Shadow Family by Miyuki Miyabe (Kodansha)

Shadow Family is a murder mystery incorporating the world of Internet chat rooms where people gather and pretend to be whoever they want to be. The story starts off with the investigation into two murders in two different locations but evidence suggests that they were killed by the same person. 

Shadow Family was originally published in the Japanese language in 2001 with the title R.P.G. At the beginning of this book we are given a short definition of the term role-playing: “A method of learning in which real life situations are acted out; by playing various imaginary roles, participants master techniques of problem-solving.” 

The victims are a middle-aged businessman named Ryosukie Tokoroda and a young woman  named Naoko Imai who was found strangled to death near her place of work. As the deaths took place far apart from each other, the police at first do not think they are related. However, the police do think there may be a serial killer on the loose picking victims at random. 

During the investigation, The police discover that Tokoroda’s family dynamics were less than ideal. The father had numerous affairs which the wife knew about and he was estranged from his teenage daughter. The police find that “Ryosuke Tokoroda had created an “alternate” family on the Internet.” Tokoroda has taken the role of “Dad”. The family also consists of “Mom”, a daughter named “Kasumi”, the same name as his daughter, and a son named “Minoru”. 

Tokoroda had more interaction with his Internet family than he did with his own. He is able to give comfort and be supportive of them than his own family. Around the time of Tokoroda’s murder, his  real-life daughter had been given police protection after telling her family that someone has been stalking her.

The police do find a connection between Imai and Tokoroda. Three years prior, when Naoko Imai was still a junior in high school, she worked part-time for a company called Orion Foods. The same company that Ryosuke Tokoroda worked for. The police have also found a trail of emails which they use to reconstruct this online family life. 

The cops have their number one suspect - Miss A, who was acquainted with both Tokoroda and Imai and has the motive to kill them. However, the evidence against her is circumstantial at best and she is released from police custody. The police then change the direction of the investigation. They decide to bring in the “shadow family” for questioning as they have determined that the family has met offline. The police also bring in Tokoroda’s wife and daughter to the precinct and have the daughter watch the proceedings from behind a one-way mirror. 

Miyabe creates a story that’s compelling as it is complicated. As the investigation nears its end, it may take you by surprise. I was hooked from the opening pages until the end where the truth finally comes to light. It’s a psychological thriller where reality and fantasy are intertwined. A story to keep you guessing “whodunnit?”. ~Ernie Hoyt

White Ghost Girls by Alice Greenway (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic)

Hong Kong in the summer of 1967: Across the border, above the line where the New Territories meet mainland China, Red Guards rampage in their goal to purify Mao’s revolution. Hungry mainlanders plunge into the sea, hoping to swim to Hong Kong.  And only a short plane ride away from the peace and prosperity of England’s prize colony, a war rages in Vietnam.

Kate and her older sister Frankie are Americans in Hong Kong, endowed with a wild freedom that’s bred by their home country and fostered by benign neglect. Their father is a photographer for Time/Life, his lens and his attention claimed by Vietnam. Their mother is a beautiful practitioner of selective blindness, an artist whose paintings are “light, pretty, airy,” drenched in “the charm and comforts of the colonial era.” Ah Bing, the girls’ amah, is the only one to provide attempts at discipline, buttressed with Cantonese curses and epithets, but she’s old and too slow to keep up with her gwaimui, her white ghost girls.

Frankie and Kate escape to the beach, building shelters from whatever is washed up by the sea, playing Castaway, calling themselves secret sisters, Viet Cong sisters. They know they’re too old for the games they play; Kate is thirteen, Frankie is nubile--or as a friend of her father’s remarks, voluptuous. Both girls are feral and neither wants to grow up.

Then comes the day that they find a woman’s body floating in the sea, “swollen and bloated like a buoy,” a peasant who tried to swim to freedom and failed. They see students march in protest through the city streets, holding up pictures of Mao. When they accompany Ah Bing to a Kwan Yin temple on a nearby island, they run away, bump into a Red Guard demonstration in a market, and leave when they see the police are on their way. As they begin their return to the temple, the girls are accosted by two men who grab Frankie and  give Kate a bag, Lychees, she’s told, a gift for the captain of the police boat. “You no come back, you no big sister.”

Terrified, Kate ends up throwing the bag into a garbage can near the market and hears it explode as she rushes back to Frankie. Neither girl has been hurt. Both of them are changed. Kate, feeling responsible for the death and injuries incurred by the explosion, becomes secretive. Frankie, molested by her captors, has discovered her sexual power. The summer darkens and takes on a dreadful momentum that their parents fail to recognize nor even notice.

White Ghost Girls is a story of loss and grief, a love letter to a vanished home written by an exile, a eulogy for a girl who would never leave Hong Kong. Alice Greenway, who also grew up in Hong Kong during the 60s, illuminates the city with a sense of place that’s meticulous, visceral, and wistful.

“Can you give me hot rain, mould-streaked walls, a sharpness that creeps into my clothes...The smells of dried oyster, clove hair oil, tiger balm...The feverish shriek of cicadas, the cry of black-eared kites?” Kate begins her story with these questions and ends with this answer. 

…”this is all I want: a wooden stool, a bowl of rice, an army canteen, a secret comrade, the whooping cry of wild gibbons,” the summer when her Viet Cong sister left her forever.~Janet Brown

Voices from the Snow by Hideo Osabe and Kyozo Takagi (Hirosaki University Press)

Voices from the Snow : Tsugaru in Legend, Literature and Fact is “an attempt to present a picture of life in Tsugaru as it once was and to some extent still is, by means of literary documents and traditional materials alternated with scholarly essays.” The book was translated and edited by James N. Westerhoven who is a Professor of American Literature at Hirosaki University and has also translated the works of Osamu Dazai and Nitta Jiro into English and has also translated the works of Haruki Murakami and Yukio Mishima in his native tongue of Dutch. Tsugaru is located at the northern end of Honshu island of Japan. During the Edo Period, it was part of the Tsugaru Domain whose capital was Hirosaki and was ruled by the Tsugaru clan. It is often considered the backside of Japan. “Because of its distance from Tokyo, its long history of isolation, and its impenetrable dialect, Tsugaru even nowadays has a backward image.”  Although Tsugaru still has a backwater image, it is home to two of Japan’s cultural assets - writer Osamu Dazai, who was born here, and the Tsugaru shamisen, a three-stringed instrument that originated in China.

Three of the most well known stories of Tsugaru were written by Hideo Osabe - Tsugaru Jonkarabushi, Yosarebushi, and A Voice in the Snow. Jonkarabushi and Yosarebushi are both stories about the songs that are played on the Tsuguru shamisen which also has a long history of its own. A Voice in the Snow is a short murder mystery in which a suspect commits a crime because of her belief in an itako.

The stories by Kyozo Takagi include Grannies’ Lodge and Yosaburo’s House. Both stories are about ordinary life in Tsugaru and appear here for the first time in English. In order to truly appreciate the stories, it helps to have a little background about the people and practices that are native to the region such as the gomiso and itako. 

Takefusa Takamori, a Professor of Ethnomusicology at Hirosaki Gakuin University, whose research focuses on folk performing arts and the music of Tsugaru gives us insight into the practices of the itako and gomiso who are considered to have shaman-like ability. The itako are blind or nearly blind mediums who are all women and must be trained by older itako. They are believed to be able to communicate with the dead. The gomiso have their regular eyesight and do not require any training but also act as a medium and also interpret people’s dreams. 

Although Voices from the Snow is a University publication, it is written for the layperson in easy to understand prose. Many of the stories can be enjoyed in English for the first time and will give the reader a better understanding of what life was like on the outer fringe of Japan up north. I find that the longer I live in Aomori City, located in Tsugaru, the more curious I am about its literature and history. The book is absorbing and informative and the stories and essays have made me an even bigger fan of my adopted hometown! ~Ernie Hoyt

Leaving Thailand: A Memoir by Steve Rosse

Back in the early ‘90s. Steve Rosse had it all. He lived in an island paradise in the south of Thailand, he had his choice of women who were attractive and acquiescent. His job as a public relations manager for an upscale resort ensured that he would eat well, drink well, and meet everyone in the world, from royalty to scalawags. As a columnist for one of Thailand’s two leading English-language newspapers, his name was widely known and his face appeared on Bangkok billboards. He had conquered the hurdles that cause most foreigners to lose sleep and gain ulcers—an extendable visa and a work permit.  With a life so idyllic, what could go wrong?

The answer to this question, Rosse tells readers in his honest, funny, and self-deprecating memoir, is summed up in one word. Everything.

In a gradual descent, he loses the woman who could have been the love of his life, marries another who becomes the scourge of it, and takes an ill-advised publicity photo that shows the Crown Prince of Denmark in close proximity to a pack of Marlboros. The fact that the Marlboros belong to Rosse’s boss and not the prince means nothing. Suddenly Rosse has no job, two children, and a wife who may be loathsome but is certainly pragmatic. Her suggestion that they move to the States removes Rosse from a place he loves to an existence in Iowa and puts him into a permanent state of culture shock and longing that he’s never recovered from.

Fortunately he has never lost his skill with words or his sense of humor. “Listen,” he says, in his opening sentence. “Let me tell you a story.” While in real life, those words would make most people run for the nearest exit, here they’re an irresistible invitation to another world. Rosse is a natural-born storyteller and Leaving Thailand is a remarkable collection of stories, some of them heartbreaking, some of them bawdy, all of them captivating.

From his welcome to Thailand, which involves an act of petty larceny after a night of serious drinking, an act of carnal knowledge with someone of dubious gender, and an act of extended bliss that leaves Rosse with a somewhat humiliating virus, right up to a poignant essay on his retirement plans that feature a house on a bluff near a temple and a massage parlor, he doesn’t miss a beat. There’s no self-pity here and no disrespect for anyone he meets, including his former wife. He tells about bar girls he has known in the Biblical sense while honoring them in some whole other sense and writes tender essays about his son that are sweet but never mawkish. He puts himself in the heart and mind of a Thai-born cafeteria lady who’s made a home in a cold country and breaks the heart of anyone who reads about his Burmese maid whose life he may have ruined with a few careless words. 

There are many books written by white men about their lives in Thailand. Leaving Thailand roams through much of their territory, expands it, and claims it. And as for its author, as he reveals himself? Let’s give him the last word on who he is--”Not bad. Not good. Just...thus.”~Janet Brown

Kim by Rudyard Kipling (Everyman's Library)

Kim is one of Rudyard Kipling’s best known characters in one of his best known novels. It was first published as a serial in McClure’s Magazine and in Cassell’s Magazine. It was published in book form for the first time by McMillan & Co. in 1901. It is the story of a young boy’s coming of age and his recruitment into the Indian secret service to take part in the Great Game in British India during the late 19th century.

“Though he was burned black as any native, though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white.”  Kim is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier and a poor Irish mother and was raised by a half-caste Indian woman. He wanders the streets of Lahore and treats everybody equally and has garnered the nickname “Friend of All the World”. 

Kim befriends a Tibetan lama and becomes the man’s chela or disciple. They travel together, each having their own quest. Before Kim sets off on the pilgrimage, he visits Mahbub Ali, an Aghan horse-trader, who he has done odd jobs for in the past.

In exchange for a bit of money, Ali gives Kim the task of carrying a mysterious message to an officer named Colonel Creighton in Umballa, a town located between Lahore and Benares. Kim is to say to the Englishman, “The pedigree of the white stallion is fully established” and to pass on a folded piece of paper with a coded message. Kim deduces that there is more to Ali than just being a horse-trader and is determined to solve the mystery. 

On their journey, Kim and the lama come across a British regiment. Their flag depicts a red bull on a green field, an image Kim was told about in his childhood. His father said to him if he ever sees this image, the people it represents would help him. The chaplain of the regiment discovers that Kim is the son of one of the regiment’s former soldiers and takes Kim away from the lama and sends him to an English school to be properly educated. 

Kim spends three years other than tutelage of the British but yearns to return to the lama and help him complete his quest. However, the British have other plans for him. Kim is appointed to a government job and is trained to join the Great Game. A term given to the political game played out by the British Empire against the Russian Empire in seizing control of Afghanistan and other surrounding Central Asia countries. It is the 19th century version of the Cold War.

Kipling brings to life the intrigue of international espionage in the Raj’s however, the most compelling thing about Kim is India itself - the people, the customs, the interactions among races and religions, all under the rule of a foreign power. The story is written in prose that can be described as poetry in motion. Kim may not be James Bond and Kipling certainly isn’t an Ian Fleming, but the spy story that emerges will make you want to read the book over and over again. ~Ernie Hoyt

From a Chinese City by Gontran de Poncins (Trackless Sands Press)

Vietnam was enjoying a brief respite of peace when Gontran do Poncins came to visit. The French had been vanquished in 1954 and the Americans hadn’t yet begun to buttress their domino theory with armed troops. In February of 1955 de Poncins arrived, a travel writer who had achieved acclaim for Kabloona, his account of living with the Canadian Eskimo for fifteen months. During his northern stay, de Poncins practiced total immersion, living, eating, and behaving as did his hosts, to the point that he completed a 1400-mile trip across the Arctic behind a dog sled. 

When he decides to spend four months in Vietnam, he chooses to stay in the Chinese city of Cholon, no doubt expecting to be able to replicate the success of his time with the Eskimos. Unfortunately he fails.

Cholon at the time of de Poncins’ arrival was a city of 650,000. Although its neighbor, Saigon, had been heavily influenced by its French colonizers, Cholon remained Chinese. As de Poncins was told at the onset of his stay, “Cholon ignores the West and has no desire to mingle with it.”

“Cholon is the Chinese pleasure city,” de Poncins says, filled with nightclubs, opium dens, restaurants, and gambling hells, but he soon discovers that’s for “the white man hankering for orientalism.” The Cholon he lives in is devoid of luxury. His world is defined by his hotel; its rooms are barebones-basic with open doors and an entire town flourishes in its lobby. As was true in his life with the Eskimos, de Poncins is immersed in a life without privacy; his door is expected to be open and anyone is free to peek inside at will. On the other hand, he’s free to observe those around him as ravenously as others do him

The staff of the hotel are puzzled. No matter what comforts are offered to him--boy, girl, opium--de Poncins refuses them. His interest is taken up by the streets outside and the life that courses through them. Every day he sits, watches, sketches, and writes about what he sees and gradually the pace and routine of the city becomes vivid. 

It isn’t always pretty. Although de Poncins is quite lyrical about the special sounds that announce the coming of street vendors and tradesmen, the beauty of the food displays, the grace of the river sampans, the ‘enchantment of form,” his drawings of the people around him are crude caricatures. When he shows them to people in his hotel who have asked to see, they turn away without comment. 

As much as he’s an indefatigable chronicler of everything that meets his eye, de Poncins is a master of generalization--”the Chinese,” he says and then launches into an idiosyncrasy that he believes he understands. As he watches laborers in the streets, he wonders if they perhaps aren’t of “a different species” from his own.

He tries valiantly to go deeper. A man who can speak several languages other than French, he attempts to learn Chinese without success. His wish to meet a Chinese woman of culture and breeding is laughed down by his friends as being impossible but this doesn’t keep him from expounding upon the virtues of Chinese women and the “wisdom” of the Chinese institution of marriage.

But de Poncins, in spite of the briefness of his time there, gives a cinematographer’s view of Cholon’s streets. His gift of observation is enviable--if only he’d carried a camera instead of a pen and paper. Even so, readers who wade past his condescension and superficial conclusions are shown a portion of a city that has no doubt vanished with only a few traces left behind.~Janet Brown

Out by Natsuo Kirino (Kodansha)

Out is a gruesome murder mystery centering on the relationship of four women who work the graveyard-shift in a boxed-lunch factory. The book was first published in 1997 and won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Best Novel that year. It is Natsuo Kirino’s first novel to be translated into English and was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel in 2004. 

The four women are Yayoi Yamamoto, Yoshie Azuma, Kuniko Jonouchi, and Masako Katori. Yayoi is the youngest of the four and is married and has two children. Yoshie, who the other three call the Skipper, is a widower in her late fifties, who also cares for her bedridden mother-in-law. Kuniko is an overweight woman who enjoys living beyond her means and is trying to keep one step ahead of a loan shark. Masako is a married woman who is estranged from her husband and teenage son. 

Yayoi’s husband is a good-for-nothing gambler, womanizer, and wife-beater. He has dwindled the family account to nearly zero. He is also stalking a hostess named Anna who works as a hostess at a club called Mika in Shinjuku’s Kabukicho District. Anna is the girlfriend of the club owner who also runs an illegal gambling casino called Kunimatsu in the same building.

The club owner’s name is Satake. Satake has a dark history of his own. He once killed a woman in a most violent fashion and spent seven years in prison for the crime. Satake is convinced he needs to keep a low profile in his businesses due to his prison record. Currently, Satake must deal with a problem customer at both of his establishments who happens to be Yayoi’s husband. 

Yayoi is looking at her bruised body caused by her husband’s violence and she’s overcome by a very powerful emotion - hatred. The following evening Yayoi has another argument with her husband. When he says, “Can’t you be nice once in a while?”, it enrages her and she strangles her husband to death with her belt. Yayoi sits and looks at her dead husband and says out loud, “Couldn't you have been nice once in a while?”

What is Yayoi to do? She confides in Masako who recruits the Skipper and Kuniko to help dispose of the husband’s body by cutting it up and throwing the bagged body parts away in different areas of the city. Unfortunately, the police have found some of the bags and now they are investigating the murder. 

Their number one suspect is Satake, as the police have found Yayoi’s husband’s coat at the casino and have witnesses who saw Satake and Yayoi’s husband fighting.  Satake is arrested and confined for nearly a month but is released due to a lack of evidence. During his incarceration, he loses both businesses and now he’s out for revenge. 

Kirino draws the reader into the seedier side of Japan. The story is set in a modern Japan that few foreigners see. A city full of host clubs, Yakuza, and loan sharks.The story will appeal to fans of suspense-thrillers and true crime.  I couldn’t put the book down. Will the women get away with murder? Will Satake find them and take his revenge? Or, will the police solve the crime before there is another death? ~Ernie Hoyt

China Syndrome by Karl Taro Greenfield (Harper Perennial)

A rapid soar in vinegar sales was the first warning. In Southern China, because boiling vinegar is an air purification method that’s used to combat respiratory illness. Soon the Heyuan Daily reported that antibiotics and herbal medicines were also being purchased in unprecedented amounts, but the paper assured its readers there was no fear of an epidemic. Then all news of any illness disappeared.

But when a Hong Kong  hospital head prepared to attend a conference in the southern city of Guangzhou, a Chinese physician said, “Don’t come. Something bad is going on here.” A month earlier, at an influenza conference in Beijing attended by World Health Organization officials, clinicians from the province of Guangdong in southern China had reported an influenza outbreak that had “people dying like flies.” 

These bits of information were all that surfaced and only virologists paid attention. When birds were found dead in a Hong Kong wetlands refuge, virologists from the University of Hong Kong grew alarmed. In 1997, the avian flu, H5N1, had jumped species from birds to humans. It had been contained but its threat was still a vivid memory.  Bird feces were tested for this virus. It wasn’t there.

In the border city of Shenzhen, a worker in a “Wild Flavor” restaurant, where wild animals were killed to order and cooked on the spot, had come down with a severe respiratory illness that swiftly spread to hospital staff. However, China has “thousands of unexplained respiratory cases a year” and Guangdong, where the bulk of these cases appeared, is the same size as Germany. A couple of hundred cases across the province excited little attention. It wasn’t until an infected doctor unwittingly spread the illness on a trip to Hong Kong that attention became focused upon it. Tourists who had stayed in his hotel carried it across the Pacific when they flew back to the United States. 

Now there was a potential global epidemic brewing, “a biological Armageddon.” The virus was soon in six different countries.  It was isolated and identified as a coronavirus, never before found in humans, and was given a name, SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Karl Taro Greenfield was the editor of Time Asia, based in Hong Kong when SARS struck. In China Syndrome he gives a horrifying account of how an epidemic spreads, from descriptions of victims who didn’t have enough energy to blink or twitch their facial muscles, whose countenances were completely blank, to Beijing’s suppression of information as its citizens died, in order to safeguard the economic boost that comes with the Spring Festival. Greenfield explains the popularity of  “Wild Flavor” restaurants whose dishes of exotic animals from around the world are believed to confer good luck and prosperity--as well as enhanced social status-- upon the diner, and tells how the wild animal markets were closed after they were proved to be a source of the coronavirus, only to reopen months later. And he poses the question: Why do viruses that are programmed to kill jump species and focus their efforts upon humans? 

China Syndrome should have been a wake-up call. Covid-19 is, according to WHO, “genetically related to the coronavirus responsible for the SARS outbreak of 2003. While related, the two viruses are different.” But, as humanity did with the Influenza of 2018, SARS was dismissed from public attention as soon as it disappeared. China Syndrome should be required reading around the world, especially for global leaders.~Janet Brown

Getting Genki in Japan : The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Family in Tokyo by Karen Pond (Tuttle)

Karen Pond and her family, which includes a husband and three sons, pack their belongings for an impending move because the father has accepted a new position in his company. However, the family is not moving across town or to another state. No, they are moving to one of the world’s largest cities located in a foreign country. They are moving to Tokyo, Japan. A city as different as night and day compared to their coastal hometown in Maine

Pond may sound a bit flustered and out of her element in her delightful book Getting Genki in Japan, a collection of articles which were previously published in INTOUCH, a monthly magazine of the Tokyo American Club, and also published in Tokyo Families Magazine. The stories are full of humor and include beautiful illustrations by Akiko Saito.

Pond is baffled by the high-tech washlets she finds in the bathroom of a department store. She learns to leave her inhibitions at the door when she has her first hot spring experience. She waltzes out of a bathroom still wearing the toilet slippers. She uses gestures at a pharmacy to get medicine for a stomach ache for her husband and feels triumphant when the pharmacist says, “Wakarimashita” (I understand). However, she didn’t bring her husband home antacid medicine. She bought her husband a pregnancy test!

At a company dinner, Pond mistakes edamame (green soybeans) for a peapod and eats the whole pod instead of squeezing out the beans. One of her husband’s colleagues says to her, “We are curious about something. In Japan, we squeeze the edamame bean into the mouth like this. We would never eat the whole bean. It is very fascinating that in your culture you eat the whole bean.” In order to spare herself from embarrassment, she responds by saying, “This is exactly how I eat edamame in my area of the States. It’s tradition, really. It is good for the character. Mmmmmmm….” 

Of course the biggest difficulty she must overcome is the language barrier. Some of her language follies include introducing her husband as her shuujin which translates to “prisoner”, the proper word being shujin. Or telling a Japanese mother that her child is kowai (scary) instead of kawaii (cute). She doesn’t realize that irashaimasse means “welcome” and not “please take off your shoes''. The language barrier rears its ugly head again when Pond orders cocoa using the English pronunciation of “koko” which means “here” instead of “ko-ko-aah” as it’s pronounced in Japanese.

As an expat living in Japan myself, I can relate to many of the situations Pond finds herself in. I once ate soramame (broad bean), skin and all before my friend told me I am supposed to squeeze out the bean inside. Many of her stories made me laugh out loud.  Some of her anecdotes may be exaggerated for maximum humorous effect and at times her lack of common sense borders on the unbelievable. However, the book is light-hearted and easy to read and is an entertaining romp that will appeal to foreign residents and first-time visitors to Japan alike. ようこうそ日本へ！Welcome to Japan! ~Ernie Hoyt

A Nail the Evening Hangs on by Monica Sok (Copper Canyon Press)

“Who is this history written for,” Monica Sok asks when she reads about Cambodia. “Is it written for me?”  In her book of poems, A Nail the Evening Hangs On, Sok writes for and about her family, people who survived a time “when family was being destroyed.”

Sok chronicles the words of survivors without ever mentioning the names of the force that tore Cambodia apart. She tells of an afternoon in 1998  when she and her brother were sent outside to play as her parents sit in front of the television, watching “an old man die in his bed.” Only the title reveals that the dying man was Pol Pot.

Words her parents have told her are fired like bullets in her poetry. Sisters search for water but instead “find, full of air, a balloon...swollen in the river.” A man who survives through lies stays awake in the dark: “I thought I heard escape.” A woman watches her husband, “the last historian,” scratch words with a stick onto tree bark; “he burns a dangerous light.”

After the war, Khmer fishermen poison egrets to sell at Thai border markets, “knowing the pendulum of war could swing anytime...They were sure it wasn’t over.” The egrets let them  have food to ration, to save in case they needed to leave again.

In Pennsylvania, Sok’s grandmother weaves silk on her loom, “her hair falls, not as the rain does but as nails the evening hangs on.” Her silk received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s shown on the cover of Sok’s book, saffron and deep turquoise, its texture palpable in the photograph, holding memories and promises, loss and sorrow, transformed into beauty.

Sok has spoken in an interview of “Cambodian experience contextualized to fit into an American gaze.” On her visits to Cambodia, her own gaze is divided by her family’s history and her American upbringing. Eating foie gras prepared by a French chef in Siem Reap, she’s watched by a local family having a meal in their shop, wondering if she, “sitting so fancy on a restaurant patio alone,” is Khmer. “In America I don’t get to do this rich people thing.” In Cambodia, Sok is unable to stomach it, vomiting it up  as she rushes to the toilet. In a Phnom Penh hotel with other university students from the U.S., she says, “The Americans hate me and I hate them, but they’re the only students with me, and maybe I’m American too.” It’s the time of the Water Festival and as people crowd onto a bridge to give their offerings to the river, there’s “a human stampede...347 reported dead, 755 injured.” On the following evening the American students go dancing at The Heart of Darkness, “they still don’t understand but I go with them anyway.”

Trauma, Sok reminds us, is passed down through DNA, “molecular scars in the genes.” But the “revolutionaries who wanted so-called Year Zero so bad” have been turned into mosquitoes, she’s told in Cambodia. “Don’t bend. Slap.”

“We can make our own  worlds as easily as we can laugh,” Sok has said in an interview. Her poetry reveals new worlds while remembering the old one, as her grandmother did when she turned her memories into radiant silk.~Janet Brown

Available from ThingsAsian Books

Slumdog Millionaire by Vikas Swarup (Penguin)

“I have been arrested. For winning a quiz show.” says Ram Mohammad Thomas, the hero of Vikas Swarup’s novel Slumdog Millionaire. This book was originally published as “Q&A” but was given a new title after the success of the movie adaptation. Ram Mohammad Thomas has successfully answered twelve questions correctly on India’s popular quiz show, “Who Will Win a Billion?” but the producers of the show think the only way he could have won is by cheating. 

Ram lives in Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the poorest area of Mumbai. The authorities come for him in the middle of the night. Arrests here are “as common as pickpockets on the local train.” This is an area where people are often carted off without any explanation. As Ram is led away, he hears a voice in the neighborhood say, “There goes another one”. 

Neil Johnson and Billy Nanda, two people involved with the quiz program come to the police station to talk to Ram. Johnson asks the show’s producer, Nanda if Ram even understands English to which he replies “How can you expect him to speak English? He’s just a dumb waiter in some godforsaken restaurant, for Chrissake!”

Johnson pleads with the police commissioner to help prove that Ram cheated on the quiz show. They do not take any notice of Ram who is still in the room because he is just a waiter and “waiters don’t understand English”. The commissioner asks what’s in it for him and Ram hears two words - “ten percent”. 

Ram is then taken away and is beaten and tortured for hours on end. Ram knows he will sign a confession statement if the beatings continue, however, before Ram can sign any statement, he is saved from the police by a woman who claims to be his lawyer and is immediately released from police custody.

The lawyer says she wants to help Ram prove he did not cheat on the show. She tells him she has a copy of the entire quiz show broadcast and says “If you didn’t cheat, I must know how you knew”. Ram tells her what he told the police, that he just knew the answers. He then begins to tell his story of how each question on the quiz show was related to an episode in his life. 

The life of Ram Mohammed Thomas reads like a Shakespearean tragedy blended with the comedy of the absurd. Fortune and misfortune rules his life. An orphan who has to use his brain and wits to survive and succeed in a very seedy world.

The story is humorous at times and can also be read as an indictment against India’s class system that still seems to be prevalent today. You cannot help but root for Ram in his case against the injustices of a highly corrupt system. You will laugh and you will cry and you may wish your life was just as lucky as Ram’s without having to deal with the misfortunes.. ~Ernie Hoyt

The End of October by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)

Reading The End of October as a novel brings on a strong case of deja vu. A leading epidemiologist travels to a refugee camp in Indonesia where he finds a hemorrhagic virus with a horrifying fatality rate has taken hold. Unfortunately the man who had driven him to this death site immediately goes on hajj to Mecca where three million potential victims are gathered. As cases begin to spread among the faithful, the holy city is cordoned off and the world begins to characterize this as a Muslim disease. 

As the general public learns of this new virus, the novel corresponds to what we’ve experienced in 2020. People rush to stores, frantically buying and hoarding groceries, pharmaceuticals, face masks, and guns. Schools are closed, hospitals accept only emergency cases, the National Guard is called into play. Shelter in place goes into effect. Separated from his U.S. family, the epidemiologist fights to return to them while desperately searching for the source of the virus and hoping to discover a vaccine. 

But this isn’t just another end-of-the-world potboiler. Lawrence Wright is a journalist who won the Pulitzer for his book on 9/11, The Looming Tower, and his latest book is more a work of investigative journalism than it is a novel—and it’s horrifyingly prescient. Researched and written long before the emergence of Covid-19, The End of October is filled with information about the history, behavior, and deadly potential of coronaviruses.

Unlike the scourge in this novel, Covid-19 is not an influenza virus, but a novel virus, one never found before in humans. This was also true of the Spanish Influenza of 1918, “a more dreadful adversary than...ever encountered, with victims that could be “fine at lunch, dead by dinner.” Wright’s fictional virus, the Spanish Influenza, and Covid-19 all share a deadly characteristic: They correspond to no previous strain and there’s no built-up immunity to them anywhere in the world.

Like Wright’s invented disaster,  Covid-19 is an RNA virus, part of a group that’s “constantly reinventing themselves over and over again in what’s called a “mutant swarm,” as Ebola did. 

The viral world is a daunting one, found in the ocean as well as on land. “A single liter of seawater contained about 100 billion of them, 90% of them unknown to man.” “More than 800 million viruses,” researchers say, “are deposited every day on every single meter of the earth’s surface. Most...preyed on bacteria, not humans.” 

Viruses are a large part of the natural world whose purpose hasn’t yet been discovered, infecting a cell and then using  “the energy of the cell for reproduction,” eventually turning the infected body “into a virus factory.” And historically viruses come in waves, with  a “cruel intermission” followed by a second wave that’s worse than the first, as was true of the Spanish Influenza.

Wright suggests viruses are a force of nature, untamable, capable of “consuming human history.” The 1918 epidemic took more lives than the combined deaths of combatants during World War I, yet that killer-lnfluenza was essentially erased from history, its terrible lessons ignored.

Perhaps The End of October will awaken humanity to the knowledge of what a pandemic is capable of doing. It could become the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of today’s world, with its fictional narrative drawing its readers’ attention to its careful research and horrifying, illuminating facts. Let us hope.~Janet Brown

Available from ThingsAsian Books

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 who 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, Li was inspired 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 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 who had been 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. 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