Bon Voyage Co. turns travel into a continuing trade.
Bon Voyage Co., the English name attached to Haruomi Hosono's 1976 Taian Yōkō, sounds like a firm whose business is wishing people a pleasant journey. A company generally requires a fixed address; a journey involves leaving one. The contradiction makes a promising entrance to the record. Distance is not merely scenery waiting on a cover. Exchange, handling, and hospitality are already possibilities within the name. The imagined world resembles a trading house through which things keep moving, rather than a destination arranged exclusively for a visitor's photograph.
Nippon Crown's program places “Hong Kong Blues,” “Roochoo Gumbo,” and “Tokyo Shyness Boy” within the same album. Hong Kong, an invocation of the Ryukyus, and Tokyo sit alongside words such as blues and gumbo without becoming one geographical location. The juxtaposition rewards attention. A place name summons a set of associations; a neighboring word shifts them. A record can use those shifts to loosen the places assigned to center and periphery by a conventional map. Its traffic moves through language as well as between locations.
The trading-house idea also draws attention to objects, commerce, and ordinary contact as vehicles of cultural movement. It offers an alternative to the solitary artist discovering an entire world unaided. These titles need not be treated as ethnographic reports for their curiosity to matter. A more productive approach notices how differences are brought close without being made wholly identical. Humor helps. A firm, a shy boy, and a wish for safe travel keep cross-regional ambition at a scale where somebody might still sit down for a conversation.
If Tropical Dandy suggests a person setting off with a particular bearing, Bon Voyage Co. can be read as a temporary place of business established for these comings and goings. It is more than another page in the same itinerary. Going to look elsewhere becomes an ongoing method. Later listeners may file the record in different categories without requiring those relationships to be bought up by any one of them. The best trading house might let somebody arrive with a question and leave with several unanticipated ones. A pleasant journey can remain pleasantly unfinished.