First published in 1976, Sombrero Fallout was Richard Brautigan's seventh published novel and the third to parody a literary genre. Subtitled "A Japanese Novel," it featured two interrelated stories. The first was about a sombrero falling from the sky and its affect on humanity. In the second story, the narrator of the first thinks about his Japanese ex-lover who had recently moved out of his apartment.

Dedication reads:

This novel is for Junichiro Tanizaki who wrote The Key and
Diary of a Mad Old Man

Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965) was a Japanese novelist.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976
5.5" x 8.25"; 187 pages; ISBN 0-671-22331-3; First printing 1 September 1976
Hard Cover, with dust jacket
Light rose paper covered boards; Deep rose embossed titles on front cover and spine; Rose end papers
Front dust jacket color illustration by John Ansado of a Japanese woman

Back dust jacket photograph by John Fryer of Brautigan sitting on a rock.

Proofs (86 pages) in printed yellow wrappers
Uncorrected proofs in tall, "pad-bound" format reported, with title written on spine.

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In addition to the specific reviews detailed below, commentary about this book may also be included in General Reviews of Brautigan's work and his place in American literature, or reviews of his Collections.


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Mr. Brautigan's novel proceeds on two levels. On one, a neurotic comic novelist mopes over his Japanese mistress, who has left him because "the upkeep was too complicated." On the other, the scraps in the wastebasket compose their own bloody fantasy. The meaning of all this is oblique and the style is relentlessly clever. As the author himself points out, "After a while non-stop brilliance has the same effect as non-stop boredom." Reckless of him.

Brautigan is a sort of last gasp of the Beat Generation who has managed to adapt himself to changing literary tastes and pose as one of the masked men of experimental writing. His virtues are a poetic imagination that is often sheerly stunning in its casual connections, and a whimsical offhandedness in dealing with heartache that is, quite probably, distinctively Californian. His latest novel: a "surface" novelistic predicament, involving a lovelorn humor writer without a sense of humor, gives birth to a subplot involving a large-scale explosion of violence in a small American town; reading the second plot as outcome of the first provides a sort of critical rationale. The heroine of this "Japanese novel" (it is being simultaneously published in Japan, for reasons not likely exceeding the superficial) is the writer's former lover, and she sleeps her way through this short fiction like one of Kawabata's sleeping beauties. Easy and enjoyable reading.

Absurdity plays against pathos to the chunky rhythm of blunt, declarative sentences. . . . Brief, ingenuous, the novel seems to follow Brautigan's eccentric muse wherever she leads, with little show of resistance.

Mostly it's just a kind of sentimental seppuku [ritual Japanese suicide].

An amusing trifle for Brautigan fans.

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Richard Brautigan's latest surreal fantasy Sombrero Fallout scarcely qualifies as a novella, let alone as a novel. It has so much white paper unsullied by print among its pages that complex mathematical calculations were required to arrive at its true cost—an outrageous 11.6 per 1,000 words. In this book Mr. Brautigan flirts more dangerously than ever with that seductive siren, wry sentiment, a tone which assorts oddly with his sombre message about the mindless violence that lies dormant in any crowd, ready to be released by any such common event as a black sombrero falling from a clear sky. An expensive curate's egg for some, but a satisfying meal-in-itself, no doubt, for addicts.

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Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 9. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978. 123-125.

Beneath the golden arches of Richard Brautigan's imagination, Mark Twain and Tim Leary might meet for a burger. . . . . Sombrero Fallout has a plethora of bizarre, precious imagery that delights the stoned.

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Only Brautigan could squeeze 2.5 plots into so little space, call the concoction a novel, and still maintain the bittersweet insanity that has marked his work from the very beginning. Try, for instance, in your head to intertwine these stories: one hour in the life of an American humorist who is mourning having been left by his Japanese girlfriend; include in this story scenes of his meeting her for the first time, various images of her now making love with other men, and the excruciating impact of finding one of her hairs in his apartment. Add a sombrero which falls from the sky, has a temperature of 24 degrees below zero, and is the cause of an entire town going berserk and battling it out with U.S. troops. This turns out to be the story the American humorist is writing at the time. Add further: the Japanese girl, asleep in bed, and her cat, who gets hungry. It may be Brautigan's shortest novel, but there isn't a page that won't make you scratch your head, smile, or want to start it all over again.

Also reviews Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork in an earlier issue of Library Journal.

The Library Journal Book Review 1976. Ed. Janet Fletcher. New York: R.R. Bowker Company, 1977. 619.

In Richard Brautigan's Sombrero Fallout, "a very well-known American humorist" tries to write about a small town's eruption into bloody riot when a weird hat falls from the sky. Then the story is discarded (it, however, keeps writing itself in the wastebasket) as he turns to tender reminiscences of his lost Japanese girlfriend and anxieties about food and literary reputation. As a Barthelme-like exercise in discontinuous modes, lyrical, topical, and confessional, the book is amusing but somehow self-cancelling. The parable about mindless public violence is too harmlessly droll, the love story too sentimental, the portrait of the artist too routinely self-loathing. Remembering Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, I would be glad to like Sombrero Fallout better, but his charm seems to be increasingly calculated.

Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 12. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1980. 57-74.

It is most unsubstantial and equivocal, not really very funny, not really very sad. But Sombrero Fallout is subtitled "A Japanese Novel" and all the foregoing strictures could be made by the uninitiated about, say, a haiku.

There is a grave embarras de choix in fiction this week, with too many good books competing for too little review space. Brautigan's new "Japanese novel" is a brilliant, funny, and strange whimsy about a heartbroken American humourist with no sense of humour whose discarded short story about a sombrero takes on a life of its own. It is as clever and delicate as a masterpiece of origami.

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Knee-buckling oriental perfumes and the Eastern woman's natural grace and rhythm in general are big topics this week, though I found the breezy Aunt Nadia's [from Kith by P.H. Newby] attractions more convincing than those of Yukiko, the subject of Richard Brautigan's canton of contemned love. Sombrero Fallout offsets a love story almost medieval in its sentimental idolatry with a fantasy about a UFO—the sombrero of the title—that manages to produce a small civil war in ten easy stages. Brautigan's comic touch is predictably unerring and the hilarious narrative development is studded with wry surreal gags ("He never lacked things to worry about . . . If he taught all his worries to sing, they would have made the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sound like a potato.") The Yukiko bits, though, kept reminding me of that sticky moment in every variety show when the lights go pink and the compère flattens his hair, shoots his cuffs, slips the mike out of its stand and huskily lets rip on "You Made Me Love You."