All the Way to the Tigers by Mary Morris (Doubleday, release date June 6, 2020)

When Mary Morris shatters her ankle in seven places, she asks her surgeon, “Will I be able to go to Morocco in six weeks?” Instead she spends a year immobile and after another year she knows she’s unable to hike as much as a mile--she can’t even walk on a beach.

A travel writer and adventurer, Morris has been stuck at home far too long, suffering from travel envy. “I covet journeys,” she confesses. Turning to her husband, she says, “I have to get away”—and she knows where. During her motionless time, she read Death in Venice and was struck by the passage, “He would go on a journey. Not far. Not all the way to the tigers.” Reading these words over and over, Morris knows what she will do when she can walk again. She’s going all the way to the tigers.

To Morris, all the way doesn’t mean the heavily touristed area of Rajasthan. “Not Rajasthan, not Jaipur, no Taj Mahal,” she firmly tells her travel agent. Instead she heads for Madhya Pradesh in central India to the Pench Tiger Reserve, a place so cold “the bananas have frozen on their stems.” There’s no heat in her hotel except for the hot water bottle that Morris tossed into her suitcase instead of the warm clothing she was certain she wouldn’t need. Her throat hurts, her head aches, her cough is inexorable, and she has a six a.m. appointment with a car and driver that will take her off in search of the tigers. 

This could easily become a tiresome account of a white lady’s buffered travels to satisfy a whim but Morris is far too skilled a writer to let this happen. Her strength is in describing what she sees and everything she sees is interesting to her. “Real travelers, like real writers, move through the world like a child. With a child’s sense of wonder and surprise.” Although the sight of a tiger becomes more improbable with every tigerless day, Morris begins not to care. Instead she  marvels at the jackals and monkeys, the white-spotted and sambar deer, the birds with turquoise and black feathers and the ones with purple plumes. With lush and lyrical language, she makes the lushness that surrounds her palpable and thoroughly intoxicating.

In the same way, she intertwines stories of her life with her quest for the tigers in a quilt that is almost seamless, with colors that never jar. Her mother throwing her strings of pearls into the Mediterranean sea, laughing as she says. “I’ve been wearing them too long,” mirrors Morris’s release of her idealized tiger as she meanders, lost yet still observant, through a Mumbai slum.

“I am shaken by this fragile world,” she says while realizing that she will always carry the curse God gave to Cain: “You will be a restless wanderer.” Morris has turned that curse into the gift of “waking up each day afresh,” reaching for her passport, and heading off into a world that for her will always be new.~Janet Brown

The Emissary by Yoko Tawada (New Directions)

Yoko Towada’s satirical novel The Emissary tells the story of what life might be like in Japan “after suffering a massive, irreparable disaster.” Originally published as Kentoshi in the Japanese language in 2014. The English version was translated by Margaret Mitsutani in 2018. We can surmise that Towada is imagining a post-Fukushima Japan with greater disastrous results. In this new world, Japan has isolated itself from the world. People are no longer able to travel freely, the country accepts no immigrants and even domestic travel is strictly regulated. In this dystopian future, “children are born so weak they can barely walk.” Only the elderly thrive. The elderly remain healthy and active, living beyond their hundred years. People in their seventies and eighties are considered the “young elderly” who also continue to work and provide for their children.

Mumei, which means “no name” in Japanese, lives with his great-grandfather Yoshiro who constantly worries over Mumei. Mumei may be “frail and gray-haired, but he is a beacon of hope: full of wit and free of self-pity.”  Yoshiro has his own routine. Every morning he goes for a run along a riverbank for about a half hour with a dog that he rents from Rent-a-Dog place. One of the biggest changes in the new Japan is how the use of foreign words were no longer being used. The change is evident when we are told, “Long ago, this sort of purposeless running was referred to as jogging.” “It was now called loping down.”  The term physical examination was also no longer being used, it is now called a monthly lookover. 

Everyday life continues. Mumei goes to school. People go to work - mostly the elderly. At a bakery, the baker tells Yoshiro the even older man making bread is his uncle. The baker tells Yoshiro that his uncle says, “Anyone over a hundred doesn’t need to rest anymore.” He tells Yoshiro that his uncle scolds him for even suggesting to take a break. The two talk about an odd concept called retirement which they reminisced as a “way of handing jobs over to younger people”. They talked about how many breads used to be called German bread or French bread and don’t they find it strange that “bread originally came from Europe, but for some reason it’s still allowed.”

Yoshiro’s was thinking about the talk with the baker as he was heating soy milk for Mumei. “Mumei’s teeth were so soft he couldn’t eat bread unless it was softened by steeping.”  He was reminded of the time when he had seen Mumei’s baby teeth “drop out one after another like pomegranate pulp, leaving his mouth smeared with pulp.”  Most children were not able to absorb the calcium their bodies need and Yoshiro thought that humankind might evolve into a toothless species. Sensing his great-grandfather’s concern, Mumei says “You manage to eat plenty without teeth, Great-Grandpa, and look how healthy you are.” Mumei doesn’t seem to regard his loss of teeth as a tragedy and still manages to look on the bright side of things.

When Mumei reaches the age of fifteen, he can no longer walk on his own and is confined to a wheelchair. He knew that soon, he would also need a breathing machine to keep him alive. Around this time, Mumei is approached by his elementary school teacher, Mr. Yoshitani. Yoshitani had been keeping an eye on Mumei for years as he saw in Mumei, the potential to become an emissary. He felt that Mumei would be old enough to understand. He explained to Mumei that “to send emissaries abroad was not so forbidden as to be considered a crime.” and the main purpose for sending emissaries to other countries was to let them be able to “thoroughly research the state of Japanese children’s health” in the event that a similar occurrence happens in other countries.

It’s a thought-provoking story to make you wonder what the future will hold if the world could not be bequeathed to a younger generation. The story stays with you long after you have finished reading it. ~Ernie Hoyt

Hiroshima Notes by Kenzaburo Oe (Grove)

In 1965, Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe accepted an offer to write about Hiroshima and its people twenty years after the dropping of the Atomic Bomb. Hiroshima Notes is his thoughts and reactions to the ongoing political situation concerning the nuclear arms race. He would interview and hear testimony of atomic bomb survivors and also the victims of radiation sickness, a new disease that was then unknown to the world. The notes were originally serialized in a monthly journal called Sekai which translates to “world” and were taken over a two year period between August of 1963 through May of 1965. It was first published in Japanese by Iwanami Shoten in 1965. This current English edition was published in 1995 and was translated by David Swain and Toshi Yonezawa. It also includes a new introduction by Oe himself.

Oe’s first trip to Hiroshima was in August of 1963. The Ninth World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs was to be held but was unbelievably disorganized and Oe himself wondered if the conference was going to be held at all. The Directors organizing the event have been holding secret meetings and even the press were kept out. After the end of the war and with the proliferation of nuclear arms, in 1958 anti-nuclear conferences began to appear around the world. One of the main contentions about the Ninth World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs was the use of “any country”. This rift caused a split in the anti-nuclear movement into the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyo) and the Japan Congress against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikin). The dispute was over “whether to oppose nuclear tests by ‘any country’, capitalist or socialist, and over the value of the 1963 Limited Nuclear Test-ban Treaty.”

In these very personal essays, Oe mentions in his Introduction to this edition that he once didn’t believe in an old saying that “One’s whole life can be decided by the events of a few days.” However, as he reminisces about his visits to Hiroshima, he now believes it does. Before going to Hiroshima, Oe became a father. Unfortunately, his son was born with severe disability. The doctors told him, even if they operate, the chances of his son leading a normal life was not likely. It was Oe’s interviews with Atomic bomb victims who gave him the courage to not abandon his child and also changed his way of thinking. Oe often speaks of the “dignity” of the Hiroshima A-bomb victims - as “people who did not commit suicide in spite of everything.”

One of the most disturbing and thought-provoking essays is how Oe says that “people want to erase the memory of Hiroshima”. Oe says it’s not just the Americans but people all over the world want to forget. Oe states references a paper that stated “Hiroshima is the prime example not of the power of atomic weapons but of the misery they cause.”  Oe continues to tell us that “Powerful leaders in the East and West insist on maintaining nuclear arms as a means of preserving the peace.” 

The argument against the use of nuclear power remains relevant today, years after Oe’s collection of essays. In the news, the conservative Japanese government continues to try to revise Japan’s constitution allowing for more military might and of even becoming a nuclear power. It appears many politicians have not learned anything from Hiroshima or Nagasaki. We can only struggle to continue the fight to make the world free of nuclear weapons. ~Ernie Hoyt

China Correspondent by Agnes Smedley (Pandora Books)

“I have always detested the idea that sex is the chief bond between men and women. Friendship is far more human.” Agnes Smedley begins China Correspondent with this as her prevailing theme. Her search for friendship and what is human led her away from a life of intellectual and financial poverty to the farthest corners of the world in wartime China, an odyssey that began in 1919 and ended in 1941.

Escaping the example set by her father and brother, who “had lived like animals without protection or education,” Smedley left for New York when she was in her twenties where she was drawn into the world of exiled Indian intellectuals. Realizing that in America a woman who wasn’t interested in marriage or money was doomed, she took a job as a stewardess on a Europe-bound freighter, saying “Live the life of a cabbage I would not.”

Landing in Danzig, she embarked upon an eight-year relationship with an Indian revolutionary leader, which she said “almost drove me to the verge of insanity.” After leaving him, she began to study Indian history, attempting to gain a PhD at Berlin University but abandoning her dream when she realized she lacked the necessary preparation for it. An interest in Chinese history and in that country’s revolution took her to China and “into the Middle Ages.” Arriving in 1928, she stayed there for thirteen years.

From the beginning, Smedley was determined to enter into Chinese life “and let it strike me full force.” As special correspondent to a leading German newspaper, she gained access to people and places that most thirty-six-year-old Western women had no knowledge of or interest in. She argued with “Chinese patricians” in Beijing, was guided through Nanjing by Kuomintang officials, and became friends with the writer Lo Hsun in Shanghai who drew her sympathies to the “men who were fighting and dying for the liberation of the poor.”

After Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, Smedley turned her attention to the Chinese troops, traveling to them and frequently with them as much as she could. In a Yan’an mountain cave  she met Mao, “a tall, forbidding figure,” who immediately struck her as an aesthete. “I was repelled by the feminine in him” she writes but later is grateful for their “months of precious friendship.” Asking him if she should write a biography of a leading general or go to the front as a journalist, she was told by Mao, “The war is more important than your history.”

As the Japanese captured Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, Smedley marched with the Chinese army, often covering twenty-five to thirty miles a day. She worked with the Chinese Red Cross Medical Corps, trying unsuccessfully to gain them American aid. She argued forcefully with an American businessmen that when he and his colleagues sold war materials to Japan, they “were digging their own graves,” only to be told “Why shouldn’t we sell to anyone who will pay?”

Reporting with every scrap of strength and energy that she had, Smedley lost journalistic objectivity by allying herself with the Red Army and eventually lost her health. However she never lost her sense of humor. In an army camp, seeing troops march past bearing rifles, she asked where they were going and was told “To watch a movie.” 

“I liked the idea of taking artillery to the movies. For years I had seen many...that had left me completely frustrated, without any way of revenging myself. I now realized had I taken a heavy machine gun,,,I could have looked on with sweet patience, biding my time.”

At last, weakened by repeated attacks of malaria and a malfunctioning gall bladder, her toenails falling off and her teeth loosened by malnutrition, Smedley was put on a plane to Hong Kong. “What do you want or need?” she was asked on her first morning. Her reply was “Ice cream.”

Before she left for the U.S, an American pilot told her “Why honey, don’t you know you’ll be unhappy back there with all those foreigners?” But Smedley returned with a new battle to fight on ground that no longer felt like her own, “to tell America the truth about China.” Almost a hundred years after her time in China, her passion and her truth still is compelling and moving, fulfilling the promise she made to soldiers who had said “Tell your countrymen.~Janet Brown

Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse (Kodansha)

Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain, translated from the Japanese title of Kuroi Ame by John Bester, reads as an anti-war novel. The story is set in and around Hiroshima. Although it is a work of fiction, Ibuse bases his tale on written testimonies from people’s diaries and also on the  interviews with victims of the atomic bombing. The main character, Shigematsu Shizuma, was a real person, and the journal he kept also exists outside of literature. The novel was also adapted into a movie directed by Shohei Imamura.

Several years have passed since the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city. A man named Shigematsu Shizuma who lives in a small village called Kobatake, located about a hundred miles to the east of Hiroshima, is worried about his niece and not finding a suitable marriage partner for her. Whenever they receive an enquiry, a persistent rumor would abound. People would say Yasuko worked in the kitchens of the Second Middle School Service Corps in Hiroshima and because of that rumor people believed she was a victim or radiation sickness and her uncle and aunt were conspiring to conceal that fact. 

Yasuko hands her uncle a diary she kept before, during, and after the bombing which he decides to copy to send to go-betweens for an omiai partner in an attempt to assure the other party that Yasuko did not serve in the Second Middle School Service Corps and was not even in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped and therefore was not a victim of radiation sickness. In her entry for August 9th, Yasuko had written about meeting up with her aunt and uncle who had come looking for her. Her uncle was hurt on his left cheek but her aunt seemed unharmed. It was when her uncle mentioned that her face looked like she was splashed with mud. This reminded Yasuko or the black rain that fell after the bomb had dropped. It is the part about the black rain they decide to leave out. 

Having read Yasuko’s diary, Shigematsu decides to keep a record of his own account and titled his document “A Journal of the Atomic Bombing”. The story is then told during the present, a few years after the bombing, in conjunction with the journal he kept, starting with his entry on August 6, the day the bomb was dropped and the world was changed forever. It was the beginning of the “Atomic Age”. He concludes his diary with the final entry on August 15, the day the Japanese people were to listen to an ‘important broadcast’ on the radio. It was the words of the Emperor of Japan who said, “The enemy is using a new and savage bomb to kill and maim innocent victims and inflict incalculable damage. Moreover, should hostilities continue any further, the final result would be to bring about not only the annihilation of the Japanese race, but the destruction of human civilization as a whole…” It was the speech of surrender officially ending th

Shizuma’s story and journal give the essence of what it was like to live through the atomic bombing and its aftermath. Ibuse doesn’t make any moral judgements against America’s use of the atomic bomb, nor does he blame the Japanese government for its militaristic expansion. What he provides here is the story of an ordinary family, of the ordinary people who continue to live with the memory and fear of succumbing to radiation sickness and how they go about living their lives as normally as possible.  This highly descriptive novel of the pain and suffering of the atomic bomb survivors is as relevant today as it was when it was first published. ~Ernie Hoyt

In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami (Kodansha)

In the Miso Soup was first published in Japanese in 1997 under the same title and won the Yomiuri Prize for Fiction in the same year. The English translation was published in 2003 and was translated by Ralph McCarthy. The story centers around two main characters. The protagonist, Kenji, is from Shizuoka. He’s twenty years old and his mother believes he’s taking college prep courses in Tokyo. Frank is a heavy-set American tourist who found Kenji’s name and ad as a guide in a publication called “Tokyo Pink Guide”. 

Kenji works as an unofficial “nightlife guide”. In other words, Kenji helps gaijin (foreign tourists) expore the seedier side of Japan - the sex parlors, cabarets, hostess clubs, S&M bondage clubs, peep shows, “soap lands” and “pink salons”. He has been hired by Frank for three consecutive nights before New Year’s Day. The day Kenji receives a phone call from Frank, he was reading a newspaper article about the death of a young high school girl. The article said, “her corpse had been dumped at a trash collection site in a relatively untraveled area in the Kabuki-cho district of Shinjuku with arms, legs and head cut off.” 

Kenji meets Frank at his hotel and Frank definitely wants to be taken to Kabuki-cho. After exchanging pleasantries, Kenji gets down to business and asks what Frank wants to do tonight. Frank answers with a grin and says, “Sex!”  Kenji seems to find Frank’s grin unnerving but he can’t pinpoint why it makes him feel that way. Kenji makes small talk with Frank but he suspects that Frank is not telling him the truth and Kenji wonders why. 

Frank tells Kenji that he wants to build up his mood before going to one of the sex parlors. They start out the evening by going to a lingerie pub. A place where women just sit and talk to you while only wearing underwear.  Frank brought out his copy of the “Tokyo Pink Guide” book and begins reading the English-Japanese sex glossary. When Frank pulled out his wallet to pay the bill, Kenji couldn’t help but notice a dark stain on one of the notes. To Kenji, it looked like dried blood. Kenji thought of the newspaper article he read earlier and begins to have his suspicion that Frank is not what he says he is, however, Kenji has promised to be his guide for two more nights.. 

It would be the second day of guiding Frank which would lead to Kenji fearing for his life. Kenji had taken Frank to an omiai pub, a bar where you can meet available single women and negotiate with them if you want something more. When Kenji was handed the bill, it was much more than the quoted price they were given. The manager is given really filthy bills so Frank asks Kenji to translate to see if he can use a credit card. The manager reluctantly agrees. Frank tells the manager and girls at the place to look closely at the card. Kenji senses that he is hypnotizing them. Frank then tells Kenji to leave for a moment and calls his girlfriend that he would handle this. 

When Kenji comes back to the pub, he sees one of the girls  “who looked as though she had another mouth below the jaw. Oozing from this second, smiling mouth was a thick, dark liquid, like tar.” The woman’s throat had been slit from ear to ear and yet she still seemed to be alive. Kenji was paralized with fear and thought Frank might kill him as well. 

Kenji manages to keep his wits about himself but is confused when Frank tells him that he should go to the police and tell them what he has done. Kenji must make a choice. Should he go to the police and report what he has seen? Should he pretend he knows nothing about what happened inside the omiai pub? 

Murakami’s gruesome tale of murder and violence is disturbing and intriguing. The reader will be drawn to the seedier side of Tokyo and will be shown the darker side of the human spirit. Read at your own risk. ~Ernie Hoyt

Three Tigers, One Mountain by Michael Booth (St. Martin's Press, April 2020)

“Two tigers cannot share the same mountain, “ is the Chinese proverb that Michael Booth choose as the epigraph to his latest book. Booth expands the proverb to include three tigers, China, Korea, and Japan. None of the three seem willing to share territory, historically there’s been animosity between them, and Booth wants to know why. When much of the world has put the crimes of war behind them and reconciled with their adversaries, why are these countries still at odds with each other? 

To find answers to this question, Booth sets off on a geopolitical odyssey that takes him through Japan, across the sea to Korea, embarking on another small voyage to China, and traveling from Harbin to Hong Kong.  He begins with a firmly held conviction that any regional trouble began with Matthew Perry’s Black Ships forcing Japan into a diplomatic relationship with the West and upsetting “the Confucian geopolitical hierarchy that had held in the region for most of the last two millennia.” China, with its predominate culture, technology, and education, was the leader, Korea “was the primary tributary land,” and Japan was “the vaguely barbaric little brother.” 

Suddenly Japan was the beneficiary of Western technology and weaponry as America brought its new ally into the modern world. Perry arrived in 1853. By 1876 Japan had defeated Korea and established a protectorate over that country after winning the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, a victory that also forced China to cede Taiwan to Japanese control. In 1905, Japan defeated Russia in a battle for the northern portion of Korea and in 1910 took over the entire country, and then moved onto Manchuria in 1931. Within a little more than half a century, Japan had gone from little brother status to the dominant Asian power, a position that it lost by force only 75 years ago. In countries that measure their existence by thousands of years, 75 years is a heartbeat of time, not long enough to heal wounds, let alone replace scar tissue.

In Japan Booth discovers a strong right wing presence that focuses its prejudice against the Korean residents, Zainichi, who came as laborers before 1945 and never left. Stereotyped as lowclass and unskilled criminals, the Koreans who haven’t assimilated into Japanese culture are easy scapegoats who are attacked with racist slogans, not only by conservative extremists but by mainstream society in general, Booth is told by a Japanese journalist. Meanwhile China overtook Japan as the world’s second-largest economy ten years ago, which exacerbates old tensions between these two countries. Japanese revisionist history teaches that Japanese expansion into Korea and China was benign and that the Nanjing Massacre and Korean slave labor is nothing more than fake news.

Korea sees its 35-year occupation by Japan as far from benign. It went from being a kingdom to a colony, with its language, culture, and even the names of its people being replaced by that of Japan. Its natural resources were drained for Japanese benefit and  beginning in the early 1930s, thousands of its women were commandered as sex slaves for the Japanese military.

Estimates of their number range from 20,000 to to 100,000, and only forty of them are still alive today. 

Although Japan paid 900 million dollars to Korea in reparations from the war, and a fund set up by private Japanese citizens offered 3.5 million dollars directly to the surviving comfort women in 1995, many of them refused to take the money. What they want, along with many of their compatriots, is a direct apology from the Japanese government, if not the emperor himself.

As for China? They’re held responsible for the division of Korea and are considered the major obstacle to its unification. 

Booth begins his Chinese journey in Harbin, where the Japanese perfected weapons of germ warfare, using prisoners of war and local Chinese as their guinea pigs. More than six hundred people a year died from experiments, including live vivisection and lethal injections of bubonic plague, cholera, and anthrax. Although a museum holds testimony from eyewitnesses to the atrocities committed in Harbin, few residents know about it according to a UNESCO survey. 

Nanjing however is deeply alive in the Chinese consciousness, and is kept that way by the use of television dramas depicting the atrocities committed by the Japanese military and the heroism of China’s defenders. As Booth points out, even the lowest estimate of Nanjing’s civilian deaths between December 1937 and January 1938, which is 50,000, compares horribly with “the 61,000 British civilians and 108,000 French civilians during the entirety of World War Two.” 

But to counteract the horrors of the past, Booth finds hope in the pop culture of the present. The youth of China are attracted to the energy of Japanese manga, anime, cosplay, and pornigraphy. Nanjing, he says, “has more Japanese restaurants here than in any other Chinese city,” and over 8 million Chinese tourists visited Japan in 2018. Korean boy bands, films, and Gangnam Style have captivated young hipsters in Japan and in China. Perhaps, he speculates,  as the aging populations of the three tigers increase, the countries will experience a “geriatric peace,” as old wounds fade within failing memories and the young find no reason to revive them.

His theory is a slick and easy one, bolstered by his slick and easy observations. Even so, his book, written in a breezy travelogue style, will attract the attention and enlarge the focus of readers who are looking for entertainment, served up with a helping of forgotten history.~Janet Brown

The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Janissary Tree is the first book in a new and exciting mystery series. It is set in the city that sits on the cusp of Europe and Asia, it is Constantinople in the nineteenth century. The year is 1836, and the Ottoman Empire is still thriving as one of the world’s greatest powers.

In Topkapi Palace, the Sultan - “Ruler of the Black Sea and the White, ruler of Rumelia and Mingrelia, lord of Anatolia and Ionia, Romania, and Macedonia, protector of the Holy Cities, steely rider through the realms of bliss” is sitting in the Abode of Felicity. The sultan is awaiting one of his slave girls from his Harem to share his bed, however, the person that comes to see him is not a beautiful girl but is one of the eunuchs, the only men allowed in the inner sanctum of the harem. He informs the sultan that one of the slave girls has been strangled to death. The sultan replies, “Send for Yashim.”

Yashim - scholar, chef, confidante to the sultan, a linguist and a thorough investigator. He is also a eunuch. Yashim is also summoned by the sultan’s seraskier, a vizier who commands the Ottoman Empire’s army. He tells Yashim that in less than two weeks time, the sultan will be reviewing the troops in the New Guard and needs to be able to show the people that the troops are as well disciplined as the former Janissary Corp. The Janissaries were an elite military organization. They were a corps of slaves, young Christian boys who were kidnapped and converted to Islam. However, four of his men in the New Guard have gone missing and one of them has been found - dead in an iron pot! The seraskier has given Yashim ten days to investigate the death.

The Janissary Corp was a formidable force to contend with and they had also grown in power, . As Western Europe’s military was modernizing and using technology, the Janissaries became outdated and unwilling to change. They also feared their power was going to be taken away, so the Janissaries rose up in revolt but were suppressed and defeated in what became known as the Auspicious Incident. 

Yashim is helped in his investigation by a Polish ambassador, a transexual dancer, and the Valide Sultan who is the living mother of the Sultan. He is led to the Janissary Tree, a large tree in the city the Janissaries chose as a meeting point. Here, Yashim finds part of a Sufi poem. This in turn, leads him to the Karagozi, a group of mystics in the Sufi sect. Yashim has deduced that the three murders are related to the Janissaries and the poem is giving a clue to the fourth location. 

Will Yashim be in time to stop a fourth murder? Are hidden members of the Janissary Corp getting ready to start a new rebellion?  Can Yashim solve the murder of the slave girl in the harem? As Yashim gets closer to the truth, he finds that his life is also in danger. This tale of murder and intrigue will keep you rivited and you will not want to set this book down. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Foreigner by Francie Lin (Picador)

The Foreigner, published in 2008, won the Edgar Award for the Best First Novel by an American Author for 2009. An award given by the Mystery Writers of America. It is written by Francie Lin, a Taiwanese American. The novel is set amidst the seedier side of life in Taiwan. It is a tale of sibling rivalry and coming to terms with one’s roots. A story of family and tradition, but is also the story of crime, murder, and death.

Emerson Chang is a financial analyst living with his mother, a Taiwanese immigrant, who is the owner and proprietor of a motel called the Remada Inn. Emerson was born and raised in the States and can’t speak a word of Chinese. He is forty years old. He’s also single….and a virgin.

Every Friday evening Emerson has dinner with his mother at a local Chinese restaurant called the Jade Palace. Today is Emerson’s birthday. His mother has also invited a single woman to join them. Emerson’s mother is a very traditional Chinese woman and wants Emerson to get married and start a family with a nice Chinese girl.

The last thing on Emerson’s mind is marriage. He was in love once, with a woman twenty years his senior. Of course his mother didn’t approve.  She also wasn’t Chinese. This evening Emerson begins to resents his mother’s meddling and brings up his younger brother, Little P. Little P left the home and went to Taiwan after the death of their father. Emerson hasn’t seen his brother in almost ten years. Bringing up Little P’s name upsets his mother who abruptly leaves the restaurant. 

Once Emerson gets back to the motel where he and his mother live, Emerson decides to confront his mother and tell her that he will not be manipulated by her anymore. Unfortunately, he finds his mother on the floor. She is taken to the hospital where Emerson first learns that she has stage four cancer and doesn’t have long to live. 

The Foreigner gets more complicated after Emerson’s mother’s death. According to his mother’s last will and testament, his mother has left the motel to Little P while Emerson is left some property in Taiwan. His mother also had one additional request - to have her ashes interred in Taiwan. The lawyers have been unable to get into contact with Little P so Emerson decides to kill two birds with one stone by taking his mother’s ashes to Taiwan and visit Little P in person to inform him of their mother’s passing and about his inheritance.

When Emerson visits his younger brother, he is greeted by a knife at his throat by a man that looks pretty up. The man turns out to be Little P! After exchanging a few awkward words, Emerson tells Little P that their mother had left the motel to him after her death. The only thought Little P had was how much money he could make by selling it. After a few more unpleasant exchanges, Emerson realizes that Little P is in trouble and feels it's his sense of duty  to help him. 

The more Emerson tries to help Little P, the further into Taiwan’s criminal underworld he goes. Emerson finds that Little P works at a small karaoke bar run by their uncle where Emerson meets a couple of his cousins, Poison and Big One, who are not the friendliest of relatives. Emerson also spots a woman at the karaoke bar and nobody will tell him who she is. It seems there is more to the karaoke bar that meets the eye and there also seems to be a secret Little P is hiding. The longer Emerson spends time with Little P, the more he feels the need to help save his little brother. But does his little brother really need saving? 

What secret is Little P hiding? Why does Emerson not give the papers for Little P to sign to hand over the motel? And who is that little girl who seemed like a little frightened waif? As Emerson begins putting all the pieces together, what he discovers will shock him and us, the readers as well! ~Ernie Hoyt

The House of the Pain of Others by Julian Herbert (Graywolf Press)

In the Mexican city of Torreon, the football team has a motto written on their locker room wall: In the house of the pain of others. This is appropriate because, as Julian Herbert discloses in his book of the same title, Torreon lives with the history of the pain of others, the massacre of over three hundred Chinese residents in 1911 during the Mexican Revolution.

It was Pancho Villa who killed them, say many Torreon residents. It was the rabble who followed the soldiers who were responsible. It was done by outsiders, not by those who lived here. Manuel Lee Soriano, a descendant of a Chinese family who remained in Torreon after the slaughter, says, “I lived through those anti-Chinese campaigns and that’s how my parents taught me to respond…’If you think you might cause offense, better not speak. Better be quiet’...the story belongs to us...It’s got nothing to do with anyone else.”

Torreon, Mexico’s youngest city, was a boom town at the close of the 19th Century, its explosive growth fueled by cotton, steel, and rubber. It needed workers and Chinese immigrants, facing poverty in their country after years of war and rebellion and drawn to North America by the California Gold Rush, came across the fluid borders between the U.S. and Mexico to seek their fortunes. Finding not only work but the opportunity to establish their own businesses in Torreon, they stayed and prospered, owning large grocery stores, hotels, restaurants, and the city’s gigantic produce market. Wong Foon-Chuck, who got off the train in Torreon with two baskets of Chinese goods, within several years had founded a school and owned hotels. J. Wong Lim arrived with a medical degree from a California university and became a Mexican national with three languages at his disposal.

Drawn by the idea of establishing a shipping line between Mazatlan and Hong Kong, a wealthy politician and Confucian philosopher, Kang Youwei, was attracted to Torreon because its Chinese were residents, not seasonal migratory workers. He soon began speculating in real estate, buying cheap and selling high, and with Foon-Chuck and Lim, founded what was called the Banco Chino which was designed to become the bank used by all the Chinese in Mexico. Torreon’s Chinese business community became an economic force with the capacity for greater growth--and as the Revolution gathered steam, they became a target.

Kang Youwei’s real estate success led to higher rents and housing shortages and demagogues were quick to exploit that, along with the threat that Chinese businessmen were killing off any competing enterprises. When the Mexican Revolution began to gather force, guerrilla forces destabilized the area around Torreon with frequent raids in the city, setting the stage for unrest long before revolutionary troops arrived on May 13th, 1911.

Making their way to the Chinese produce farms, the soldiers demanded food and water at first, then stepped up their demands to include tools, cash, and even the clothing on people’s backs, leaving their victims vulnerable and “the easiest to kill.” From the night of May 13th to the night of May 15th, Chinese businesses were looted, businessmen and their employees were killed in their shops, and those who found hiding places were dragged out from safety and killed in the streets. Corpses were thrown from the windows of the Banco Chino, at least four Chinese children were murdered in plain sight, and Mexican residents carried away whatever bounty they could scavenge from the looted stores and houses. The massacre continued until the revolutionary leader Emilio Maduro finally declared martial law and an immediate end to attacks upon the Chinese. By that time almost half of Torreon’s Chinese residents had been killed within a period of two days. They were buried in mass graves outside of the city. 

The economic loss to the Chinese community was estimated at over 1,300,00 pesos and many of the survivors left Torreon. China demanded financial indemnity for the death of its citizens and Emilio Madero’s brother Francisco, after gaining power as the Mexican president, promised a payment of 3,100,000 pesos, a decision that was highly unpopular with his fellow countrymen. Not long afterward Madero was assassinated and the indemnity was never paid.

Wong Foon-Chuck’s descendants still live in Torreon. J. Wong Lim remained in the city for years after the massacre; his home is now the Museo de la Revolution. But Torreon’s Chinese community is muted in comparison to what it once was and its bloody history is obscured. As Manuel Lee Soriano’s parents told him, “Better keep quiet.”

Julian Herbert, ignoring that advice, has brought these truths out of the house of pain into the awareness of outsiders in the rest of the world. ~Janet Brown

No One's Perfect by Hirotada "Oto" Ototake (Kodansha)

When HIrotada “Oto” Ototake was born, the doctors thought his mother might be given quite a shock if she were to see him. They decided it was best to keep things unsaid for the time being. It would be more than a month later when Oto’s mother finally sees her newborn son for the first time.

Why did the doctors keep Oto’s mother from seeing him? The year was 1976. In Japan, it was the days before the age of “informed consent”. People took what the doctors said at face value. Their word was final. The father said he was just following the doctor’s orders. You see, Oto was born with a very obvious congenital birth defect. He was born with tetra-amelia syndrome. To put it simply, Oto was born without any arms or legs! However, when Oto’s mother finally set sight on her little baby, she said, “He’s adorable.”

Oto’s story is very inspirational. He  writes his autobiography with a flair for humor such as telling us in kindergarten he made friends at once,  “Thanks to my arms and legs, or lack thereof.” Oto shares with us his life during his preschool and elementary years, followed by his middle school, high school, and cram school years and finally about his campus life at Waseda University. 

Oto’s parents decided to enroll him in a regular school but were faced with a grim reality. Back then, It was still taken for granted that disabled children would go to special schools but Oto’s parents were determined that Oto would get a mainstream school education. Fortunately, they found a school willing to take Oto on as a student. Here, Oto meets Takagi Sensei, a man who thinks about Oto’s future. He held the firm belief that, “We can coddle him all we like right now, but he’ll have to fend for himself one day.” 

As a senior in high school, Oto has to start thinking of where he wants to go for university. University entrance exams can be quite difficult so most students in their third year of high go to a juku or cram school. Oto comes face to face with the discriminatory attitudes towards people with disabilities as he is turned down from one cram school to the next. Most of the schools tell him, “the school doesn’t have full facilities for wheelchair users, such as elevators, and accessible toilets, and so it’s not possible for us to accept you.” or “We can’t be responsible if anything should happen.” 

This is the first time when Oto thinks to himself, “Gosh, being in a wheelchair is quite a problem.” but that does not deter him in any way. Oto does find a cram school that accepts him and passes the entrance exam for Waseda University. At Waseda, Oto meets another key person in his life who introduces him to the term “barrier free”. This sets Oto on a path to make the Waseda campus “an environment in which students with disabilities have free access to learning.”

This book was first published in Japanese under the title “Gotai Fumanzoku” meaning having the body and limbs (gotai) all satisfactorily there (manzoku). As Oto didn’t have any limbs to speak of, he made up and used the word fumanzoku.  He chose No One’s Perfect for the English edition because Oto wanted to send a loud and clear message. He says, “You don’t have to be born perfect to be happy.” 

Oto ends his book saying, “Some people are born able-bodied but go through life in dark despair. And some people, in spite of having no arms and legs, go through life without a care in the world. Disability has got nothing to do with it.” ~Ernie Hoyt

All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe (Kodansha)

Miyuki Miyabe is one of Japan’s best known writers. She has won many awards including the Yoshikawa Eiji Prize for Literature, the Yamoto Shugoro Prize sponsored by Shinchosha Publishing Company and the Naoki Prize. Many of her novels have been adapted into movies as well including titles such as “Brave Story”, “Solomon’s Perjury” and “Crossfire”. A South Korean production company adapted All She Was Worth and released the film with the title of `Helpless”. 

Miyabe is best known for her mysteries and this book rates as one of her best  All She Was Worth, originally published in 1992 in Japanese as “Kasha” won the Best Mystery and Best Novel in the year of its publication. It follows the story of a police detective named Shunsuke Honma who is on an extended leave since the death of his wife Chizuko three years ago and is also recovering from being shot in the leg on duty. As a favor to his nephew, he takes on a missing persons case. 

Jun Kurisaka, the son of Honma’s wife’s cousin has come to ask for help. Honma hasn’t seen Jun in seven years who also didn’t show up for Chizuko’s funeral. Honma was wondering why Jun was coming to see him. After Jun arrives and exchanges pleasantries, Jun finally tells Honma the reason for his visit. He tells Honma that he’s gotten engaged but his fiancee has disappeared and wants his help to find her. 

This sets in motion the search for a woman named Shoko Sekine. A 28 year old woman with no parents. The trouble all started with a routine application for a credit card. Jun was informed by his friend who works in the banking and credit industry that Shoko Sekine was blacklisted, that she had also filed for personal bankruptcy. Jun thinks the bank made a mistake and gets into an argument with his friend who suggests that Jun should ask Shoko himself. He tells Honma that when he confronted Shoko about it, she went white as a ghost. Jun tells Honma, she didn’t deny it and said, “...there were all kinds of complicated circumstances behind it.” She told Jun, she needed a little time and the next day, she disappeared.

Reluctantly, Honma decides to help Jun and takes on the case of searching for Shoko Sekine. Jun had told Honma where Shoko worked and that is where he starts his unofficial investigation. First he goes to Shoko’s last place of employment and asks to see her resume. He decides to work backwards to see what kind of information he can garner. When he checks with Shoko’s former employers, he discovers that none of them existed. They were all fictitious companies. He also discovers that Shoko Sekine owes a lot of money to loan sharks. 

As Honma delves deeper into Jun’s vanished fiancee, he discovers a truth that surprises him and thinks it will be an even bigger shock to Jun. It appears that Shoko Sekine is not who she says she is, that her identity has been stolen by a complete stranger!  Honma believes the real Shoko Sekine might be dead. What will he tell Jun? Will Honma continue to investigate to find out the truth of the matter? ~Ernie Hoyt

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