sayonara, gangters by genichiro takahashi

this book is mostly beautiful nonsense. it's also completely unsentimental while being all about sentiment most of the time. it's poetic and funny and it has it's own imagination. you can read it in a day and then go back and read it again the next day. you might have to, it haunts you right after you put it down and then you forget about it and then not. next time you're in a bookstore or a library pick it up and read the opening, it's worth reading that much of it and then finding out that the book was actually written a number of years back and has only recently been translated.