I was completely obsessed with Abe as a young man.
Very useful, but flawed. It is very much a narrative of how the part of the scene of he was involved was built, so the focus is quite narrow.
I had two main issues with the book. First, that the translation is quite direct, which makes many of the descriptions of people and music sound quite samey: the inferences and ironies that are presumably in the original are missing. Second, the scene was obviously very insular and clannish, and marked out by 70s student maoist / nationalist views that are a bit exhausting to read about, and hard to sympathise with.