In the review of Dai Sijile's book, Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch, Yanofsky states that "In the early 1970's when critics began using the label magic realism to describe Latin American writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, the writers being labeled found themselves in something of a predicament. They were being praised, but they weren't quite sure for what. As far as they were concerned, they were simply describing what they saw and lived every day."