Click on the covers for more information on the different editions, including their availability. If you cannot view the image, download the most recent version of Flash Player The Tokyo-Montana Express by Richard Brautigan by Barbara A. Bannon? What does Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General From Big Sur) think about in the 1980s? Now middle-aged, he thinks a great deal about death. Married to a Japanese woman, he thinks a good deal about the superiority of Japanese women to American women. The vignettes in this novel, his 19th, are "the many stops along the way" of the imaginary Tokyo-Montana Express. "The 'I' in this novel is the voice of the stations along the tracks..." ruminating on such matters as Harmonica High, where everybody plays; buying a humidifier in Montana; what cantaloupe tastes like to a cat; and the menu on Death Row (one of the few genuinely funny moments here). The vignettes are, for the most part, self-indulgent, lackadaisical, uninspired. And Brautigan fails to achieve the driving locomotive effect that he promises. These facts probably won't deter his fans, however. Publishers Weekly September 19, 1980 Reprinted in Publishers Weekly 11 September 1981: 71.

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