A poet is talking to a refrigerator. The refrigerator with whom he is conversing is Virgil -- yes, that Virgil, author of "The Aeneid" and later Dante's guide through the inferno. Virgil the refrigerator, Virgil the bard, is telling his young interlocutor about the calling they share: "A poet is always aiming to commit the perfect crime. But what, you ask, is this perfect crime? It is to create an entirely indecipherable work of art."
Thus the question arises: What, in "Sayonara, Gangsters," a novel in which Virgil is reincarnated as a refrigerator, has Genichiro Takahashi given us? Has he committed the perfect crime? First, let's dispense with what will be another mystery for those who don't read Japanese: Genichiro Takahashi -- who is he?
Born in 1951, Takahashi was an active participant in the radical student movement of the 1960s and early-1970s. Indeed, he was such an active participant that he ended up spending half a year in prison, a harrowing experience from which he emerged with a sort of aphasia.
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