At bottom right, Bob Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo walk through a snowy landscape created by Hiroshige Ando (1793-1858), one of Japan’s greatest woodblock print masters.
The original photo of the couple, used for the cover of Dylan’s 1963 album Freewheelin’ was shot in Greenwich Village in February 1963. It was pretty cold there too, judging by the snow on the ground.
The ‘woodblock’ artwork was created to publicize Dylan’s current 11 concert tour of Japan. The script above the figures says “welcome to Japan” and gives the year in the traditional counting system as Reiwa 5 (2023).
Dylan will be 82 next month, but his voice was clearer and stronger than it has been in a long time. He performed all except one of the songs from his exceptional album Rough and Rowdy Ways, released in 2020.
Twelve years old, they put me in a suit
Forced me to marry a prostitute
There were gold fringes on her wedding dress
That’s my story, but not where it ends
She’s still cute, and we’re still friends
From Key West
I’ll pick a number between one and two
And ask myself, “What would Julius Caesar do?
From My Own Version of You
Step right into the burning hell
Where some of the best-known enemies of mankind dwell
Mr. Freud with his dreams, Mr. Marx with his axe
See the rawhide lash rip the skin from their backs
From My Own Version of You
Everything’s flowing all at the same time
I live on a boulevard of crime
I drive fast cars, and I eat fast foods
I contain multitudes
From I Contain Multitudes
The hall was by no means full, but the mood was reverent. In the seat directly in front of me was a skinny figure sporting a black leather jacket and a mass of curly hair in the style of Dylan in the mid-60s.
It turned out to be Naoki Urasawa, one of Japan’s most imaginative and successful manga creators. Thanks to 20th Century Boy, Pluto and other best selling series, he is a household name in Japan and has a strong following overseas too. According to Bong Joon-ho, director of the Oscar-winning film Parasite (2019), Urasawa is “the greatest story-teller in the world today”.
He is also a major Dylan fan and leads a folk rock band.
The real Dylan was in relatively expansive form, performing significantly rewritten versions of some familiar songs and joshing with his musicians as he introduced them. Supposedly, one had appeared in the TV show Columbo, another in “the movie Tommy” and another was said to have played the supersized Hoss Cartwright in the 1960s TV show Bonanza !
One of Dylan’s improvised lyrics ran “in another ten or twenty years I’ll be gone”. So he’ll probably be back in Reiwa 6.