Sayonara Gangsters
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.
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