Author Richard Brautigan married Akiko Yoshimura in 1977. This was his second marriage. He wrote quite a few books back in the '70s. This page has some pretty good notes about his stay at the Keio Plaza.
One day a rather tall stranger stopped by and ordered a beer. He was dressed just about like you see him in the pictures blue jeans and western shirt but no big hat. He stood next to me and we started talking. I introduced myself and he introduced himself and asked what I was doing in Tokyo. The name Richard Brautigan meant absolutely nothing to me as I had never heard of him. I asked him what he was doing there and he said "I am just a fifty year old hippy who has never outgrown it. He said he was a writer and named a couple of books that I had never heard of probably Trout Fishing [in America] and [In] Watermelon [Sugar].
We often stopped by that Little Bar and just talked about nothing in particular. If anyone is ever in Tokyo and goes to the Keio Plaza he always stood in the same place about four feet over from the left side facing the bar. Maybe he left some " Karma" there or something. We often did the Sunday New York Times crosswords there on Friday nights as that is when they were published in Tokyo. As a rule he finished first but not always. After the Little Bar closed I usually went to my room and he went over to Shibuya where a lady friend of his ran a bar.
I felt that he was a fine person who cared for people. He once told me that I was the only American in Japan that he had anything to do with. He went into a small spiel about the Americans that were there that had nothing to do with the Japanese. He called them the Ropongi Crowd, I think. And he had little use for them. He felt that when one was in a foreign country that one should partake of that culture.
His book "The Tokyo-Montana Express" was influenced by his days in Japan. He killed himself with a shotgun blast in San Francisco in 1984.
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