The Tokyo-Montana Express (1981) - Plot & Excerpts
Having just read "The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western" by Brautigan & having liked it but feeling a bit unsatisfied by what easy reading it was I turned to this not knowing what to expect but expecting a novel of similar ilk - but instead this.. is different.. AND given my taste for inventiveness.. I was PLEASED. This is somewhat unique. I wdn't call it a novel.. it's more a collection of ruminations couched in a writing style that keeps it away from being any established genre in particular.. &, YET, it's still easy-ish reading.. but probably a bit too original for a general readership. There's so much here. He manages to tell short tales in a fairly concise way but still manages to twist the language around in ways I found engaging. & the tragedy of his having committed suicide haunts me: in "No Hunting Without Permission" there's this: Brautigan's been having a bad day, he phones a 'friend': "[..] At one point toward the end of our thousand-mile little chat, I said: "Well, I've just been fishing and writing. I've written several little short stories this week." ""Nobody cares," my friend said. And he was right." W/ friends like that who needs enemies, right? I HOPE Brautigan's 'friend' committed suicide. In "Skylab at the Graves of Abbott and Costello", he wrote: "If you are expecting something dramatic to be revealed about chickens and their place in the firmament, forget about it. What I am about to reveal here could not be used as the plot for a disaster movie starring Burt Reynolds as a chicken rancher who takes the law in his own hands with brilliant cameo appearances by Reggie Jackson, Lillian Carter, Red Buttons, Bill Walton, Elizabeth Taylor, the graves of Abbott and Costello, and also starring Charlton Heston as "Oak."" Now that's near the beginning. The last paragraph: "I think you get the picture of what was going on in my mind except that I have not told you the reason for this story. Sometimes I feel just like the chicken who got all six ears of corn on his head." Were the paragraphs in between worth it? Definitely. Then there's "Hangover as Folk Art". I've written a note to myself that suggests I shd quote this in full. Feeling not up to that at the moment, even though it's short, I'll let one paragraph quasi-suffice: "Normally, a real bad hangover bites the dust when the sun goes down. It dies like a snake. This hangover didn't die at all. It changed into folk art made from my central nervous system, my stomach and the little stretches of imagination I call my brain." As usual, his development is brilliant. Good short story writers are expected to develop & surprise as quickly as possible & Brautigan is damned good at that. In "California Mailman" he manages to take the presumably common occurrence of disappointing mail & turn it into a story (not really) about ESP, dreams, cults, whatnot. All this in less than a page. It's funny, it's sad, it's a big accomplishment in a small space, a droll short story 'haiku'. "Cold Kingdom Enterprise" in its entirety: "Once upon a time there was a dwarf knight who only had fifty word [sic] to live in and they were so fleeting that he only had time to put on a suit of armor and ride swiftly on a black horse into a very well-lit woods where he vanished forever." Of course, it's a 50 word story. The 1st Flash Fiction, perhaps? "The Menu / 1965" took me by surprise. He writes about visiting San Quentin prison & getting the menu for food fed to prisoners on Death Row there. Then he takes the menu & shows it to friends. Everyone is disturbed by this. Some seem to think that the Death Row prisoners are being fed too well. Whatever Brautigan's motives, whatever people got out of this, this was, indeed, a strange story ripe w/ implication every wch way. A sample paragraph from it: "I carried the menu in a Manila envelope past innocent and unassuming people going to the store to buy halibut steak for dinner and then to fall asleep while watching television on Channel 7." I like the way he uses meandering to rope in people apparently unrelated to the story. & then there's "Castle of the Snow Bride": another one that took me by surprise: a description of his ultimate fantasy porn film told in such a way that one isn't exactly sure whether it's imaginary or not - as if even the author isn't sure whether it's imaginary or not. Brautigan wrote 2 more bks after this. If they advanced on what he accomplished here they must really be something.
I have read nearly all of the Brautigan books that can be categorized as "fiction" (versus poetry) and this is by far one of my favorites. It is also one of the last he wrote prior to his suicide, and there are hints of his despair throughout The Tokyo-Montana Express (see "No Hunting Without Permission). That said, this is by no means a depressing read - on the contrary. It is Brautigan at his finest, and there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments.Word of warning: do not take the introduction to the book literally, which states: "Though the Tokyo-Montana Express moves at a great speed, there are many stops along the way. This book is those brief stations: some confident, others still searching for their identities. The "I" in this book is the voice of the stations along the tracks of the Tokyo-Montana Express." Like an idiot, it took me awhile to even get into this book, because I thought I was supposed to be grasping something other than autobiographical vignettes of Brautigan's life as he moved back and forth from Montana to Tokyo. Just read the "I" as Brautigan. (Doh)There are so many excellent stories, but one of my very favorites is "The Menu / 1965," about the menu for death row inmates at San Quentin. I also enjoyed "What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?," "The Bed Salesman," and "The Old Testament Book of the Telephone Company." A great read and one I will return to often in the future.
What do You think about The Tokyo-Montana Express (1981)?
I've never been too sure what to make of Richard Brautigan. I like some of his books (generally his earlier ones) but find some of his books just a bit too whimsical. The problem for me is when he tried too hard to be whacky, as it always seemed a bit too false. I think The Hawkline Monster is the one I'm thinking of here.However, The Tokyo-Montana Express was a revelation. He's retained his whimsicality, but it no longer seems strained. No longer is he trying to outdo Vonnegut, no longer is he trying to create a novel, instead what we get is a book of short prose poems. And they feel right. This seems to be Brautigan's style of choice...and it works like a charm.
—Jonathan
For the most part the inert ramblings of a has-been well on the road to disintegration into the loneliness and incoherence of old age, at times excessively so, such as extended diatribes on replacing light-bulbs, watching the temperature change on a thermometer, and umbrellas, but interspersed with occasional instances of his rare genius, like the strange adventures of a death row dinner menu and a certain Swedish migrant in the Californian Gold Rush. The things his attention latches onto, like vanishing schools, misleading automobile advertisements, and popcorn, range from the mundane to the peculiar, but always in Brautigan’s domestic sense of the term. Despite the low rating, I did quite enjoy the book, picking at it slowly over my morning coffee, as I believe it ought to be read. But this is C-grade Brautigan, and mere table-scraps compared to his earlier innovative works like Trout Fishing. Fans and the curious only.
—Tayne
The subtitle on this one is a giveaway. "The Tokyo-Montana Express," the title blazes across the cover. Followed by, "A Book By Richard Brautigan." Not a novel. Not "stories." Not "poems." A "book." This is the second-to-last book published during Brautigan's lifetime. It's followed by the eerily prescient "So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away," which deals with bullets and accidental death and thoughts of suicide (Brautigan would put a bullet into himself a few years later, in 1984), and preceded by "Dreaming of Babylon," the last of his fake-genre satires, that time a detective parody.The titular train is a red herring -- you would hope that it might be one of Richard's fanciful location creations, like the library in "The Abortion," the town in "In Watermelon Sugar," or the place where the frozen sombrero falls in "Sombrero Fallout." And the intro wants you to believe it is -- each of the 131 chapter-ettes is a different "station," and the "I" is the voice of the station, supposedly. Actually, it's just a bunch of impressions typed up by Brautigan, half while living in Montana, the other half in Tokyo. He shuffled the deck, came up with some catch chapter titles, and there you have it.One of my favorite books is his short story collection, "The Revenge of the Lawn." It's a lovely combination of quiet absurdity, everyday realism, sweet pathos and girl-crazy women ogling. "Tokyo-Montana" has a similar tone, adding little puffs of insight to situations like passing a Tastee-Freeze that's closed for the winter, buying brighter light bulbs for your cabin, collecting 390 photographs of Christmas trees lying out in the street in January, and watching people at Japanese subway stops. A generous handful of the stories have something to recommend them. A few were laugh-out-loud funny, and a few others were quietly affecting. Two or three were downright magical. The bulk of them just passed by without much notice. The book is girded with recurring feelings of aging, falling into obscurity, days drifting into days, and a portrait of middle age that makes it sound like the author feels 30 years older than his actual age (he claims to be 45 or so). If "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away" is prophetic in cataloging his final desperation, "Tokyo-Montana" shows an author for whom the flavor is disappearing from life, and who is trying desperately to keep a little handful of whimsy tucked away to stave off the dark days. If you're interested in trying some Brautigan, I recommend "In Watermelon Sugar," "Revenge of the Lawn," "The Abortion," or "Sombrero Fallout." Roughly in that order. I haven't yet read his postuhumously-published novel, "An Unfortunate Woman," but for now, "The Tokyo-Montana Express" ranks down near "Willard & His Bowling Trophies" in the unenviable "tie for last" ranking. But even middling Brautigan is worth a browse, and if the wash of these little stories and impressions beats against you ceaselessly like an unchanging tide, feel free to have a look around. There are little glints of light all around for you to enjoy.
—Chris
