Before the Deluge : The Vanishing World of the Yangtze's Three Gorges by Deirdre Chetham (Palgrave Macmillan)

After graduating from Harvard, Deirdre Chetham went on to study anthropology at Columbia University. She became interested in the Three Gorges “when China was taking its first steps toward economic and political opening”. As she was trying to decide on her thesis topic and where in China to do her field work, she made a chance meeting with an employee of Lindblad Travel, a luxury tour company whose ships often traveled along the Yangtze River.  The company hired Chetham who believed she was qualified to lecture on Chinese archeology. 

Since then, Chetham has spent more than twenty years traveling up and down the Yangtze River. She has “attempted to provide a glimpse of the history and the current situation of a remote area, as the people who live here stand on the brink of immense personal and social disruption”.

Before the Deluge was first published in 2002. The subtitle of her book is The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges. It is the story of the planning and building of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. Chetham follows the project throughout history. A project that was first suggested by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen in 1919. He said the goal was to industrialize the nation and improve navigation. 

Chetham continues discussing the history of the dam from the beginning of its construction under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, followed by the Japanese occupation who surveyed the Three Gorges and came up with the Otani plan, a dam project that would continue after Japan’s anticipated victory. Chetham also hits upon the vicarious truce between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government and the communist government as they banded together to oust the occupying Japanese. The nationalist government then invited the U.S. to help them on the project. 

Unfortunately, the Chinese Civil War started and construction of the dam was halted for another number of years. The plans for the Three Gorges Dam dam once again became national news during the eighties under Deng Xiaoping’s government. This time, progress seemed to be more or a reality than just a project on paper. 

Chetham had interviewed a number of people who would be affected by the construction of the dam but most of the locals seemed to view the project as yet another ambitious ploy by the Chinese government to show the world that China wasn’t an undeveloped country. They informed Chetham they survived the suffering caused by the Cultural Revolution, so a mass displacement would just be another hardship they would be forced to endure.

The dam was completed in 2006, four years after the publication of this book, and became fully functional in the summer of 2012. As of 2012, it has been the world’s largest power station in relation to installed capacity which is the amount of energy that a power station, or in this case, a dam, can produce. 

Before the Deluge is a fascinating history of one of man’s greatest projects ever undertaken. The environmental impact and the loss of archeological and cultural artifacts is still being debated today. The dam continues to raise the question for every developing country - should development in the name of progress take priority over the loss of culture and the displacement of a large number of its citizens? Do the benefits outweigh the negative impact on the people and the area? And most importantly, are the benefits of such a project sustainable? Only the future will be able to tell us. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Delightful Life of an Expat Crime Writer: Fifteen Journeys with Colin Cotterill and Dr. Siri (Soho Press)

Who would imagine that Hercule Poirot could ever be displaced by an unqualified coroner in his seventies who lives in Laos during the 1970s-80s? Or even more surprising, who would imagine that a middle-aged cartoonist with a background in physical education who lives in the depths of Thailand would become one of the English-speaking world’s leading crime writers? 

In 2004, Soho Press published a quiet little mystery called The Coroner’s Lunch that introduced Dr. Siri Paiboon, a medical doctor who becomes national coroner for the country of Laos simply because he is one of the few surviving physicians. Dr. Siri accepts the offer that he really couldn’t refuse and makes the acquaintance of his forensic team, a young nurse with a flair for foreign languages and an assistant with Downs Syndrome. Fortunately both Nurse Dtui and Mr. Geung have absorbed the finer points of Dr. Siri’s new profession. Siri’s contribution to the coroner’s office is a highly developed sense of skepticism and a distaste for bureaucratic obfuscation, which proves useful in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. He also learns that he has an invisible posse dogging his heels—a collection of spirits from the Great Beyond—who both help and hinder what becomes his real vocation. Siri is unable to view a cadaver without discovering its true cause of death and this leads him to amateur detective work, for which he has a natural flair. Joined by Chief Inspector Phosy and a friend of his youth, the irascible Civilai, Dr. Siri makes his way through fifteen books, solving crimes in a leisurely and amiable fashion.

The books that chronicle his crime career are permeated with the placid, unhurried pace of Laos time and many delightfully sarcastic jokes, along with those pesky spirits getting in the way. Over time, the characters grow older and happier. Siri falls in love with Daeng, a gorgeous septuagenarian noodle seller who learned the fine art of killing during the American War, and Dtui and Phosy become a couple. Even Mr. Geung finds love. 

Through the years, the books deepen with historical research, which has all but taken over the latest volume, The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot. When Dr. Siri is sent a package that contains a diary, with the first half written in Japanese and the second in Lao, this provides a serial drama, chapter by chapter, as Siri reads it aloud to Daeng every evening. Gradually an invisible character tries to dominate the book and Siri and Daeng go off to find why the journal ends so abruptly and who the writer truly was.

Suddenly the book becomes suffused with a kamikaze pilot, the Nanjing massacre, the Japanese occupation of Laos, and a fascinating but deeply disgusting pantheon of Japanese ghosts. Siri and Daeng have to work overtime to keep control of the plot but with fourteen earlier adventures under their belts, they’re more than equal to the task.

A man who has given the world fifteen volumes of Dr. Siri in sixteen years, Colin Cotterill is a master of the shaggy dog story, where the punch line is almost incidental to the plentiful and fascinating details. His characters have made these books irresistible, to the point that when the killer is discovered, it’s difficult to care. What draws his readers back are the members of this eccentric, delightful community—oh, and the titles help too. I Shot the Buddha. Curse of the Pogo Stick. Don’t Eat Me. (Cotterill was incensed when Soho said he couldn’t use The Devil’s Vagina for one of Siri’s mysteries. Whatever replaced it was much less memorable than the original, which was a direct translation of the name of a plant that grows in Laos.)

The real mystery at the heart of his latest book comes in a note of thanks at its very beginning. “This last book in the Dr. Siri series,” Cotterill says and ends his thanks with Sayonara. However since Dr. Siri is still alive at the book’s end, let’s hope the man meant “latest,” not “last” and that Sayonara is simply a form of homage to the Suicide Pilot. After all, Siri has the spirit world on his side and his creator has only “a number of deranged dogs,” a truth to which I can testify. I’m putting my money on the eventual reappearance of Dr. Siri.~Janet Brown

Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama (Riverrun)

First published in Japanese as Climber’s High by Bungei Shunju Ltd in 2003. It was also adapted into a film of the same name in 2008. Seventeen is Hideo Yokoyama’s second novel to be published in English, his first being the crime/mystery novel Six Four. The story is set in two time frames - 1985 and 2002 and blends fiction with an actual event. Yokoyama uses his background as an investigative journalist and creates a story of a small-town journalist covering one of Japan’s worst airline disasters.

On August 12, 1985, Japan Airlines Flight 123 from Haneda Airport to Osaka crashed in a mountainous area of Gunma Prefecture killing the entire fifteen-member crew and 504 of the 509 passengers. It is considered one of the deadliest single-aircraft accidents in aviation history. In his foreword, Yokoyama relates what he witnessed at the crash site. 

“I arrived at the crash site after trekking for more than eight hours up a mountain with no routes or climbing trails. The terrain was steep, unimaginably narrow, and it was the rare lucky reporter who didn’t inadvertently step on a corpse. After sundown, I spent a night on the mountain, surrounded by body parts that no longer resembled anything human”.

Kazumasa Yuuki is a veteran reporter for the North Kanto Times, a local newspaper based in Gunma Prefecture. For years he worked the police beat. Although he is married and has two children, he is away from home most of the time and is estranged from his thirteen-year old son Jun. The story opens with Kazu getting off a train at the base of Mount Tanigawa, also known as the Devil’s Mountain. He was supposed to climb the Tsuitate Face with his friend Kyoichiro Anzai seventeen years ago and still wonders about the last words he heard his friend say, “I climb up to step down.”

Seventeen years ago, on the day Yuuki was getting ready to climb the mountain, a wire from the news service came in stating that, “It appears that Japan Air Lines Flight 123 has crashed on the Nagano-Gunma prefectural border.”  The newspaper office goes into turmoil and Yuuki is assigned as the JAL Crash Desk Chief. This tragedy brings the newsroom together and there are high hopes for the paper to get a real scoop before all the national publications. 

What follows is an adrenaline-filled chaos as Yuuki tries to organize and delegate assignments for the story and to coordinate with the other departments to get the story ready for print as soon as it is possible. We get a first-hand glimpse of the politics involved with various departments as well as the different factions supporting politicians on opposing parties. 

The story is more about how the news is handled and presented than it is about the crash itself. It isn’t only about the characters, but the ethics of what’s appropriate or not. Are the deaths of people in a major disaster more important to the media than the death of an individual that has little to no value to a newspaper? 

“There are big lives and little lives, aren’t there? Heavy lives and lightweight lives, and lives that are...not.” 

It’s definitely something to think about. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City by Juan Du (Harvard University Press)

To any traveler who goes beyond the Central Business District of Shenzhen and explores it through its vast spiderweb of subway lines, this city seems inexplicable. Once the central core with its dazzling towers is left behind, what’s left is a sprawl of disparate clumps of urbanity, like a gigantic follow-the-dots puzzle where the dots are connected only by a 177-mile subway line. Each clump feels unrelated to its counterparts, existing like its own little outpost, in a weird metropolis that spreads over 792 square miles. Conventional wisdom says Shenzhen sprang from a single fishing village with a population of 30,000. How and why did it spread, over the space of forty years, from this tiny nucleus into a bizarre and randomly-placed mushroom-crop of skyscrapers flung across an area that’s almost double the size of Los Angeles, with a GDP that in 2017 outstripped Hong Kong and Singapore?

The answer lies in debunking a creation myth that has been gleefully spread by everyone from the New York Times to the World Bank. Something from nothing is the classic Cinderella story and applying it to Shenzhen makes the emergence of this city almost miraculous. The truth however makes it much more interesting.

Hong Kong architect and academic Juan Du became intrigued with Shenzhen after she missed her flight out of the city. Wandering away from the affluent grounds of her hotel, she stumbled upon a village that was decidedly not affluent. The ramshackle buildings were no more than seven stories tall and children, accompanied by barking dogs, played noisily near long lines of vendors who were cooking over open flames. People sat on folding chairs, eating outdoors at a night market that was at least a century behind anything else Juan Du had seen in Shenzhen. 

When she began to investigate, she discovered that Shenzhen had over 300 of these villages spread across the city, all of them surrounded by skyscrapers. Between them they contained over 350,000 peasant houses that now offered affordable rentals to the city’s recently arrived labor force. How did these places come into being? 

The uncovered truth shatters the Shenzhen myth. In 1979 Bao’an County became the site of the city of Shenzhen. An area of 2020 square kilometers, with a population of 358,000, it contained over 2000 agrarian villages. Each of these provided a separate nucleus for urban development, which grew up around the farming communities, and each became known as an urban village. 

Even the crown jewel of Shenzhen, the glittering and wealthy area of Shennan Boulevard, is based upon humble origins. It originally was Country Road 107, built to connect the port to the market town that gave the city its name. Stripped of the mythical origin of a little fishing village, the legacy of Bao’an County is rich in regional history, with a longstanding economy built upon salt and oyster farms, as well as agriculture. What now appear to be random dots of modern development are actually based upon the villages that still prevail. Shenzhen’s “spatial development” has been shaped by “centuries-old agrarian spatial patterns,” which explains the confusing incoherence of it all.

But perhaps not for much longer--Shenzhen’s goal is to become a “comprehensive city,” with urban planning that will turn those unconnected dots into a full picture. To accomplish this, the urban villages are being subsumed into the whole, with Huanggang Village providing the desired prototype.

A community that had been in place since 1426, Huanggang was demolished and rebuilt as an urbanized historic village, touted as a “model village,” clean, modern, and sanitized beyond all recognition. It stands in brutal contrast to the village that Juan Du first encountered.

Baishizhou was notorious for being the “poorest, dirtiest, and biggest” of Shenzhen’s urban villages. Once five separate farm villages, it held approximately 200,000 people who lived in 2477 peasant houses. It was famous for having the lowest rent in the city and new arrivals flocked to it, attracted by housing that was cramped and uncomfortable. However, unlike the factory housing provided by employers like FoxConn, which was only a few kilometers away, the rooms in Baishizhou were unmonitored; they offered personal freedom.

Small businesses sprang up to cater to the needs of the new residents but gentrification was lurking on the edges. Surrounded by theme parks and luxurious hotels, Baishizhou became a prime target for the owners of art galleries, gourmet coffee shops, and craft breweries. When residents refused to make room for these new refinements, the city simply cut off their water and electricity. Now Baishizhou exists as an online video game created in the U.S. 

Shenzhen learned to become forceful in its relocation efforts after dealing with a villager who had owned both house and land rights for over forty years. She was the sole hold-out as her neighbors struck deals with the city.  For three years, as other houses were demolished and the skyscrapers drew near, her home stood alone in the midst of rubble, a “nail house” that remained hammered into place. She sold it at last for 12 million yuan and disappeared with her fortune. It was much cheaper to simply turn off the utilities.

But as the lights darken in the villages, they’re replaced with the blaze of 21st Century splendor. The new dream is to blend Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong into a single world-dazzling metropolis. Impossible? Tell that to Shenzhen.~Janet Brown

Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

“I used to be human once. So I’m told. I don’t remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being.”

Animal’s People is set against the backdrop of one of the world’s worst industrial accidents as a model that took place in Bhopal, India in 1984 and was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. 

On the night of December 2 and 3, 1984 at the U.S. owned Union Carbide pesticide plant, over thirty tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC), a highly toxic gas used in the production of a pesticide called Sevin which is Union Carbide’s brand name for carbaryl, which spread over the town of Bhopal, immediately killing thousands of citizens and continues to haunt the populace today as the company was never forced to clean up their mess. 

The story is narrated by a nineteen year old Indian boy, only known as Animal, whose faithful companion is a dog named Jara and lives in the fictional city of Khaufpur. He was born a few days before that night “which no one in Khaufpur wants to remember, but nobody can forget.”

Animal is an orphan as the gas killed his parents. He was brought up in an orphanage run by a French nun known as Ma Franci. The nun used to be able to speak Hindi and English but after the incident, she has forgotten all languages except her own. 

Animal makes his living by doing all sorts of scams throughout the city. The factory gases have affected his body so he can only walk on all fours, as an Animal. He spots three college-aged girls and practices one of his routines by having Jara play dead while he goes on a spiel about suffering from starvation to which one of the girls does something he does not foresee. 

She asks, “Did you teach him?” Animal says that for five rupees he can get the dog to sing the national anthem. She counters with, “Is begging fun?” Animal replies, “Is it fun to be hungry? No, so then don’t mock me.” This is where he meets Nisha who changes his life. It is Nisha who teaches Animal how to read. He also learns to speak the language of Ma Francie. 

Animal becomes infatuated with Nisha but he feels a bit of jealousy when he’s introduced to Zafar, an activist who has been leading the fight against the Amrikan Kampani (American company) . At the same time, a young American woman named Dr. Elli appears in Khaufpur and announces that she is going to open a clinic and it will be free to anyone who wishes to come. 

After spending her own fortune and going through a lot of government red tape, the idealist Dr. Elli opens her clinic only to be puzzled why nobody shows up. Unfortunately, Zafar believes the clinic is another one of the Kampany’s plans to divert being held responsible for an incident that happened almost twenty years ago. Dr. Elli realizes that people want treatment but they all refuse to come to the clinic. She expresses her exasperation to Animal, “These people have nothing. Why do they turn down a genuine and good offer of help? I don’t get it.”

Animal says he understands because they’re his people - Animal’s people. The story explores government corruption and multinational corporations exploitation of labor and resources. It is a novel that sheds light on the injustices of the world and how it affects the life of the ordinary everyday citizens who have no money or power to fight back. In this day and age of for profit enterprises, it takes a book like this to point out that there are more important things than money. ~Ernie Hoyt

Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen (Knopf)

Huong comes from Vietnam to New Orleans with two small children. She’s haunted by war, armed with a handful of words in English, hates the word “refugee” and feels a surge of bitter humor when she’s placed in public housing that has been given the name “Versailles.” With an academic husband whose field is French literature, she recognizes the irony. 

In Vietnam, “theirs was a house of love...it was all they ever needed. And with love they would survive.” When Huong receives a postcard telling her to make a new life because her husband will never join them, love is what makes her keep this truth in a hidden box, a secret from her sons--and that love is what keeps this novel from being a dark and tragic story.

Even though her oldest son searches for a different sort of family in a gang of Vietnamese street toughs and her youngest finds affection and mentorship in the gay community, even when her secret comes to light and divides her family, even when one single slap in the face sends her youngest away from home to eventually live in Paris, Huong keeps love alive in a persistent flame, along with her ability to create a stable center in an uncertain world.

“Huong likes emergencies. She thrives on figuring out how to avoid danger, how to stay alive….she would save them all if it came down to it.” And when Katrina falls upon New Orleans, she’s ready. She knows the art of survival, which she anchors with her love.

In a literary world that has provided countless stories of dysfunctional families, Eric Nguyen has written a novel filled with light, hope, and beauty. He presents Huong and her children through their different perspectives, in chapters that skirt despair in favor of radiance. An old Chinese shopkeeper gives the oldest son a bowl of soup and saves him from an act that would have changed his life forever. A used car salesman courts Huong by taking her to an orchard of fruit that she never expected to see in this new country and wins her heart with bunches of sweet, freshly picked longan and a taste of her previous life. The youngest son discovers who he is in a deserted swimming pool, where he and the boy who kisses him are “both stars, the two of them...Floating. Free.”

It’s unusual to find tenderness in a novel nowadays but Nguyen provides it, untainted by saccharine sentimentality. Huong and her children learn where the nature of home resides; “this had become her city,” Huong realizes after spending years in New Orleans, “the place she lived but also a place that lived in her.” And on their different paths, both of her sons find what lives within them.

The radiant truth of those separate voyages toward that discovery is inspiring, humbling, and indelible. Nguyen, in his debut novel, has evoked a gentle yet realistic vision of family life as it could be and as it should be.~Janet Brown

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri {Riverhead Books)

Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station, originally published in Japanese in 2014 as JR 東京上野駅公園口 (JR Tokyo Ueno Eki Kouen Guchi) is set in modern Japan. It was published in English in 2020 by Morgan Giles and won the National Book Award for Translated Literature for that year as well. 

Kazu is dead, but it is through his eyes that we see the everyday comings and goings of people who live in or visit Ueno Park, one of Tokyo’s most popular public parks that houses many museums, shrines, and a zoological garden. As Kazu describes what he sees, he also talks about his own life and how he came to be homeless and living in the park. 

Kazu is philosophical from the beginning as he relates his story. “I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there’s the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.”

Kazu was born in 1933 in Soma in Fukushima Prefecture. He is married to Setsuko and has a son and a daughter. In order to support his family, Kazu becomes a migrant laborer and goes to Tokyo to help with construction before the coming Summer Olympics which are to be held in Japan for the first time. 

After the Olympics, Kazu is sent to Sendai and continues to work as a migrant laborer to help pay for Koichi’s university tuition as he is studying to become a radiologist. His daughter got married and currently lives in Sendai as well. Kouichi had just passed his radiology exam but a few days later, Kazu receives a call from his wife informing him that their son has died. 

Tragedy seems to follow Kazu even after he returns to his hometown. Setsuko passes away at the age of sixty-five. His granddaughter Mari worries about him and suggests that Kazu come live with her but Kazu thinks it’s improper to live with a twenty-one year old woman and heads back to Tokyo. He leaves a note telling Mari not to come looking for him. 

The last station on the train line that Kazu takes ends at Ueno Station. This is where he has come to die but as he becomes one of the many homeless living in a tent village in Ueno Park and before he knows it, he has been living there for over five years. 

Tragedy strikes again when Kazu hears of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake which causes a tsunami that wiped out many towns along the coast of Northern Japan. One of the victims of the tsunami is his granddaughter Mari and her pet dog.After the sudden death of his only friend in Ueno Park, Kazu falls into despair and makes a grand decision that may shock the reader. 

Yu Miri writes about the harsh reality of the underside of Tokyo. She shows us what the government of Japan does not want to acknowledge. The invisible people, the marginalized, the homeless. She reminds us through the voice of Kazu that most homeless people do not choose to be homeless. We hear the voice of another homeless person saying, “I can’t believe I became homeless...Having passersby look at me like I’m something dirty…” We may feel the pain and agony of Kazu and wonder what direction we would have taken? ~Ernie Hoyt

Life isn't all ha ha hee hee by Meera Syal (Anchor Books)

Meera Syal is a British actor and writer whose parents came from India. She was born in Wolverhampton and grew up in the small town of Essington in Staffordshire. Her family was the only Asian family in the area and she uses this experience as a backdrop to her 1999 novel Life isn’t all ha ha hee hee which was also adapted into a three-part television mini-series in 2005. 

The story centers around three childhood friends who continue to have a strong bond as adults in their thirties living in London. They are Chila, Sunita, and Tania. Sunita is the oldest of the three. She dropped out of university and married her psychotherapist Akash and has two kids. Tania is an ambitious career woman working in television who speaks her mind and doesn’t think much of her Punjabi roots and currently lives with her Caucasion boyfriend, Martin. Chila is the youngest of the three and is just getting married to one of the most eligible bachelors and the man of her dreams - Deepak Sharma. 

Deepak used to be a ladie’s man and has a long history of having many girlfriends, including Tania. His family is happy that he has chosen a nice Punjabi girl and not one of the blondes he used to flaunt when he was younger, however, things get complicated when Tania makes a film about the love lives of ordinary Indian people, mostly using her friends and not exactly showing them in the best light. The premiere is a success but has unforeseen consequences. 

The bonds of friendship are rattled when Tania and Deepak share a passionate kiss after having an argument at the film’s premiere. They are seen by Chila, Sunita, and Martin. Martin soon leaves Tania. Chila and Sunita no longer speak to Tania but Chila refuses to bring up the matter with Deepak and Deepak takes no responsibility for his actions.

Although Tania’s film was successful and critically acclaimed, it’s consequences were not just relegated to her close friends but to the Indian community as well. The new production company which hired her wants her to make similar films but Tania no longer wants to make movies about “her people”. In order to appease her colleagues, she tries to get an interview with Jasbinder Singh, a woman whose husband wouldn’t grant her a divorce and doused himself and their children with gasoline and lit himself on fire in front of her. 

Chila gives birth to a son but refuses to let her husband see him. By chance, Tania meets  up with her two friends in the hospital and the three reform their bond as Deepak makes a surprise appearance and Chila’s son is nowhere to be found!

Syal gives us an interesting insight into the immigrant experience of how three modern day Indian women live with one foot in London while the other remains in the tradition of their Punjabi roots. All three women want to live independent and happy lives but they try their hardest to find a balance between where they want to be and where their husbands and relatives think they should be. 

The lives of these three women may be the same for a number of women who find themselves in the same situation where the man believes he is the head of the household and what he says is law as they all try to find a balance in pleasing their husbands and boyfriends but not at the cost of their own happiness. Men should take notes and learn to respect women and not treat their wives or girlfriends like second-class citizens. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong (Viking)

Each of the women who loved Lafcadio Hearn called him by a different name.

His father named him Patrick. His mother added Lafcadio, to identify his birthplace, the Ionian town of Lefkada, on an island that bore the same name. But to her, he was always Patricio, “who was born hungry,” and until she took him to his father’s relatives in Ireland, this was the only name he knew. There he became Patrick. The gold earrings he had worn from birth were stripped from his ears, and his memories of warm sunlight, the hills covered with golden ginestra blossoms, the flavor of garlic, all faded away, but not “the dark and beautiful face--with large brown eyes like a wild deer’s.” He cherished the memory of his vanished mother, saying “I would rather have her portrait than a fortune.”

He left Ireland as soon as he could, finding his way to Cincinnati where he launched his writing career as a journalist. It was here that he met Alethea Foley, the daughter of a slave and a plantation owner who made her living as a talented cook in a boarding house and it was she who called the new boarder Pat.  The two of them traded stories, fell in love, and managed to circumvent miscegenation laws by getting married. Inevitably their union fell apart when the world intervened. Pat made his way to New Orleans where he was became a writer who was known as Lafcadio.

As Lafcadio, he met the reporter who would become his biographer, Elizabeth Bisland, a journalist who achieved fame by racing Nellie Bly—and losing—in traveling around the world in eighty days.  She describes the man who would be her friend for his entire life as “most unusual and memorable...five foot three inches in height...with an almost feminine grace and lightness in his step and movements... abnormally shy.” He had, she says, “an astounding sensitiveness” that “drove him to flight,” and it was this perhaps that took him to Japan.

In a country where he never truly learned its language, Koizumi Yakumo found a kind of safety and came to life. Here he met and married Koizimi Setsu, who became his interpreter, guide, and storyteller. With the birth of their first child, he became a legal subject of Japan to ensure that his wife and children wouldn’t lose their Japanese citizenship. It was no sacrifice. As Yakumo, a member of the Koizumi family, he was given a home from which he had no desire for flight.

Through the voices of Hearn’s mother and his two wives, Monique Truong has stitched together an oblique but vivid portrait of a somewhat vampiric writer, a man who soaked up other people’s stories and made them his own. Truong’s poetic narrative is underpinned by portions of the biography wriiten soon after his death by Elizabeth Bisland, which was largely based upon Hearn’s own version of his life. Through eight years of exacting research and travel, including the discovery of an English translation of Koizumi Setsu’s memoir of her husband (Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn), Truong has created a work of beauty and brilliance, one that transcends Hearn’s life and enriches it at the same time.~Janet Brown

Kensuke's Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo (Egmont)

Michael was lost at sea ten years ago. He was only eleven. It would be ten years after his rescue that he would share his story. Such is the premise of Kensuke's Kingdom, winner of the Children’s Book Award and written by Michael Morpurgo. 

Michael’s family consists of him, his mother and father, and his pet sheepdog, Stella Artois, Michael had a paper route on Saturdays. On Sundays, the family would go dinghy sailing at the city’s reservoir. His father worked at the brickworks and his mother worked part-time at the brickworks office until their family received “the letter” which would change their lives. 

“The letter” was a notice to inform them that the brickworks was closing down. Michael’s parents looked for other jobs but there was nothing. The family was falling apart. His parents were not speaking to each other and when they did they would be arguing about little things. 

Then, one Saturday, Michael’s world changes. He finds his mother at home crying because his Father sold the family car and said they would be moving south. Michael had never seen his mother in this state. She said it was because of him that their father had this crazy idea. 

She tells him what his father said to her. “There’s only one lousy wage coming into this house - Michael’s paper money.” Father tells his wife, “How do you think that makes me feel, eh? My son’s eleven years old. He’s got a job and I haven’t!”. 

Father’s big plan was to make his dream into reality. He had enough money to buy a yacht named Peggy Sue. He prepared for everything, even Michael’s education. At first, the sailing goes well as the family visits Brazil, Africa and Australia. It isn’t until they hit a storm in the Coral Sea where Michael and his dog fall overboard. 

Michael and Stella wash up on a deserted island and must use his wits to survive on his own. He has no food and water and believes that his time is up and accepts the fact that he will die. However, when he wakes, he finds a plate of fish and fruit and some drinking water provided. Now he knows he is not alone. 

It doesn’t take long for Michael to discover the only other inhabitant on the island. A man whose language he doesn’t understand and who uses words he’s never heard of - Dameda! Yamero! Abunai! At their first encounter, the only thing Michael learns is that the man’s name is Kensuke. 

One day Michael goes swimming in the ocean only and is stung by a large and poisonous jellyfish. It’s Kensuke that nurses Michael back to health and they begin to form a fragile friendship as Kensuke asks Michael to teach him English. 

Once the two can communicate, Michael learns that Kensuke is Japanese man from Nagasaki.  He learns about Kensuke’s family history. How Kensuke joined the Imperial Navy and believes his wife and only son died in the bombing of Nagasaki and how he’s been stranded on the island since the end of the war but has nothing to go back to in Japan. 

Kensuku’s Kingdom is a story of survival and friendship. It’s about creating new bonds and keeping promises and protecting what one deems important. The story may remind you of Gary Pausen’s Hatchet in which a young boy must survive the wilderness on his own. Michael may not be alone on the island but he learns what is most important in life. It is something we should not take for granted. ~Ernie Hoyt

Xi’an Famous Foods by Jason Wang with Jessica K. Chou, photographs by Jenny Huang (Abrams Books)

“There’s a tall, old white dude with a film crew. Do you know who he is?” David Shi, the owner of Xi’an Famous Foods in Queens, is probably one of the few people in New York City in 2011 who would have to ask that question. His son Jason Wang gives him the answer. The old white dude is Anthony Bourdain and the film crew with him is going to propel this small restaurant in a Flushing shopping mall into a culinary destination with worldwide fame.

Shi brought his family to the U.S. from China when his son was only seven but the little boy was already claimed by the strong flavors of black vinegar and cumin-dusted lamb skewers. He had come from a city that was once a major stop on the Silk Road and had developed its own cuisine with the addition of Middle Eastern ingredients: lamb and “earthy spices like cardamom and star anise.” Jason Wang left a “city of fiery desert food” for a country where soy sauce was an exotic item on supermarket shelves. His father discovered that Chinese restaurants in the U.S. served food that would never be found in China. He supported his family by cooking sweet, bland dishes in cities across the East Coast, working at a circuit of different restaurants for years.

Wang soon became homesick for the street food he’d known since birth. As soon as he was tall enough to see over the top of a barbecue grill, he began to recreate the lamb skewers that haunted his taste buds. Adding cumin and salt, he successfully replicated the flavor that he longed for. Obviously, his future in food was already set in place, although it took him time to realize that.

Anyone who has eaten the food of Xi’an will never forget its taste and textures. Xi capitalized on that distnctive cuisine after he moved his family to the Chinese city of Flushing, a district of Queens that has become the borough’s culinary capital. Growing from a streetside stall near a shopping plaza to “a mini empire of stores all across New York City,” Xi’an Famous Foods has turned cumin-lamb noodles into a New York dish that’s become as popular as pizza or bagels.

Wang pays homage to his birthplace with photographs (taken by Jenny Huang) and stories that are as enticing as the recipes that have come from the city of Xi’an. He reveals the bounty of the  Xi Cang street market as he remembers it, long before it became a tourist attraction that sells deep fried scorpions to crowds of out-of-towners. He teasingly exults over a childhood favorite spot that’s still in business, selling lamb dumplings in vinegar, while refusing to divulge its location, and is thrilled when he finds shops that only make the “daily bread of Xi’an,” fried in a skillet and served warm. He pays homage to the kitchens of his grandparents and offers The No-Frills Guide to Xi’an as a Tourist: a launching pad to this city whose history has been shaped by thirteen dynasties.

Xi’an Famous Foods is more than a cookbook, despite its extraordinary collection of recipes and its detailed instructions on how to follow them.  Wang has written a family history and a tribute to a rapidly changing center of Chinese culture, as well as to the Chinese outpost in New York that launched his family’s success.  On so many different levels, his book is an inspiration--to eat different kinds of food, to make it at home, to visit the banquet of Xi’an food hat exists in New York, and to explore the place where it all came from—”the swirling of cultures in Xi’an.”~Janet Brown

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha (Ballantine Books)

The quest for beauty and the hunger for family dominate the lives of five young women who live within the same building in Seoul’s famous Gangnam neighborhood. 

Ajuri, who lost her voice in a childhood fight with schoolmates, earns her living  in a hair salon, making other women beautiful. Her roommate and childhood friend, Sujin, calls her “the little mermaid,” who communicates solely with pen, paper, and the gift of touch. Without speech, Ajuri has sharpened her other senses beyond what they had been before she became mute;  “the wind,” she says, “I don’t remember it having so many shades of sound.” 

Sujin and Miho grew up together in the same orphanage. Their lives diverged when Miho’s artistic talent took her to live for years in Manhattan. When she returns to Seoul, Sujin urges her to live in the “office-tel” building,” with its desirable zip code and proximity to the subway. Miho, seeing this as a place “for the unfettered”, becomes roommates with a stranger, Kyuri.

Kyuri works in one of Seoul’s most prestigious “room salons,” one that is known as a “10 percent,” employing only the prettiest 10 percent of the girls who make conversation and pour drinks for men who “pay to act as bloated kings.” “Electrically beautiful,” Ajuri describes her neighbor, while Miho sees her as “painfully plastic.” Kyuri has paid a borrowed fortune for her skin that “gleams like pure glass” and her features that have been sculpted into a replica of a popular Korean singer. Trapped in debt, she is haunted by her “expiration date” and thinks of moving to Hong Kong or New York, where beauty is measured by a less demanding standard.

Sujin yearns for Kyuri’s face and the chance it will give her to become a room salon girl, even though she knows it will take at least six months for her to recover from the surgery. The reshaping is a brutal process that makes Sujin mask her lower face to hide the swelling and the numbness that makes her drool as though she was shot up with novocain. But when her beauty begins to bloom, she claims the happiness that eludes Kyuri.

These girls are the reason why a young wife decides to move into the office-tel. She’s magnetized by the glimpses she sees of their closeness and their freedom, an intimacy and mobility that she’s never had. Wonna, after a long series of miscarriages, guards her most recent pregnancy with fierce possessiveness, yearning for the daughter who will give her a family of her own.

Within the framework of these lives, Frances Cha gives a view of modern Korean life with the perspective of an American outsider and the trained eye of a professional journalist. She shows the extraordinary wealth and power of Korea’s upper class in a single sentence, when an heiress approached by a stranger on the street, says to her companion, “Maybe I can have him killed.” “Korea is the size of a fishbowl,” Miho observes, “Someone is always looking down on someone else.” Economic class is difficult to transcend, which makes beauty a necessity. 

But beauty gives a fleeting advantage, accompanied by a crippling loan that’s taken on with little thought. “It is easy to leap when you have no choice,” Kyuri remarks. 

Many women face the prospect of old age without children who will provide emotional and financial support. Korean firms offer maternity leaves that can last at least for three months and as long as a year, something they do their best to avoid providing. The cost of bringing up a child can be astronomical.  Parents who don’t qualify for free government daycare can end up paying huge amounts for child care. Peer pressure makes them buy budget-draining robots who read aloud to children from books that come in sets of 30-50, air purifiers for gigantic baby-strollers, and “pastel bumper beds with tents.” “All these ob-gyns and birthing centers and post-partum centers are going out of business because nobody is having children.” Kyuri says. Meanwhile hospitals devoted to cosmetic surgery attract patients from all over the world and a never-ending supply of room salon girls.

Artifice, for Cha’s characters, is an established fact of life. Elaborate weddings with hundreds of guests confer a fragile status upon wives who wait for husbands to come home from the girls in room salons. Cha strips away myths that proclaim the strength of family and the privileges of beauty,  revealing a glittering, lonely world where women learn to support each other.~Janet Brown

The Binding Chair by Kathryn Harrison (4th Estate)

Foot binding: An ancient Chinese custom of tightly binding the feet of young girls to make their feet as small as possible. The practice continued well into the beginning of the 20th century. Bound feet were considered a status symbol and also as a mark of beauty. They were also known as lotus feet. 

Kathryn Harrison, the writer who shocked the world with her semi-autobiographical novel The Kiss, describing her incestuous but consenting affair with her father, has written a story set in turn of the century China. The Binding Chair opens with eleven people answering an ad placed by one Mrs. Arthur Cohen. “Whatever the name Mrs. Cohen might suggest to someone answering an ad, May would not have been it. To begin with, wasn’t Cohan a Jewish name? And there she was unmistakably Chinese.”

How does a Chinese woman end up living in France while married to an Englishman? The story flashes back to when May was five years old and she was still known as Chao-tsing. This is the year that her grandmother took charge of May’s feet. May’s mother who remembered the pain of having her own foot bound could not find the courage to do the same to her daughter. The matriarchal grandmother tells May’s mother, “The choice is this, either Chao-tsing will grow up to be the bride of a prosperous merchant, or she will be as large-footed as a barbarian and find no husband at all!”.

As May gets older, May’s traditional grandmother sets about looking for a perfect match to marry off her granddaughter. She is soon married to a rich merchant and looks forward to a bright future. Unfortunately, May discovers that she is the youngest and also the fourth wife of the man. She is also resented by the other wives and is virtually ignored by her new husband for weeks on end. When he does show up, he treats her brutally often using her as nothing more than a sex-toy.

Chao-tsing manages to escape the house with the help of one of the servants. She reaches the bright lights of Shanghai where she finds a job in a brothel. She tells the proprietress that she’s will to work and do anything for various clients under one condition - no Chinese! It is at the brothel where she meets Arthur for the first time. Their initial encounter is not quite friendly but when Arthur sees her bound foot, he becomes obsessed with them. 

I have never given any thought to feet-binding and as with May’s husband Arthur, assumed it was a foot whose growth was somehow prevented. Arthur learns that this is not so. “A bound foot is a foot broken: a foot folded in the middle, toes forced down toward the heel.” I cannot make any judgments on why small feet were considered beautiful in China. American standards of beauty are suggested by the images of women we see in magazine ads or on television. In other cultures, it may be face tattoos, henna, or lip plates. In China, it was bound feet.

The relationship between May and her family sets you on an emotional rollercoaster that will at times pull at your heartstrings. The suffering women had to go through to please their families and husband is still relevant today as it was during May’s time. Fortunately, the practice of foot-binding has long been outlawed. No women should have to endure pain and suffering just to find happiness. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Consul's File by Paul Theroux (Washington Square Press)

When people see or hear the name Paul Theroux, it most likely brings up images of a well-traveled man who goes on journeys and writes about his experiences. It is his travel essays where he found most of his success. His first major success was the account of his journey from Great Britain to Japan and back. The book was titled The Great Railway Bazaar and has become a classic of the travel genre. However, Theroux is a prolific writer of fiction as well. 

The Consul’s File which was published in 1977 is a collection of stories set in the fictional town of Ayer Hitam in Malaysia. The unnamed narrator is the American consul sent to the town as the United States still had an interest in the rubber estates. However, the rubber trees were being replaced by oil palms and many of the Americans had already left. It was the narrator’s job to phase out the consulate. 

We are told, “In other places the consular task was, in the State Department phrase, bridge-building; In Ayer-Hitam I was dismantling a bridge.” The narrator tells us that he was told that all he needs to know are all written in files kept in a small box-room at the Residence. He decides to write and add his own stories and stories he heard which he knows to be true to the files for posterity. 

The narrator’s secretary told him about the files so one day, the consul takes a day off and spends it at the Residence where he decides to open the box-room. There was a mystery surrounding files holding who knows what kind of secrets. What he does find is a stack of yellow papers bounded by string and partially eaten by termites. It didn’t take him long to discover “that there was little writing on them, and certainly no secrets; in fact, most of the pages were blank”.

The Consul spends two years in Ayer-Hitam and deals with a variety of people who either need his help or ask favors of him. One of the most annoying characters is a woman writer named Margaret Harbottle. She is the epitome of the entitled white American when the term wasn’t even in fashion yet. She bursts into his office as soon as it opens, she makes all sorts of demands before the Consul can even sit down. She believes it’s the Consul who should make her feel comfortable as she says she will give his name a mention in her forthcoming book. 

There is the woman anthropologist who reminds you of Conrad’s Kurtz as she goes native and marries an aboriginal chief. The woman who claims to have been raped by some oily man only to be told by one of his helpers, the person responsible was Orang Minyak, orang meaning man and minyak which means “oily, like ghee butter on his body”. He also tells the consul that Orang Minyak is a Malay spirit that only bothers women at night. 

The twenty intertwined stories gives you a feel of what it must have been like to work as a diplomat in a third world country in one of its outermost posts. The characters, both and foreign and domestic, are brought to life by Theroux’s wit and observance. It’s a shame that there are still American citizens who act like the writer who expects everything to be done for her. Visitors to other countries must remember that they are the guests and shouldn’t be making any demands just because of their nationality. ~Ernie Hoyt

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Knopf)

“Am I even Korean anymore,” Michelle Zauner asks herself after the death of her Korean mother. She finds her answer when she goes to H Mart, the Korean supermarket chain that is found across the U.S. “I hardly speak any Korean but in H Mart it feels like I’m fluent.”

As she views the food of her childhood on the grocery shelves, Zauner’s fluency extends to her grief and she wanders the aisles in tears. In the supermarket’s food court she watches mothers feeding their children the choicest morsels of their meals and feels waves of anger when she sees women of her mother’s age and those who are older, still enjoying their food,  their lives. 

Her mother was never a “Mommy-mom,” as Zauner called the mothers of her friends. “My mother was always trying to shape me into the most perfect version of myself...Hers was tougher than tough love.” But the two of them had a common ground in food. From early childhood Zauner learned that being an adventurous eater gained her mother’s approval and happily consumed delicacies like live octopus tentacles. It took much longer to realize that the way her mother revealed her love was through the food she cooked for her daughter.

Half-Korean, Zauner and her mother make many trips to Seoul to visit family. The differences that make Zauner’s life difficult in rural Oregon become enviable assets in Korea. Her small face, the double-fold of her eyelids, and her pale skin earn her the praise of yeppeu, pretty, and the attention of a K-drama director. When she finds that her mother has discouraged what Zauner sees as her one chance at fame, she’s outraged. Her mother looks at her and tells her “You could never be anyone’s doll.”

The truth of this statement becomes clear as Zauner leaves home for the artistic life of the East Coast, independent, unconventional, and pursuing a career in music. She returns home when her mother is diagnosed with cancer and the two of them embark on an agonizing journey, in which love becomes the keynote, expressed through food. But now it’s Zauner who makes the  gifts of sustenance while her mother expresses her affection by eating as much as she is able to swallow.

After her mother’s death, Zauner opens the “kimchi fridge” and discovers instead of jars filled with pungent fermented vegetables, her mother has stocked the shelves with old family photographs. Strengthened by the memories contained in the photos, Zauner begins to make kimchi for the first time.

Food is the underpinning of Zauner’s tribute to her mother. As well as being a stunning look at pain, grief, and devotion, Crying in H Mart is a guide to the food that can be found in that supermarket, a glossary that should be carried on trips to Korean restaurants. Zauner generously names and describes the dishes her mother made for her, translating and illuminating the different forms of love that nourished her and are integral parts of her life.~Janet Brown

Red-Light Nights, Bangkok Daze : Chronicles of Sexuality Across Asia by William Sparrow (Monsoon Books)

No matter what your standards of morality are there is no denying one fact - sex sells! It’s also one of the biggest industries throughout Asia, especially Southeast Asia which is known for its sex tourism. In Red-Light Nights, Bangkok Daze, William Sparrow takes us on a journey through the underside of Asian countries, exploring their red light districts. 

Sparrow is the creator and writer and editor for his website AsianSexGazette.com. Simon Tearack, a Western journalist living in Thailand, who is also a contributor to Asian Sex Gazette (ASG) says “ASG shunned pornography and blazed a new trail: “sex journalism”, a rare attempt at honest, agenda-free coverage and analysis of actual news events linked to the sex trade and sex practices in general, on the world’s largest, most populous and most diverse continent.”

Sparrow visits the go-go bars and sex clubs in Bangkok, discusses enjo-kosai (compensated dating) and the age of consent in Japan, talks about pornography on the Internet in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, and even manages to get himself invited to Triad wedding. Sparrow also partakes in many sexual adventures, for research purposes of course, and writes about them as well. 

He admits that he had avoided going to see the sex shows in Bangkok for years because of what he unwittingly experienced when he walked into one of those types of establishments. He popped in, watched what was happening on stage, then immediately fled. To Sparrow, “there are just some things you don’t want to see being done with fruit or Ping-Pong balls. He also says, “I feel there is nothing sexy about the female vagina being used as a bottle opener.”

The chapter on Japan’s age of consent law is rather disturbing. Japan has one one of the lowest ages of consent at thirteen. However, Sparrow mentions that it is even younger in Metropolitan Tokyo, at twelve. I did my own research but could not find any information to back up his claim. However, I was informed by Japanese lawyer that twelve is indeed the age of consent in Metropolitan Tokyo, but there are all sorts of conditions that need to be met for it to be legal. 

As a longtime resident of Japan, I also want to inform other readers that the term kogyaru is not a contraction of enjo-kosai and gal (gyaru in Japanese) but refers to a fashion style. It’s a subculture where school-aged girls and young women dress in school uniforms and usually hike up the skirt so it’s very short. 

The articles are entertaining and very informative. Sparrow does his best in being objective about the sex practices of the various nations he visits. He also has a very understanding and forgiving Thai wife that lets him indulge in various “sexcapades” in pursuit of a story. I know for a fact that if I were to do the same things as Sparrow, my wife would not be understanding at all and I would be hit with a divorce form quicker than you can say “gomenasai”. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Beginner’s Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer (Vintage)

Pico Iyer, a writer who has made a literary career out of being a nomad, has been running in place for the past thirty years. The man who made his name with Video Night in Kathmandu fell in love with a woman and her country, as he described in The Lady and the Monk, and Japan has been his base ever since. 

Iyer is famous for tossing out provocative ideas and then sliding past them with deep charm, moving on to another gorgeous description, another apt anecdote. In this latest book, he relies almost exclusively on glittering statements, which lead from one to another in a way that connects but does not elucidate. Sprinkled among what he calls “Observations and Provocations” are ten essays which peripherally address the brief passages that make up the rest of the book. “Salvos,” Iyer calls them, “Much of this book may infuriate anyone who knows Japan.” It’s called a beginner’s guide, he says, because it was written by one.

His book is traditional and contemporary, mirroring both the commonplace books of the 19th century in which ideas and brief descriptions were jotted down as they came to mind, and the status updates that besiege us all on social media nowadays. But more than anything else, it takes on the form of a pointillist landscape, with each dot of the brush making a whole picture only if the viewer stands back from it and looks from a different angle.

Iyer is happily enmeshed in irony--a travel writer who spends his time at home, a fiercely literate man who neither speaks nor reads Japanese beyond the level of a very young child. He would be in danger of living within his own fantasy were it not for his highly skilled art of paying attention.

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” Simone Weil’s quote is the one Iyer has chosen as his epigraph and it guides the thoughts that follow. Like a very young child, Iyer keeps his senses completely alive to the world around him, without preconceptions to run interference and get in his way.

Within his delightful and often startling observations (18th century samurai were advised to carry powdered rouge for moments when they might be “of bad color”) are concise thoughts that may well carry truth (“My friends in Japan are less inclined to try remaking the world than simply to redecorate its corners). It’s no accident that Iyer occasionally brings to mind the cleverness of Oscar Wilde. He claims that Wilde, born the year after Peary’s ships sailed into Japan, was as shaped by Japanese influences as were Van Gogh and Manet, backing up his assertion with witticisms from Wilde that buttress Iyer’s observations of Japanese life and culture.

This book is “fan-shaped,” Iyer says, and although each statement stands on its own, they all lead to the ones that follow. Manga proceeds to the use of robots, the possibility of artificial intelligence enabling communication with the dead, and the presence of Shinto in everyday life. ”Anime is the natural expression of an animist world.” 

Speaking Japanese is useless without thinking in Japanese, Iyer says, and fluency is no guarantee of acceptance for foreigners. In fact it can be quite the opposite, as Victoria Riccardi pointed out in Untangling My Chopsticks, when she admits she had to leave Japan before she began to hate it. In his silence imposed upon him by his lack of language, Iyer begins to understand his chosen country’s apparent paradoxes: the Shinto concert where every instrument was silent, “the space between absence and presence,” the idea of emptiness as luxury. “When you leave , what will you miss most about Japan,” a friend asks and Iyer replies, “All the things you don’t have to say or explain.” 

This is the power of his deceptively simple book, the unsaid, the unexplained, lurking beneath his terse and clever bits of wit and description. Living within a riddle, Iyer says, means being unable to imagine what will happen tomorrow. It’s that unpredictability within a world of predictable ceremony, ritual, and etiquette that gives Japan--through Iyer’s eyes--a compelling and irresistible luster.~Janet Brown

Spark by Naoki Matayoshi (Pushkin Press)

Naoki Matayoshi’s debut novel 火花 (Hibana) was published in 2015 by Bungei Shuju. It’s release took the Japanese literary world by storm. The book went on to win Japan’s most prestigious award for literature - the Akutagawa Prize. The book was also adapted into a Netflix Original Series.  Matayoshi is well known in the entertainment world for being an avid reader but it still came as a surprise to everyone when he won the award. 

It is now available in English as Spark, published by Pushkin Press and translated by Alison Watts.  English readers can enjoy a story about a subject close to Matayoshi’s heart, the art of manzai. Manzai is a Japanese form of comedic dialogue, often performed by a duo, one playing the straight man while the other provides comic relief.  

The story opens as the manzai combination, Sparks, takes the stage during a summer fireworks event in Atami. The comedians were going through their routine although nobody was paying them any attention. Near the end of their routine, a loud BOOM went off signalling the start of the fireworks so the pair just went through the motions, hoping to leave the stage as quickly as possible once their allotted time was up. Another comedy duo, The Doofuses, was scheduled to take the stage and Tokunaga, the funny half of Sparks decided to stay and watch their routine. 

Tokunaga is impressed by one of the members of the Doofuses and is even more surprised when the person invites him out to drink after the show. Tokunaga discovers that Kamiya is four years older than him, making him a sempai, his senior in Japan’s hierarchical society. Tokunaga becomes his kohai or junior. Tokunaga decides right then and there to be a disciple of Kamiya. He believes Kamiya has that certain something that’s necessary to survive and succeed as a manzai artist. 

Their friendship progresses from a mere sempai-kohai relationship to becoming a bond where they can speak to each other as equals. We follow the careers of both the Sparks and the Doofuses with the Sparks becoming more popular, landing spots at various theaters and also on television shows giving them more exposure. 

After ten years in the business, Tokunaga’s partner, Yamashita, marries his girlfriend and says his wife is pregnant with twins so their manzai partnership is over. The Doofuses on the other hand don't find the same success and Kamiya would disappear for months at a time. Tokunaga continues to have faith in his senpai and believes that Kamiya is always pushing the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable and respects that.

Naoki Matayoshi knows firsthand what it’s like to be a struggling manzai artist as he is a veteran manzai-shi himself. He is the “funny man” half of Peace and performs alongside Yuji Ayabe. Armed with his knowledge of how the manzai industry works adds to the realism of the discussions Tokunaga and Kamiya have when they get together.

After winning the Akutagawa Prize, Yuji stops calling Naoki by his name and refers to him as Sensei. As a combination, Peace has gone on hiatus as Ayabe went to the U.S. to study English with the hopes of landing a role in a Hollywood film. Matayoshi continues to appear on television and continues to write as well. I find Peace’s brand of comedy quite entertaining and hope that they will perform as a duo once again in the near future. ~Ernie Hoyt

Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao, translated by Mike Fu (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Every once in a while, but not often enough, a book makes me want to meet the writer, sit and chat, become best friends. Failing that, I read whatever I can find about that author, trying to fit the jigsaw puzzle pieces of her life together to make a whole person from those fragments of information. 

This is what happened when I finished the last page of Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara. The kohl-encircled piercing stare gleaming from the determined face of a slender woman dressed in black, standing within a blurred desert street scene, gives little away.  Nor did I learn much about her background in her vivid essays where she figures prominently but usually as an observer. 

How did this young woman from Taiwan end up married to a Spaniard, living in the Sahara? Sanmao doesn’t say. She begins her book with “I desperately wanted to be the first female explorer to cross the Sahara,” but gives no clue as to how this ambition came into being. other than blaming the National Geographic. She doesn’t even say if her ambition was realized. Instead she gives vivid glimpses of life in a desert outpost, living among Sahwari villagers, with a Spanish military camp some distance away. Her husband Jose persuades her to marry him, but she does so only after exploring for three months, “running around the tents of the native nomads with my backpack and camera.” She mentions that she knew Jose in Madrid, but how they met is never divulged. The only reason why Sanmao writes about their wedding, I suspect, is because it’s great comic fodder, as is her description of setting up a household, repurposing an old tire and boards from crates that once held coffins. 

Her satirical humor is turned only upon herself and, peripherally, upon Jose. During her year in the Sahara, she is acutely aware of how her neighbors live, and she reports on this with deep respect, even when she finds the events horrifying.

Her story of the ten-year-old bride who lives next door and has become her friend, the slave who can neither hear nor speak but communicates through pantomime and gifts, the Spanish soldier who is haunted by both his slaughtered battalion and the hate he has for the tribesmen who killed them, the rebel and his lover who were destroyed by politics--all are described with compassion, along with cool, dispassionate details. Even when she tells about the night Jose was caught in a quagmire and the men whom she flags down for assistance decide to rape her instead, Sanmao is almost matter of fact in her narrative, as though this had happened to someone else. She sees no villains, simply people who exist in a different, inexplicable, and fascinating way of being, within their own world.

She is clearly in love with the desert, which she reveals in brief snapshots. Its yellow dust filling the sky during sandstorms, its pale orange light at sunrise, even its “heat that made you wish for death,” its nights of “frozen black,” all are unveiled in swift descriptions that she  sweeps tnto the fabric of her stories, making the Sahara as irresistible as the tales themselves.

Who was this woman? Born in China in 1943, raised in Taiwan, a traveler who went to 55 countries in 14 years, who studied in Madrid, Berlin, and Illinois during the 60s --she was a child whose ambition was to marry Picasso, a young woman who left home in her early twenties and returned as a celebrity (and a Spanish citizen) when she was 38, a writer who sold 15 million copies of her 15 books and gave five hundred talks to audiences numbering in the thousands in Taipei, before she hung herself with a pair of silk stockings at the age of 47.

Jose died in a diving accident when the two of them lived in the Canary Islands. Sanmao took too many pills on purpose soon after she was widowed and years later still referred to him in the present tense, while admitting “I had never been passionately in love with him. At the same time I felt incredibly lucky and at ease.” Passionate or not, how could she resist a man who gave her a camel skull, complete with teeth, as a wedding gift? Passionate pales next to the love and understanding that comes with a present like that. Living without the man who had loved her from the time he was sixteen, who told the woman eight years older than he that he would marry her when he grew up, must have stripped much of the color from Sanmao’s life. She continued to write but “her later pieces are all veiled in melancholy.”

“Solipsistic,” a Chinese-American writer said of Sanmao in the New Yorker, “...myopic, not truly curious.”  If this is true, it was certainly lost in translation. Sanmao’s life was her art, and her beam of curiosity was laser sharp, at least as it’s conveyed by Mike Fu’s English interpretation from the original Chinese. We should be all be as myopic as this woman of many names--Sanmao. Echo Ping Chen, Chen Maoping--who lived a life of stories and offered them up with relish and charm.~Janet Brown

Born Into Brothels by Zana Briski (Umbrage)

“The most stigmatized people in Calcutta’s red light district, are not the prostitutes, but their children. In the face of abject poverty, abuse, and despair, these kids have little possibility of escaping their mother’s fate or for creating another type of life.”  ~Diane Weyerman

Zana Briski is a British photographer who went to India in 1995 and wasn’t sure what direction her life was going to take. She was taking pictures of the “harsh realities of women’s lives - female infanticide, child marriage, dowry deaths, and widowhood”. It wasn’t until a friend took her to the red light district in Calcutta where she finally found her reason for being. 

It took months for Briski to penetrate the tight-knit community of prostitutes and even longer for the workers to open up to her. Her persistence and patience paid off, although it was the children of the prostitutes that took to her right away. They were fascinated by the foreign woman and her cameras. She showed them how to use the cameras and let the kids take the pictures. That gives her an idea for her next trip to India. 

Briski spends the next few years fund-raising and generating support for her project. She asks for help from one of her colleagues who at first refuses but after she sends him video footage that she took and explained her idea, he was on the next plane to India. 

Briski returns to India with ten easy-to-use cameras and begins teaching a photography class for the kids. This then gives her the idea of recording the kids progress. Together with Ross Kaufman, they make a documentary film titled Born Into Brothels which is also the title to this companion book. The book includes the subtitle Photographs by the Children of Calcutta. The film was shown at the annual Sundance Film Festival and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2005. 

The pictures in this book “are taken by children of prostitutes, children who have grown up surrounded by violence and clouded by a social stigma that denies them a right to an education”. The cameras “become windows to a new world” and for some, “a door to a new life”. 

We are introduced to eight of Briski’s brightest students - Avijit, Gour, Kochi, Manik, Puja, Shanti, Suchitra, and Tapasi. They range in age from ten to fourteen. Briski gives these children an opportunity to improve their lives through the use of photography and cameras. The vivid portraits compiled in this book are by these children and are the vision of India. It gives us a glimpse into the “real” India. 

Some of the kids are afraid of leaving their homes so their pictures are limited to their family, friends, and living accommodations. Others are more adventurous as they go out into the city to take pictures of whatever interests them. 

Thanks to the success of the film and support from people around the world, Briski sets up a non-profit organization named Kids with Cameras. The organization continues to teach impoverished and marginalized children the art of photography. It “builds platforms for the children to exhibit their work, telling us their stories and transforming the children and their audience through the processes of instruction, creation, and experience.” 

The pictures you see may change any bias you may have had about India and its people. The young photographers and many of their subjects are seen smiling. These images provoke one of the strongest human emotions - hope! ~Ernie Hoyt