Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (John Murray)

Sea of Poppies by Amitov Ghosh is truly a story of epic proportions. It is the first volume in the Ibis trilogy and was published in 2008. The story continues in River of Smoke, published in 2011 and concludes in Flood of Fire published in 2015. The initial story is set prior to the First Opium War between the Great Britain and China in a time when Britain’s East India Company was trading opium made in Bengal, a part of the Indian sub continent (currently Bangladesh),  to China.

The trilogy is named after a ship called the Ibis. A former slave-ship which was being refitted in Calcutta to accommodate the coolies who were to be transported to Mauritius, coolies being indentured laborers.  The ship’s new owner is Benjamin Burnham, an evangelist and a prominent player in the opium trade. Aside from Burnham, he main characters who wind up on the Ibis are an ordinary Indian woman and the man who saves her from certain death, an american sailor with a secret, a disgraced Rajah, and a Chinese opium addict.

Deeti is a housewife and mother. She is married to a crippled husband who works at the local opium factory. Deeti discovers that she was drugged with opium by her mother-in-law on her wedding night and was raped by her husband’s brother. She never tells her daughter, Kabutri, the truth about who her real father is. Deeti’s husband dies and fearing what her husband’s family will do to her daughter, she sends Kabutri to live with her relatives. The brother who raped her says demands Deeti to marry him but she refuses and chooses sati (ritual of self immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre) before succumbing to her brother-in-law’s wishes. On the day she is to perform the sati, she is saved by a lower caste man named Kulua. They both escape and find passage on the Ibis.

Zachary Reid is an American who is the son of a white father and a quadroon mother. He had joined the crew of the Ibis on its first journey from Baltimore to Calcutta. In a series of mishaps on the sea, many of the senior crew are lost and Reid finds himself quickly rising in rank. Once he sets foot in Calcutta, he is treated as gentry and is offered the job of second mate on the Ibis’s next voyage, transporting coolies to Mauritius!

Neel Rattan Halder is the rajah of Raskhali and also the ruler of the zamindars (Indian property owners). Halder has run up a huge debt and is unable to pay it back. Burnham says he can settle his debts by giving up his zamindary (property owned and governed by the rajah) but Halder refuses. Halder is then accused of forgery and is sent to trial, loses his case and is sentenced to spend seven years in Mauritius.

Paulette is a French orphan who grew up with her unconventional father and feels more comfortable in a sari than western clothes. Mr. Burnham had taken Paulette in after the death of her father and frowns on her love Indian culture. As Paulette gets older, Burnham is pressuring her to marry his friend, an older man named Kendalbushe. We also discover that Burnham has a perversion of his own which he as Paulette satisfy.  Fearing for her future, Paulette decides to run away and manages to gain passage on the Ibis. 

Finally, we meet Nob Kissin Baboo, a man who is the catalyst that will set many actions in motion aboard the Ibis. He works for Mr. Burnham as an overseer and believes that Zachary Reid is the incarnation of Krishna.

The prose flows smoothly although you may have to look up some terms which may be unfamiliar if your knowledge of colonial British India is limited. You will be exposed to words such as zamindar, zamindary, rajahs, sepoys, and lascars which you may have to look up on your own, but it does not effect the story. This book has everything you can hope for in an epic - high adventure, love, romance, and betrayal, loyalty and trust and the pursuit of a happier life. ~Ernie Hoyt

Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe (Haikasoru)

Miyuki Miyabe is mostly known for her suspense and mystery novels. This is her first fantasy novel published in 2003 in Japanese. The English version was translated by Alexander O. Smith and published in 2007. It is a coming of age story set in the fantasy world of Vision.

The story starts off right after the beginning of the new school year. A rumor has spread about a house located near the Mihashi Shrine called the Daimatsu Building. This is how our hero, Wataru Mitani, heard about it. He was told by his friend, Katchan whose real name is Katsumi. They are both in the fifth grade and go to Joto Elementary School. However, no one knows how or who started the rumors. Wataru is not prone to believe in rumors and wants to get facts to satisfy his scientific and logical mind. He makes a promise with his friend Katchan to sneak out at night “to see if there really is a ghost.” “And if one shows up, I wanna see whose ghost it is.” 

At night, as Wataru was debating about going to the alleged haunted house or not and not wanting to break his promise with his friend when he hears a voice in his room. A young girl’s voice even though he is alone. He almost puts it out of his mind when she speaks to him again. He now believes he has to investigate. 

The two boys manage to go to the Daimatsu Building near midnight, only to be discovered by Mr. Daimatsu himself, along with his son Noriyuki and his daughter Kaori, who was sitting in a wheelchair. Wataru thought she was beautiful but appeared to be despondent. She didn’t smile, she didn’t show any reaction to what was happening around her. Wataru began to think that her condition might be related to this house which is said to be haunted in some way. Wataru also thought it was strange that the Mr. Daimatsu would be taking his daughter out for fresh air at this time of night. 

The strange happenings coincides with the admission of a new transfer student at Wataru’s school named Mitsuru Ashikawa. A boy whose popular with the girls, gets good grades, and his good at sports as well. More rumors were spread throughout the school saying that Mitsuru had taken a picture of the ghost at the Daimatsu building. Wataru was hoping to meet him at school to ask about it, but Mitsuru was assigned to another class. Mitsuru seems to be drawn to the Daimatsu Building and this time when he goes, he gets a glimpse of someone dressed as a wizard walking up the staircase. After he gets home, he finds that there seems to be trouble brewing between his mother and father.  He learns that his parents are getting a divorce and Wataru’s world is shattering around him. 

Wataru doesn’t know who he could talk to about what he saw but decides it would be best to tell his uncle who feels quite at ease with. Uncle Lou, as Wataru calls him, takes Wataru back to the Daimatsu Building and checks the stairs again. Although, he doesn’t see a wizard, he sees bright lights emanating from what looks like a gate. This is where the real adventure begins. 

Wataru finds himself in another world. A world called Vision. He is told that in this world, he can change his destiny. He is told that he must collect five gemstones before going to the Tower of Destiny and will earn a chance to talk to the Goddess of Vision who can grant him his one true wish. What will Wataru wish for. Will his family become as one again? What of the friends he has made in Vision? Brave Story has also won the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for the publisher in 2008. The Batchelder Award being an award given to publishers for children’s literature translated into the English language. ~Ernie Hoyt

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)

Lahore, Islamabad, Karachi, Rawalpindi - currently these cities in Pakistan have been described as strongholds of the Taliban and also as havens for terrorists. However, the short stories collected in this book take place long before the Taliban came to power. The stories are about tradition, class struggle and social change in Pakistani life. Most of the stories are set in the towns of Lahore or Islamabad. The writer himself was brought up in Lahore and currently lives on a farm in the southern Punjab region.

This is a collection of previously published short stories compiled into one book. They are drawn from a vast array of literary journals and magazines such as the New Yorker, Granta and Zoetrope: All Story. One of stories, “Nawabdin Electrician” was included in “Best American Short Stories 2008”. There are a total of eight stories starting with the previously mentioned “Nawabdin Electrician”. Also included are “Saleema”, “Provide, Provide”, “About a Burning Girl”, “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders”, “Our Lady of Paris”, “Lily”, and “A Spoiled Man”.

In “Nawabdin Electrician”, a lower class man with twelve daughters and one son is a mechanic and an electrician who works for a wealthy landowner named K.K. Harouni. Nawab takes care of the man’s seventeen tube wells located on his property. He goes from one well to another by bicycle. He talks his patron into providing him with a motorcycle to do his job more efficiently. Once Nawab is in possession of the motorcycle, it also raises his status in the eyes of his peers. However, it also leads to his near death as he is nearly robbed of his prized possession, even getting shot in the process.

In “Saleema”, we find that she works as a maid, is married, but is also sleeping with Hassan the cookSaleema and the cook, Hassan work for K.K. Harouni. She uses sex to advance her station in life and unexpectedly falls in love with one of the other servants, the driver, Rafik. Saleema gets pregnant by Rafik, although he is married as well. But the fountain of wealth, K.K. Harouni passes. As Hassan and Rafik had been in service to Harouni for a number of years, they would be sent to a different house in Islamabad. Saleema finds a job at another house, friends of Harouni, who took her in just because she worked at his house. But in the end, she loses her job, she starts taking drugs she once despised, leaves her husband, and ends up on the street begging with her son. Soon enough she dies and her son is left begging in the streets becoming what is known as “one of the sparrows of Lahore.”

Onto “Provide, Provide”, we learn about K.K. Harouni and how he was born into a rich family. As he tries to keep up appearances to compete with the new breed of Pakistani industrialist, he would sell vast amounts of land he owns and sink the money into factories; however, the more he sinks into the factories, the more they seemed to decline until his bankers advised him to close. While Harouni was spending less time at his family home in the southern area of Punjab, he left that up to his manager, one Chaudrey Nabi Baksh Jaglani who has ideas of his own.

The characters in the five remaining stories are related to the central character of K.K. Harouni as if part of one long and continuing soap opera. The stories provide us with a detailed look into the social strata of Pakistani life with the caste system derived from India, ever strong and present. Once you’ve completed the book, you find yourself wanting more. To see what has become of some of the newer characters and to see what has happened to the ones you have already become familiar with. The book provides everything you can hope for - love, romance, betrayal, loyalty, and the interrelationships between all the characters. It’s a book you won’t want to put down.

The Mindful Moment by Tim Page (Thames & Hudson)

British photographer Tim Page was still in his teens when he arrived in Southeast Asia and was only twenty when United Press International sent him to Saigon as a war photographer in 1965. He remained in Vietnam for four years, leaving only after shrapnel from an exploded land mine “had taken away the right side of my skull.” as Page casually puts it. “On the chopper to the field hospital at Long Bin, my heart had been jump-started three times.”

Page didn’t go back to Vietnam until 1980, when the Observer hired him to accompany the first British tour group to make a post-war excursion,  landing in Hanoi and moving through the south. He returned throughout the ‘80s, traveling through Vietnam and into Cambodia, taking photos for two books, Nam and Ten Years After. With photographer Horst Faas, he created Requiem: By the Photographers who Died in Vietnam and Indochina, which is both a book and a photography exhibit that now hangs in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, and includes the work of North Vietnamese combat photographers. 

The Mindful Moment is a collage of words and photographs that tumble into sight the way memories emerge in the mind,  without regard for chronology or theme. Moving through this gives the feeling of sitting in a room with Page as he pulls out random photographs and tells stories. The disjointed quality of the book adds to its power; past and present exist side by side with no artificial divisions. 

At the outset Page honors the “two-thousand year struggle to maintain a homogeneous national identity” that culminated in the Vietnam War, then mourns the changes brought to that country by consumerism, “which has done more to despoil the country’s social harmony than the decade-long war.” If The Mindful Moment has a theme, this would be it. Teenagers wearing jeans on shining new motorcycles and smiling market vendors in 1990’s Hanoi clash against the calm faces of captured Viet Cong suspects in 1969 and the stark portrait of a woman’s face of quiet rage, watching with her children as a hovercraft destroys their home in 1966. Children in Saigon, poor but whole, all of their limbs intact, contrast savagely with babies who were born with cruel defects, physical and mental, caused by Agent Orange.

Page captures the spirituality that runs through Vietnamese life with photographs of funerals, during wartime and in peace. He pays homage to the leader of the “Coconut Daoists,” who led his followers in prayers for peace “around the clock and thoroughout the year,” on Peace Island, while five hundred meters away gunships and bombers did their fatal work. When Page returned to this place after the war, it had become a tourist attraction, “stripped of any dignity.”

“The war,” Page says, “is hard to remember...it was fun, it was a thrill, it was simply terrifying.” Included in the 136 photographs of The Mindful Moment is one taken by another photographer in 1965 during the battle of Chu Phong Mountain. A young man stares from the frame, his face inscrutable, his eyes focused beyond the photographer upon something invisible. It’s Tim Page at twenty during his first year in Vietnam, interrupted for a minute or two while doing his work. As The Mindful Moment shows, he’s never stopped working. ~Janet Brown

Burial in the Clouds by Hiroyuki Agawa (Tuttle Publishing)

This original title of this book is Kumo no Bohyo and was first published in Japanese in 1956 by Shinchosha. It was translated into English by Teruyo Shimizu in 2006. The story is set at the height of World War II during Japan’s military expansion. Although the story is fiction, it is written in a diary-form by a young Japanese college student, Jiro Yoshino, who was inducted into the Japanese Imperial Navy. 

Jiro starts writing his diary from the first Sunday after joining the Navy. He is sent to the Otake Naval Barracks in Hiroshima Prefecture. We follow his progress from being labeled as flight-worthy for pilot training before his official enlistment which will determine the course of his military career. He knows that he will be chosen as a member of the tokko-tai which is the shortened form of tokubetsu kougeki tai and translates into English as the “Special Attack Force”. They are more commonly known to Americans as kamikaze which translates to “Divine Wind”.

Jiro writes and lets us know that the Student Reserves are separated by the schools they attended such as Waseda Division and the Tokyo University Division. He also notices that there are divisions from Chuo University, Hiroshima Higher Normal School, and of course his own school, Kyoto University. Jiro also finds that three of his good friends are here which gives him a sense of calmness. 

Jiro gives us a first-hand account of his training. Starting off with his taking of the Student Reserve Officer Examination. We follow his progress from those humble beginnings to choosing to become a pilot. He writes about the many hardships throughout his training, including getting accustomed to Navy life, flight training on planes that use a highly volatile alcohol mixed fuel and he also voices his doubts about Japan winning the war.

However, I get a sense of Jiro’s change of attitude after a few months in the navy. Some of his first entries are about his lack of courage and his questioning of the righteousness of the war. But in his later entries, he begins to believe in the ideology that he must be willing to die to protect his country. He even writes, “I must sink all impertinent thoughts to the bottom of my mind and try to become a man.” 

As the war progresses and fuel becomes a valuable commodity, the Student Reserves are grounded and must practice maneuvers on the ground simulating flying in the air, while the Naval Academy graduates continue to be able to practice in the air. But when it's time to set out against the enemies, the Student Reserves are the first to be called upon while Academy graduates “..stay behind on the pretext that they have to conserve their crews and aircraft.” 

This is a powerful novel about war and sacrifice. I couldn’t help feeling sadness as I read Jiro’s last two entries - his “farewell notes” knowing full well he would not be returning from this last sortie. Sometimes I forget the book is fiction as Jiro’s last letters are dated July, 1945 - just one month before the end of the war. This books spawned mixed feelings in me as quite a few years ago, I went to the War Memorial Museum at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The shrine that is at the heart of controversy whenever a sitting Prime Minister visits it because this is the shrine where fourteen Class “A” war criminals are enshrined. On the day I went, there was a special exhibition of the Tokko-tai. Real final letters to family, friends, and loved one from young kamikaze pilots. I was able to read a few with my still limited knowledge of kanji characters. Trying to put myself in their place, thinking what would my final words be if I knew I was flying to my death, never to return. ~Ernie Hoyt

Totto-chan : The Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi (Kodansha)

This is an autobiographical account of Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, one of Japan’s most popular television talk show hosts. The story is about her first two years at an elementary school called Tomoe Gakuen which was established in 1937 but was burned down in 1945 at the end of the Second World War. The story is told in the third person: however, it is not only the story of her elementary school years, but also focuses on her teacher, Sosaku Kobayashi. For Kuroyanagi, whose nickname was Totto-chan as child, it wasn’t until she reached adulthood that she understood the lessons that were taught by Kobayashi at Tomoe. What at first seemed like happy childhood memories turned out to be valuable life lessons.

Kuroyanagi starts off her semi-memoir with the memory of being taken to a new school with her mother not realizing how worried her mother was. The reason why her mother was so worried was “although Totto-chan had only just started school, she had already been expelled. Fancy being expelled from the first grade!”

The school itself was unusual and when Totto-chan saw it for the first time she couldn’t believe her eyes. The first thing that caught her eye was the gates of the school. At her previous school, as with most schools in Japan, the gates would be made of concrete pillars with a plaque of the name of the school on it. At Tomoe Gakuen, there gate consisted of two poles with leaves and twigs still on them. What was more amazing was the school itself. Classes were held in abandoned railway cars. 

Once Totto-chan saw the “train” school, she ran towards it and was about to go into one of the classrooms when her mother caught up with her and said to her, “You can’t go in yet.” “The cars are classrooms and you haven’t been accepted here yet.” She was told that they would first have to see the headmaster and talk to him. 

The headmaster, Sosaku Kobayashi, is the man who changed the course of Kuroyanagi’s life. In the postscript following the main story, Kuroyanagi gives a brief explanation of Kobayashi’s teaching method. Kuroyanagi says, “He believed all children are born with an innate good nature, which can be easily damaged by their environment and the wrong adult influences.” She goes on to say, “His aim was to uncover their “good nature” and develop it, so that the children would grow into people with individuality.”

Once the headmaster and Totto-chan are alone, the headmaster says to Totto-chan, “Now then, tell me all about yourself. Tell me anything at all you want to talk about.” So Totto-chan talks about the train she took to get here, wanting to become a ticket-collector, how pretty her homeroom teacher was at her previous school. The headmaster let Totto-chan talk and talk until Totto-chan herself ran out of things to say. What Totto-chan didn’t realize as she couldn’t tell time yet was that it was time for lunch. She and her mother came to the school at 8am and it was now noon. This seven year old talked to the headmaster for four hours straight. This was the first time an adult sat and listened to her and didn’t fain boredom or restlessness. After their conversation, the headmaster said to Totto-chan, “Well, now you’re a pupil of this school.” 

This is not just an entertaining account of one celebrity’s childhood but its also an hommage to her teacher and founder of Tomoe Gakuen, Sosaku Kobayashi. The episodes Kuroyanagi reminisces about are entertaining and funny but also fills me with sadness, especially on reading about the destruction of the school during the fire-bombing of Tokyo. It is no wonder that Ministry of Education has formally approved its usage in Japanese schools even today! ~Ernie Hoyt

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (Vintage)

Haruki Murakami is one of the most well-known writers in Japan and internationally. His books have been translated into over fifty languages and has gone on to become bestsellers in his home country and abroad. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature but hasn’t won it...yet. He has won many other awards including the World Fantasy Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. 

In this story, set in Nagoya in contemporary Japan, Tsukuru Tazaki thinks about his four closest friends he had in high school. Two boys and two girls. It was by coincidence that his friend’s names all contained a color in their name. The boys’ last names were Akamatsu which translates to “Red Pine” and Oumi which translates to “blue sea”. The girls’ last names were Shirane which translates to “white root” and Kurono which translates to “black field”. Tazaki was the only name that didn’t have a color in its meaning  It wasn’t long before the friends used colors as their nicknames - Aka (red) and Ao (blue) and the girls were Shiro (white) and Kuro (black). 

The story opens with Tsukuru thinking about death and ending his life. He has been having these thoughts since July of his sophomore year at college and for five months that’s all he could think about. Although, he constantly thought of death, he never considered committing suicide. However, the question remains is why has Tsukuru reached this level of depression.

It all goes back to his four friends in high school. They all come from similar backgrounds and the five friends were all classmates at the same high school in a suburb of Nagoya. During summer vacation of the first year of high school they all did volunteer work at the same place and became fast friends. The volunteer work started as a social studies assignment but even after the first summer ended, the five friends continued to their volunteer services. They also hung out with each other going hiking together, playing tennis or just hung out some place and talked for hours on end. Things seemed ideal and all five hoped their friendship would continue after graduating high school. 

So what led Tsukuru to his current situation? Tsukuru was the only one of the five friends to leave Nagoya after graduating high school. He went to Tokyo to study engineering because it was his dream to build railway stations. He would meet up with everybody when he returned during the holidays. Then one day, his four closest friends said that they did not want to see him or talk with him, ever again. No reason, no explanation. He was just cut off from group just like that. 

Since that day, Tsukuru finds it difficult to have any long-lasting relationships or any connections with anyone. Until he meets a woman named Sara. It is Sara who says it’s time for Tsukuru to confront his friends and find out the truth about what happened that day and why they treated him as they did. It has been sixteen years since he has spoken to any of them but he sets out on a journey to clear his mind once and for all. He may not like what he finds but it is something he is determined to do.

You cannot help but be taken in my Tsukuru’s predicament and I find myself also wanting to find out the truth. This is one of the books that is hard to put down. Part mystery, part romance and definitely a journey of self-discovery. You may see your friends in another light and ask yourself, what would you do if you were in Tsukuru’s shoes. ~Ernie Hoyt

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister by Jung Chang (Knopf)

Daughters of a wealthy Shanghai merchant who were raised as Christians and educated in America at a time when an overseas education was akin to flying to the moon, the Soong sisters became three of the most famous women in the world during their lifetimes who still continue to spark controversy today.

The eldest daughter, Ei-ling, was given a Portuguese passport in 1904 to circumvent the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and boarded a ship that would carry her from Shanghai to San Francisco. She was only fourteen, the first Chinese woman to be educated in the States, at a college in Georgia that was one of the first to grant diplomas to women at that time. She would remain at Wesleyan College for five years, in a small town where the inhabitants regarded her as an unwelcome anomaly. 

Four years after Ei-ling’s arrival at Wesleyan, she was joined by her younger sisters, fourteen-year-old Ching-ling, the beauty of the family, and the baby sister May-ling, who was nine when she arrived in Georgia and wouldn’t return to Shanghai until she was nineteen. 

All three sisters’ lives were shaped by their American years. Ei-ling, who spent most of her time there as the only Chinese woman for thousands of miles, was scarred by a remark she overheard during her ocean voyage: “I’m so tired of those dirty Chinamen... We won’t see anymore for a long time, I hope.” This, she said, “seared her heart forever,” making her withdrawn, self-sufficient, and fiercely devoted to her studies. Ching-ling was chic, quiet, and a rebel whose model was Joan of Arc, with a passionate devotion for the newly-founded Republic of China. May-ling, who spent most of her childhood and adolescence in America, was happy there and became the most highly educated of the sisters, graduating with a degree from Wellesley before returning home to Shanghai. “At times,” she wrote to a friend in the states, “I cannot express myself in Chinese.” 

In spite of their wealth and extraordinary educations, each sister took the traditional way out and chose husbands whose ambitions would buttress their own. Ei-ling found her match in H.H. Kung, whose money, Christianity, and degrees from Oberlin and Yale made him her ideal counterpart. Ching-ling expanded her passion for the Republic of China to include the man who was its founder. Sun Yat-sen was her father’s friend and contemporary; she married him against the wishes of her parents, beginning the rift that would separate her from her family for the rest of her life. May-ling, gay and frivolous, became an inveterate flirt, worrying her oldest sister to the point that Ei-lng found her a husband, Chiang Kai-shek, the Generalissimo, leader of the Nationalist Army.

With these marriages, the sisters’ fates were set. Ei-ling’s money and brains made her a power behind the rise of Chiang Kai-shek as he became the bulwark against the forces of Communism led by Mao Tse-tung. Ching-ling, after the death of her husband, threw in her lot with the Communists as Madame Sun Yat-sen and became a prominent figurehead in the People’s Republic of China. May-ling became the uncrowned empress of the Nationalist Chinese and an essential ambassador for her husband by lobbying for him in the United States.

Their colorful stories are poised against the backdrop of the political drama and turmoil that pervaded their lives and that they maneuvered through so well. Jung Chang has written a comprehensive and opinionated history, not only of the Soong sisters but also of twentieth-century China. Chang’s personal biases are clear and at times threaten to sink her book but her passionate point of view and dogged scholarship make this biography/history compelling and insightful, proving that the three sisters still capture the limelight long after their deaths. ~Janet Brown

The Accidental Office Lady by Laura J. Kriska (Charles E. Tuttle)

I highly recommend this to any woman who has aspirations or dreams of working for a large Japanese multinational corporation in Japan. Laura Kriska was one of those women. Times may have changed for the better but corporate Japan is still a very patriarchal organization and is very resistant to change.  

Kriska is an American who was born in Tokyo to missionary parents who were on assignment there. The first words uttered were Japanese. She lived in Tokyo for two years before her family moved back to their home state of Ohio. When she was sixteen, her family traveled back to Japan. It took her a few days before curiosity got the best of her and started to explore the country of her birth on her own. After graduating high school, she studied Japanese at a small university and signed up for an exchange program with Waseda University for her junior year. 

Her goal was to become a translator and she managed to get a part-time job with the Honda manufacturing plant in Ohio. It was there where she would meet a certain Mr. Yoshida. He was an alumnus of Waseda and he was also the vice president of the Honda Ohio plant. He took an interest in Kirska’s Japanese studies and encouraged her to get a job at the Honda factory in Japan during her exchange year. He provided her with a list of contacts. 

She was hired by the company to be one of the “Welcome Ladies” at Honda’s headquarters whose job was to greet guests and hand out complimentary pens. After completing her year in Japan, she returned to Ohio and was hired by Mr. Yoshida to work as an intern at the Ohio plant for a month. Her job consisted of translating press releases and writing articles for the company newspaper. 

Here is where the story really starts. Mr. Yoshida offers Kriska a job working at the Honda plant in Tokyo shortly after graduating college. Her contract would be for two years. This means, Kriska would be the first American woman to work at Honda’s headquarters in Japan.Her first year would be spent working in the executive offices being an assistant to one of the managing directors. Her second year would have her gaining experience in other departments such as sales, public relations, and finance. 

A young college graduate and the first woman to work at Honda’s headquarters in Japan. Kriska was full of ideas and energy. She was looking forward to becoming part of the Honda team. Working at Honda was her dream job and although she admits to knowing nothing about manufacturing, she had the ability of language. What she didn’t know was how a Japanese business really works - “the phrases of assimilation, the words of compromise, the messages of rebellion and acceptance.” 

Once in Japan, she was dressed in her best business suit and was ready to take on the challenge of working in a foreign country for a foreign company. One of the first things she noticed was that all the women were wearing blue polyester suits. It was company policy. However, there was no dress code for men. This was her first shock. She would become an “Office Lady”. A term used in Japan to describe women who work in large companies whose job is mostly to answer phones and serve tea. Her second was being told that an apartment had already been found for her, an apartment she hadn’t seen and is located two hours away by train. 

This book is about her trials and pitfalls of learning to manage life working in corporate Japan, a place that was still considered a “man’s world”. However, we also read about her triumphs and victories, small though they may seem. Kriska was not one to give up so easily on making changes for the better. Not only for women but for the foreign workers who came to Japan for training at the Japanese factory. This book will open your eyes to a Japan that not many Americans or other foreigners get a chance to see. A truly delightful tale of managing life in the corporate world of Japan. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima (Kodansha)

Yukio Mishima is one of Japan’s most prolific writers. He has written over fifteen novels including the “Sea of Fertility” tetralogy which includes “Spring Snow”, “Runaway Horses”, “The Temple of Dawn” and “The Decay of the Angel”. He was also a poet, a playwright, an actor, and a model. He was also a very right-wing nationalist and created a group called the “Tatenokai” whose main purpose was to restore the Emperor to his seat of power. One of his most famous acts that Mishima is known for aside from his books was his committing seppuku or ritual suicide after his group’s failed attempt to have the Japan Self-Defense Force join in his cause to reverse Japan’s 1947 Constitution. 

I first read this when I was in my teens. I think the subject matter of this particular book was a little advanced for my junior high mind at the time but it was suggested reading by my mother. To be honest, I didn't enjoy it (probably because I didn't understand it at the time). I found it dull, depressing, and I couldn't understand the actions of its protagonist. 

As an adult, I have a better understanding of the plot and the actions of its protagonist - an adolescent named Noboru Kuroda. Kuroda lives in Yokohama and his group of friends are all good students at the school they attend but they are also a gang. They believe in strong morals and Noboru is their leader. One day Noboru finds a peephole in his chest drawer and uses it to spy on his mother who is a widow. Noboru’s mother is well-off and owns a successful boutique store. As Noboru also likes ships, one day, his mother takes him to see one. There they meet a sailor named Ryuji. This meeting is the catalyst for how the story evolves. Ryuji stays the night with Noboru’s mother and Noboru watches them through the peephole having sex. When Noboru hears the distant sound of a sea horn and sees Ryuji turning to the sea, this affirms his notion that Ryuji is not like other men. He feels Ryuji’s simple act is an act of someone who will go on to bigger things, to be a hero. 

Noboru begins losing respect for Ryuji when he and his friends see Ryuji all wet from playing in a fountain at a local park. Noboru feels this is “childish act” and is embarrassed by it. Noboru becomes even more distraught when he learns that Ryuji and his mother are engaged to be married. They also find Noboru’s peephole but Ryuji doesn’t not punish Noboru as his mother asks in the hopes of becoming a good father. 

Noboru wants to retain his image of Ryuji as “savior” or “hero” and calls his gang members together with a plan that will make Ryuji become a hero in his eyes again. His plan is simple, to kill Ryuji to save him from becoming something all the gang members despise - a father. He reassures his friends that nothing bad will happen to them because of a Japanese law which states, “Acts of juveniles under the age of 14 are not punishable by law.” 

The ending can come as a bit of a shock to those not familiar with Mishima’s works. The main gist of this story is about glory and honor and what one will do to maintain that image. Not only do Noboru and his friends planned on killing Ryuji, they also plan to dissect him. Ryuji is tricked into meeting the boys who plan to drug him by putting pills into his tea. Ryuji looks to the sea and ponders his life he gave up not noticing one of the boys putting on gloves as he sips his tea. It is up to you the reader to decide if the boys go through with their plan. ~Ernie Hoyt

Shogun by James Clavell (Dell Books)

I’m usually not prone to re-reading books I have previously read but I’ve decided to revisit this epic novel about feudal Japan for two reasons. One, I am no longer daunted by it’s one-thousand plus pages of prose. Secondly, I’ve just learned that it is soon to be an FX limited series, FX being a pay television channel owned by the Walt Disney Company. My first venture in reading this voluminous book was back in high school when along with my mother, who is Japanese, we were hooked on the mini-series which was aired on NBC in September of 1980. Even in my young mind, I felt the need to read the original. 

As an adult, I’ve learned a few new things about this book. The protagonist, John Blackthorne, and many of the major characters were loosely based on actual historical figures. Blackthorne was modeled on an Englishman named William Adams who was a navigator for a ship for the Dutch East India Company and was one of the first of his countrymen to reach the shores of Japan. 

The story is set in feudal Japan a few months before the Battle of Sekigahara in the year 1600. A decisive point in Japan’s history and often cited as the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate. However, this story is fiction and two of the opposing characters who hope to attain the title of Shogun are Yoshi Toranaga, who is modeled on Ieyasu Tokugawa and Ishido, who is modeled on Mitsunari Ishida. Toronaga’s rise to the Shogunate is seen through the eyes Blackthorne. 

Portugal and the Jesuits of the Catholic Church have already set a foothold in Japan and hope to continue to expand their power in the country. Blackthorne is hoping to compete with Portugal by setting up trade and making an alliance on their own. However, Blackthorne and his crew are shipwrecked off the shore of small rural community and are taken prisoner by a local samurai. Once the daimyo arrives, The Englishmen are put on trial on pirates with a Jesuit priest being the interpreter. The Englishmen lose the trial and an infuriated Blackthorne rips off the crucifix from the Jesuit and stomps on it to let the daimyo know that the Jesuits and Portuguese are enemies of England. The local daimyo sentences them to death but the local samurai convinces his daimyo to spare their lives so they can learn more about Europeans and how they live. 

As the story progresses, Toranaga learns of the captive Englishmen and sends his men to take Blackthorne, along with their ship so Toranaga can use it to his advantage against his rival Ishido. There is a lot of give and take from both sides with Blackthorne at the center. An epic telling of enormous proportions but is so well written, you can sense the unease and mistrust of the Japanese hierarchy of power. The book keeps you interested as you wonder what will become of John Blackthorne and his crew. With a bit of luck on his side, Blackthorne becomes a confidante of Toranaga and is granted the status of samurai. Add in a romance with a woman who teaches Blackthorne Japanese and you have all the elements of what makes reading such a fun pastime. Will Blackthorne ever leave Japan and return to England? Will Toranaga let him? Who will be Shogun? Toranaga or Ishido? ~Ernie Hoyt

Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race by Lara Prior-Palmer (Catapult)

When still a teenager, Lara Prior-Palmer decides to enter the Mongol Derby, seven weeks before the race begins. “I am extremely competitive,” she announces in her application, “and want to be the youngest (am 18) person to finish.”

Giving herself minimal time for preparation, she’s allowed to enter a “1,000-kilometer race on twenty-five wild ponies, a new steed for every 40-kilometer stage” across the Mongolian grasslands, with only ten days allowed for completion. But, she says, “my thighs were strong and my heart was raw.” In a little over a month, she’s on her first pony, with a copy of The Tempest stowed away in her bag of survival gear. 

Her journey is broken by stops at the urtuus, the stations where riders change their mounts, which have been loaned by local families for a rental fee and vary in their stages of wildness. By 8:30 competitors are forced to stop for the day, choosing their “glum horses” to begin their ride by 7 the next morning.

It takes a while for Prior-Palmer’s competitive spirit to kick in. At first her goal is simply to make it to the next urtuu and eventually to finish the race. Her hours on horseback are contemplative ones and her observations are precise and poetic. Following in the hoofprints of Chinggis Khan’s thirteenth-century Postal Express, riders who carried the mail in stages from Siberia to Poland in twelve days, she’s haunted by thoughts of the Great Khan, a man so humble that he demanded that his burial ground remain unknown, with no grand monuments or markers, one who permitted all religions to be freely practiced within his empire, and who even now is regarded as Mongolia’s “ancestral spirit.” 

Stopping at the required time means she often sleeps in ger, those windowless circular tents that collapse and are moved on to the next grazing area, leaving no trace of their presence. Baigal or “what exists,” the natural world, is so respected by the Mongol nomads that they wear soft-soled shoes in order to avoid harming what their feet will fall upon. 

Prior-Palmer is seduced by baigal, even when “thunder burgles the sky” and she and her pony “ride on, curling our bodies against the teeth of the storm.” The sky looks like “a map of the world,” and she feels “very alone,” “the last drops in the bottom of a wine glass.”  

Perhaps it’s the pain that comes from days of constant riding that brings out the spirit of competition or perhaps it’s the awareness of Devan, an obnoxious young woman from Texas who takes the lead early on and maintains it, but on her fourth day, Prior-Palmer decides she wants to win. 

On the seventh day of the race, she enters the final urtuu, babbling stories and unconcerned that Devan has arrived ahead off her. Within twelve minutes she learns that she’s the winner because her competitor has been penalized for raising her pony’s heart rate above the sanctioned limit. 

From her copy of The Tempest, she finds “when I waked, I cried to dream again.” “Endings fade,” Prior-Palmer decides, “but the force behind a story lives on.” The Derby is over but the steppes of Mongolia live on, in this book and in the minds of its readers. ~Janet Brown

Into the Heart of Borneo by Redmond O'Hanlon (Vintage Departures)

Two middle-aged British academics embarking upon a journey up a jungle river on the island of Borneo--what could possibly go wrong?  After all, Redmond O’Hanlon has a relative who once trained men in the art of jungle warfare and his chosen travel companion, the poet James Fenton, spent time in Cambodia, Vietnam, South Korea, and the Philippines as a journalist. Armed with an impressive library of natural history and poetry, a survival kit supplied by the British Special Air Services, and a rather terrifying amount of information given by the Major in Charge of SAS Training, Fenton and O’Hanlon fly off in search of the rare two-tusked Borneo rhinoceros, while carefully observing all avian wildlife that might come their way. 

“I want permission to go up the Baleh to its headwaters and then to climb Mount Tiban,” O’Hanlon announces to a skeptical Malaysian bureaucrat, “James Fenton and I wish to re-discover the Borneo rhinoceros.” Somehow they manage to gain the necessary permits and the guiding services of three Iban, members of a jungle tribe who were once famed for their skill in headhunting and who have never been to the area that they will help their charges to reach.

Spending their days in a boat and their nights in campsites on the riverbanks, O’Hanlon and Fenton swiftly learn that they are comic relief for their companions. The Englishmen come with flyfishing gear that is inferior to the harpoons of the Iban, they are rapidly laid low by the arak that their guides can drink by the quart with few ill effects, and are less than charmed by the steady diet of rice, bony river fish, and meat from an occasional turtle or lizard. Elephant ants and leeches are plentiful; every morning the novice explorers coat themselves with SAS anti-fungal powder, and Fenton comes close to drowning in the whirlpool of a waterfall. All of this provides rich amusement to the Iban, who are delighted to offer their new friends as entertainment to the jungle tribes they encounter along the way. Yet the exploration party all develop an understanding and respect for each other that ripens into true friendship.

Underpinning a wildly funny narrative of Oxford men struggling through Borneo is a stunning naturalist’s view of tropical wilderness and its fauna, with an underpinning of accounts from past explorers. Gibbons, langurs, kingfishers, and eagles are marvels that make up for the agonizing discomforts of jungle travel. And although the elusive Borneo rhinoceros never makes an appearance, O’Hanlon ends his quest by meeting one of the men who have caused that animal to become a rare and miraculous sight.

Not just a diverting travel narrative, Into the Heart of Borneo gives a poignant look at a way of life that is already beginning to vanish in 1983, as timber interests discover the jungle. O’Hanlon’s journey could never be replicated today. Below the wit and charm of his story lurks a bitter sadness that surfaces when it’s read in this century. The world he found and learned to love is rapidly disappearing, if not destroyed. ~Janet Brown

Divine Encounters: Sacred Rituals and Ceremonies in Asia by Hans Kemp (Visionary World)

Human beings, from those at the beginning of time to the inhabitants of today’s technology-ridden planet, are constantly driven by an overwhelming need to improve their luck, to establish connections with distant forces who can make this transformation take place. Many depend on the quaint ritual of casting votes into ballot boxes to choose new leaders who will help them. Others rely on an invisible agency--the world of the spirits and the chosen mortals who can muster supernatural help. Who’s to say which is more primitive and ineffective? 

Certainly not Hans Kemp, who has explored the latter option with deep respect and artistry. From the jungles of Papua New Guinea to the highly modernized nation of Japan, he has been allowed to witness holy ceremonies and has portrayed them carefully and beautifully in Divine Encounters: Sacred Rituals and Ceremonies in Asia.

This is not a book to place on the coffee table and skim through at leisured intervals. Whoever opens it will go on a journey that may well take several days, moving through different worlds and into the dark corners of the viewer’s own consciousness. In some ways, Kemp has created a visual version of a psychedelic experience, one that evokes fear, reverence, and new ways to look at life.

In Kerala oracles draped with wreaths of marigolds and clad in scarlet draw blood from their foreheads with special swords, leading vast numbers of pilgrims in “a riotous expression of divine unity,” at temples devoted to the Mother Goddess. In a ceremony that’s equally ancient, the Japanese city of Inazawa turns to Shinto exorcism by choosing one man who will absorb the ill fortune of his community as the lunar new year begins. Chased and grabbed for an entire day by thousands of men who are desperate to hand him their bad fortune, the Shin Otoku, is symbolically cast out, returning later as an honored God-man. Christians in the Philippines show their devotion on Good Friday by carrying crucifixes along the Via Crucis in the Stations of the Cross. Flagellants whip at open wounds that have been cut into their backs and there are men who become Kristos, volunteering to be nailed on a cross, where they remain for as long as fifteen minutes. 

These images are shocking at first view: the blood, the nails driven through flesh, the faces locked into ecstasy and frenzy. But through the lens of Kemp’s camera, it becomes clear that what’s being revealed is belief propelled by hope, a common thread that links all humans. When the young men of Papua New Guinea have their skin cut and abraded, with their scars taking on the appearance of crocodile scales, they are not only connecting themselves to the legendary power of that animal, they’re embarking upon an intensive six-week period of education that will usher them into manhood. Immediately thoughts of male circumcision come to mind, a process that has become so engrained in developed countries that male infants routinely undergo it, with few people questioning why. The young men along the banks of the Middle Sepik River know quite well why they are submitting to this ritual; it connects them to knowledge and power. 

Kemp ends his journey with words from P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous: “But I had seen myself, that is, I had seen things in myself that I had never seen before.” Within Divine Encounters are myriad ways for us all to see ourselves, if we open our eyes and minds. ~Janet Brown

A War Away by Tess Johnston (Earnshaw Books)

During her seven years in Vietnam, Tess Johnston was both immersed in the war and removed from it. As a USAID employee, from her arrival in 1967 until she finally left in 1974, she worked as a secretary and lived in government-provided housing. She shopped at U.S. military commissaries and had a flourishing love life. When reading the opening pages of her memoir, it’s easy to dismiss it as an echo of Bridget Jones’s Diary, but that’s far from the truth. 

Johnston’s powers of observation and spirit of adventure take her miles away from chick-lit territory and into a corner of history that’s relatively unexplored: the life of a female office worker in a war-ravaged country.

Soon after arriving in Saigon, Johnston attends a lecture given by a man who would later be immortalized in Neil Sheehan’s classic A Bright and Shining Lie, John Paul Vann. 

Vann had come to Vietnam as a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army. By the time Johnston encounters him, he’s a high-ranking civilian military adviser, “either the most hated or the most respected man in Vietnam,” who’s famous for his knowledge and candor. When he tells the truth about the war, people listen, whether they agree with him or not. Johnston not only listens, she decides that she’s going to work for him. Soon she leaves the comforts of Saigon to live outside the village of Bin Hoa, close to Vann’s headquarters and near army and air force bases. This will be her home until Vann’s death in 1972.

Johnston’s description of her new home are vivid and captivating. “I marveled that any place could be so unlovely,” she remarks, while clearly reveling in the life and vitality of  Bien Hoa with its constant parade of GIs, bar girls, street vendors, and traffic that includes “the occasional oxcart,” looking “like a small and dirty Rio in carnival time.” 

It’s impossible not to speculate that her enthusiastic acceptance of her new home is influenced by Vann’s wholehearted embrace of the world he dominated. “He loved gutsy females” and when visiting dignitaries balk at accompanying him on a helicopter surveillance trip, he barks at them, “Hell, my secretaries go out with me all the time.” When Johnston is stranded on a locked-down air force base after an ill-fated party that ends with an attack during the Tet Offensive, she calls Vann to say she won’t make it to the office anytime soon, only to be told “get the hell back to work.” And she does, because he sends a military officer who has enough clout to breach the locked gates of the base and who brings her safely back to her responsibilities.

“I was later and often accused of having developed the “Intoxication with Cordite Syndrome,” when “you truly believe that you’re not going to die.” “After...that first night of Tet I was never seriously afraid again,” Johnston says, and backs up that assertion with stories of refusing to hunker down in a ditch under enemy fire because she doesn’t want to ruin a favorite dress. She’s blithe about the lengthy and potentially dangerous “commissary runs” that she makes to Saigon for food supplies; she’s as untroubled by driving “under random gunfire” as she is by attending a graphic striptease show. And she confesses that one of her favorite things to do is to direct Saigon newcomers to a Southern-style diner where the waitresses serve breakfast while clad only in skimpy aprons.

Johnston’s perspective is unique; the story she tells about her wartime life is tragic one minute, delightful the next, unfailingly irreverent, and, from beginning to end, well worth reading. ~Janet Brown

The White Devil's Daughters by Julia Flynn Siler (Knopf)

Tien Fu Wu had no idea how old she was when her father took her from her Zhejiang home and sold her.  She later estimated that she was between six and ten when she entered the U.S. in 1892 as a “paper daughter,” falsely identified as a relative of an established  Chinese merchant in San Francisco. 

Upon arrival in that city she was sold to the owner of a Chinatown brothel to work as a servant and then to a family where she took care of an infant while still a small child herself. After two years of labor and mistreatment, she was rescued by a missionary, her body covered with burns and bruises that had been inflicted upon her by her owner.

Tien was so small that at first her rescuer overlooked her since the child in question was reported to be twelve years old and Tien seemed far too tiny to be that age. She was taken to the Mission Home, a refuge for Chinese women and girls who had been sold into prostitution and domestic servitude. 

Established by Presbyterian women in 1874, the Mission Home was established to provide sanctuary for Chinese women who had been brought to San Francisco as prostitutes. In the late 19th century, prostitution was still legal in that city but slavery and “involuntary servitude” had been banned by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Even so, Chinese women were removed from ships to public auctions, where they stood naked in front of potential buyers. Some of them were as young as twelve. 

In 1871 the first prostitute to escape a brothel and ask for help started a small revolution, as other Chinese women learned that missionaries would give them a safe place to stay and would help them find other ways to live their lives.

When San Francisco became affluent, its demand for servants was almost inexhaustible and traffickers turned to the importation of Chinese children to fill that demand. In response, the Mission House, in the company of police officers, turned their attention to the rescue of the mui tsai, the “little sisters,” who had been sold as domestic slaves, as Tien Fu Wa had been.

A year after Tien became a resident of the Mission Home, twenty-five-year-old Donaldina Cameron arrived to work there as a teacher. By 1900 she had become the superintendent, a position she held until 1934, when she turned sixty-five. Over the years, Tien became her closest friend and colleague; Cameron was known as Lo Ma or Old Mother to the residents of the Mission House while Tien was called Auntie Wu. When Tien retired in 1951, she and Cameron lived next door to each other and were buried close together in the same cemetery. 

Throughout the bubonic plague that ravaged San Francisco’s Chinatown from 1900 to 1908, into the destruction of the 1906 earthquake and the fire that left Chinatown “in smoldering ruins” with its “entire population...homeless,” these two women spearheaded a crusade against human trafficking and immigration issues, to the extent that Cameron was known as the “White Devil of Chinatown.”

The Mission House still stands at 920 Sacramento Street, under the name of Cameron House. It is said to be haunted, and as Julia Flynn Siler says, it “has a haunted history.” Through her careful research and brilliant use of narrative, that history breathes again in a work of nonfiction that holds more excitement and heroism than many novels. ~Janet Brown

Hong Kong Holiday by Emily Hahn (Doubleday & Company, out of print)

Emily Hahn was an American writer who came to live in Shanghai in 1935.  She remained there until 1941, leaving it for Hong Kong only after she fell in love with Charles Boxer, a British Army officer. During her two years in the Crown Colony, Hahn chronicled her stay in articles for the New Yorker, which were published as the essay collection, Hong Kong Holiday.

The title is obviously a sardonic choice. What begins as a respite from the war in China takes a grim turn after the first four essays. Hahn came to Hong Kong after spending time in the “beleagured” capital of Chungking; her opening essays describe the bliss of living without air raid sirens, the pleasure of living on the Peak with her gibbons, enjoying cocktails, gossip, and the soothing ministrations of a good hairdresser. Then the Japanese bombers come to town, Boxer is wounded in a fight against the invading Imperial Army, and Hahn, who recently had given birth, begins a long battle for survival in a fallen city.

With Boxer in a prison camp, Hahn is focused upon keeping herself and her baby out of an internment center and with keeping everyone in her extended family fed as well as possible. Hong Kong becomes unnaturally silent; its people have “the drawn, false anxiety of a starving man’s face.” “I lost the energy for pity,” Hahn says, and she is ruthless in her drive to safeguard the people she loves.

But  it’s impossible for her to lose the energy for  writing. The New Yorker had hired her to be their China correspondent in 1935 and Hahn can’t afford the luxury of writer’s block. She chronicles her Hong Kong years with an offhand touch that almost disguises the hunger, the extreme cold, the fear, and the rage. 

A Eurasian friend whose husband is missing in battle says, “The Eurasian boys were the ones who fought best. Almost all of the good ones were killed...I ask myself what my husband died for.” Another tells what happened after Japanese soldiers took over the hospital where she worked. “I got away from them in the dark and hid under a cot. The other girls had to go with them.” She tells the story over and over until Hahn realizes the truth and tells her “If a thing isn’t in your mind, don’t you see, it never happened.”

With a mixture of understanding and deep contempt, Hahn tells stories of the Hong Kong collaborators. She herself benefits from teaching English to members of the Kempeitai, whom she terms the Japanese Gestapo, and those students supply her with necessities of life: bags of rice, flour, wheat. When her daughter reaches her first birthday, a Japanese soldier brings a tin filled with sugar for Carola’s birthday cake.

Hahn shows how war creeps in almost imperceptibly before it explosively announces its arrival, illustrates how determination and ingenuity are more valuable than gold in an occupied city, and reveals the core of spun steel that still exists within Hong Kong’s glittering and privileged exterior. Hong Kong Holiday, 73 years after it was first published, is a testament to the strength of the Region and an assertion of its ability to remain alive. ~Janet Brown

You Gotta Have Wa by Robert Whiting (Vintage)

I will be the first to admit that I have absolutely no interest in baseball. However, my older brother loved the sport and often forced me to play. This would have been in my elementary years when we lived on a military base in Japan. But I did enjoy watching the sport back then with my brother and we would often root for the home team, the Yomiuri Giants. One of my fondest memories was seeing an actual game between the Yomiuri Giants and the Hanshin Tigers at Korakuen Stadium.

As an adult, I moved back to Japan and saw how baseball is still popular as ever, maybe even more popular than the traditional Japanese sport of sumo. That is when I came upon Robert Whiting’s book which renewed my interest in finding out more about how the game became so popular in Japan. 

Robert Whiting writes an interesting story about the history of baseball in Japan. How Japan took an American sport and made it into their own national pastime. In order to really enjoy this book, you need to understand what wa is. To put it simply, wa is a Japanese word that means unity or harmony. It’s a concept whereby a team or group of people act as a whole and where individualism is frowned upon.

This book was first published in 1988, more than thirty years ago but is still relevant today. It is not so much about baseball as it is about Japanese culture as seen through the sport. A culture that is very resistant to change. The concept of wa isn’t limited to professional baseball players but to high school and university players as well and in most businesses too.

This is what Reggie Smith, a former Major League Baseball player had to say about playing for the Yomiuri Giants in Japan for two seasons, “This isn’t baseball….it only looks like it.” Those sentiments were shared by other American players and even some Japanese players as well. 

Suishu Tobita, considered to be the “god of baseball” said,  “Student baseball must be the baseball of self-discipline. It must be much more than a hobby. In many cases, it must be a baseball of pain and baseball practice of savage treatment.”  

From this American’s perspective, their training seems to be very intense verging on abusive. Choji Murata, who played for the Tokyo Lotte Orions, which changed their name to the Chiba Lotte Marines followed the strict regimen and believes that “pitchers should pitch until their arms fall off”. He threw over a hundred pitches during practice and even more during a game. He then continued to pitch with a torn ligament in his elbow for a year and a half. I don’t know if that’s dedication. It seems more like he was brainwashed into believing it was the right thing to do, 

I think Japan has been making progress though. I recently read a news piece about a high school baseball manager who benched his star pitcher, Roki Sasaki,  for the final in a tournament game because the player had threw 129 pitches the day before. The team would lose ending their chances of going to the prestigious Koshien tournament which is the World Series of Japanese High School Baseball. The manager was criticized by many for thinking about the pitcher’s health instead of focusing on winning. Current Major League Baseball player Yu Darvish of the Texas Rangers praised the manager’s decision saying, “In my opinion, those people saying things like why he (Sasaki) didn’t pitch are not giving a single thought to the kids.” 

Even if you are not a fan of baseball, Whiting will make you interested. You will be fascinated by the history of Japanese baseball and of the cultural comparisons between Japan and the U.S. The book has made me appreciate Japanese baseball more but not enough for me to become an actual fan of the sport. ~Ernie Hoyt

Beijing Payback by Daniel Nieh (HarperCollins)

Victor Li is a typical American twenty-two-year-old, more interested in what he can do on a basketball court than in a college classroom; he smokes weed once in a while, and was just busted for a DUI. But unlike any of his buddies, Victor is trying to cope with his father’s recent murder. Vincent Li died from  “two precise stabs in the chest and a clean slash across,” leaving his son a peculiar legacy: an attache case filled with stacks of cash, a Walther PPQ, and a Chinese passport bearing Victor’s name. 

Then a stranger from China shows up, revealing the business Victor’s father was enmeshed in before he emigrated to the States, in conjunction with three men who remained in China, and claiming Vincent Li’s murder resulted from a disagreement among partners. The stranger knows; Sun worked for Victor’s father since childhood in “China America trade,” a smuggling business that became so murky that it led to murder. And, as both Sun and a letter written to Victor by his father make clear, this murder leads to a clear-cut need for revenge against the partners who arranged the death.

Suddenly Victor is on a China-bound plane with a newly acquired passport, a PPQ, a hefty pile of cash, and Sun.  In Beijing Sun leads Victor to the luxurious underground bunker that belongs to the one partner who can be trusted, a nightclub that’s a Chinese version of Star Wars’ Cantina Bar, an upscale coffee shop “filled with solo expats and their MacBook Airs.”  Within this bizarre and twisted labrynth Victor encounters a mosaic of separate puzzle pieces: a gorgeous woman who uses her body as a trap, a French journalist who willingly sacrifices physical harm for career success, and a bag of ketamine lying near a corpse who has a long incision running down the side of his stomach.

In a stunning first novel, Daniel Nieh takes the format of a conventional crime thriller, turns it inside out, and slowly divulges its intricacies and its plot twists bit by bit. His richness of detail threatens to swamp his narrative but Nieh is always in control, ending an impenetrable puzzle with a surprise that’s impossible to anticipate, yet makes perfect sense. Beginning as a quick and forgettable beach read, Beijing Payback becomes the story of a rite of passage, as Victor Li moves from a bright California boyhood into Beijing’s underworld. Wading through crime, blood, and death, he discovers who his father really was and what his own future may hold.

And yet not all is gloom and slaughter--the book is lightened with the sardonic humor of Victor’s college friends and his older sister, given depth with its precise and vivid descriptions of the American Dream and the Chinese Miracle. Best of all, its open-ended conclusion leaves room for at least one more exploration of Victor’s odyssey into adulthood, showing why he’s on that bus, heading north. 

Although it’s only a possibility that readers haven’t seen the last of Victor Li,  it’s a certainty that Daniel Nieh will come up with another smart and riveting novel. The only flaw is it can’t come soon enough. ~Janet Brown

Tabloid Tokyo : 101 Tales of Sex, Crime and the Bizarre from Japan's Wild Weeklies compiled by Mark Schreiber (Kodansha International)

I’m a long time resident of Japan. I have been living in Japan for over twenty years. When I first moved here, I had the same image as most people do about Japan. It’s a safe country. I can leave my wallet or bag on the train and nobody will steal it. People are very kind and helpful. Women can walk the streets alone at night without fear of being molested or raped. Drunk salarymen do not need to fear having their wallets stolen and so on. Most of this still holds true today. 

When I first moved to Japan in January of 1995, three days later, one of the largest earthquakes hit Kobe and over five thousand lives were lost. Only three months later, there was the sarin gas subway attack on a line I frequently used, committed by a doomsday cult which called themselves the Aum Shinri Kyo. So much for my image of Japan being a safe country.

As with most countries, even Japan has its seedier side. There is the Yakuza, the Japanese version of the Mafia which are involved in organized crime. The host and hostess clubs, known as mizu shobai in Japanese which are usually run by the Yakuza as a legitimate business. There are places called Pink Salons where men can go and legally pay for oral sex. There are image clubs which have rooms set up to fulfill clients fantasies such as being groped by a woman on a train or the room will have an office setting and the client can play boss and secretary. There are also health clubs and soap lands where a woman will bathe you and provide some type of sexual service for a small fee. 

This book is a collection of articles that were selected from a variety of Japan’s weekly publications by three reporters - Geoff Botting, Ryan Connell, and Michael Hoffman and compiled into this one book by Mark Schreiber. The original articles were translated into English with the reporters own interpretation of the stories. The articles appeared in the “Tokyo Confidential” column of the Japan Times and the “Waiwai” section of the Mainichi Daily News online site. The articles were taken from many different tabloids which are similar to the National Enquirer and World Wide News but do not include stories about alien abductions or coming back from the dead.  

The publications have such titles as Friday, Shukan Jitsuwa, Shukan Post, and Flash, just to name a few. The articles have such colorful titles as “Parasite Couples Drain Parents Dry”, “Panty-Gazing Research Revealed” or one of my favorites, “Ugly Women Draw Men Like Flies”. They’re a collection of articles where the cliche, “truth is stranger than fiction” may be applicable. These stories give you a glimpse into a part of contemporary Japan that the Japanese probably do not want you to know about. However, as to the actual facts of the story, well, as with most tabloid publications, the stories are highly embellished and is best to read them with a grain of salt. Keeping that in mind, the stories are funny and entertaining and may get you to thinking what exactly is the “real” Japan. ~Ernie Hoyt