Making the Chinese Mexican by Grace Pena Delgado (Stanford University Press)

When England abolished the slave trade in 1807 and ended slavery within its empire in 1833, the need for cheap labor became an issue everywhere but the United States, until the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation thirty years later. Caribbean sugar plantations found a labor solution in coolies imported from China, a practice that spread into South America. 

A Mexican politician, convinced that he could make a fortune from growing coffee in the scorching climate of Chiapas, advocated the importation of Chinese laborers into his country, as they already were in Peru, Brazil, and Cuba. Lack of infrastructure within Mexico to transport workers to the areas where they were needed, as well as the hellish climate of the coastal and jungle work sites, diverted the Chinese labor force to the more amenable areas of the United States. While only 1000 Chinese were part of the Mexican labor force in the mid-1800s, over 100,000 worked in the United States by the end of the 19th century.

With the completion of America’s transcontinental railroad, the need for cheap labor diminished and xenophobia increased. Mining in the Arizona Territory attracted immigrant labor from England, Ireland, and Mexico. Chinese workers trickled down from California and still more arrived from China, increasing the Territory’s Chinese population from 20 to over 1500 in ten year’s time.

But the increasing number of white Americans arriving in Arizona brought the “demonization” of Chinese workers with them. The threat of miscegenation was brandished in lurid fashion, along with the belief that “wily Mongolians” were taking jobs from American citizens. In the mining town of Bisbee, widows of mine workers resorted to taking in laundry to make ends meet and they claimed Chinese laundries were taking bread from the mouths of their fatherless children. Washerwomen in Tombstone added their complaints to the furor and laundering became a forbidden occupation to Chinese “adjunct labor” in mining areas.

Tucson was less restrictive with its diversity of population, with Mexicans making up 64% of the town’s population. One of the leading businessmen, Leopoldo Carrillo, began renting small tracts of land to Chinese truck farmers. As these farmers achieved success, some opened grocery and dry goods stores and even laundries. An economic kinship grew between Tucson’s Mexicans and Chinese, with Mexican families renting rooms to Chinese laborers and leasing land where Chinese families could build homes. Soon the area known as El Barrio where the Mexicans of Tucson lived became inhabited by Chinese workers. Although Tucson never had an officially established Chinatown, by 1883 the Chinese residents of El Barrio had established “four large buildings, two washhouses, three stores, two opium dens, and a block-long adobe structure that ‘lost all its Spanish-American attributes and [became] wholly oriental.”

The relationship that was formed between Chinese and Mexicans, a form of kith that could be as strong as kin, made it an easy matter for Chinese to flow across the porous border into Sonora, Mexico when U.S. immigration policies and racial discrimination made that country an unattractive destination. Chinese labor flooded into Mexico by ship and then were trafficked across the border to U.S. towns.  Others remained in Mexico, “becoming a vital part of Mexico’s economic reality.” By 1910, 13,203 Chinese lived in Sonora and other states of northern Mexico.

After the Mexican Revolution of 1911-1917, a strong anti-Chinese movement failed to discourage Chinese businessmen within Mexico  who understood that crossing the border into the U.S would bring them no relief, only the probability of deportation. By the mid-1920s the Chinese in Sonora owned 40% “of manufacturing firms and small-scale dry-goods shops while controlling 65% of all grocery stores.” Antichinista forces turned to vicious propaganda and violence; Chinese stores were raided and burned. Murders were not uncommon. Eventually the government, swayed by fears of miscegenation and disease, began the expulsion of 3,500 Chinese from Sonora, with the goal of expanding this throughout Mexico. 

Today there are estimated to be no more than 70,000 people of Chinese descent living in the entire country of Mexico.~Janet Brown

So Can You by Mitsuyo Ohira (Kodansha)

One of the major problems still facing Japan today is iijime. This is the Japanese word for “bullying”. Victims of bullying are still ostracized and treated as if the bullying were their fault. Schools often feign ignorance or disclaim deny claims of abuse. A lot of parents seem to be more concerned about appearances and gossip instead of the welfare of their children. Mitsuyo Ohira is one of those victims.

So Can You is based on her own story. She doesn’t hold back any punches and tells us the grim reality of what she went through. She talks about being bullied in junior high school, how it started, how it escalated, ultimately leading to her attempted suicide. The story doesn’t end there. So Can You is also a story of inspiration of how she, a junior high school graduate, was able to overcome impossible odds and become a lawyer.

Mitsuyo tells us up front, the actions in the book had taken place over twenty years ago and that her oppressors probably have no recollection of what they put her through but Ohira says, “But I haven’t forgotten. Even after twenty years, the memories come rushing back as vividly as if it had all taken place yesterday.”

The time was 1978. Due to a family situation, Mitsuyo had to transfer to a new school after the school year had already started. She was looking forward to going there and making new friends.  She enjoys being the center of attention. Her classmates did warn her about a student naemd “A-ko”. A-ko was the leader of the “bad” girls in Mitsuyo’s homeroom. Actually, she was the leader of all the “bad” girls in the first year. 

Mitsuyo thought if she just avoided A-ko and didn’t provoke her in any way, she wouldn’t have any problems. She was enjoying her status as a type of celebrity and with hindsight thinks maybe she was just a bit too pleased with herself. At some point in time, A-ko spoke to her but she didn’t reply. Little did Mitsuyo know that this little act of defiance would have consequences she never imagined.

First, her classmates starting ignoring her. At lunch time, nobody would sit with her or talk to her. Then came the graffiti. Someone had written on Mitsuyo’s desk, “I am a pathetic moron. Everyone hates me. If you want me, you can have me cheap.” It was signed with her name, homeroom and year. The bullying didn’t stop there. Soon, rumors were spread about Mitsuyo being “easy”. 

The second year, Mitsuyo thought she had made some new friends only to be betrayed by them. Their friendship was only a ruse to get Mitsuyo to let her guard down. Once again, Mitsuyo became the subject of a school-wide scandal and thought the only thing left to do is die, ultimately leading to her suicide attempt.

Throughout Mitsuyo’s junior high school years, she experiences being a victim of bullying, attempting suicide, and eventually follows the path into delinquency. Mitsuyo didn’t go to high school and scraped a living by working at a hostess club. A chance meeting with an old friend of her father’s at the hostess club was the turning point in Mitsuyo’s life. 

Ohira-san or “Otchan” as Mitsuyo knew him, becomes her mentor and gives her encouragement to make a new start on life. He is the first person to tell her that it is her fault for not even trying to change. Otchan lights the fire inspiring Mitsuyo to change.

Mitsuyo was not with her life, but with the encouragement of Ohira-san, she starts to set small goals for herself. Once she reaches one goal, Ohira-san encourages her to set an even higher one. This sets the stage for Mitsuyo, a junior high school graduate to attempt to pass the National Bar Exam and become a lawyer!  The story is heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Burden of Flowers by Natsuki Ikezawa (Kodansha)

A Burden of Flowers is an English language version of the Japanese book  “Hana wo Hakobu Imouto”, translated by Alfred Birnbaum who has also translated many of Haruki Murakami’s novels into English. It literally translates to “The Sister Who Carries Flowers”. The book won the Mainichi Award for the year 2000, given by Mainichi Publishing, a subsidiary of the Mainichi Shimbun (newspaper). The story was inspired by true events that happened in the eighties. 

The two main characters are a brother and his younger sister, Tetsuro and Kaoru. Tetsuro “Tez” Nishijima is a successful artist and an avid traveler. He is also a recovering drug addict. He currently finds himself sitting in a prison cell in Bali, Indonesia.  Kaoru is five years younger than Tez. She is a Europhile and studied at the Sorbonne in France. Although she never graduated from the Sorbonne, she became fluent at speaking French and for the past five years, she had been living in various cities in Europe. Kaoru has moved back to Japan and her current job often requires her to work in Europe. 

So begins an incredible story of great courage and persistence of a young sister’s journey into the unknown world of international law and politics.With the help of a retired professor and two of his close and well-connected Indonesian friends, they take on the case to keep Kaoru’s brother from receiving the death sentence. 

The story is told through the eyes of Kaoru and Tez in alternating chapters. Kaoru’s story focuses on going through all the hurdles of red tape in Indonesia’s legal system. She is also witness to its corruption, having to deal with a police chief who is totally uncooperative and has already determined that Tez is guilty of heroin trafficking as Tez has already signed a confession admitting to his guilt.

Tetsuro’s story focuses on his reminisces about traveling through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam It is in Thailand where he meets a German woman who leads him into the world of heroin use He thinks about his addiction, his rehabilitation and his relapse into using heroin again. Still, he doesn’t understand why the purchase of two grams of heroin calls for the death penalty. It is with hindsight that Tez realizes he has been framed as he is being charged with possession of 200 grams of heroin with intent to sell. 

Unknown to Tez or Kaoru, good fortune was on their side. The siblings discover the news at a later time after the charge against Tez had been reduced without explanation. They were shown a magazine article which was translated them for them. They were informed that the police chief was being investigated by a detective in the Independent Investigations Division and had been working undercover to investigate misconduct in regional police departments. The detective had been shot and left for dead but survived and managed to get help. 

The actions of the two main characters are excellently interwoven to provide the reader with a peak into a young woman’s uphill battle combating a corrupt system and a man coming to terms with his own actions which led him to his current predicament. The more you learn about Tez and his fall from grace, the more you want Kaoru to succeed. The suspense of the outcome keeps you riveted to the story.  ~Ernie Hoyt

The Dancing Girls of Lahore : Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan's Pleasure District by Louise Brown (Harper Perennial

In The Dancing Girls of Lahore, Lousie Brown, an academic who works and teaches at Birmingham University in England, spends four years living amongst the women who work in Heera Mandi, a neighborhood and bazaar located in Lahore, Pakistan. It is also Lahore’s red light district. In the day, the bazaar is like any other in Pakistan, full of food stalls, small shops selling musical instruments and khussa, a traditional hand-crafted footwear, but at night, brothels located above the shops open for business.

In the past, Heera Mandi was a place “that trained courtesans who won the hearts of emperors”. These courtesans were known as tawaif, professional women who were taught to sing and dance, but times have changed. The women say that things were different back then, that women like them were respected. “They were artists, not gandi kanjri - not dirty prostitutes.”

The tawaif is similar to Japan’s geisha. They were women who were trained to sing and dance or recite poetry. Their main purpose was to entertain the nobility. Once the British annexed the area, the tawaif’s services declined and they made ends meet by selling their bodies, often serving the British military and thus they were defamed and branded as prostitutes.

We are witness to the life in the Heera Mandi as seen through the eyes of Brown. She introduces us to Maha and her family. A lady in her mid-thirties with five young children. Maha was sold as a bride at the age of twelve. She was a successful dancer in her twenties but after becoming the second wife of a man and having many babies, she has become plump and no longer dances for a living. Her meager existence with her children is poorly supported by her husband Adnon, who comes to Heera Mandi, only to smoke his opium in peace away from his “proper” family, meaning his first wife.

For the next four years, Brown shares the story of Maha’s family. It is very heart-wrenching and sad but is also a grim reality that there are more families such as Maha’s. Women who are born into this life and cannot escape it. The nighttime world of Heera Mandi which Brown describes is very difficult to imagine. In Heera Mandi, we are also introduced to khusras, transgenders who live on the fringe of society. We are taught words in Urdu and Punjabi that are frequently used in the business such as dalal, which translates to promoters, agents, or simply - pimps. We learn the slang for men and women’s private parts, and derogatory terms for prostitutes such as taxi and kanjri.

Brown does admit to feeling a bit of guilt sharing the story of Maha and her children as she is also a mother with children of her own who are about the same age as Maha’s. She tells us while her fourteen year old daughters in her middle class life in Britain go to school and to the cinema, Maha’s daughters “dance for men and have their virginity purchased by the highest bidder.” 

The Dancing Girls will make you laugh and cry and at times will make you angry. The abuse these women endure is unimaginable. What’s even more unimaginable is the vicious cycle in which the mother becomes her own children’s agent soliciting sex with them to potential customers. A tragedy whose story needs to be read by everyone. ~Ernie Hoyt

Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language by Katherine Russell Rich (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

“India will change you forever,” a friend once told Katherine Russell Rich and after recovering from cancer and losing her job, that change was just what Russell wanted. “I no longer had the language to describe my own life,” she explains. “So I decided to borrow someone else’s.” She decides to study Hindi for a year in Rajasthan.

Adult language learning isn’t for the fainthearted. The optimum period for language acquisition begins at eighteen months and peaks at seven. The ability to pick up vocabulary lasts forever but learning intonation and sound patterns becomes progressively harder with age. However Russell is intrigued by the idea that speaking another language opens up another world, wondering if learning Hindi will double the size of the world she was born into.

What she discovers is her new world expands with its new language and her old one begins to vanish. While she learns words that have no equivalent in English, vocabulary she’s used all of her life fades into the back of her mind. “Hindi pollutes my English,” as she absorbs the formal address of her new language and transfers new rules of pronunciation into her native language where they don’t belong. She begins to say “we” instead of “I,” as Hindi blurs the distinction between the individual and the group for her. Even her face begins to change. When she looks in a mirror, she judges her features by the standards that exist in her new culture, described by her new language. She learns that in Hindi yesterday and tomorrow are the same word, that Indian time is circular, not linear. “in India, in Hindi, it’s always right now.”

Russell practices total immersion, living in “the incurably medieval” city of Udaipur with an extended family who ensure that she’s surrounded by Hindi, “a monsoon of words.” She takes long walks alone, looking at unfamiliar sights that she has no names for. Without language, she falls back into the wonder of childhood, where nothing appears ordinary.

Then on a bright day in September, the world shakes when the Twin Towers fall. Language becomes political with words like “terrorism,” “fanaticism,” “war.” The deep and murderous divide between Indian Hindus and Muslims becomes horribly evident to Russell. She learns that Hindi is seen by many as a right-wing nationalistic tool, intended to supplant the nation’s eighteen official languages and to remove all lingering traces of Persian words that came with the former Mughal rulers.

Linking Muslims and Christians as undesirable foreign outsiders, right-wing Hindu terrorists attack and kill an Australian doctor and his two sons because they believe the man has been proselytizing. Russell is attacked three times in public, punched and knocked down. Her host family, one of her teachers tells her, has been spreading rumors about her and, unnerved, she thinks this is true. She leaves the house that’s been her refuge, moves to a hotel, and becomes “lost in India.”

Four hours from Udaipur, Hindu pilgrims burn to death in a train car conflagration. “Muslims had done this thing” is the popular verdict, reinforced by nationalist leaders, and Muslims are killed with impunity as a result. The official death toll is nine hundred. Russell’s friendships are shaken when she hears people she’s close to spew hatred against Muslims. When her year is up, India and Pakistan are “teetering on the edge.” And yet India becomes part of her, her second world, along with her imperfect but passionate grasp on Hindi.

Dreaming in Hindi is more than a memoir. It’s a deep and piercing examination of what’s gained and what’s lost by submitting to another language, another culture. ~Janet Brown

Silence by Shusaku Endo (Kodansha)

After reading Donald Keene’s autobiography, I was moved by his love of classical Japanese literature and was inspired to read another book by a well known Japanese literary author. In the past, my Japanese mother strongly suggested that I read works by Yukio Mishima and Natsume Soseki. She looked down on my love of science-fiction and fantasy. I reluctantly read books by both authors, Yukio Mishima’s “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” and Natsume Soseki’s “Botchan”, mostly to please my mother. Now, I wanted to read some classic Japanese literature by choice but which author’s books should I choose? 

I decided on Silence by Shusaku Endo for a couple of reasons. The first reason is simple. I had seen the movie adaptation of the novel and thought it was a great story. The second is the subject matter which centers around a relatively unknown group of people - the Japanese Christians. Endo presents a conflict between East and West, “especially in its relationship to Christianity.” Endo is quoted as saying, “Christianity must adapt itself radically if it is to take root in the ‘swamp’ of Japan.”

The story is set during a time when Christianity is banned and people who are caught practicing the religion are executed by burning. However, the burnings didn’t produce the desired effect as the condemned became martyrs in the eyes of other believers. The Shogunate realizes this and changes their tactics where death is  “preceded by torture in a tremendous effort to make the martyrs apostatize.” 

News had reached the Church in Rome, “Christovao Ferraira, sent to Japan sent to Japan by the Society of Jesus in Portugal, after undergoing the torture of ‘the pit’ at Nagasaki has apostatized.” Three fathers in the Society of Jesus, Sebastian Rodrigues, Francis Garrpe and Juan de Santa Marta, are currently working in the Dutch colony of Macao. After hearing about the situation in Japan, they are desperate to reach the shores of Japan even though Japan has cut all ties with Portugal. 

Rodrigues writes in a letter and relates Juan de Santa Marta’s words who says, “In that stricken land the Christians have lost their priests and are like a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Some one must go to give them courage and to ensure that the tiny flame of faith does not die out.” He also says, it is their duty to seek out their teacher, Father Ferraira, to find out the truth. Did Ferreira really apostatize or was it a lie spread by the Dutch and the English.

The Head Priest in Macao gave permission to Rodrigues and Gaarpe on the condition that they leave Juan de Santa Marta in Macao who was showing signs of catching malaria. In Macao the two Fathers meet their first Japanese, a twenty-nine or thirty-year old, unshaven and drunk man named Kichijiro. 

Two priests accompanied by a Japanese man named Kichijiro manage to reach the shores of Japan during the night so as not to be spotted. Gaarpe does not trust Kichijiro as he would not answer the simple question, “Are you a Christian?”  Father Rodrigues gives Kichijiro the benefit of the doubt and is pleased that Kichijiro has found some hidden Christians. Word spreads quickly and other Christians in hiding come to see the priests. Unfortunately, it isn’t only the Christians that have heard the news that there are foreign Fathers on Japanese soil. The news has reached the local government officials as well. 

Once the searching commences, the two Fathers are separated. Father Rodrigues cannot go back to his original hiding place and wanders the land with Kichijiro as his guide. Father Rodrigues is then betrayed by Kichijiro and is captured. However, the local daimyo doesn’t order Father Rodrigues’s execution but plays psychological games with him to convince the Father to apostatize in front of the other captured Christians. 

The Silence of the title is Father Rodgrigues’s question to God. Why does He remain silent as Christians are persecuted, tortured and killed? However,  the real question is, will Father Rodrigues apostatize to save the suffering of other Christians or will he defend his faith until his own end? ~Ernie Hoyt

Chronicles of My Life : An American in the Heart of Japan by Donald Keene (Columbia University Press)

To long-term expat residents of Japan, the name Donald Keene is synonymous with “Japan expert”. He is an American who found a deep love for Asia and Japan in particular and is also  a Professor Emeritus of Columbia University where he taught Japanese Literature. He has written extensively about Japanese literature and culture and has translated a number of Japanese classics into English. A man who was friends with the Japanese literary luminaries such as Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe, and Yasunari Kawabata. Unfortunately, he passed away in February of this year. It only seemed appropriate to read his autobiography as my personal tribute to him.

Chronicles of My Life is his autobiography where Keene shares how his love of Asia and Japan got began .I had assumed that he was a permanent resident of Japan long before I became one myself but found to my surprise that he only became a resident in 2011 after the Tohoku Earthquake and after his retirement from Columbia University. 

I was even more surprised when Keene admits that during his childhood, “The word kimono (however I pronounced it) was probably the only word of Japanese I knew.”  He mentions that he was familiar with kanji characters, thanks to his collection of postage stamps. But he goes on to say, “I never saw a Japanese film, never listened to a Japanese piece of music, never heard a word of Japanese spoken.” He didn’t meet his first Japanese until he was in junior high school. 

Keene excelled in his academic studies and was accepted at Columbia University when he was only sixteen. He meets his first Chinese in his humanities class and became good friends. However, Lee was studying to be an engineer, literature did not hold as much interest to Lee as it did to Keene. Keene comes up with the brilliant idea of having Lee teach him Chinese and starts practicing the art of calligraphy. During Keene’s college days, he used to frequent a book shop that specializes in remainders and found “The Tale of Genji” by Murasaki Shibibu for forty-nine cents. It’s this story that opened his path to Japanese literature. 

On December 7, 1942, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Keene’s professor of the history of Japanese thought was interned as an enemy alien. Keene realizes that he would probably have to join the military but had learned of the Navy’s Japanese language school whose main purpose was to train men to be interpreters and translators. Thus, Keene was able to continue his Japanese studies in the navy.

After being discharged from the army, Keene returns to Columbia University to continue his studies in Japanese where he worked on his Master’s Thesis and Doctoral Dissertation. He also studied for a year at Harvard University before transferring to Cambridge University where he received his second Master’s Degree. His hopes of studying in Japan was not possible because it was the time of the Occupation and the only non-military people who were allowed into the country were businessmen and missionaries.

Keene fulfills his wish of going back to Japan by receiving a fellowship from a foundation to study at Kyoto University. During his stay in Kyoto, Keene writes his first articles and reviews in Japanese for academic and literary magazine.

This is a fascinating story of one man’s love affair with Japan written in a style that is entertaining and easy to understand. Keene’s quest to gain a better understanding of Japan’s literary history is so enchanting you may feel the urge to visit your local bookstore or library and starting reading Japanese literature on your own. ~Ernie Hoyt

Empire of Horses by John Man (Pegasus Books)

In the earliest days of humanity, “an ocean of grass” stretched across continents, ignored until horses and bovine animals were domesticated and needed to be fed. Herdsmen traveled across the grasslands, moving their livestock from one spot to the next, becoming “pastoral nomads.” They discovered that horses, which could be tamed, ridden, used to carry heavy burdens, and (when necessary) eaten, were valuable animals that gave rise to a new civilization--one that was dominated by horsemen.

With the advent of the Bronze and Iron Ages, the horsemen became archers, hunting with bows and metal arrowheads. The skill they needed to hunt for food became extraordinarily useful when employed against enemies, aiming deadly arrows while astride swift horses, and the precursor of medieval knights was born.

Within the Great Bend of the Yellow River, the nomadic region of Ordos was born, which became the empire of a mysterious tribe called the Xiongnu. Where these people came from is a matter of speculation but it’s a fact that they were formidable warriors. Soon their territory extended to 350 kilometers from the Han Dynasty’s capital of Chang’an and their leader, Modun, was hungry to expand his borders.

He had been a significant problem for China for years, attacking its northern borders with his “horseback archers,” enough that the Han emperor tried to buy him off, with gifts of silk and Chinese princesses. This bought an uncertain peace for sixty but failed to achieve the underlying goal: to weaken the invaders by giving them a taste for Chinese luxury. The Xiongnu counted their wealth in horses and bows with the strength to turn arrows into armor-piercing bullets.

The Xiongnu never succeeded in conquering China but for centuries they maintained their empire, which was “almost twice the size of Rome’s”  and “took what they wanted,” until at last they fell to the time-honored practice of divide and conquer. The southern Xiongnu succumbed to Chinese influence while the northerners clung to tradition. Still the victories of their empire are legendary, to the point that modern-day Mongolians claim them as their ancestors and Modun as the influence for Genghis Khan.

The Mongol name for the Xiongnu is Hunnu, or, Man says, “simply Huns.” This takes him to the theory that this first nomadic empire was the root of another army of mounted archers, one that would be scorned as barbarians and that would eventually take over the Balkans from the Caspian Sea to the Baltic, “an area half the size of the USA. Attila, leading his people known as the Huns, was a “juggernaut that could live by pillage,” much like the Xiongnu. 

In the mid-eighteenth century, a French Sinologist in a five-volume work called A General History of the Huns, Turks and Mongols made the astounding and unsubstantiated claim that “Attila’s Huns were descendants of the ‘Hiong-nou.” This theory was given credence by Edward Gibbon, the 1911 edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, and historians of the 1930s. However, as Man says, the one conclusive similarity is both the Xiongnu  (or Hunnu) and the Huns came out of nowhere, established their empires by conquest, and then completely vanished. With enigmas like that, especially when they bear almost the same name, who can possibly keep from romantic speculation? ~Janet Brown

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