A coming-of-age novel. Man how I hate those generalizations, but that's what it is. The year is 1969. Yazaki is a senior in high school. He listens to Hendrix and read Camus. He aspires to be a rebel and a cool dude. To impress a Lady, Lady Jane, he barricades the school and wants to create his own festival.

It wasn't that I didn't read a lot myself, of course. The complete Sartre; Proust's Remembrance of Things Past; Joyce's Ulysses; the World Classics and Masterpieces of Oriental Literature series published by Chuko Books; Kawade's The World's Great Thinkers and Sacred Texts of the World; the Kama Sutra; Das Kapital; War and Peace; The Divine Comedy; The Sickness unto Death; The collected Works of John Maynard Keynes; The Complete Lukacs; The Complete Tanizaki...I knew the titles of all these books by heart. But the works I really loved and actually read and underlined in red ink were the great comic-book serials "Joe Tomorrow," "The Way of the Dragon," "Muyonosuke the Ronin," and "The Genius Bakabon."

There were no icepicks, no exploding neck goiters, no greasy fat perverts, or no women with piercing fixations. Coming from Ryu, this was a bit of a disappointment. Ryu without an icepick is not a Ryu. ( )

The film comes nowhere near the book. ( )

This is a really witty, funny book written by the perspective of Japanese man in his 30's, but writing about when he was 17 years old, in 1969 (hence the title). He grew up and lived in a small town in southwestern Japan, and he discusses the changes that occur in that year. I found it to be a light, easy read, and actually quite interesting to learn about Japan during that time, when back in the USA and Canada people were protesting the war in Vietnam, the youth in Japan were doing the same thing. ( )

Ryu's slight roman a clef about his high school days delves into the Japanese youth rebellion of the late '60s, a time of reaction against Western imperialism in Vietnam. The author's conclusion about those momentous days, however, is that rebellion was simply a prank, a childish scheme to attract women's attention.

Full review: http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/revi...