Fugue of Exits: Improvised Prose from the Shadows of Japan

By Dan Cosley

Fugue of Exits: Improvised Prose from the Shadows of Japan
by Dan Cosley

A foreign musician moves through Japan as both participant and outsider-gaijin, perpetual guest. Carrying his instrument like a passport, he drifts between temples and subways, rehearsal rooms and back-alley bars. Each passage is an exit: from a city, a performance, an identity-yet never a final arrival.

Twelve improvised episodes unfold like a score: restless, layered, fugitive. The prose bends toward jazz, veering between sharp dissonance and unexpected silence. Japan itself becomes stage and labyrinth, shaping a meditation on travel, art, and impermanence.

At once intimate and panoramic, Fugue of Exits is not memoir, not fiction, not travel writing exactly. It is a fugue: variations of departure and return, told from the vantage of the foreigner who can never fully belong, yet finds in exile a strange kind of freedom.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FRZH9V5Y
• ISBN13: 9798266430808
• Release Date: September 2025
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 57 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.1" x 5.0"