Golden Palace

Author: Takashi Sagawa
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: Midnight Express is the code word among foreign prisoners in Turkish prisons. They call escaping prison "hitching a ride on the Midnight Express." The author views his own journey as an "escape"—a journey of spatial wandering transformed into the threads of words, fueled by a compassionate heart—emotional ups and downs as the lifeblood of his writing, unfolding a social tapestry of joys and sorrows of people from various strata across the Eurasian continent. At the age of twenty-six, the author suddenly had an idea: let's take a 20,000-kilometer bus trip from Delhi to London. So, the author embarked on this strange and interesting journey. He arrived in Hong Kong, a place where he was unfamiliar with the land and people, and was inexplicably drawn into the revelry of the metropolis, not noticing that he had lingered in the north for too long. Next, he came to Macau and became obsessed with gambling, nearly losing all his travel expenses, but thankfully, in the end, he luckily won back some of the money and continued on his way. Then, he flew to Bangkok, experiencing a city life even livelier than that of Beijing or Hong Kong. After that, he took a train south from the Malay Peninsula and, by chance, ended up staying in a brothel in Penang, going on picnics and watching movies with the ladies. Then, he arrived in Singapore to discover and experience the ordinary lives of people in this city-state.