Genichiro Takahashi never graduated from Yokohama National University. As a student radical, he was arrested and spent half a year in prison, a harrowing experience that rendered him incapable of reading or writing for several years. Sayonara, Gangsters took the literary establishment by storm and remains one of the summits of postmodern writing in Japanese or any other language. Winner of the Mishima and other coveted literary awards, Takahashi has been the best-kept secret of readers of Japanese. Sayonara, Gangsters is his first full-length work to be published in English.
