Peace Boat

“Electric blaze, Akihabara night. The rain doesn’t fall, it buzzes in the air like static on a broken television. Puddles slashed with neon, illuminated advertising trucks blaring songs and voices. The crowds slosh by, PVC umbrellas up. From above they must look like some slow moving mass of jellyfish – flup-flup, flup-flup – floating along unthinking, caught in a current they don’t understand.”

Opening with the thoughts of a waitress from a maid café giving out flyers on the rain soaked streets of Tokyo, Peace Boat proceeds to take its readers on a journey round the world in twenty four short stories. Following in the footsteps of the eponymous boat’s 2012 voyage this collection contains something for everyone.

Each story can be read individually, but taken as a whole they produce a dazzling, kaleidoscopic effect. Crossing the gamut from flash fiction glimpses of a face in a crowd to miniature historical epics, a chorus of voices cross space and time to tell their tales. They include: an Indian mystic watching the centuries drift by from his perch by a river, a Ukrainian resistance fighter going slowly mad in the catacombs beneath Odessa, a Romanian boy watching royal ghosts inside the ruins of the grand casino and a Jamaican child making a bid for freedom from her kindergarten.

Each story has its own distinct voice and with an accompanying photo from each location it’s hard not to allow this eclectic host of characters to ignite your desire to get out into the world and see the places that inspired this collection for yourself.