Every Day I Read by Hwang Bo-Reum, translated by Shanna Tan (Bloomsbury) ~Janet Brown

Reading might be the most solitary action we undertake. We talk about what we read, why we read, and where we read, but how we read remains undiscussed. Book clubs, silent reading gatherings, and acknowledgements of reading as therapy are all places of common ground but when we sit with a book, whether it's in paper or on a screen, nothing comes in between our page-turning and the words on those pages. Perhaps someone comments on how rapidly or slowly we move on to the next book, but nobody knows how we absorb its words in the moment of reading. It's an action that's as private as prayer and as individual as grief.

Every Day I Read, Hwang Bo-Reum says and my first reaction was "So what?" That's like saying "Every Day I Breathe.” Even people who aren't bibliophiles are readers; my years of working in bookstores taught me that. Everybody reads: comic books, instruction manuals, cookbooks, the Bible, the Koran, first aid instructions. Books are part of everyone's lives even if they never read for pleasure.

But still I bought Hwang's book because of the incomprensible hubris of its subtitle: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books. What could she possibly tell me that would increase the intimate and essential relationship I've had with words on a page for the past 73 years?

She hooked me with her first paragraph because she asks the same questions I did as a bookseller. Tell me who you are and I'll tell you what you might want to read. Then she intrigued me by espousing the universal appeal of books on the bestseller lists. Clearly this reader was more democratic and pragmatic than my snobbish literary self.

As it turns out, she's a much more adventurous reader too. She's taught herself how to read translated literature that native speakers (and by that I mean me) shy away from after encountering the first sentence. 

"Don't we love a good challenge," a friend asks Hwang when she's surprised that a 600-page book on art history is one of the most popular offerings at a book exchange. Hwang certainly does. Her reading ranges from Anne Fadiman's delightful essay collection, Ex Libris to Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein. She quotes from a book written by a Korean bartender called How to Drink a Novel, and later admits "It was only after reading Aristotle that I've never sought out happiness." How did she achieve this wide-ranging and fearless approach to reading?

Although she chooses a book based on how it makes her feel when she first picks it up, Hwang is a fervent advocate of going beyond her comfort zone, be it emotionally or intellectually. She quotes Kafka's advice, "We ought to read only the books that wound or stab us," while refusing to be limited by those words, and when she's daunted by a book, she'll read a sentence over and over until she understands it. Only then will she move on to the next and the next, until she’s finally reached the last page. (She also espouses reading more than one book at a time. No wonder!)

While many of her essays concentrate on why she reads, the most compelling pieces tell us how she does this. Will I use her method and follow her into Nichomachean Ethics? Will I finally pick up Flaubert's Parrot? Only Hwang Bo-Reum has made me wonder "Why not?"

Where will she take you? Go beyond the cute cover filled with cats and bookshelves to find out.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan, translated by Jesse Kirkwood (Penguin) ~Ernie Hoyt

Rie Qudan is a Japanese writer who was born in the city of Urawa which is now part of Saitama in Saitama Prefecture. She made her debut as a writer in 2021 when her book 悪い音楽  (Bad Music) was published. Her first book and her novella Schoolgirl were published in English by Gazebo Books in 2025. The book won the 170th Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary prize for new writers.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo is her second novel to be published in English. It was originally published in the Japanese language with the title 東京都同情塔 (Tōkyō-to Dōjō Tō) by Shicho in 2023 and was translated by Jesse Kirkwood, a multilinguist who is proficient in French, Polish, and Japanese. 

Kudan’s novel is set in the city of Tokyo in the near future and is narrated by a woman architect named Sara Machina, her last name being pronounced as Makina, and her would-be biographer, Takt.

The story opens with Machina having a conversation with herself in her head. Her firm had been chosen to build what would become the centerpiece of Tokyo - Sympathy Tower Tokyo. What bothers her is the excessive use of katakana, a phonetic script in Japanese that is mainly used for writing foreign words, names, onomatopoeia, and scientific terms. Sympathy Tower Tokyo - シンパシータワートーキョー (In katakana English it would be pronounced shin・pa・shee tawa- tōkyō). 

So, what exactly is the Sympathy Tower Tokyo? It is the name for a prison that is to be built in the middle of Gyoen Gardens in Shinjuku, one of Tokyo’s most popular botanical gardens. 

For Machina, “-the sound of it, the katakana charactersused to approximate the English words, and what those words meant, and all the currents of power swirling around the project - started to bother me, and now there was no going back.” 

The more she thinks about it, the angrier she gets. She keeps asking herself, “Why this name?” and her own response to that question is, “Because the Japanese people are trying to abandon their own language”. She can’t understand why the Japanese want to use these foreign words - シングルマザー (shinuru maza / single mother), パートナー (patona / partner), ディファレントリー・エイブルド (diffarentori eiburudos / differently abled) when they have their equivalents in Japanese - 母子家庭の母親 (boshikatei no hahaoya), 配偶者 (haigusha), and 障害者 (shogaisha).

The tower would house homo miserabilis, the new word for 犯罪者 (hanzaisha), formerly “criminal” in English.  According to an AI-built, a fictictious chatbot that is similar in design and concept as ChatGPT, the concept was first proposed by the sociologist and happiness scholar Masaki Seto. 

Seto had written a book titled Homo Miserabilis : The New Subjects of Our Sympathy. Seto “sets out a caring attitude toward convicts and juvenile delinquents serving sentences in correctional facilities, urging us to consider their backgrounds, personal circumstances and personalities as deserving of pity, tenderness, and compassion”. 

Seto also created the term Homo Felix - a word for those who are “happy” or “fortunate”. He emphasizes the “need for Homo Felix to acknowledge their own privilege”. Of course there are those who oppose the building of the tower and argue that criminals, not homo miserabilis, do not deserve sympathy and should be punished for their crimes. 

Sympathy Tower Tokyo does get built but during its construction, Machina continually referred to it as the Tōkyō-to Dōjō Tō and the name became more popular in usage than its official title. It would also be the last building Machina designs. 

What really makes this novel interesting is Qudan’s use of ChatGPT to write about 5% of the book. However, she later clarifies that AI was used only for the AI dialogue in the book. It’s a book that’s guaranteed to start discussions on language and the use of artificial intelligence, which in my honest opinion, is a good thing.


Julie Chan is Dead by Liann Zhang (Simon & Schuster) ~Janet Brown

Maybe Shakespeare's the one to blame. When he announced "A sad tale's best for winter," he issued a pronouncement that publishing houses have taken to heart. For centuries, all the ponderous biographies, the academic elucidations, the gloomiest literary novels show up in bookstores during the darkest, coldest time of year. Anything light, diverting, and frivolous is dumped into the category of beach books. As soon daylight returns, so do entertaining bits of fluff, as bright and evanescent as daffodils, ready to toss into a bag along with sunscreen and an oversized towel. 

The truth is those puffy bits of fictional candy are wasted on the beach. They can't go into the water,  they're hard to see in blazing sunlight, and they're easily smeared with suntan lotion. When they're needed is during the cavernous black hole that stretches from New Year's Eve to St. Patrick's Day to combat Seasonal  Affective Disorder. Wallowing in depression, readers need books that settle lightly upon the brain and might even make them laugh.

They need Julie Chan is Dead. In spite of its grim title, this is a book to brighten winter's gloom, written by a woman who divides her life between Northwestern Canada and Northeastern Canada. Well acquainted with what's needed when daylight is scanty and temperatures plummet, Chinese Canadian Liann Zhang provides the perfect antidote.

Julie Chan is one of a matched pair, an identical twin who has the same looks but none of the luck enjoyed by her sister. When their parents died, Julie was taken in by an aunt while her sibling was adopted by the Van Huusens, a wealthy couple in New York. As Julie toils behind a supermarket counter, her sister Chloe becomes the darling of the Internet, an influencer with over a million followers on Instagram and six hundred thousand Youtube subscribers. 

She sees her sister only once after their separation, when Chloe descends upon her, followed by a camera crew, and presents Julie with a house. "A beautiful angel plucking me out of the gutter," Chloe embraces her twin while giving a loving speech, "so eloquent it must have been prepared." It all stops when a camera man announces "That's a wrap." Chloe vanishes. The reunion gets ten million views in ten days.

That's the last Julie sees of her sister for years until she receives a brief and ominous phone call that makes her worry. Going to Manhattan in an effort to be certain her sister is all right, Julie finds Chloe lying on the floor of her luxurious apartment, dead.

Physically the sisters are carbon copies and when Julie is mistaken for Chloe, she steps into another life. Chloe's body is accepted as the result of a drug overdose, taken by her less fortunate sister. Julie instantly has everything she's always wanted, burdened only by an identity that she hasn't been trained for. Almost immediately she meets her sister's PR manager and is given a full calendar of social events, ones that Chloe thrived upon and has Julie floundering. But not for long. 

What began as a Shakespearean of errors becomes a social satire, as Julie takes on the trappings of an Internet goddess. This is where Liann Zhang shines, with phrases as sharp and as piercing as a tattoo needle. Julie describes her aunt as the sort of Cantonese woman "who uses old Cheeto bags as folders for her tax returns." A fellow influencer "runs a pet account for her white Yorkie who looks like she'd bite your ankle for sport." Chloe's parents had adopted "a Chinese kid to prove they weren't actually racist." One of Chloe's friends gained over almost two million followers and a spot on the New York Times bestseller list when she wrote a book called Healing Through Dessert. Another achieves fame by writing poetry that’s "less profound than the back of a shampoo bottle."

Zhang's biting observations pervade her novel, right up to the bittersweet end. Her modern day version of Cinderella is the perfect way to spend a long evening after the winter solstice has set in. It's neither profound nor thought-provoking, just a snarky, funny helping of gleeful schadenfreude that's "best for winter," no matter what Shakespeare had to say.

Kinami Mayumi's Aomori Apple Story 1 by Mayumi Kinami, translated by Takahiro Ido (Ringo History Research Center) ~Ernie Hoyt

2025 marks the 150th anniversary of apple cultivation in Aomori Prefecture, Japan. Mayumi Kinami who was born into a family of apple grower, decided to write a book about the history about it. The book was independently published in May of 2025 in Japanese with the title of [靑森りんご物語 ①] (Aomori Ringo Monogatari 1). The English version was published later the same year with the title of Kinami Mayumi’s Aomori Apple Story 1.

In this first volume about the history of apple cultivation in Aomori, Kanami begins by discussing why it began. She explains that it “began as an unemployment policy of feudal warriors who lost their jobs after the Meiji Restoration”.

Three apple saplings arrived in the Aomori Prefectural Office in the spring of 1875. A man by the name of Tate-e Kikuchi, a former samurai, planted them on the grounds of the Prefectural office. According to Kinami, Tate-e Kikuchi is the father of apple cultivation in Aomori. He “dedicated his life to apples and other agricultural products”.

However, Kinami explains that it wasn’t just Tate-e Kikuchi who was responsible for the growth of the apple cultivation business. In order to get a real understanding of apple cultivation in Aomori Prefecture, we also need to learn about these three other people - Tsugaru Tsugaruakira, the 12th daimyo (lord) of the Hirosaki Domain, Daidoji Shigeyoshi, a chief retainer of the Hirosaki Clan. Shigeyoshi was also the founder of the Aomori Michinoku Bank, Kakuhiro Company and other companies, and Naritomo Sugiyama, another chief retainer.

Kinami also says apple cultivation in Japan wouldn’t have been possible without these people - Shungaku Matsudaira, Gartner from Germany, Lewis Boehmer, and John Ing.

Matsudaira is thought to be the first Japanese to make and eat an apple. Gartner is known for establishing a large apple orchard in Nanae in Hokkaido, and Boehmer taught the grafting method to Kikuchi. 

John Ing was a teacher. He was brought from Yokohama to Hirosaki to teach at the To-o Gijuku, “the only school in Tohoku at the time that employed foreign missionaries”. He fed apples to his students. 

There are many others that were involved with the growth of the apple business in Aomori. After the introduction of the main people involved in the apple business, then the real story of Aomori Apple begins.

The book consists of five chapters. The first chapter goes way back to the prehistoric era of the Aomori Apple and is divided into two sections. The first section deals with where the apples came from while section two deals with the dawn of the apple industry in the Tsugaru Plain. 

Chapter 2 deals with the beginning of apple cultivation in Aomori Prefecture. In this section, Kinami gives a more detailed account of Tsugaru Tsuguakira, Daidoji Shigeyoshi, and Naritomo Sugiyama. 

Chapter 3 goes into detail about the life of Tate-e Kikuchi while chapters 4 and 5 deal with “Apple Bubble” and Tate-e Kikuchi’s successors. This entire book is just a prelude to Part 2, in which Kinami will discuss the history of the Fuji apple, one of the world’s most widely produced varieties of apples.

If you can’t wait for Part 2 to come out, Kinami has also created a card game called Apple Pie. She based it on the game of mahjong. She thought, “if I incorporate the history of apple cultivation into the yaku (hand) of mahjong, players will learn about it while enjoying the game.

It is a fascinating subject and an enjoyable read. However, I think the publishers should have hired a more qualified translator for the English version. Sill, I am looking forward to reading the sequel and no, I have not played “Apple Pie” as I don’t understand the rules of mahjong.


Two Women Living Together by Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo, translated by Gene Png (HarperCollins) ~Janet Brown

Two women living together automatically evokes several assumptions. They are mother and daughter, sisters, best friends from childhood, lesbians, or roommates sharing a flat. Wrong. None of those categories apply to Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo, yet they made a leap that is customarily taken by married couples. They bought a house together, even though they'd known each other for less than ten years.

Six years of a social media friendship had let Hana and Sunwoo discover they had a lot in common. They knew many of the same people, they both grew up in Busan, and each of them made their living as writers and editors. When they finally met for a cocktail that turned into hours of conversation, they became friends who eventually confessed they were both tired of living alone, yet neither of them was ready to get married. They loved their independent lives and careers in Seoul but they had "reached the apex of living alone." The novelty of it had grown stale.

Hana and Sunwoo were weary of living in their apartments but real estate prices kept  both of them from buying a place on their own. But, they discovered, if they pooled their incomes and got a loan from a bank, they could end up with what they wanted. The problem was deciding what they wanted, as their separate tastes and needs came into play.

Every home buyer knows how this purchase can affect a relationship, especially when pooled resources come into play. Perhaps because they had a friendship of recent duration, the two women were able to compromise while being clear and businesslike in their financial arrangements. They took equal financial responsibility in all aspects of home ownership.

This was the most clearcut solution the two of them were to find in their unconventional housing arrangement. More difficult was the way they managed their daily lives. Hana was a minimalist who kept a tidy house. Sunwoo took great pleasure in shopping and accumulating but housekeeping was the last thing on her mind. Since Hana worked at home while Sunwoo's workdays frequently lasted well into the night, housework became Hana's burden, and one that she resented. After a few domestic battles, the two women came to an agreement,  learned to live with each other's different approaches, and hired a part-time housekeeper. 

Sunwoo loves to cook. Hana is happy to do the clean-up work. Each of them brought two cats into their new household and turned the four felines into a blended family. Both women are avid readers and movie-goers. When Hana is hospitalized, Sunwoo is her companion and caregiver. When Sunwoo gets into accidents that require medical care, Hana is there for her. When Covid comes with its mandatory isolation, the two women become best friends.

"Living with a good friend is essentially having a neighborhood friend who lives zero meters away," Sunwoo observes, while often mentioning how much she and Hana love to drink. At times they fantasize about returning to Busan and opening a pub by the ocean. Instead they fall into another way of working together, one that's made them famous in Korea.

It's probably inevitable that two writers who live together will eventually write about it. Hana and Sunwoo joined forces, wrote Two Women Living Together, and watched it turn into an international bestseller. "It was as if our society had been waiting for a book like this," Hana says. The success of their collaboration is overwhelming, letting them pay off their mortgage and turn their backs on employers. In addition to writing a sequel about traveling together, they've created a podcast that's been picked up by Apple and Spotify. "It's like we're a quaint family restaurant that has received a Michelin star," Hana concludes.

Told in alternating voices, Hana and Sunwoo present their story with humor and candor, in short chapters that resemble blog posts. The simplicity of Two Women Living Together doesn't obscure the truth that these two women took a big chance and succeeded, making their adventure an enriching one, in every possible way. 



How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder by Nina McConigley (Pantheon Books) ~Janet Brown

Amma is lonely. She had never planned to leave India and America hadn't been a place she yearned to see. Her life as a well-educated girl at the end of the Raj had been shaped by England and that's where she travels after she becomes a lawyer in Madras. That's where she meets a Texas geologist, where she falls in love with a man who marries her and takes her to Wyoming. Not only does she end up in one of the most Western of all the fifty states, she's the first person from India to live in Marley, "a town for passing through, firmly oil and gas land."

Her husband's job with an oil company turns Amma into a single parent. Her life centers around her two daughters, whom she names after her two favorite authors, Agatha Christy and Georgette Heyer. She raises Agatha Krishna and Georgie Ayer on a diet of Indian folktales and British manners but as the girls become immersed in their own lives, Amma, isolated and homesick, sends for her family. When her brother, sister-in-law, and nephew arrive, they're the first Indians Amma has seen in fourteen years and she happily lapses into a life with domestic squabbles and shared memories, in a house that now shelters an extended family.

But for Agatha Krishna and Georgie Ayer, what's an idyll of companionship for their mother becomes a secret nightmare for them. Their uncle turns out to be a sexual predator who teaches both girls "the art of freezing." Disassociation of their minds from their bodies is the only defense they have against Vinny Uncle, who tells them if they go to their mother about what he does to them, he and his family will have to return to India. "You know how lonely Amma was before," he warns them.

When a neighbor's cat dies from drinking antifreeze that drips from the family car, the girls find their solution to the horrors posed by Vinny Uncle. They begin to put spoonfuls of Prestone into his glasses of soda, gradually increasing the dose, with the goal of having him dead by the summer's end. A story that begins with the sweetness of To Kill a Mockingbird, narrated by Georgie Ayer, ends with the same ambiguity found in that American classic. What does their plan cost the two girls and who was Vinny Uncle's killer? And who is ultimately to blame?

Daughters of a woman who was shaped by colonialism, Agatha Krishna and Georgie Ayer blame the British. "Everything went back to the British...It was the British who taught us to keep our upper lips stiff at all times." The British were the ones who divided India and Pakistan and taught Amma to embrace English culture, making her a double foreigner living in a provincial little American town.

Agatha and Georgie, "half-and-half," born in America, enter adolescence guided by magazine quizzes and articles that promise popularity. They become astute observers of why they are different and what they hope to become. Cataloging what white Americans expect from them as their appearances promise exotic differences, the girls list every stereotype associated with being Indian and show how little these categories figure into their daily lives. Divisions are what they live with every day and they use satire and wit to cope, until Vinny Uncle shows up. The division he brings is insurmountable and they know he is ultimately the one to blame for what transpires.

Nina McConigley, biracial herself, was born in Singapore and grew up in Wyoming. She knows what she's talking about and what she has to say raises questions. What's the difference between an immigrant and an expat? What's it like to be a Third Culture Kid who grows up in a white monoculture? How does life in a small town in the American West make it easy to consider thoughts of violence? Who's to blame when powerless children find a means to achieve protection?

This is a book to handle with care. It may look like a cozy little murder mystery but instead it gives a perspective that's badly needed and has been a long time coming.

Very Bangkok (Updated Second Edition) by Philip Cornwel-Smith (River Books} ~Janet Brown

Bangkok, according to Travel + Leisure at the beginning of this year, is the most visited in the world. It's also the least understood, by design and intention. A city where all wishes can be granted, for as much or as little money as a traveler wants to spend, it has carefully extended attractive boundaries that few vacationers care to cross. Different circuits appeal to different tastes, from the sophisticated and affluent to the wide-eyed budgeteer. Both might leave without ever deviating from the coherent pathways of the Skytrain, feeling certain that they've "done Bangkok."

For foreigners who have decided to live and work in this city, things become more puzzling, a situation that's made more difficult by the idiosyncratic, multi-toned Thai language. Within a couple of months, unanswered questions abound and become a galling source of frustration, in a place that constantly changes like a hyperactive kaleidoscope.

Back in the distant past, Philip Cornwel-Smith provided a compendium of answers in a book called Very Thai. That was several coup d'etats ago and both Cornwel-Smith and Bangkok have changed since 2005. In 2020 he followed up what was essentially a dictionary of Thai customs and behavior with an encyclopedia to the place he's inhabited for over thirty years. Now he's come out with an updated second edition of over three hundred pages. (This would be much longer if it hadn't been printed in a font that just barely goes beyond miniscule, with photographs that are predominately thumbnails, an unfortunate decision.)

However Cornwel-Smith found a way to pin Bangkok to accessible proportions. Accurately terming it a "city of the senses," he explains it in a collection of essays that reveal Thailand's capitol and primate city as it's experienced through the senses. He goes well beyond the usual five, venturing into the sense of space, direction, motion, and the one known as "the sixth sense." He concludes with the very Thai concepts of "heart" and "face," venturing into local perspectives in a way that could only be done by a writer who's made Bangkok his home since 1994.

Cornwel-Smith immediately targets this city's sense of impermanence, one that has probably rendered many of his observations inaccurate. He anchors them with a sense of history, from ancient to the beginning of this century. This provides background that's usually unknown or overlooked (or obscured by the city government), expanding the perspective of foreign explorers and residents in a way they aren't going to find anywhere else, unless they tackle the imposing bibliography that's provided at the back of Very Bangkok. 

This isn't a book that will be read from start to finish in a linear fashion. Much like the magazine that Cornwel-Smith launched and presided over for years, Bangkok Metro, it consists of discrete bursts of information that can be browsed at random. Unlike a magazine, it provides insights that are far from superficial and are frequently deeply sad. Cornwel-Smith quotes many Thai writers and journalists who have seen their city change and don't applaud the changes. (In a burst of candid schadenfreude, one of them who goes unidentified says that "Brexit and Trump are direct karma for Western criticism of Thailand.”)

Delving into the spiritual underpinnings of a city that flaunts its materialism and carnality, giving urban history that illuminates areas that have been brutally modernized, providing a guide to the art that flourishes in a place that elevates financial profit, Very Bangkok accomplishes an impossible task. It provides as full an examination of this city as one book is able to capture. Although its readership will be a narrow one, its readers will keep it as an essential historical record of an enigmatic metropolis.





Celestial Lights by Cecile Pin (Holt) ~Janet Brown

Would you choose to become immortalized in history if it meant you would be separated from everyone you love for ten years, without human contact of any kind except for the three people who go with you? For Oliver Ines, the answer comes easily. He says yes.

A solitary child who has grown up feeling separated from the rest of the world, Oliver has two touchstones. One is a little girl who pulls him into her backyard search for cicadas and becomes his one friend until she moves away, never to return. The other comes through a rare conversation with his father who tells him he should work to become a mechanical engineer. Although the description of the job is prosaic, Oliver seizes upon it as a way to be "a builder of dreams."

A professor later tells Oliver that he sees him as a man who will sacrifice many things to realize his ambitions. When he's rediscovered by the cicada hunter, they marry and have a child. However the professor's assessment proves to be true. Oliver is given the chance to work for a plutocratic visionary who wants to conquer the universe. An earlier attempt led to failure when one of his spacecraft vanished into some unknown galaxy. Determined to achieve his dream, he hires Oliver to spearhead the building of an improved version of the doomed project. Then he gives Oliver the chance to make the dream materialize by becoming the commander of this new expedition, to reach the moon of Jupiter known as Europa and come back to Earth with samples taken from its surface.

Suddenly the man whose ambition was to build dreams is given the chance to become an essential part of what he has built. No matter that his mother is dying of cancer, his wife is in the midst of her own career, and their young son will be on the cusp of adulthood by the time this mission returns to Earth, Oliver accepts the offer.

Cecile Pin's first novel, Wandering Souls, (Asia by the Book, May 2023) told the story of a very different sort of voyage, a fictionalized account of her mother's journey from Vietnam to the safety of a new home, an odyssey as imperiled as Oliver's space journey. But Pin's mother and grandparents were driven by survival as a family while Oliver abandons his. 

His story alternates with entries he makes in the personal log that he keeps while rocketing through space. Through those pieces from his journal. Pin reveals the starkly impersonal spirit of their writer. While this is a novel of the exploration of outer space, it's equally a journey into the heart of darkness that lies within one man's soul. 

In his quest to become part of history, Oliver succumbs to a tragic flaw, the sin of hubris. His decision to override his craft's navigational auto-pilot turns him into a modern-day version of Captain Ahab, endangering the success of his mission and the fate of his crew.

Cecile Pin has written a novel that has more in common with Camus' The Stranger than it does with Samantha Harvey's lyric account of space travel in Orbital (Asia by the Book, December, 2025). As bleak as it is original, this book is a stunning achievement that carries a dark warning, along with echoes of “Be careful of what you wish for.”.




Away from Beloved Lover by Dee Peyok (Granta Books) ~Janet Brown

In this century, fourteen years is a lifetime ago, and in that other lifetime back in 2012, Dee Peyok was ensnared by Cambodian music. In the atmospheric ruins of the once elegant Bokor Palace Hotel, she heard the familiar strains of Procol Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale coming from a "ghetto blaster" carried by a young Cambodian man. But this 1967 rock and roll classic was sung by a voice she'd never heard and the words were in a language she didn't know. Sinn Sisamouth, a Cambodian icon, was singing this in Khmer, giving it the title of Away from Beloved Lover, and he captured the imagination of a young British singer and her American husband. Within fourteen months they were living in Phnom Penh where Dee Peyok began her ten-year quest into the rock and roll history of Cambodia.

Before the Khmer Rouge took control of the country and shattered all cultural norms, Phnom Penh was a vibrant center for the arts, encouraged by King Norodum Sihanouk. He was a man who produced and directed fifty films, taking a central acting role in some of them, and as a musician and songwriter, he welcomed advances in dance and music, the more modern and Western the better. Under his reign, young Cambodians embraced jazz clubs, the Twist, the art of surf guitars, and under royal auspices, rock and roll.

This all was brutally cut short by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in 1975. Within less than four years, this regime took Cambodia back into the Middle Ages, doing their best to erase all vestiges of education, art, and social norms. 

When Peyok began her musical odyssey in 2014, she was lucky.  Filmmaker and writer Rithy Pan, who recently released The Elimination (Asia by the Book, November 2025), had established the Bophana Center, which had an archive of Khmer film, photography, TV, and music from the period known as the Golden Years, from the 60s up to 1975. A foundation called Cambodian Living Arts was begun by Arn Chorn-Pond, whose early talent for music had put him at the age of eleven in a Khmer Rouge musical propaganda troupe, Youk Chang survived starvation and torture when he was fourteen to create the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which collected oral histories and mapped mass grave sites, where perhaps as many as 90% of Cambodia's musicians are interred.

With these resources and with the help of interpreters and fixers, Peyok tracks down as many surviving musicians as she can, from royal princes to agrarian peasants, from musicians who learned to play in temples and Catholic churches to girls whose stunning voices took them from rice fields to stardom. One man made it his mission during the Pol Pot years to find and save vinyl records. Even though possessing them meant a death sentence, he stashed them away in boxes buried in fertilizer warehouses. Another, blinded by smallpox when he was a toddler, became a pop star known as the Cambodian Ray Charles, and against all odds, survived the Khmer Rouge regime under which many disabled people perished. Other survivors came away with fingers ruined by the years of hard labor and found their musical gift had been diminished.

Peyok has written a musical history that is painfully intertwined with the modern history of Cambodia. Her passion for her subject is diluted by her reliance on interpreters, who couldn't give her the nuances of the testimony provided by the musicians whose stories she tries to tell. This is a diligent, dogged primer, offering an introduction to a rich and tragic narrative that may someday be told in the way it deserves. 






I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan (Astra House) ~Janet Brown

In China, Double Eleven and Double Twelve are two of the main commercial festivals. Double Eleven is a celebration for those who are single, giving themselves gifts and taking themselves out for dinner and a movie. Double Twelve is ostensibly a counterpart for couples, while actually it's the brainchild of online megasellers, Taobao and TMall, a way to stimulate e-commerce at the end of the year. This is when delivery couriers "start earning real money," as Hu Anyan is told when he tenders his resignation shortly before the onslaught of gift-giving begins.

Hu doesn't care. In his three months of working as a courier for one of Beijing's largest parcel delivery services, "the Haidilao of couriers," he has submitted to an unpaid three-day trial period, received a position as a contract worker with no benefits or insurance, and worked for weeks without a delivery trike, making his rounds on foot. A case of pneumonia has cost him a large amount of his monthly paycheck and his workday is brutally long. Taking a job at a smaller delivery service with shorter workdays and full insurance coverage is an easy decision. After all, he reasons, "What more do the poor really have to lose?"

Hu begins to examine the value of his work. All tasks not directly related to delivery are his fixed costs that make him no money. In order to reach his "desired wage," he has to complete a delivery every four minutes. Using a restroom costs him one yuan, so he cuts back on drinking water. A lunch break of twenty minutes costs him ten yuan, with the additional price of the food making this too expensive, so he forgoes lunch most of the time. "I became suddenly, painfully aware that time is money, " and he begins to "take time for myself." After work, he reads.

His choice of literature comes as a surprise. This man whose job essentially turns him into a human robot doesn't read comic books or martial arts thrillers. When he picks up a book at night, it's James Joyce's impenetrable classic Ulysses and The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil. Later in his narrative, when he tells about jobs he's had in the past before delivering packages, he reveals surprises. He's worked at a firm that produces 3D architectural drawings, learning Photoshop and AutoCAD.  He's been an anime artist and a graphic designer for a comic book publisher. He's had his own business. He spent time in Beijing as an artist, living a bohemian lifestyle. He's a published writer and a voracious reader of "American realism," devouring books by J.D. Salinger and Raymond Carver. He becomes a follower of Hemingway's "iceberg theory" that advocates leaving eighty percent of a story hidden, discovered only by careful readers. When covid arrives with its enforced isolation, Yu begins to write online and his work attracts magazine editors. 

It's only in his final pages that this man reveals part of the iceberg, showing his intellectual side, his thoughts on freedom, and his commitment to his work as a writer. "Freedom," he decides, "is largely a matter of consciousness, and not of what you possess."

The surprise that comes from reading his book is how much more freedom a Chinese worker has than an American laborer. Wages are low but jobs are so plentiful that Hu leaves one place of employment for another easily, without worry. Rent is cheap enough that he always has a place to sleep; homelessness isn't part of his narrative. He's able to afford food and medical care when he needs it and when he decides to move to another city, he does that without apprehension. When his work is contrasted against accounts written by American workers for e-commerce giants, Hu's life is the one to envy.



おばけ宇宙大戦争 (Obake Uchu Dai Senso) by 水木しげる (Shigeru Mizuki) (Poplar) ~Ernie Hoyt *Japanese Text Only

As I have mentioned in a previous review, I often read books in the Japanese language to improve my kanji character understanding and reading skill. The local city library sponsored a book recycling event and I took home five books. 

During my elementary school years (1st grade through 4th grade), our family lived in a housing annex for American military families living in Japan. We lived in a place called Narimasu in Itabashi Ward in Tokyo. As you can imagine, my older brother and I didn’t grow up with American superheroes like Superman or Batman and we didn’t get a chance to watch any American cartoons. 

My brother and I were big fans of Japanese cartoons. In the seventies, many of the titles were sports-related - Kyojin no Hoshi (baseball), Ashita no Jo (boxing), Tiger Mask (wrestling), and Attack No.1 (volleyball), were some of the anime series we watched. However, there was one cartoon which was very Japanese in content. That series was titled ゲゲゲの鬼太郎 (GeGeGe no Kitaro). Almost all of the anime series were adapted from manga of the same name. 

GeGeGe no Kitaro was written by Shigeru Mizuki. Osamu Tezuka may be considered the “Godfather of Manga” but Shigeru Mizuki is the manga artist who popularized and revived Japan’s yokai culture. Yokai are supernatural creatures and spirits in Japanese folklore. 

おばけ宇宙大戦争 (Obake Uchu Dai Senso) which literally translates into English as Ghost Space War is the fourth book of twelve in Shigeru Mizuki’s series おばけ学校 (Obake Gakko) - Ghost School series in English. All the books feature GeGeGe no Kitaro and friends. 

GeGeGe no Kitaro or simply Kitaro is the main character. He is a yokai boy who was born in a cemetery after his parent’s death. Besides his mostly-decayed father, he is the last surviving member of the Ghost Tribe or Yokai Tribe. His father, Medama-Oyaji is an eyeball with a full body that can also speak. 

Kitaro’s friends include Neko Musume (Cat Girl), Nezumi Otoko (Rat Boy), Sunakake-Babaa (Sand-Throwing Hag), Konaki-Jijii (Crybaby Geezer), Ittan-Momen (Roll of Cotton), and Nurikabe (Plastered Wall). They all help Kitaro protect humans against evil yokai and others. 

The main story of this book is about a UFO queen who wants to take over Earth. She looks nearly human but her minions squids with more legs. Her large spaceship is hovering over Tokyo. An egg-like item was dropped from the ship and when it hit the ground it released a smell so bad that the entire population of Tokyo's cats disappeared. 

Many yokai gathered at Kitaro’s house and told him that he needs to do something about it or life would become inconvient for all of them. Kitaro agreed that that would be a big problem and set off to counter the UFO Queen’s attack. 

The Queen became aware that Kitaro was the leader of the yokai. She ordered her minions to use their secret weapon on him - a hallucination bomb. He then saw his friends Sunakake-Babaa and Konaki-Jijii. They told him that Kitaro was in alliance with the UFO Queen and that he was here to attack humans. The hallucination bomb clouds gathered around Kitaro and stuck a “transformation nail” in his head. Kitaro had now become a slave to the UFO Queen. Not only that, Kitaro’s friends discover there is another group of aliens invading Earth. Are they here to help the Queen or are they going to help the humans?

Will the world be taken over by the UFO Queen? Will Kitaro’s friends be able to save Kitaro from being a slave? Your guess is as good as mine. 

The book includes a second story titled Neko Machi Kippu. In this story Kitaro and Nezumi-Otoko take a part-time job with Neko-Hakase (Cat Professor) to help him find out why when unknown humans increase, the more cats there are.  

I’ve always believed that you do not have to be a child to enjoy children’s books. I still believe that today which is why I enjoy reading books such as these.


A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Knopf) ~Janet Brown

Ma has won the Third World jackpot. Her husband has a research position in the States that enables him to send for his family and she, her father, and her little girl have just picked up their passports, each stamped with visas to the "country of encompassing hope." The three of them have plane tickets that will, within a week, take them away from Kolkata where heat is "a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one's head," 

Farmers have died, street markets have vanished, while people "wept for a handful of something to eat." Ma and her family aren't weeping. She's pilfered food from the emergency shelter where she recently worked, enough to last until the day she leaves this stricken city forever with her family. 

At nightfall on the day they've received their visas from the American consulate, a boy from the shelter breaks into their house while the family sleeps. He has seen Ma laden with spoils from the shelter's store of food and he feels no compunction about stealing her stolen goods. On his way out, laden with bags that will keep him alive, he grabs Ma's purse and steals her future. When he discovers the passports inside the handbag, he has no idea of what they are and tosses them into a mound of garbage. 

The tragedy of this is diluted immediately as the boy's history becomes part of the narrative. Boomba has struggled to save his own family, as much as Ma has committed thefts to safeguard her own. His own attempts to bring his family out of rural poverty have been dashed by thieves and his efforts have been no less heroic than Ma’s, nor more evil either. 

Presiding over them all is a billionaire, a woman born in Kolkata who has achieved wealth beyond imagination and has built a palatial home, a hexagon floating on the city's river. Her only daughter will soon be married and the rumors claim she will provide a fabulous feast for the impoverished and starving of the city. 

As Ma, Boomba, and the billionaire careen toward a tragic union, Ma's father yearns to remain in the city he knows and loves, a place that in spite of its privations, makes him laugh and feel alive. Although Ma regards her husband as a man in which "all is true," he is keeping truths from her. America is "a fading paradise," where crops wither,  rivers dwindle, and the streets are filled with silence. "Climate immigrants" face bigotry and hatred, and he knows his family won't be exempt from that poison. He withholds these facts from Ma and she tells him nothing about the stolen passports.

Boomba knows what truth has become. "The worth of honesty was itself a lie," he decides. In this novel, all absolutes become a matter of necessity. Who is evil when they commit crimes to save the people they love? And what use is virtue in any form when it can be negated by the power of the most powerful government on earth?

Who is the Guardian? Who is the Thief? At the end of this novel, the blame rests upon all of us. Megha Majumdar extends a prophesy for the future that is already much too real.

Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami (Mariner Books) ~Janet Brown

"I've always thought it makes good sense that the word for 'clean' in Japanese is the same as the word for beautiful." Few sentences have illuminated Japan's culture so incisively as does this quote from Emily Itani's Kakigori Summer. In fact few books have done this as thoroughly as this sweet novel about a family reunion, which makes it a fine choice for anyone intrigued by Japan.

One reason why I avoid Japanese literature is because it's so opaque. With all that I've read, from Yasunari Kawabata to Pico Iyer, nothing has provided a detailed glimpse into Japanese daily life, and that annoys me.

Kagigori Summer tells a conventional story of three sisters who come together in their childhood home after the youngest of them becomes "a national scandal” in Japan. A popular singer who has been idolized by her fans falls into a pit of notoriety after being photographed kissing the president of a major record company at the entrance to a love hotel. She tumbles into a nervous breakdown and her sisters come to take care of her.

Three sisters are a standard archetype, and true to form, these each embody a different facet of femininity. Rei, the oldest, is the ideal career woman who has achieved success in London. Kiki, the middle sister, is steeped in Tokyo’s domestic life, a single mother to an adorable blond moppet of uncertain paternity. Ai is the beautiful, artistic rebel. 

What makes these sisters different is their bloodline. They are hafu, with a Japanese mother who committed suicide when they were young and a British father who left them long before that and is immersed in his second family. Their maternal grandmother is their only nurturing relative, living next door to the house where the sisters grew up and where they come after Ai's collapse. 

In predictable fashion, they clash and grow closer over the summer, each finding their true path in life by the novel's end. What isn't predictable are the sharp insights and marvelous details of the Japanese language and culture, served up within the context of the novel.

Rei, living in England, finds herself, when looking at group shots of herself with her friends and colleagues, wondering for a minute or two who the Asian is in the photo.In Japan, she and her sisters are anomalies, "the size of ordinary Westerners. Towering Olympic shot-putter by Japanese standards." As outsiders, they attract attention and they focus it too. They have the knowledge of Japan that comes from living in the country and the perspective that allows them to see what makes their birthplace unique.

Carefully the novel describes the layout of a Japanese family home, the flowering plants in a cottage garden, the appearance of a temple and its shrines in a place that isn't thronged with tourists, the art of fireworks in a small town, the sacred rocks and wind-battered trees of a deserted beach with "paradise colors." It tells exactly how to shop in a place without a supermarket and gives the ingredients for making plum liqueur. 

And by using Japanese words without explanation, leaving readers to figure them out through context or google searches, this story gives as much total immersion as possible in its 322 pages. 

"There's no exact translation for 'cosy' in Japanese," Kiki observes, but in Emily Itami's generous unveiling, readers see the coziness of daily life for themselves and are certain to end up yearning for it--or at least for kakigori, the delectable mixture of shaved ice, syrup, fruit, and beans that the sisters share in their emotionally fraught, yet idyllic, rural summer.

How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino, translated by Bruno Navasky (Algonquin Young Readers) ~Ernie Hoyt

How Do You Live? is the English translation of 君たちはどう生きるか (Kimitachi wa Dou Ikiru ka?) which was originally published in the Japanese language in 1937 by Iwanami Shoten. This English edition was published in 2021 and translated by Bruno Navasky, a teacher and writer based in New York City. The new edition also includes a foreword by Neil Gaiman.

I had read the manga and text verision of 君たちはどう生きるか (Asia by the Book, January 2024) and was not overly impressed. I discovered this English translation of the book at the local city library. I was thinking that reading the book in English might give me a new perspective on what Genzaburo Yoshino was trying to convey. 

In order to properly understand the book, you would need to know a little about the author, Genzaburo Yoshino. He was a journalist and a teacher. He graduated from the Tokyo Imperial University, now known as Tokyo University and is considered Japan’s most prestigious university. Although he studied to be a lawyer, his interest shifted and graduated with a degree in philosophy. 

After serving for two years in the Imperial Japanese Army, he got a job at the Library of Tokyo, where he developed an interest in politics. This was during the time Japan was becoming more militaristic and authoritarian. A special branch of the police department was created called the Tokubetsu Toukou Keisatsu, also known as Tokko which translates into English as the Special Higher Police, a division of the police force whose main purpose was to enforce civil law, control political groups and ideologies deemed to threaten the public order of the Empire of Japan. 

In 1925, the Japanese government passed the Peace Preservation Law which made it a crime for anyone to say or write things that were critical of the government. It sounds like something the current American administration is trying to replicate. Yoshino was arrested for having ties to alleged socialists. He spent eighteen months in prison. 

After he was freed, a friend of his offered him a job as an editor of a book series for younger readers. Their plan was to write an ethics textbook for the series to teach the next generation how important it is to have a free and progressive culture for humans to grow. 

The main character is Junichi Honda, known to his friends as Copper (Koperu in the original Japanese version), a nickname given to him by his uncle, attributing the name to Copernicus for one of his nephew’s insights into human nature. 

The book is mostly a coming of age story set in Showa era Japan but it’s more than just about Copper growing up and finding his way into the world. It includes a lot of life lessons - the importance of thinking for yourself, standing up for others, and doing what you believe is right.

Junichi goes through a lot of growing pains and many of his experiences are experiences we can relate to as well. The book may have been published many years ago but its message still holds true today. I found Nasasky’s translation of the original a lot easier to understand than I did when I read the manga version. Having learned a little more about Genzaburo Yoshino, I have a better appreciation of what this book tries to accomplish.


のらいぬクロの冒険 (Nora Inu Kuro no Boken) [Stray Dog Kuro's Adventure] by 那須正幹 (Masamoto Nasu) (Mainichi Shinbun) ~Ernie Hoyt *Japanese text only

As a long time resident of Japan and a self-taught Japanese kanji reader I often like to challenge myself by reading a book in its original language. The city library was holding a recycle book campaign where I picked up five books. My kanji reading ability is still probably around an elementary student’s level so I mostly chose children’s books to take home. 

The first one I read was のらいぬクロの冒険 (Nora Inu Kuro no Boken). The title translates into English as Stray Dog Kuro’s Adventure. It was published in 2003 by Mainichi Shinbun and was written by Masamoto Nasu and illustrated by Moe Nagata.

Kuro, the main character, was born at the end of spring in the garden of a house under a magnolia tree. He was one of a litter of four. Kuro’s mother was a young dog whose doghouse was located near the root of the magnolia tree. She was all brown except for the tip of her tail which was white. 

In reality, the parents had no intention of getting a dog but their children begged them so they got a dog from an acquaintance of the father. At the time, the dog was still a puppy and they named her Moko.

At first, everyday someone would take Moko for a walk in the morning, but after six months, the family stopped taking her for walks. Moko would spend all day tied up near her doghouse in the garden. 

When Moko was a puppy, the children would bring their friends over and play with the dog. Once Moko got older, the family would ignore her and Moko became hard to please. If someone new came into the garden, she would bark loudly and jump at them with such force it seems like the chain would snap. Whenever she did that, the father would punish her. Now, the only person taking care of Moko was the mother, but all she did was bring Moko food. 

One day the mother was shocked. She shouted, “Oh no! Moko has given birth to some puppies”. Sure enough, she gave birth to a litter of four. The children were excited and begged their mom if they could keep them. Their mother ignored their requests but their father answered, “How can you keep any more dogs if you can’t even take proper care of Moko?”

The father’s solution to the problem was taking the four puppies away from Moko, placing them in a cardboard box, and taking the box to a nearby park and leaving it there. These days if someone were caught doing something like that, they would be suspected of cruelty to animals. It’s unfortunate that this practice still continues today. 

The puppies were still small and crying for their mother. At the park, the puppies managed to get out of the cardboard box and they went running around the park looking for their mother. Unfortunately, one of the puppies fell into a small river and was taken away by the current. There were now only three puppies. 

An adult stray who lived at the park heard the cries of the puppies. An old lady who frequented the park and would often give her food called her Shiro as she was a white dog. Shiro. She decided to take care of the remaining three puppies. However, by the following morning, two more of the puppies were cold and didn’t have a heartbeat. Kuro would be the sole surviving puppy. 

This is where Kuro's real adventure begins. Shiro teaches Kuro how to be a strong and independent stray dog. She teaches him to avoid certain areas at certain times of the day. She shows him different places where humans will sometimes give them food. She also teaches him to not trust any humans. 

One day, a young boy finds Kuro at the park. Kuro reminds him of a pet he had when he was younger and decides to take Kuro home. At first, Kuro is very cautious but as the days go by, he learns to trust the boy and learns that the boy’s name is Tetsuo. Tetsuo takes good care of Kuro and becomes his pet. 

The story is simple and easy to follow. It teaches the reader about being responsible for a pet. As long as owners love and care for their pets, there would be less animal cruelty, such as the father abandoning newborn puppies in a park far from their home. 

I’m not a pet owner but when I hear or read about the cruelty some people do to animals, it makes me very angry. Kuro was lucky to have been found by a boy like Tetsuo. If only there more people like Tetsuo, this would be a better world.


Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki (Viz Media) ~Ernie Hoyt

Spirited Away is the international English title for director Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli film 千と千尋の神隠し (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi). This book is the graphic novelization of the 2001 full length animation movie of the same name. 

It is the story of a young girl named Chihiro who is on her way to her new home with her parents. However, the father gets lost and the family finds themselves in front of a tunnel that goes through an old building. The father decides to check it out and although Chihiro is a little afraid, she follows her mom and dad. 

Once they’re out of the tunnel, they find themselves at what the father believes is an abandoned theme park. The father also smells something delicious and as they go into town, they come upon an area with a number of restaurants with a lot of tasty looking items on the table. Although there is nobody serving the food, the parents decide to eat. The father tells Chihiro not to worry, “You’ve got Daddy here. He’s got credit cards and cash”. 

Chihiro refuses to eat any of the food and decides to do a little exploring on her own. She finds herself on a red bridge in front of a large bathhouse. From the bridge, she can see a train and thinks the station must be nearby. She then hears someone shouting at her saying, “YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE! GET OUT OF HERE! NOW!”. 

Chihiro and her parents had unwittingly entered into the world of kami or spirits. The boy she meets on the bridge is named Haku. Haku tells Chihiro that she needs to cross a riverbed before it gets dark and the spirits start showing up. As Chihiro goes to find her parents, she finds that they have been turned into pigs and she can no longer cross the riverbed as it has become flooded. 

Haku comes to help her again. He tells her in order to save her parents and return to the human world, she will have to get a job here in the spirit world. He tells her to go see a person named Kamiji, a man who works at the boiler room for the large bathhouse. Kamiji sends her to the owner of the bathhouse - a witch named Yubaba. 

Yubaba tries to turn Chihiro away but eventually gives her a work contract. As Chihiro (千尋) signs her name, Yubaba takes awa the second kanji character of her name and renames her as Sen (千) and Chihiro soon forgets her real name. Haku later explains that that is how Yubaba controls people by taking their names. If she completely forgets her name, she will be stuck in the spirit world forever. 

Chihiro is taken under the wings of a bath worker named Lin. Lin shows her the ropes. However, Yubaba and the bath workers make things difficult for Sen. One of her first jobs is to clean a tub that hadn’t been cleaned in months. She then has to take care of a customer who is not only really large but also smells really bad. 

Later on, she sees another spirit and believing it to be a customer, she lets it into the bathhouse. However, that customer turned out to be a monster called No-Face and it is causing havoc on the premises. 

Can Chihiro save the bathhouse from the monster? Can she be able to find her parents and help them become human again? Will she be able to remember her real name and will she be able to help Haku find his own real name as well? All the answers to these questions will depend on the courage and spirit of Sen herself as she faces many challenges and obstacles to reach her goal. 

Spirited Away is not only a beautiful story that incorporates Japnese myth and folklore, it was also the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Annual Academy Awards held in March of 2003. It was also Japan’s highest grossing film until until 2020’s Demon Slayer : Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Movie Mugen Train,

Mending Bodies by Hon Lai Chu, translated by Jacqueline Leung (Two Lines Press) ~Janet Brown

Back in a distant decade I edited a series that had been translated from Chinese into English. The books were comprehensible but almost every sentence needed to be rewritten, something I had never done before as an editor. When the review comments began to stream in from people who had read the saga in Chinese, it became clear that much of the lyrical quality that had made the books a sensation in their native language was gone in English, completely lost in translation.

For a long time I had read contemporary Chinese literature and had decided I disliked it. After my editing experience, I realized what I had disliked were the translations done by Howard Goldblatt. After I finished reading that man’s translation of Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, I met the publisher who had come out with a Thai translation of the novel, a woman who had read it both in English and Chinese. “The Thai translation is better,” she told me.

I’ve never approached fiction in translation in the same way again. A translator, I’ve decided needs to be a writer who respects and conveys the feeling behind the words, as well as their exact meaning. If that doesn’t happen, the novel is flat and lifeless.

With this always in mind, I often read a translated novel wishing that I could read the original work without an intermediary, a feeling that haunted me as I recently read Hon Lai Chu’s Mended Bodies.

In an unnamed island city, the Conjoinment Act is changing the basis of the primary social contract. Individuals of the proper age are matched with another person of the opposite sex and the two are stitched together, quite literally becoming one flesh. The couples take new names and are given a common identity card. They lose any vestige of privacy and can escape each other only when they’re sleeping.

The surge of conjoined couples revives the economy, as they launch a need for medical professionals, filling hospital beds and therapists’ offices post-surgery. Clothing, cars, furniture, are all redesigned for the altered bodies. Employment figures soar. 

The newly instituted law evokes controversy. Some maintain its necessary in order to reconfigure failing social norms, while their opponents claim conjoinment is in place to distract people from “a long campaign for the city’s independence.” Others say it reduces the environmental evils that come from overpopulation. But in spite of the various opinions, nobody actively agrees or disagrees. “A certain ambivalence toward policies we had no control over was the last effective resort for protecting our remaining freedoms.”

This is the thought of the young university student whose dissertation is on conjoinment throughout mythology and history. Unsure of her conclusion, she finds a mate through a body-matching center and the two of them are stitched together. Unknown to her husband, this woman has chosen conjoinment as an experiment that will help her to advance her thesis.

“It’s both of us or neither of us,” her husband says after the surgery is over. He’s convinced this is the death of their individuality but his wife soon knows “we never asked what the other person did while we were asleep.” 

As she continues her study of historical conjoinment, she realizes the artificiality of the stitched bodies and the impossibility of a manufactured union. To continue her exploration, she drugs her husband into unconsciousness and, struggling under his dead weight, visits her aunt who chose to be separated after conjoinment, and the university professor who is her dissertation adviser. Slowly she discovers the conclusion that’s eluded her and she makes her choice.

An allegory that lacks subtlety, Mending Bodies never comes to life. It drowns under images that are poorly conveyed by someone who has no gift for rhythms in sentences nor for dialogue that is unstilted. One character bites into “a dank piece of tuna.” Another “knits her brows.” Descriptions miss their mark and become comic, “an afternoon in plum rain season, lush mold blooming all around.” So many promising images go awry, speeches become clumsily polemical, and I blame the translator.  Let’s hope that Hon Lai Chu finds a better one for her next foray into English.



The Elimination by Rithy Panh with Christophe Bataille, translated by John Cullen (Other Press) ~Janet Brown

Rithy Panh’s childhood ended when he was thirteen, when the Khmer Rouge changed Cambodia overnight. He “walked barefoot for four years,” watched his father commit suicide by refusing to eat, and saw his mother borne away in an oxcart, never to glimpse her again. He learned that “survival was our first duty,” and stripped of “his name, his family, his face,” he discovered that “nothing is more real than nothing.” As the Pol Pot regime began to crumble under a Vietnamese invasion, he led fifteen children, orphans who were no older than seven or eight, away from the fighting, slowly advancing toward safety. Astoundingly, he found his only surviving sister and with her made his way to the Thai border and a refugee camp. Two of his brothers had gone to France before Pol Pot took power and Rithy and his sister joined them.

When the Khmer Rouge leaders faced a tribunal, Rithy, now a filmmaker and writer, spent months in a jail cell, interviewing the man known as Comrade Duch. Duch had been the head of S-21, the Phnom Penh high school that had been turned into a torture center “where no one escaped death.” Under his leadership, 12,380 people were photographed, tortured, and died. 

Rithy finds “a man of memory, fluent in “the language of slaughter,” who says of the people who died under his direction, “They were at the end of the line. They were already corpses.” On a list of prisoners, next to the names of three young children, Duch has written the instructions “Grind them into dust.” He orders the draining of all the blood from living bodies to be given to wounded soldiers at the front.  In one case he gives the puzzling and horrifying order of “moderately hard torture.” He says that he never dreams, while he “incessantly draws mounds of skulls.” It was, he claims, his duty to follow orders. 

For the Khmer Rouge “there was no moral law,” Rithy says.  Educated men killed the educated class because “the closest followers of Marxism are the illiterate…Elimination was the goal.”

Duch spent his life moving from one belief system to another, from Buddhism to Marxism to evangelical Christianity which he believes has given him another life. He laughs and smiles as he’s interviewed, clinging to the belief that “the blood debt must be repaid with blood.” In his case and that of other Khmer Rouge leaders, this doesn’t happen. Pol Pot dies in his bed within a jungle encampment. Duch and the others die in prison cells.

They died victorious, Rithy claims, with their erasure of the dead. Only those who survived stand as memorials to the years of starvation and torture. While accepting the concept of the “banality of evil,” Rithy ends by extolling the “banality of good” that’s inherent in everyday life and is “inerasable,” a “work in progress…the human world.”

The Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer (Vintage) ~Janet Brown

Who can explain why a country that we’ve never known can call to us? Pico Iyer, a man of many backgrounds, felt an inexplicable affinity for Japan from childhood onward. Without ever having been there, it always felt like “an unacknowledged home” and when he spent a long layover in the town of Narita while on his way to Southeast Asia, what he saw was much like his boyhood in England. “A sense of polite aloofness” in “an island apart from the world,” “an attic place of grey and cold” where “polished courtesies kept the foreigner out” all felt very British. Iyer, “with no plans, no contacts, no places to live,” came to Kyoto with two suitcases, hoping to live a solitary life of learning and exploring the spiritual life in Japan.

Spending his first weeks in a temple, Iyer discovers that the temple is “ringed by love hotels. “A wonderland of indulgences” is only five minutes away, where streets explode with pachinko parlors, convenience stores, and shopping malls. Soon he finds a room on a narrow lane in a residential neighborhood that’s occupied almost exclusively by women and children. Iyer is probably the only male in the area who doesn’t spend his working hours in an office.

Kyoto, he says, more than almost any other city in Japan, is “self-consciously Japanese,” a “repository of the country’s female arts and of the spiritual life found in temples…a city defined by monks and women.” So it’s almost inevitable that on a visit to a temple he meets an elegant Japanese lady who invites him to come to her daughter’s birthday party.

Iyer is in love with Kyoto by now, wrapped in “the blue intensity of knowing nothing but the present moment.” His senses sharpened, he finds that living in “a flawless world shook me out of words. Still his descriptions are precise and painterly, seeing “the moon a torn fingernail in the sky,””the sky a burnished strip of gold and silver,” and autumn as a series of “tidy daily miracles” with “drizzle softer than a silk still life.” He becomes enthralled by Japanese classic literature in which poetry and its two most famous novels, The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon were written by women. “Enameled perfection,” Iyer describes this, “poetry of the paper screen.” In Japanese, he’s told there are “different colors for each wind, different words for moonlight on water.”

It’s an easy step to go from this deep infatuation with a culture to a fascination with the one person who opens this culture for him. The elegant lady quickly reveals her restless spirit in English that is as articulate as it is charmingly flawed. She longs for Iyer’s freedom. He becomes enthralled by her quick intellect and her delightful candor. A prisoner of her traditional culture, Sachiko welcomes the opportunity to leave her household and take this foreigner to places she’s never been able to visit until now. She’s a fearless speaker of English and Iyer is eager to use the Japanese language in which he’s still a beginner so their conversations are “three-legged waltzes” in which emotions take on a greater prominence. While they discuss Herman Hesse and Emily Bronte, they forge a form of intimacy that neither expected.

The Lady and the Monk is a book that only carries a special meaning if the readers know the life that Iyer has now. Without that knowledge, it ends on a note reminiscent of Madame Butterfly, with Iyer leaving Japan and Sachiko embarking on a new life without him. In truth, this is an introduction to their life together in Japan and should have included an afterword to this effect. But even without that, this scrupulous and lyrical story of a double-barreled love affair, with a country and a person, is told with delicacy and grace, leaving readers with this question. Where is your own “unacknowledged home” in the world?