![]() I recently saw him in Tokyo, reading with Kou Machida, another of Japan’s greatest living writers. Punk is rampant in Furukawa’s writing, but it’s most obvious when he reads. Furukawa “samples” a few key lines from Murakami’s “Slow Boat” and uses them as chapter titles in his novella, but the worlds constructed around those words are radically different. That said, the two stories have little in common. He’s a big Murakami fan and, in Furukawa’s own words, Slow Boat is a Murakami “remix.” But, as Furukawa makes clear in his “Liner Notes” (the afterword to Slow Boat), Murakami was on his mind when he wrote his book. Furukawa’s story has a lot to do with Sonny Rollins’s later take on the standard. Originally, it comes from Frank Loesser’s hit song “On a Slow Boat to China,” which charted in five versions (by Kay Kyser, Freddy Martin, Benny Goodman, Art Lund, and Larry Clinton) within six weeks of its first release in 1948. 2017) after Haruki Murakami’s short story “A Slow Boat to China,” but the title has been around for years. Hideo Furukawa named his novella Slow Boat (2003 trans. Here he discusses the book’s literary and musical influences. ![]() David Boyd’s translation of Hideo Furukawa’s novella Slow Boat was published in 2017 by Pushkin Press. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |