This Way More Better : Stories and Photos from Asia's Back Roads by Karen J. Coates (ThingsAsian Press)

Karen J. Coates loves traveling. You may find this hard to believe but she’s been traveling since she was seven! It’s true. Coates tells us in her own words, “The journey began on the family room floor of a middle-class Midwestern home.” She continues, “There I sat on the green shag carpeting with the pages of National Geographic spread before me.” She tells herself, “I want to go there and there and there. I want to write that and that and that.” 

That is exactly what she does. First, she studies as a grad student in Hanoi, After graduating, she takes a job writing for a newspaper in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and she has been traveling ever since.  You can read her writing in the pages of  National Geographic, Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia, the Wall Street Journal Asia and Fodor’s Travel Guide.

This Way More Better is a collection of her essays covering about a dozen years from 1998 to 2010. Coates and her photojournalist husband, Jerry Redfern, travel extensively throughout Southeast Asia. Their travels take them through Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia  and the newly independent nation of East Timor.  She meets the people and shares their stories, their dreams, their desires, and their way of life. Accompanying many of the essays are black and white and color photos taken by Redfern. 

In 1999, in the Vietnamese border town of Sapa near China, Coates meets Shu, a ten-year-old Hmong girl who is also an innovative entrepreneur. She befriends Coates and her husband and becomes their guide. Conversations are made in broken English and by using gestures. Coates learns that Shu takes tourists on walks and sells the handmade crafts made by her parents. The American duo also make a trip into the forest to see firsthand the effects of the illegal logging industry which supports the villages and families of the Hmong people and other hilltribes. 

In Laos, they visit the famous Plain of Jars, a unique archeological site where over three-thousand jars or stone vessels were discovered. Some of the jars are very large, measuring over nine feet in height and weighing in the tons. They are also informed that the Plain of Jars is considered one of the most dangerous archaeological sites not because of the jars themselves but because of the massive amounts of unexploded ordnance, UXOs that are leftover from the Vietnam War. 

One of the most fascinating stories Coates writes about is Aunty Glen, an Australian woman, friends says runs a homestay in the jungle. The place is located in a small town called Pilok, Thailand, only a few short kilometers away from Myanmar. Coates has never met Aunty Glen but she is told, “She has an oven.” “She bakes cakes.” “They’re the best in Thailand.”. What better excuse does she need to make a visit

You will enjoy this small collection of stories about the people Coates and her husband meet and the places they visit. They meet Dr. Dan, a man who runs a clinic in Dili in East Timor. They are invited to the coronation of Cambodia’s newest king. They sip tea in northern Thailand.

In 2009, Coates receives an unexpected email The sender is none other than Shu, the ten year old Hmong girl, introduced in the first essay of the book. The story of their reunion is a highlight that will stick with you long after you’ve set the book down. 

Each story in this book is unique. Although the essays are not written chronologically, they do have a certain order that is unique to Coates. She sums it up best in her introduction when she says, “Books often offer a vacation from life. I hope, instead, this book takes you traveling.” Bon Voyage! ~Ernie Hoyt

Available from ThingsAsian Books

Once and Forever : The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa by Kenji Miyazawa (Kodansha)

Kenji Miyazawa is a very popular Japanese writer who was born in Hanamaki, Iwate Prefecture. He is a novelist and a poet, however, he is mostly known for his children’s literature. He is as popular as A.A. Milne and Lewis Carroll are in the West. One of his best known stories is “Night on the Galactic Railroad”, which is also known as “The Milky Way Railroad”, “Night Train to the Stars” and “Fantasy Railroad in the Stars”. The story was also made into a feature length animation film and inspired Leiji Matsumoto to create his manga “Galaxy Express 999”. 

Once and Forever is a collection of twenty-four of Miyazawa’s short stories and was published in 1993 and were translated from the Japanese by John Bester. Sixteen of the stories were previously released in another book titled “Winds from Afar” which was published in 1972. All of the stories in this collection have been revised for this edition. The stories range from the humorous to the tragic, including the story of the origin of a traditional dance and a story that incorporates local superstitions. 

“The Restaurant of Many Orders” is about two hunters who are walking in the mountains with their two bear-like white dogs. They are very deep in the mountains when their guide disappears and their dogs freeze to death. They are lost without their guide and they find that they are hungry as well. Luckily, they find themselves standing in front of a brick building with a sign that says RESTAURANT WILDCAT HOUSE. They enter the restaurant and find themselves opening one door after another, each door with a sign making a specific request to the guests. The two hunters finally realize the “Restaurant of Many Orders” is not a restaurant where you can choose from a menu but is a restaurant where orders are given. They finally realize that they are being prepared as the main dish!!

The whimsical tale of the origin of a folk dance can be found in “The First Deer Dance”. One day, a man falls out of a tree and hurts his left knee. He goes to a hot spring in the mountains which is said to have healing powers. On his way home, he stops for a short rest and eats some chestnut and millet dumplings. He decides to leave a little piece of dumpling out for the wild deer. He realizes that he had dropped his towel when he left the snacks out for the animals. As he goes back to get it, he sees a group of deer walking in a circle around his towel. He notices the deer seem puzzled by the towel which they think is alive. The longer the man watches the deer, he begins to hear their voices consulting with each other on what kind of animal it is that’s keeping them from getting to the dumpling. He finds that he can hear the deer sing and watches their movements thus establishing the basis for the shishiodori or “deer dance”. 

“The Ungrateful Rat” is a story about what can happen to you if you are discourteous to all who help you and don’t reciprocate the kindness. In “The Thirty Frogs” there is a lesson in how not to abuse your strength or authority. It epitomizes the proverbial saying, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”. “Kenju’s Wood” is about patience, persistence and following one’s convictions. “The Dahlias and the Crane” is another cautionary tale about conceit and narcissism. 

What makes Once and Forever most entertaining is that no two stories are alike and can be enjoyed by children and adults. Some of the tales are plotless while others seem to convey a type of moral message, although that message may be ambiguous. You may gain a better understanding of Miyazawa’s stories with repeated readings and with each subsequent reading, you will be sure to discover something new. ~Ernie Hoyt

Stranger in the Shogun's City by Amy Stanley (Scribner)

“I wanted to go to Edo, but you wouldn’t let me go.” These words echo from the early 1800s, written by a woman who became the scandal of her rural, religious family. 

Tsuneno was born in snow country, where ten-foot measuring poles were buried by blizzards, temperatures remained at freezing “from equinox to equinox,” and gigantic icicles grew inside people’s homes.  The daughter of a village priest, she was taught to read and write, with the understanding that she would become a wife who could write letters, read poetry, and keep household accounts. The interminable winters sent her to read manuals of good conduct for women but what Tsuneno gleaned from them was the knowledge of another life in the metropolis of Edo, a two-week journey from her home.

Married when she was twelve, Tsuneno was divorced by the time she was twenty-eight. Her family rushed her into another marriage which lasted only four years. A third marriage was over in three months, due to “her selfish behavior,” her older brother wrote. Tsuneno was now a thirty-eight-year-old triple-divorcee, and although divorce carried no stigma in 19th-century Japan, she was apparently barren and definitely shopworn. Her prospects were dismal and she made up her mind. She would break tradition by running  off to Edo and making a life for herself far from home.

A neighbor promised to guide her over the mountains to her destination and to finance her journey, Tsuneno sold clothes from her many trousseaus and pawned more utilitarian garments. These were garments that she had made herself, carefully, from fabric that only the more fortunate were able to procure. Good clothing was a mark of social status and she was selling hers. She would be haunted by that decision for much of her life.

Tsuneno was forced into a pragmatic liaison with her guide, a man with relatives in Edo who would give them a place to live and help them find their footing in the capital. This lasted about as long as the money she had brought with her and soon Tsuneno was on her own, with only the clothes she had worn during her escape. But she was a survivor, with little regard for social class. Taking a job as a maid in a samurai’s household, she began the life she’d always wanted in a city filled with vitality and culture. 

She arrived during a time of turbulence and hunger. Edo was flooded with refugees from the countryside, fleeing starvation, looking for work. That Tsuneno survived on her own is an amazing feat, one that she chronicled in letters to her family, long streams of letters to people who had all but disowned her.

Family records in Japan at that time were preserved for future generations. Tsuneno’s father had over a hundred years worth of paper, documents that detailed every minute transaction of his ancestors, every letter that had ever been sent. His son carried on this tradition, keeping even the letters of the sister who had brought shame to her family. She wrote to him up until the year of her death at the age of forty-nine, the year that Commodore Perry arrived in Edo and the city became Tokyo.

Historian Nancy Stanley was online reading the public archives from a city near the place where Tsuneno’s family had lived for centuries. One of the archivists had discovered the letters of a woman who had written an epistolary history of herself and the city she had made her own and Stanley was hooked as she read Tsuneno’s words to her mother. “I went to...Edo--quite unexpectedly--and I ended up in so much trouble!” But even while enduring this “trouble,” Tsuneno left a legacy, a picture of Edo just before the arrival of Commodore Perry changed it forever. 

If there’s one cavil to be had with Stranger in the Shogun’s City, it’s the regret that Tsuneno’s own words don’t tell her story. Even so, her vibrant, adventurous spirit pervades this history, while Stanley gives a detailed, lively view both of Tsuneno’s unchronicled early life and of the city this headstrong woman loved.~Janet Brown 

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (Canongate)

A Tale for the Time Being is the story of two people who live oceans and years apart and yet are indelibly linked together. Nao is Naoko Yasutani. She is a sixteen year old Japanese girl who lives in Japan. She calls herself a “time being” and explains that a “time being” is “someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or will ever be.” 

Ruth is a married woman living in a small town on Vancouver Island in the province of British Columbia, Canada who will discover something that belongs to Nao and it will forever change her life. Ruth was beachcombing when she discovered a barnacle encrusted freezer bag. Believing it to be garbage, she takes it home to throw it out with the trash later. Having forgotten that she left the bag out on the porch of the front steps to the house, her husband, Oliver, picks it up and asks what it is. Ruth says it’s just garbage but before she can tell her husband not to bring it in the house, it was too late. He not only brings it into the house but opens the bag to discover a Hello Kitty lunchbox. In the box were more plastic bags and inside the bags they found a stack of letters, a book with a French title, and a wristwatch.

Ruth and Oliver are book lovers. Ruth is a novelist and Oliver believes that all novelists should have cats and books. The title on the book from the Hello Kitty box said “A la recherche du temps perdu par Marcel Proust”. “In Search of Lost Time”. However, when Ruth opens the book, what greets her eyes are handwritten pages in purple ink and by the looks of the writing, she surmises that it was written by a young girl. 

Ruth and Oliver also discover that the stack of letters were written in Japanese and they imagine that the items were thrown overboard from a cruise ship. A friend of theirs says it may have drifted from one of the Pacific Ocean’s gyres, a collection of ocean currents that circulates around Japan and the West Coast. Their friend said that experts had predicted debris from the 2011 tsunami in Japan would eventually wash up on the shores of Vancouver Island. 

The book with the Proust cover turned out to be a diary written by Nao. Ruth wasn’t sure if she should read it or not but curiosity gets the best of her and what she reads disturbs her. On the first page after Nao introduces herself and wonders who will read this book, but then writes  “Actually, it doesn’t matter very much, because by the time you read this, everything will be different.” Nao continues to tell the reader that this is her diary of her last days on earth, implying that she intends to commit suicide after completing it. 

As Ruth continues reading the diary, she becomes obsessed with finding out more about Nao. After reading the first few pages, Ruth feels an urgency to either help the girl or save her, even though she realizes both actions are not logical. The more she learns about Nao’s life, the deeper she tries to find out exactly who Naoko Yasutani is. Nao’s diary is full of reasons why she wants to say good-bye to the world - being bullied at school, her father getting fired from his job in the U.S., her mother who she believes is more concerned about appearances than about her own daughter. 

There is still the mystery of the letters written in Japanese that appear to be older than the Proust diary book and there is also the question of the antique watch. Does Ruth believe she can help Nao in any way? Does Nao carry out her plan to end her life? Finally, do they ever meet or are they just two “time beings” that have yet to cross paths? ~Ernie Hoyt

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li (Picador)

Yiyun Li is a Chinese-American writer. She was born and raised in Beijing, China. She was born in 1972 when Mao Zedong was still the Chairman of the Communist Party of China. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a nuclear physicist. As a Freshman at Peking University, Li was required to spend one year in the military or as Li says in her own words, “to immunize students to the disease that was called freedom, all freshman were sent to the military for a year of brain-washing, or political re-education, as it was called.”

In the same year Li graduated from Peking University, she went to the United States and studied for four years at the University of Iowa receiving a Masters of Science degree in immunology in 2000. She continued to study at the same university and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative nonfiction. 

Having grown up in Communist China inspired Li to write the short stories collected in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Some of the stories were previously published in magazines such as the New Yorker and the Paris Review.  All the stories in the collection are set in contemporary China. The stories are heartbreaking and humorous, describing the lives of ordinary people in modern China. Two of the stories have been adapted into feature films, both directed by Wayne Wang. The films were based on “The Princess of Nebraska” and the title story of the collection, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers”, both films being released in 2007. 

In “The Princess of Nebraska”, a young woman named Sasha is traveling by bus to Chicago to get an abortion. She is accompanied by an older Chinese gentleman named Boshen, who came to the U.S. by way of a false marriage. Boshen is a gay man and was put under house arrest in China when it was discovered that he had been exchanging mail with a Western reporter telling the reporter that there was a high risk of an AIDS epidemic in one of China’s rural province. A lesbian friend who had recently immigrated to the U.S. and had become a citizen offered to marry him. The man who got Sasha pregnant was a Chinese man named Yang. Yang was a Nam Dan, “a male actor who plays female roles on stage in the Peking Opera”. Yang was ousted from the opera after being discovered that he had a male lover and became a money boy, a male prostitute. Boshen was in love with Yang.

“A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” was made as a companion piece to “The Princess of Nebraska”. In this story, a retired Chinese man visits his recently divorced daughter, Yilan, who lives in Spokane, Washington. He wants to help his daughter in her time of need, but his daughter is totally uninterested in his assistance.  The father-daughter relationship is strained due to their different ideas of duty and honor. 

What really makes these stories special is the fact that Li only started to write in English six years prior to the publication of this book. She refuses to have her work translated into Chinese for fear that the Chinese authorities might consider her work “counter-revolutionary” or “would read like an indictment of the regime” and she knows what could happen if the government were to make that distinction and knowing Li feels that way makes you feel as if you’re reading illicit literature yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Plotters by Un-Su Kim (4th Estate)

When his job gets him down, Reseng knows it’s time for Beer Week. He orders ten boxes of beer, clears out his refrigerator,  and replaces the food with beer cans. He takes peanuts and dried anchovies out of his freezer for nourishment and opens his first beer. By the time he crushes the last can, he’s ready to get back to work.

Found in a garbage can when he was a baby, Reseng is adopted when he turns four by a man called Old Raccoon and grows up in a place called the Doghouse Library. Surrounded by books, he teaches himself to read, a skill that will do nothing to enhance the career path Old Raccoon has waiting for him. Reseng is fated to become an assassin, one of many who are directed by plotters and owned by contractors. Reseng is owned by Old Raccoon.

After his first kill, Reseng asks “Am I going to end up killing more and more people?” “No,” Old Raccoon tells him, “You’ll kill fewer and fewer. But you’ll make more and more money.”

And as Reseng’s targets become increasingly valuable, the money increases too. He’s good at his job. But the morning that he finds a small ceramic bomb in his toilet, a delicate but deadly item, sends him off into Beer Week. 

In Reseng’s line of work, a man doesn’t have friends; he has associates and one of his associates is a tracker. Jeongan is a man who cultivates the art of being so ordinary that nobody will ever notice him or remember him. He can find anyone and he finds the person who put the bomb in Reseng’s toilet. 

Mito works in a convenience store, a puzzling occupation considering that she studied medicine and is fully qualified to be a doctor. Too small to be an assassin, too young to be a plotter, she is, Jeongan says, “one disturbingly complex woman,” who is obsessed with Reseng. But why?

The Plotters is no ordinary thriller. Each one of its characters is unique and none of them are who they seem. The cross-eyed librarian who works for Old Raccoon; the “grumbling orangutan-size man” who “looked like Winnie the Pooh” and runs a pet crematorium that also burns the corpses brought to him by assassins; the polished, Stanford-educated contractor who also grew up in Old Raccoon’s Doghouse Library; the old man with a mastiff who cultivates his garden far out in the woods and is one of Reseng’s targets--all of them are walking riddles, and all of them are intertwined in a morass that includes government officials.

Un-Su Kim has constructed an eerie, dreamlike world for his characters, one that’s revealed in chapters that appear to be stand-alone short stories. Then their common thread begins to surface: in the library with 200,000 books that nobody ever borrows, the knitting shop run by Mito’s crippled sister where the attic is filled with photos of Reseng, the high-rise insurance building that holds “the luxurious digs of an assassination provider bang in the heart of the Republic of Korea.” 

The biggest puzzle of all is Reseng, a man moving down a dead-end street who never went to school but who grasps the essence of the world he was brought up to inhabit. “There was no better business model than owning both the virus and the vaccine. With one hand you parceled out fear and instability, and with the other you guaranteed safety and peace.” These words resonate with a horrible meaning ten years after they were written. They give The Plotters a dimension that seems to have been written for the time we face in 2020. ~Janet Brown

Dragon Dance by Peter Tasker (Kodansha)

If there are three countries vying for the dominant position in East Asia, I think it’s China, Japan, and the United States. Fortunately, the region is currently stable right now and all three countries are working together in the best interests of their citizens (or so I would like to believe). Imagine if things were different. Imagine if the story you’re about to read came to fruition. A very scary thought indeed. 

The time is 2006. The world is suffering from a great recession and Japan is falling by the wayside. Their economy is down and the people are looking for someone to blame. At the same time, China is becoming a power that can no longer be ignored. As Japan weakens, China gets even stronger and a leader in a secret group in China is making use of a Japanese terrorist named Reiko Matsubara to further destabilize the relationship between Japan and the United States, leaving the gap opened to be filled by China.

Tasker sets up a great story filled with political intrigue, manipulation, conspiracy, espionage and the search for truth. He has lived in Japan for over twenty years and his knowledge of the nuances of Japanese places and culture makes you feel as if you are there in the middle of this power struggle.

Dragon Dance is a delicate balance of power between three of the world’s largest economies - Japan, China, and the United States. Japan, once having the image of being one of the world’s safest places now has a rising crime rate, regular security alerts and an increase in homelessness and poverty. In these trying times, one politician has come to the fore, Tsuyoshi Nozawa, a former musician with a very right wing agenda is riding on the wave of his popularity. He is an ultra-nationalist who is campaigning to have Japan sever it’s military ties with the U.S. and for Japan to become a nuclear power.

Following another storyline, a long time Japan resident and female reporter, Martine Meyer has been following the progress of Nozawa’s rise to power. Around the time of a new election, Meyer has been receiving e-mails from an unknown source warning of impending “accidents” at various places. The more she looks into the matter, the more complicated the news story gets. She senses a conspiracy about Nozawa’s rise to power and how Nozawa is being manipulated by more sinister forces. 

As a longtime resident of Japan myself, I can attest to the authenticity of Tasker’s Japan. He makes you feel as if you are there yourself. Tasker manages to create a mystery that is compelling enough to keep you interested in the outcome, however, the plot does tend to veer off in some directions which at times takes the story away from the main action. The subplot of the female reporter and the relationship with her Japanese microbrewery owner boyfriend is a bit lacking in detail and doesn’t really add anything to the story, but don’t let that keep you away from a good yarn. 

Even today, many countries are still trying to be the dominant force in all of Asia - especially China. The U.S. does not want to remove its military bases from Japan, and some sections of Japan’s current government would love to repeal Japan’s constitution to perhaps allow for a military build-up. I sure hope those right wing advocates remain in the shadows! ~Ernie Hoyt

The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Oe (Kodansha)

Kenzaburo Oe is Japan’s second recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first being Yasunari Kawabata. Oe was awarded the honor in 1994. The Nobel Prize in Literature committee called The Silent Cry “Oe’s major mature work,” praising it for dealing “with people’s relationships...in a confusing world.” 

The story is set in the sixties and centers around the Nedokoro brothers, Mitsusaburo and Takashi. They had left their hometown, a small rural village on the island of Shikoku. Mitsusaburo moved to Tokyo where he taught English at a university and also worked as a translator. Takashi had set out for the United States after the suppression of the student protests in his home country.

Mitsusaburo is twenty-seven years old. In the opening chapter, he wakes up in the predawn and seems to walk in a daze. He spots a square hole in the ground which was dug to set up a septic tank for the house. Mitsusaburo climbs down the hole and sits in the hole and ponders life. He thinks about his friend who committed suicide at the end of summer “who daubed his head all over with crimson paint, stripped, thrust a cucumber up his anus, and hanged himself.”

Mitsusaburo and his wife also have a child. Unfortunately, their son was born with a congenital birth defect and the doctors have told them that the chance of their son leading a normal life is unlikely and they have recently committed him to an institution. This leads Mitsusaburo’s wife to drink, affecting their relationship. 

The following day, Mistsusaboro hears from his brother’s friends that Takashi would be coming back to Japan. Takashi meets Mitsusaburo and suggests that he and his wife should join him and move back to their hometown in Shikoku and start a new life. Around the same time, an owner of a supermarket chain has made an offer to the Nedokoro’s for their kura, a traditional “store house” that is still in their possession in their hometown. Mitsusaburo lets his younger brother Takashi take care of all the details, not giving much thought to its sale or about starting a new life again.

As the story progresses, we discover that Takashi has an ulterior motive. Takashi not only sells the kura but the land as well. Mitsusaburo realizes he’s been duped into coming back to Shikoku for Takashi’s nefarious purpose. It appears that Takashi idolizes their grandfather’s younger brother who was a leader of a rebellion against the “establishment”. Now, Takashi wants to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather’s younger brother and to start a rebellion of his own. 

When the Nedokoro brothers were younger there was a small community of Koreans who were brought there to work as forced laborers during World War II. The owner of the large supermarket in town is Korean by origin. After the opening of the supermarket, many of the local shops were forced to sell or close as they were no longer making any profits. Takashi has recruited a lot of young people from the town and has been teaching them how to play football which is only a ploy to teach his recruits to use violence to help him in his rebellion.

A complex story about family ties and relationships - love, marriage, children, adultery, incest, violence, and suicide. The intricate web of the Nedokoro brothers' volatile relationship and their family history can be painful at times and draws a dark web that will haunt you long after you have finished reading the book. ~Ernie Hoyt

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