(concept) album, a novel with twelve tracks. Like the way Murakami uses the Charlie Parker tune -and all that jazz - in his books, Furukawa uses echoes and bits of Murakami's work in this. Murakami's 'unforgettable short story - 'A Slow Boat to China'' is the focal point, but Furukawa's book is more than a riff on just that. He admits: 'For me, Murakami is at the centre of it all - the roots of my soul'. Phrases lifted from the work of another writer. Slow Boat is presented as: 'A Slow Boat to China RMX' (remix), with a music-album-like playlist table of contents - and 'Liner Notes' for a conclusion.Īs everything from the book-subtitle to the liner notes-subtitle ('Writing about what I'm writing about') suggests, we are deep in Murakami Haruki territory here. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. 'A mood of gloomy, wisecracking rebellion against the 'idiotic world' pervades the writing.' - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal.Ignatov, Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs The new blended structure is completed when readers fill in the patterns created by earlier projections.' - Michael S. (.) Furukawa is playing a game specifically with readers of Murakami, inviting them to project analogs from Murakami’s universe onto his work. If the book were a song, the dream sequences would fulfill the chorus function.

(.) Dream sequences are the driving thematic force of Furukawa’s narrative.

'Broadly put, SB2002 is a novel about escape, about three attempts, three failures, and a dubious success.

Even the puns work in translation.' - Iain Maloney, The Japan Times For a novella that is about the limits of language (the narrator regularly curses Japanese for not having the right words or structures to allow him full self-expression), language is used in startling and unique ways. David Boyd has done a spectacular job of translating not only the casual, chatty narrative voice, but the wordplay and linguistic nuances of Furukawa’s Japanese.

'The prose in this short novel fizzes.

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Slow Boat by Hideo Furukawa