Slow Boat (Japanese Novellas)

it’s 2002, and a man not yet thirty years old is mulling over his life from the perspective of some dark place. that same ol’ song and story…. he’s had his moments but they’ve never turned out right. he’s been angry for most of his life, and his anger has turned to violence, but he doesn’t give up, not knowing what to give up, hard work blesses him with rewards though misfortune is his curse. but he keeps going on. he does know that he wants to get out of tokyo, outside of tokyo is where all the girls he loves go. it’s fate which always holds him back when he most wants to leave with them. tokyo becomes the object of his hatred. for better or worse, he’s a dreamer and he believes that if he can create a place which is not tokyo inside tokyo that he can live inside as he lives inside his dreams. this is a very witty novella in translation, giving the impression that english and japanese speakers are working with similar nuances. the author credits haruki murakami and pop culture and music as influences. it may be boring to cite dostoievski and rimbaud, but their influences are there. furukawa sub-titles his novella a remix, much is tossed in, much is conveyed and communicated, and much is understood.

I liked this book for personal reasons, my having lived in Tokyo throughout the late 1980s through the 90s. Although sometimes fragmentary in structure and thus confusing in general, I followed along with the story delighted at its reflections of my own times in Tokyo. That is until the "ending." I put that word in quotes because there is no ending. I suspect that in the original Japanese this book could be lauded for the journey, not the destination (for there is none). The conceit of never being able to leave Tokyo was beyond absurd to me. How hard could it be to board any number of single train lines, east, west, north, or south; nod off and wake up in Chiba, Yamanashi, Saitama, or Kanagawa? Oh yeah. Even with single train lines in this book, you can't possibly ride them far enough. Maybe they have no terminal stations. No endings. When I read that this book was a kind of homage to Haruki Murakami's "Slow Boat to China" I decided to give that a read. I liked it better than this. But I didn't love it. There is this thing that Murakami does: he takes on a kind of hard-boiled style of writing as if he is a detective a 1950s American detective novel. It doesn't suit the dork that he actually is. Still, Murakami's story is coherent and can be followed easily. It has humanity. But it's like Furukawa has been influenced by television and has the need to break the narrative up with nonsense. Kind of like how the narrative of TV shows are broken up with commercials. It did, however, keep me reading to the (unsatisfying) end.

I'm not sure what to make of Hideo Furukawa's short novel Slow Boat translated by David Boyd. In the last chapter titled "Liner Notes: Writing about What I'm Writing About" the author says, "This book demands an explanation." He’s right. The chapter titles are all taken from works by Haruki Murakami, and Slow Boat itself is a nod to Murakami’s story, “Slow Boat to China.” In fact the Japanese title of the book is 中国行きのスローボトRMX or Slow Boat to China Remix. You can find Murakami’s story translated by Alfred Birnbaum in The Elephant Vanishes (1993). In it, the first-person narrator remembers the few Chinese people he has a met: a proctor at a Chinese school where he once took an exam, a female Chinese co-worker he might have had a relationship with but managed to carelessly lose, and a Chinese acquaintance from high school with whom he briefly reconnects. It is a story of memory, missed opportunities or lost connections, and a sense of living the wrong life and aching for another. The publisher’s bio says that Furukawa was born in 1966 in Fukushima, “and is highly regarded for the richness of his storytelling and his willingness to experiment; he changes his style with every new book. His best-known novel is the 2008 Holy Family, an epic work of alternate history set in northeastern Japan. He has received the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, the Japan SF Grand Prize and the Yukio Mishima award.” The narrator of Slow Boat states in the book’s first sentence, “I’ve never made it out of Tokyo.” The rest of the book is a chronicle of his three failures to leave Tokyo, seasoned with interesting asides. For example on the first page, “The Japanese language is nothing but lies. Or maybe just chaos.” But if the language is nothing but lies (and let’s not be distracted by the fact we’re reading this in English), what is he telling us? Why are we reading him? He’s writing in Japanese because, “It’s the best language I have for writing down my experiences (or the contents of my brain).” That said, he tells us it’s 9:20 in the morning in December and he’s in Hamarikyu, a park where the Sumida River meets Tokyo Bay. As a fifth-grade student in 1985 he would not leave his bed and was sent to an “alternative school for dropouts” in the mountains, which “kind of felt like summer camp,” but was still in Tokyo. A new student arrives. She’s “not a freak or anything, but stuffed into her tight little bra are the finest, fullest-formed sixth-grade boobs in the Greater Metropolitan Area.” They become friends, but at the end of the summer, he loses her. When he is nineteen, he begins having sex with a girl who points out that her left areola is “a flawless map of Hokkaido.” Her right areola seems to be the map of another island, and when she identifies it and takes off for it, she leaves the narrator literally stuck in Tokyo. He starts a café (Murakami ran a coffee house and jazz bar) and when his chef is unable to work, the guy’s younger sister, a high school girl, fills his place. She is a genius with s knife. “When everyone else my age was holding a milk bottle, I was gripping my boning knife.” Her dream had been to join the family business, but one day her father told her “I know what you’re thinking—but forget it. This business is no place for girls. Believe me, you’ll never make it.” She does, in fact make it in the narrator’s café and they become successful associates and all goes well until the shop is smashed. The Suginami police “concluded that a large amount of ice broke loose from the undercarriage of an American fighter jet and fell out of the sky,” destroying the café, which the narrator’s insurance will not cover. Because Slow Boat is a remix of Haruki Murakami’s structure and themes, the book feels more like an artifact than a story, a work artificially created rather than one that grows out of engagement with the world. It is difficult to suspend disbelief willingly and thereby be engaged knowing from the get go that these characters, these situations are inventions and the author doesn’t expect the reader to believe they are genuine felt experience. What I do admire immensely about the book is David Boyd’s translation. He manages to maintain the narrator’s voice throughout, and it cannot have been easy. He also had to deal with dialogue and come up with an exchange like this: “Listen to me, you little #%&@ . . .” He’s looking me right in the eye. “I’m not some grunt making fast food by the #%$@& manual. Got it?” “Ye—yeah, I got it . . .” “Here. Try this, %$#&@.” [This site tends to refuse reviews with naughty words.] I would like to see the original Japanese if only to broaden my knowledge of the language and the translator’s art, but it does not seem to be available as a standalone book. If your taste runs to the improbable (an areola in the shape of Hokkaido?) and the artificial, you will probably enjoy Slow Boat. And even if you do enjoy the improbable, I think Murakami does it better.

I am in no way educated in Japanese literature or culture. I found the description intriguing so I chose this book. I love how the author experiences a place in time, especially the 1980s which are so familiar to me. I was mesmerized buy the arc of the girl at summer school and the full circle of her impact. The translator does a lovely job making the text sing; he really deserves praise for how readable this is in English. Coming at this cold with no knowledge of the author, I found this brief book enchanting.

This is a wonderful novella. It is a bit poetic, and the translation is exceptional. It is a short read, but packed with so much insight into the main character's life, his loss of three girlfriends, and his failed attempts to escape Tokyo.

This book is written in a staccato, slightly manic mode that is reminiscent of young, unformed writers wanting to embrace the gravitas of more experienced novelists. The themes are slightly wacky, like the bit about a woman's aureole that the protagonist eventually finds out resembles an island. However, these bizarre, high energy antics do not necessarily add up to good reading. Overall I found the plot points difficult to follow and found myself concluding that the pressured speech, disjointed, surreal ambiance, and anger were all a pose, without any real literary punch. Sometimes the anger reveals itself in vulgar speech, which I found very un-Japanese-like. It is probably due to the translator's decision to make the text appear hipper (not sure how adding F-bombs does that, but the current literati seem to enjoy the indiscriminate communicative power of vulgarity). Japanese explicatives are different than in English, and the Americanized translation diminishes the unique character of Japanese writing. The story does get better especially in the last third of the book. But whether that was worth it I am still debating. If you are expecting work as subtle and polished as Haruki Murakami (as suggested by the blurbs), you will be disappointed. The writing was more like Murakami when he was in Junior High school.

There was a lot I didn't like about this book in the beginning and I was ready to give it up. His first two girlfriends I found underdeveloped and very boring overall. The third however saved the day for me. The story around "Knife Girl", the teenager who grew up with a mastery of kitchen knifes and worked illegally at his restaurant deserved a book of her own. She helped change my mind overall about the book, too bad she too had to pass. The strange ending of his restaurant sanctuary called Kate, in a method reminiscent of a TV show I once saw on cable about a girl named George who had to help gather souls of the dead. She had been killed by a toilet seat that fell from a space station, much the same as the demise of Kate. The author can be descriptive and interesting in sections, but for me the book would have been better if it had focused totally on "knife girl". There are part of this that I'm not sure will play well with English speaking audiences. My love of anime, manga and trying to learn the language helped inn some areas, but I thought others might be a little lost. For instance a comparison early in the book discussing something that was supposed to read or convey simplicity and was therefore written in Kana as the Kanji would have distorted the meaning of the phrase. If you did not understand that Kana is a simple breakdown of symbols to represent Japanese language sounds, where Kanji can be very complex characters the represent entire words or phrases you'd miss the point in the book. There are a number of other examples where, not knowing the culture you'd miss the nuance the author was attempting. I recommend the book to fans of Manga and Anime with an appreciation of the Japanese culture. I recommend the author recover that "knife girl" character and give her a novella of her own. Take it from before he meets her and go beyond her leaving for America to work in a restaurant there she'd make an interesting start to what seems to be a male oriented profession in Japan.

I would rate this a 3.5 and that's a bit generous but giving this reputable author the benefit of the doubt. I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review. It is a book that is very hard to get into but thankfully was not very long. For those who like stream of consciousness writing, it might be better enjoyed. It is a coming of age tale told by a young narrator who had a troubled youth in Tokyo and his many attempts to leave. Literally, this book may have gotten lost in the translation from Japanese as it has gotten rave reviews. For me, it was a little too difficult for me to follow.