SOURCE: Bankston III, Carl L. “Japanese by Spring.” Bloomsbury Review 13, no. 2 (March-April 1993): 10.

In the following review of Japanese by Spring, Bankston asserts that, despite some flaws in the narrative, “Reed's enormous gift for social satire enables him to get away with breaking many of the normal rules of fiction.”

Chappie Puttbutt, neoconservative black academic and protagonist of Japanese by Spring, is described as having reviewed an earlier Ishmael Reed novel with the remark, “For those looking for plot, character development, and logic, skip this one.” It must be admitted that Aristotle might be hard-pressed at times to recognize the logical progression of Reed's writing. The narrative tends to ramble in and out of extended didactic digressions on the virtues of linguistic pluralism, the wrongs supposedly done to Clarence Thomas, Japanese American trade conflicts, and almost every other issue of interest to the author. The plot speeds through more...