With One More Step Ahead by Goro Takano

In With One More Step Ahead Goro Takano has composed an amazing post-national post-apocalyptic encyclopedic philosophical trans-genre literary critical untranslated novel with poems about post-war Japan, African America, Hawai`i, film, Japanese literature, television news, dementia, paralysis, a sex cult, the atom bomb, gender, race, culture, the corporate state and much more. Read this book and chant after Virginia Woolf: What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables!

—Susan M. Schultz, author of Dementia Blog and Memory Cards & Adoption Papers

Takano’s a magic poet—imagine Theresa Ha Kyung Cha, author of Dictee, writing a nearly 400 pp long epic with a layered mobile architecture that’s simply breathtaking in its metafictional possibilities, conjuring up a stimulatingly diverse array of allusive literary political worlds ranging from Flannery O’Connor [Church without Christ] to Nabokov to The Dream of the Red Chamber and Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and Dispatches by Michael Herr…nearly as transformational from chapter to chapter as a cicada’s many skins…

—Chuck Richardson, author of Smoke

The words in Goro Takano’s With One More Step Ahead seem to try to fill a hole, a void left behind by the abdication of self-image, of nationality, of identity. These words create a novel that exhibits the formalistic daring of John Barth while telling a story in a non-native tongue that, like Vladimir Nabokov’s English, creates a language more volatile than any written with ingrained mastery. Ultimately, the words never fill any hole. Instead, they take us deeper and deeper down to a dark and disorienting place that continually excites the reader with its threats and possibilities.

—John Dermot Woods, author of The Complete Collection: Of People Places and Things 

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Goro Takano is an “ESL” Japanese national who was born in the city of Hiroshima. He is currently working as assistant professor at Saga University Faculty of Medicine, Japan, mainly teaching English / Japanese literature to Japanese undergraduates.

He graduated from University of Kyoto (Law and International Politics), obtained MA from University of Tokyo (American Literature), and received Ph. D from University of Hawaii at Manoa (English / Creative Writing). From 1991 to 1998, he was working for a Japanese broadcasting station NHK as TV program director.

With One More Step Ahead is his first novel, which is based on his creative-writing dissertation submitted to University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2007.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 380 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 9781935402572

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