---
product_id: 66526863
title: "Slow Boat (Japanese Novellas)"
price: "E£ 2249"
currency: EGP
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 8
url: https://www.desertcart.com.eg/products/66526863-slow-boat-japanese-novellas
store_origin: EG
region: Egypt
---

# Slow Boat (Japanese Novellas)

**Price:** E£ 2249
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## Description

desertcart.com: Slow Boat (Japanese Novellas): 9781782273288: Furukawa, Hideo, Boyd, David: Books

Review: sonny rollins and the beatles - 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.
Review: Evocative of Its Time and Place - 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.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #600,290 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #1,506 in Cultural Heritage Fiction #4,690 in Short Stories Anthologies #20,599 in Literary Fiction (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.0 out of 5 stars 90 Reviews |

## Images

![Slow Boat (Japanese Novellas) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71yF9uU4M0L.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ sonny rollins and the beatles
*by C***R on May 28, 2017*

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.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Evocative of Its Time and Place
*by G***R on November 5, 2018*

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.

### ⭐⭐⭐ It's a slow boat that goes nowhere
*by W***D on February 15, 2021*

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.

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*Last updated: 2026-03-02*