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From the moment the deeply eccentric Hiroshi,
a budding Japanese jazz genius, hits American ground, the
ground starts hitting back with everything it’s got
— just as he is to begin a high-profile gig that promises
to make his career.
Hiroshi’s experiences in New York are exhilarating and
humiliating, thrilling and traumatic in equal measure. As
the quirky, disaster-prone, and language- and music-obsessed
artist struggles to recover both emotionally and physically
from a paralyzing illness that is not permanent but whose
aftereffects may render him unable to ever again play his
clarinet, he must also cope with the long-distance betrayal
of his beautiful girlfriend and with his sublimated guilt
over his role in the death of his sister many years ago, at
the dusty end of a mysterious route she called “The
Forbidden Pathway” in the tiny country town in Japan
where they grew up.
This seriocomic novel, densely populated with quirky characters,
is a love letter to New York City and to the English language.
It also shines a spotlight on one fairly peculiar corner of
the Japanese sensibility embodied in its hyperconscious but
absentminded, sensual but abstracted, intelligent but terribly
innocent hero, a Japanese Lucky Jim, who comes to terms with
becoming an adult and respecting his gifts against the dual
backgrounds of a mysterious pathway in Japan, which now exists
only in his memory, and what he lovingly describes as “the
filthy charm of New York City,” in the only too-real
present day.
MICHAEL ANTMAN is a veteran
advertising creative director and marketing consultant, and
a principal of the Chicago-based corporate positioning and
branding firm McSweeney & Antman. He lived in Japan for
three years, where he was a cross-cultural trainer and author
of the popular weekly magazine column “Antoman’s
Idiomu Scuramburu,” which used a serialized story in
Japanese to illustrate the meaning of various baffling business
idioms, such as “dog and pony show.” He also published
haiku in literary magazines and anthologies, wrote textbooks
and recorded English-instruction tapes that today can be found
underneath couches and car seats all over Japan.
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