experienced when reading the Argentine writer Borges:
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought….
The passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.
There are books like that, incredibly rare, that seep through the ether, float around the world, the room, the mind. Genichiro Takahashi’s Sayonara Gangsters is one of those. A little teaser for you, taken randomly from page 193:
“Welcome Home”
12.
I walked over to the snoozing Song Book.
Her legs were aligned, sticking out perfectly straight.
Her hands were arranged neatly on her knees.
An open comic book lay under her hands.
Song Book makes no effort to follow the story when it comes to comic books. Song Book just likes looking through them, jumping from scene to scene. She goes on gazing for ages at scenes she likes. That’s how she reads comics.
Song Book falls asleep gazing at her favourite scenes.
I gazed gently down over Song Book’s shoulder at the scene unfolding beneath her hands.
I thought it apt to create my own taxonomy of Sayonara Gangsters.
The passage quotes a ‘certain Japanese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘characters are divided into: (a) immortal gangsters who die (b) virgil the poet as a fridge (c) ectoplasm becoming chair (d) the author Thomas Mann who did not exist (e) “Henry IV” (f) barman with wings (g) poetry school teachers (h) pontum adspectebant flentes (i) James Joyce expounded (j) “One After Another, Like Bowling Pins, the U.S. Presidents are Toppled by Gangsters (k) GILA monsters (l) potty poetry (m) a manifesto for the Fat Gangster, inelegantly expressed (n) JOVIAN pinky promises.’
Other reviews have said more normal things:
If readers are capable of ignoring the voice inside that wants to yell out that none of this makes sense, they will be well rewarded.
It’s about feelings rather than rationality
 it’s about the journey not the destination. This is a novel that will immediately captivate daring readers.
or,
Reading it can feel like sharing a tiny room with a manic kitten. Sayonara, Gangsters seems
mostly interested in amusing itself
unfolding in accordance with private rules. Only you can decide whether this whimsical novel is worth your time, whether the emperor has clothes, whether or not he knows, and whether or not it matters.
Indeed.“ - Blizzardboy

Genichiro Takahashi, Essayist