The Tokyo-Montana Express
Read The Tokyo-Montana Express Online
Authors: Richard Brautigan
Published by
Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence
1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
New York, N.Y. 10017
Portions of this work first appeared
in
Mademoiselle
,
Esquire
,
Outside
,
California Living
,
Earth
,
Evergreen
,
Triquarterly
,
New Ingenue
,
TheCoEvolution
Quarterly
,
New Orleans Review
,
San Francisco Stories
, and
The
Overland Journey of Joseph Francl
published by William P. Wreden.
A limited edition of
The
Tokyo-Montana Express
was published in different form by Targ Editions.
The author thanks them and
Playboy
(Japanese edition) for publishing his work.
Copyright © 1980 by Richard Brautigan
All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where
permitted by law.
Manufactured in the United States of
America
First printing
LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Brautigan, Richard.
The Tokyo-Montana express.
I. Title.
PS3503.R2736T64 813’.54
80-17171
ISBN 0-440-08770-8
FOR RICHARD AND NANCY HODGE
Though the Tokyo-Montana Express moves
at a great speed, there are many stops along the way. This book is those brief
stations: some confident, others still searching for their identities.
The “I” in this book is the voice of the
stations along the tracks of the Tokyo-Montana Express.
THE ROUTE OF THE TOKYO-MONTANA EXPRESS:
The
Overland Journey of Joseph Francl and the Eternal Sleep of His Wife Antonia in
Crete, Nebraska
All the People
That I Didn’t Meet and the Places That I Didn’t Go
The Japanese
Squid Fishermen Are Asleep Now
The
Smallest Snowstorm on Record
The
Irrevocable Sadness of Her Thank You
What Are You Going
to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?
There Is No Dignity,
Only the Windswept Plains of Ankona
Cooking
Spaghetti Dinner in Japan
Farewell to the
First Grade and Hello to the
National Enquirer
The Closest I Have
Been to the Sea Since Evolution
Skylab at the
Graves of Abbott and Costello
Marching in the
Opposite Direction of a Pizza
Her Last Known
Boyfriend a Canadian Airman
Crows Eating a
Truck Tire in the Dead of Winter
The Last of My
Armstrong Spring Creek Mosquito Bites
In Pursuit of the
Impossible Dream
The Old
Testament Book of the Telephone Company
Another
Montana School Gone to the Milky Way
A Study in Thyme and
Funeral Parlors
A Different Way
of Looking at President Kennedy’s Assassination
Homage to Rudi
Gernreich / 1965
Turkey and Dry
Breakfast Cereal Sonata
The
Remarkable Dining Cars of the Northern Pacific Railroad
Five Ice-Cream
Cones Running in Tokyo
Poetry Will
Come to Montana on March 24th
A Different or
the Same Drummer
When 3 Made Sense for
the First Time
A One-Frame
Movie about a Man Living in the 1970s
Joseph Francl and the
Eternal Sleep of His Wife Antonia
in Crete, Nebraska
PART 1: OFTEN CLOAKED LIKE TRICK OR TREATERS IN THE CASUAL
On the third day out from Lucky Ford
River we found a corpse almost eaten by wolves (which are very numerous here,
howl in concert at night and keep us awake) and scalped by the Indians… We
buried him and went on our way, with sorrowful thoughts. —Joseph Francl
Often, cloaked like trick or treaters in
the casual disguises of philosophical gossip, we wonder about the ultimate
meaning of a man’s life, and today I’m thinking about Joseph Francl: a man who
brought his future to America, God only knows why, from Czechoslovakia in 1851,
and completely used up that future to lie dead, facedown in the snow, not
unhappy in early December 1875, and then to be buried at Fort Klamath, Oregon,
in a grave that was lost forever.
I’ve read the surviving sections of a diary
that he kept on a long unsuccessful gold mining expedition that he took in 1854
from Wisconsin to California, and some letters that he wrote back from
California.
His diary is written in a mirror-like prose
that is simultaneously innocent and sophisticated and reflects a sense of gentle
humor and irony. He saw this land in his own way. I think it was an unusual
life that led him inevitably, like an awkward comet, to his diary and then
later to his death in America.
In the beginning Joseph Francl was the son
of a man who owned a brewery and a glassworks in Czechoslovakia, so he was
probably surrounded by a stable world of abundance.
He became a classical musician who studied
music at the Prague Conservatory and travelled with an orchestra that gave
concerts in Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany.