A film about the last years of the writer Richard Brautigan’s life during which time

and the later Tokyo Montana Express (1980)

A film about the psychology of the writer and the uses of the creative process.

So the wind won’t blow it all away, his last published book in 1984.

His last book was An Unfortunate Woman, an unforgettable journey in which he explores the shadowland of death. Alone and isolated in an empty house with a gun he took his life, it was supposed that he was disillusioned with his lack of recognition/connection.

Suicide is defined by japanese psychiatrist Takeo Doi as a response to some failure of localised amae and a retreat into generalised amae. In his book The Anatomy of dependence he describes the psychology of amae as a way of understanding the Japanese experience and also as an excellent vantage point for looking at the West. Amae is the desire to be passively loved- amaeru the craving of a newborn child for it’s Mother, this feeling carries into adulthood. It is known to Brautigan’s biographer’s that he was abandoned by his Mother in an ‘empty’ house as a child this experience was something he returned to in his work.

Everywhere around I see frustrated amaeru.

Takeo Doi

an interesting way to examine Richard Brautigan’s experience as transposed in his books.

Brautigan was drawn to Japan as it seemed to provide a language of beauty and evanescence to counter the existential bleakness forged in his childhood. After a while America provided only ‘a stale discourse to Japan’s textual fallout,’ wrote Malcolm Bradbury in an essay on Brautigan.

His interest in Japanese aesthetics was not simply trendy and Californian it was more fundamental showing his interest in rediscovering the eternal things through the representation of small concrete objects existing somewhere between gesture and nothingness.

‘‘I was seventeen and eighteen and began to read Japanese haiku poetry from the 17th century I read Basho and Issa and I liked the way they used language concentrating on the details of an image until they arrived at a form of dew like steel.’

I’ve been examining half scraps of my childhood they are distant  pieces.’

‘In Tokyo Montanta Express I spend a lot of time interested in little things tiny portions of reality.’

Brautigan describes how reality cannot be contained by language.

language becomes fossilised when written and characters are sucked dry by outward linguistic systems.’

His attraction to Japan was mutual in that his books achieved recognition and a following in Tokyo at a time when his popularity in America was fading.

The filmmaker retraces his journey from Montana to Tokyo as depicted in Tokyo Montanta Express visiting places and  memories of macho cowboys in Montana (where he wrote The Hawkline Monster) and looking for fans and interviewing the acclaimed novelist Banana Yoshimoto and psychologist Takeo Doi in Tokyo.

‘I had become so quiet so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there.’

So the wind won’t blow it all away.

Keith Abbot a writer describes his friend’s death Oct 26 1984 in Bolinas.

Before going back to Bolinas he borrowed a pistol from a San Francisco restaurant owner Jimmy Sakata. Calls to his house were met by the answering machine, slowly the batteries ran down and his voice became slower and slower until hope slipped.

He was  47 years old.

His escape from an unhappy childhood and isolation was to create fictions, it is his inability to sustain this and his inability to exorcise lacklove as commentated by his friend that raises questions about psychic wounds, society and creativity.

‘The life of the suicide is, to an extraordinary degree, unforgiving.(what a friend called the cold unforging place) Nothing he achieves by his own efforts of luck bestows, reconciles him to his injurious past.’

A.Alvarez The Savage God