A startling novella from the heir to Haruki Murakami and Gabriel García Márquez
'I've never made it out of Tokyo. I can't tell you how many times I've asked myself if the boundary is real. Of course it's real. And if you think I'm lying, you can come and see for yourself.'
Trapped in Tokyo, left behind by a series of girlfriends, the narrator of Slow Boat sizes up his situation. His missteps, his violent rebellions, his tiny victories. But he is not a passive loser, content to accept all that fate hands him. He attempts one last escape to the edges of the city, holding the only safety net he has known - his dreams.
Filled with lyrical longing and humour, Slow Boat captures perfectly the urge to get away and the necessity of finding yourself in a world which might never even be looking for you.
Hideo Furukawa, born in 1966, is an acclaimed and prize-winning writer, hailed by many in Japan's literary world as a prodigy worthy of inheriting the mantle of Haruki Murakami. He was awarded the Mishima Prize in 2006 for Love. His best-known novel is the 2008 Holy Family, an epic work of alternate history set in north-eastern Japan, where he was born.
Publisher: Pushkin Press
ISBN: 9781805331414
Number of pages: 128
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
Language: English (Language of text), Japanese (Original language of a translated text)
Translator David Boyd brings the slight and endearing story into riffing, confessional English - Wall Street Journal
The story is elegant and compressed, an investigation into memory, its faults and the arbitrary markers that we set down to locate ourselves, and to form our perspective on the present - TLS
In this refreshing book, Furukawa proves to be an imaginative and captivating storyteller - Publishers Weekly
The prose in this short novel fizzes... language is used in startling and unique ways. Even the puns work in translation - Japan Times
Not only readable but very enjoyable... bound to leave you engrossed in self-questioning - The Japan Society
Untitled Empyrean (Not Book Four)
The Raven Scholar
The Devils
The Fires of December
Dungeon Crawler Carl
The Ascended
The Song of Achilles
This Shattered Tempest
Vine of Hearts
With Hearts of Flame
The Unicorn Hunters
A Court of Thorns and Roses 7
Runebreaker
Once Upon a Broken Heart
Disenchanted
From nearly the first page I could tell that Furukawa was heavy influenced by Haruki Murakami. After reading the afterword Slow Boat was written as a homage to a short story by Murakami. Slow Boat doesn't reach... More
The author makes it clear that ‘Slow Boat’ pays homage to Murakami’s style, making reference to ‘A Slow Boat to China’. Despite this, I still found it retained its own style and voice. I found the writing to be... More
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