The Weary Generations by Abdullah Hussein (Peter Owen)

The Weary Generations by Abdullah Hussein was first published in Urdu in 1963. The English edition, translated by the author, was published in 1999. It follows the story of two Muslim families living under the British Raj up until Partition in 1947 when British India was separated into two nations - Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. 

Mirza Mohammed Beg, had two children. The elder son is Niaz Beg. His second son is Ayaz Beg. Niaz took after his father and had a love for metalworks and started his own workshop building many things.

Ayaz had a love for books. He studied at a madrasa, a school for higher learning. He found that he did not like it and helped his brother in the workshop but got bored with village life and left. He taught himself to read English and became a mechanic. “He did not return home”.

A major incident occurred which prompted Ayaz to return to the village. His brother Niaz was arrested “on the charge of having committed a grossly illegal act”. Niaz was sentenced to twelve years in prison. The government didn’t stop there. They also confiscated most of his lands which were in the names of both brothers, leaving just enough land for Niaz Beg’s two wives to get by on. 

Ayaz did not stay in the village. He came and took his brother’s son with to Calcutta. Although he was not formally educated, Ayaz rose to a good position as an engineer. He remained single throughout his life but felt he now had a purpose in life - to educate his nephew, Naim.

The main focus of the story centers on Naim and his relationship with those around him. He marries a woman whose father was a very prominent man who willingly works for the British. Azra, the woman, falls in love with Naim but her family does not approve of the relationship. After a long while, Azra’s father reluctantly gives his assent for the two to get married.

Naim was the son of a peasant who lived in a rural part of India. He marries Azra, the daughter of a rich landowner. Their relationship is strained from the start as Azra’s family was not supportive of the marriage, deeming themselves to be a higher caste of people. Their union reflects the relationship between the people of India and the rule of the British Crown. 

Shortly after Naim gets married, he is drafted into the military and is sent to Europe and Africa where he is wounded and loses his left arm. After he returns home, he is treated as a hero and is awarded lands for his bravery. However, it is what he witnesses that makes him question the validity and the oppression of his people under British rule and becomes involved in politics opposing the Raj. 

Naim’s marriage to Azra can be seen as a metaphor for the relationship between India and the British Empire as well. Naim is the underdog, the oppressed, he can be seen as the face of India while his wife Azra, who is from an upper caste represents the Raj. The class differences are hard to ignore. 

What makes Naim’s life more complicated is the Partition of the British Raj in 1947 when the British Crown arbitrarily set a boundary separating the mostly Hindu province of Bengal and the mostly Muslim area of the Punjab, setting off a vast migration of Hindus and Sikhs to India and Muslims to the newly created country of Pakistan. 

Hussein tells the story of Partition and the violence that followed in a way that creates a fear in the reader for Naim and his family. It is a story that opens the readers eyes to the dangers of colonialism and the arrogance of the British Empire. It’s a shame that the world still cannot live in harmony without conflict. We are supposed to learn the mistakes from history but as the old adage goes, “History tends to repeat itself”. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (Tor)

In his sequel to The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu steps out into a whole other world. The Earth is aware that its Doomsday is approaching and inevitable. Trisolaris has covered the planet with a shield of protons that receive and transmit every word that is spoken beneath its envelope of surveillance. Some humans who have the means are considering Escapism, a flight to safe planets, while others choose to undergo hibernation, planning to revive themselves when the Doomsday battle takes place. 

The woman who set this disaster into motion is preparing to die but first she finds an undistinguished academic, Luo Ji, and gives him two axioms that hold the secret of cosmic sociology, but only under the right conditions. Burdened with secrets that might save humanity but which he has no idea of how to use. Luo Ji becomes the most wanted man on Earth and is chosen as one of the men whose brains might forestall Doomsday.

In a transmission to an ally on Earth, Trisolaris reveals a fatal flaw and discovers a human advantage. Trisolarans communicate through thought alone and every thought they have is on visible display. They live in a society without hidden plans, lies, or subterfuge, and initially regard human speech as a biological weakness. Quickly they begin to understand that the human mind is something to fear and humans realize that duplicity is their key to survival. They assemble a group of intellectuals who will develop defense systems in silence, with alternate untruths being sent to Trisolaris in spoken words. The Wallfacers, as they are called, all succumb to the Trisolaris allies called Wallbreakers, all except for Luo Ji.

His plans are all self-serving and hedonistic, allowing him an earthly paradise shared only with the woman he loves. Trisolaris decides he’s ridiculous, worthy only of their extermination. When they infect him with a genetic weapon, a flu that will kill only him,  his doctors put him into hibernation, hoping when he revives in another century there will be a cure for his illness.

But Luo Ji not only carries a fatal virus, he has discovered the secret of the axioms given to him by Ye Wenjie. Can he use them to avert Doomsday?

Once again Cixin Liu has taken a cliched plot and enriched it with prophetic details,  puzzling science, and unexpected swerves. The Dark Forest is more opaque and difficult than its predecessor. Although the story rushes into new arenas, they seem to be dead ends, fascinating but unconnected to the general plot. Even when the ending seems to bring a conclusion, there are too many undecided fates for this to be satisfying--and far too many unanswered questions.

The perennial problem of constructing the middle of an adventure in a way that makes readers want to move on to the next installment is made murkier than usual because of a change in translators. Ken Liu provided quantities of footnotes that helped readers understand The Three-Body Problem and gave its characters ample dialogue to define and sharpen their different personalities. Translator Joel Martinsen has chosen to offer very little of either, evoking suspicion that he understood little of what he put into English and chose simply to translate The Dark Forest word by word. When the universe is at last revealed to be the dark forest, there will be many readers who have no idea of what this means. 

Fortunately the concluding volume of what has been named the Earth’s Past trilogy is back in the capable and brilliant hands of Ken Liu, the perfect choice to  clarify the complexities of Cixin Liu’s enigmatic genius. Don’t stop reading--help is on the way!~Janet Brown

The Pachinko Woman by Henry Mynton (Morrow)

Pachinko : a type of mechanical game similar to pinball but stands vertically and originated in Japan. It is widely used in Japan as a gambling device.

Harry Mynton is the pseudonym for a writer who has lived in Japan for over thirty-five years and was also a former business owner in Tokyo. His novel, The Pachinko Woman, uses his knowledge of Japan and Asia and has created a highly entertaining and provocative murder mystery involving the pachinko industry in Japan with its ties to North Korea. 

The story opens with an excerpt from a comfort woman’s diary. A Korean woman forced into sexual slavery during World War 2 to serve the soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army. This diary becomes a focal point of international intrigue as the woman writes about meeting an American woman who suffered the same fate as her.

Helim Kim is a naturalized American, born to North Korean parents and raised in Tokyo, Japan by her grandmother. The diary belonged to her grandmother who was from North Korea and is part owner of Allied International, one of the largest pachinko firms in Japan. Her mother disappeared when she was only seven. 

Kim worked for four years as a translator at the United Nations but has set up her own translating company in Los Angeles and still does client contracts for the UN. She had just returned from Pyongyang ten days ago and is now meeting with a Korean man who also has ties to the North.

She is meeting with Park Chung-Il, a North Korean officer who was a senior member of the intelligence department. However, in one of the hard-liners purges, he was stripped of all his powers and sent to Helsinki,Finland before being too liberal. They could not dispose of him because he was related to the current leader of North Korea, Park Tai Jin. 

Park Chung-Il has formed a group called Koreans for Democratic Action. The KDA’s main function is to sponsor indirect actions to destabilize Pyongyang and liberate North Korea. Park is using Helim Kim, the Pachinko Woman, to serve as a pawn for his own agenda. 

A few months ago, he contacted the FBI who were concerned about money laundering. Park told them he could give them information on Asia’s biggest money-laundering scam. “Blackmail from Japanese pachinko companies in the billions of dollars was being shuttled through offshore banks from Japan to North Korea. Someone inside the Japanese government was involved.”

Park has told the FBI how he could help stop the money-laundering operations. His group, the KDA, has managed to convince ten of the largest pachinko companies to file for Japanese stock listings. “Public listing in Japan demanded transparent accounting, stringent auditing, and recording of all funds transfers abroad. Japanese ownership and auditing would prevent extortion payments, dry up the money source, and decimate Pyongyang’s foreign exchange.”

There are multiple storylines happening concurrently and the number of characters are often hard to keep track of including an East German assassin hired by Russians to take out North Korean owners of pachinko parlors in Japan, a Japanese detective investigating the deaths, Kim’s former boyfriend who worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency, her current American lawyer boyfriend, FBI agents concerned with North Korea’s nuclear proliferation, and a former U.S. president who is to meet with the current leader of North Korea in Niigata, Japan. 

Many questions are left unanswered or are not satisfactorily explained. Who was the American comfort woman? Why is the Russian government involved in the killings? And how does Helim Kim’s grandmother’s diary tie into all this?

Mynton manages to use the current concerns surrounding the peninsula into his story such as North Korea’s attempt to continue making nuclear weapons. The comfort women issue is another delicate subject which is a thorn in the side of the Japanese government. Readers interested in the history of Asia and the politics surrounding both Koreas and Japan will be highly entertained, but should remember to keep notes about the characters. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Tor)

Although the Cultural Revolution wasn’t the greatest of humanity’s evils, three deaths that it caused during the late 1960s would be the impetus for the destruction of life on earth in the following century. Ye Wenjie saw her father and her favorite university professor die under the mental and physical torture inflicted by the Red Guards, while her sister was killed by those who had been in the first wave of this reign of terror.

When the 20th century makes room for the 21st, Ye Wenjie has the knowledge and the opportunity while working at a military installation to send a message out into space. When she receives a reply, it tells her repeatedly, “Do not answer.” Any response she might make would lead to the invasion and conquest of her planet. Wenjie, steeped in the brutal history of the past century, welcomes the thought of a hostile take-over and the doom of humanity is sealed by her next message.

An invasion from outer space is an ordinary theme in many works of science fiction, but this time it’s been twisted and turned by Cixin Liu into a trilogy, with The Three-Body Problem as its fiendish and confounding introduction. Using an intricate, multi-leveled virtual reality game as a snare, the extraterrestrial world of Trisolaris finds its way into the minds of other disillusioned members of the human world. Giving them peeks at the history of Trisolaris, with its three suns creating alternating time periods of Chaos and Stability, showing how Trisolarans survive times of Chaos by dehydrating into “dry, fibrous objects” which they rehydrate back to life  during Stabile Eras, Trisolaris gains toeholds into some of the best human intellects. With its superior technology, Trisolaris begins to damage the acceleration of human technological prowess, an acceleration that’s far swifter than their own, due to Earth’s environmental advantages. To Trisolarans, humans live in paradise, developing under the gentle power of a single sun, and they want this existence for themselves.

In a diabolical game of chess, Trisolaris begins a subtle destruction of Earth’s science, placing doubts of its importance in human minds and planting skepticism in the minds of scientists by carefully revealing the limits of what they thought were laws of the universe. Ye Wenjie becomes the leader of the Earth Trisolaris Organization, joined by an American plutocrat who carries on communication with the Trisolarans. Both of them welcome the destruction that Trisolaris promises. 

An attack force launched by Trisolaris will reach the Earth in four or five centuries, a successful capture of the interplanetary communication reveals. Trisolaris has no fear that Earth will find a way to repel its future invasion, sending human scientists a disdainful message through space and time: “You’re bugs.” 

However, as a nonscientist points out to the panic-stricken intellectuals, bugs are unconquerable, prevailing against attacks of technology.

The ffirst installment of Cixin Liu’s trilogy was first published in a Chinese magazine as a serial in 2006. Published as a book two years later, Its English translation came out in 2014, two years before politicians in the US placed science under attack. This time-frame makes the Trisolaran use of ignorance as a weapon seem prescient now. After all, how many people have died from Covid-19 in 2020 because they didn’t believe in the science that provided vaccinations? 

Along with its predictive qualities, The Three-Body Problem goes beyond ordinary sci-fi with its fully-fleshed characters, its enigmatic glimpses into the field of physics,  and its clever distortion of time as its story unfolds. “Science fiction should be the literary genre most accessible to readers of different nations,” Cixun Liu says in an afterword--not only accessible to science fiction readers but irresistible to those who usually would rather read the words on a cereal box instead. This book takes a soaring leap into the literary possibilities of science fiction, with its next installment, The Dark Forest, promising to extend that neglected genre even deeper into the realm of literature.~Janet Brown

The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck by Rory Nugent (Open Road)

Rory Nugent’s amusing account of his search for a rare bird started with a talk among five friends about lost treasures. They were talking about what is left to find in the world. One of his friends said, “India is the place”. He continued by saying, “One of us should go after the pink-headed duck. It hasn’t been sighted in years. Extremely rare…the most elusive bird in the world.” 

The next day, Nugent did some research and discovered that the last sighting of the bird was some fifty years ago in India. The more research he did on the duck, the more interested he became in finding it. Most scientists believe the duck to be extinct but from time to time, sightings of the bird have been reported. Nugent comes to believe that the bird may just be hiding. Then, two months later, he sold his apartment and put the rest of his stuff in storage, took a taxi to JFK airport and flew to India. 

The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck chronicles Nugent’s search for the rarest of birds as he begins his journey by looking for the Fowl Market in Calcutta. When people learn what it is he’s looking for, he is accosted by a number of people claiming to have the pink-headed duck although it is obvious even to the most casual of observers that the ducks presented to him have had their heads dyed pink. Not finding any luck in Calcutta, Nugent decides to go to New Delhi, the capital of India. 

Nugent spends the first few days riding the buses to give himself an introduction to the city. He buys a city map and a relief map of India where he discovers two areas that are unmarked and unnamed. “One is a narrow section near the giant rhododendron forest of Northeastern Sikkim; the other, triangular in shape, lies in the upper Brahmaputra River Valley, near the conjunction of Burma, China, and India. Rory decided then and there where next to start his search. 

As Sikkim is near the border of Tibet and Bhutan, permission has never been given to a foreigner to explore those areas. Nugent is also informed that it is only the federal government that can grant permits to those restricted areas. And so begins Nugent’s ordeal dealing with government red tape. One of the natives who befriends him suggests offering the officials some baksheesh, commonly known in English as a bribe. to the official but Nugent sticks to doing things the proper and legal way. 

His persistence pays off as he does get approval to visit Sikkim and can continue his search for the pink-headed duck. In Sikkim he meets smugglers who help him step inside Tibet even though his permit doesn’t allow him to visit that particular area. He checks into a hotel of questionable repute. He hangs out with the Gurkhas who want to claim land for themselves and establish Gurkhaland, but the pink-headed duck is nowhere to be found in the area. 

As the search was fruitless in Sikkim, Nugent decided to check out the other unexplored area on the map he bought in New Delhi. Once again, he subjects himself to government red tape in order to get permission to sail down the Brahmaputra River. As with getting permission to visit Sikkim, Nugent refrains from bribing any officials and his persistence and perseverance pays off. 

Nugent meets a man at a bookstore on his return to New Delhi and cannot believe his good fortune as the man had once attempted to paddle down the Bramhaputra himself. The two join forces and travel down the river from Saikhoa Ghat located in the east of the State of Assam, and paddle all the way down to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.  

At the time of Nugent’s journey, there was unrest in Bangladesh. Rioting had occurred in the capital city of Dhaka. Martial law was declared and the borders were closed. The two rivergoers decided to end their journey in Dhubri, the last town in India on the Brahmaputra. 

Did Nugent ever find the pink-head duck? Is it really extinct? Or is it just good at not being found? Whatever the results, Nugent’s narrative in the Himalayas and down the Brahmaputra River will keep readers glued to his exploits and may find themselves rooting for his success. His story is not only exciting, it’s also inspiring as we follow one man’s dream to rediscover a lost avian. In the process, you may find yourself wanting to pursue your own impossible dreams! ~Ernie Hoyt

O Beautiful by Jung Yun (St. Martin’s Press)

“So you’re Elinor Hanson, huh? You must have married a Viking or something, “ a North Dakota farm woman greets the reporter who’s come to interview her. Elinor’s used to this. She grew up in rhis area and has been asked the follow-up question since she was able to talk. “Your father was American and your mother was…?”

North Dakota is white people country, which is why Elinor’s Korean mother left it, deserting her half-white daughters and her white husband. Once she graduated from high school, Elinor did the same thing. She boarded a bus to New York City where her beauty allowed her to be  a model, a woman who’s “looked at for a living.” Now in her forties, still pretty, she’s back in her home state as a freelance journalist, assigned to a story on the changes brought by the Bakken oil fields.

Groggy after her journey from New York, uncertain if she was sexually attacked on the plane while she was knocked out by a sleeping pill, Elinor is unsettled by the unfamiliarity of a town she used to know. 

Her looks have made her accustomed to male attention and she grew up knowing she was an outsider, neither white nor Korean. But now, in Avery, North Dakota, she’s unique because she’s a stunning woman in a town that’s overtly and crudely dominated by men. “I’ve never been in a place where there are so many men. Where I feel completely outnumbered,” she tells her editor during a Facetime meeting. 

When she was a model, the gaze of a male photographer meant a paycheck. Now as she struggles to find work in a different competitive field, male gazes have become an annoyance. In  Avery, they strike her like a bludgeon. Catcalls and lewd gestures greet her when she gets out of her car, a raucous and obscene version of the attention she routinely receives from men in New York. Equally upsetting are the conversations in which racial slurs are casually directed toward anyone who’s not like the typical resident of North Dakota.   

A white town hit by a “diversity bomb” of oil workers, Avery has decided they’re the scapegoats for every problem that’s come with the petroleum industry. When a young white woman disappears, local vigilantes turn to the oil fields and grab two likely suspects, one Black and one Mexican. Nobody seems to know what was done to those men. They’re no longer around and that’s all that matters.

As Elinor spirals into a long series of serious mistakes, she’s caught in a claustrophobic web that’s tinged with horror. The view she loved as a child, the empty land that stopped only when it reached the horizon, is now clogged with drilling rigs and the crews that work on them. The air smells like Vaseline’s petroleum jelly. The women have turned into gleeful sexual trophies, their scarcity giving them an intoxicating illusion of beauty, making them prey. Then there are the American flags hanging upside down in random farmhouse windows, puzzling and shocking signals, but what are they signaling? Who are they calling? “Some people say it’s a distress signal,” a man reluctantly tells Elinor. The flags are placed that way, he says, because of “people who look like you.”

This difficult novel with its mixture of brutality and hope gives a bleak view of what America is and what it has lost. O Beautiful strips privilege from its readers as starkly as it does from Elinor. A graphic examination of misogyny, racism, class divisions, environmental damage, and xenophobia, it offers a form of Rorschach test. How much are we prepared to overlook? How much does it take to make us flinch? As Jung Yun sees it, we’re all being groped in a dive bar--or on a plane--and our beauty isn’t going to save us.~Janet Brown

My Falling Down House by Jayne Joso (Seren Books)

My Falling Down House is Jayne Joso’s third novel and the first one set in Japan. The book won the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Award whose aim is to “promote understanding and cooperation between the U.K. and Japan” in a variety of fields, including literature. 

Takeo Tanaka is a young man in his twenties who narrates the entire story. A year ago, he had everything a man could want. He was young and ambitious, and had a good job with a great salary.  He had a beautiful girlfriend he lived with in one of Tokyo’s more upscale neighborhoods. He seemed set for life. 

A year ago when he was out drinking with co-workers, he got so drunk that when he woke up, he found himself in an abandoned and dilapidated house. It seems he had also bought a cello before finding his way to this dwelling. 

It was sometime after his twenty-fifth birthday when a financial crisis occurred. Takeo lost his job, his girlfriend, and his home. For a while Takeo managed to sleep at the office creating a small nest under his desk with just a box and a blanket. His co-worker Shizuko nicknamed him the Box Man. But once he lost his job, he could no longer sleep at the office. 

After becoming jobless and homeless, Takeo decided to seek out the old house where he once spent the night in a drunken stupor. He was drawn to the place. He felt there was “a feel for nature here, a sense of a slow and simple way of living. A forgotten way of living.” He told himself it was only temporary. Once he recovered, he would move on. 

So begins Takeo’s new life of disappearing from society. He isolated himself by taking residence in an old house located on the grounds of a temple. He encounters a cat, finds his cello, and slowly settles into the life of a hermit. His supposed temporary stay extended to one season and then another. 

The longer Takeo stays at the house, he believes he sees or is being haunted by a yokai, a spirit or shapeshifter. As the summer turns to autumn and autumn turns to winter, Takeo seems to drift further and further away from the reality of life. It is becoming harder and harder for Takeo to determine what is real and what is fantasy. He thinks he may be slowly going crazy. In order to keep his sanity, he works on a number of projects just to keep his mind busy but still, he does not know if he is on his way to recovery. 

As Takeo had no room in a home to hide himself away in, he installed himself in a fragile wood and paper house. This phenomenon of hiding oneself away from people and society has become a very big problem in Japan. A new term was given to this phenomenon. It is called hikikomori in Japanese. It translates to “social withdrawal” in English. It can be described as a mild form of depression. 

Takeo’s story can be the story of any salaryman in Japan. Joso makes Takeo out to be an anti-hero. A man you hope will come out of his loneliness and self-pity to become a productive member of society once again. Anybody who has had a setback in life can relate to Takeo, however I believe there is no shame in asking for help. ~Ernie Hoyt

Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan edited by Bruce Rutledge (Chin Music Press)

When Bruce Rutledge, after living in Japan for fifteen years, thought briefly of writing essays about his time there, he realized “it’s been done to death...Who needs the views of another lanky Westerner?” Instead he “brought together a group of writers--a mix of Westerners and Japanese--who probably wouldn’t even get along if they were stuck in the same room.” 

The result is a volume that’s outstandingly gorgeous as an object and delightfully eccentric in its multiple points of view. Not your ordinary essay collection,  Kuhaku also contains short stories, paintings, a map that’s a single line of stark black ink and lists the businesses, over a hundred of them, crammed into one street, a satirical advice column, a gallery of canned coffee, each can described in the language of usually used for wine tastings, and an anecdotal glossary that’s illustrated by peyote, an artist whose drawings  resemble a kinder, jollier Ralph Steadman. This book is dizzying.

Kuhaku is defined as “a blank, empty space, a vacuum, a void, a tabula rasa” which means every reader can decide for themselves what the theme of the book might be. The opening essay provides one possibility with an expat’s claim that the even-tempered nature of Japan goes against the soul’s need for upheaval and tempestuousness. That assertion is backed up later by keruru, a newly-coined word defined as a sudden violent act that erupts when a person reaches a breaking point.

An upheaval of sorts is found in every piece that follows. It’s expressed benignly when an American tells of the confusion he causes in public by addressing his dog in Japanese as well as in English. It teeters on a kind of domestic insanity when a woman confesses to turning a bathroom into a storage unit for unclassifiable garbage, rather than facing public humiliation by putting it in the wrong trash bin. A short story by a Japanese writer, portraying a husband who explores the sex trade first-hand while writing a magazine article, is counterpointed throughout the book by translations of interviews with unfaithful wives. Modern-day Dharma Bums come perilously close to burning down a three-hundred-year-old wooden temple and Haruki Murakami explains why young Japanese men engage in “father-hunting,” when they set upon middle-aged salary men and beat them up in the street.

Grim? Oddly enough, not at all. Somehow every upheaval seems as natural as an earthquake, coming unexpectedly and releasing pressure before resulting in a tsunami. The elegance of the book itself--its compact size, its embossed cloth cover, the tiny illustration that ornaments a title page for every piece--makes it  a sensory pleasure, while its glossary gives it a thoroughly unexpected conclusion, a splendid potpourri of stories, descriptions, facts, words of warning, and even a couple of recipes. 

Somehow without ever nailing down a linear description of what it is to live in Japan, Kuhaku gives a vivid, impressionistic sense of how that life would feel. The first book published by Rutledge’s Chin Music Press, it’s set a standard that his small press has continued to nurture: books that find and reveal unexplored territory with skill, care, and beauty.~Janet Brown

Behind the Fire by Steven D. Salinger (Warner)

Steven D. Saligner’s debut novel Behold the Fire is a thriller set in the streets of New York. The murder of a man comes to the attention of NYPD homicide detective and Vietnam vet Mel Fink. However, at the scene of the crime, there was no sign of a struggle, no signs of a break in, and nothing was stolen. 

The victim was Franklin Grelling. He was an employee of Parker Global, a big defense contractor for the Pentagon. The company maintains that Grelling was “a traveling salesman with a fancy title”. Grelling’s partner, Barton believes the murder was related to drugs or to a relationship gone bad. Grelling spots a map of Vietnam on the wall and has a hunch that Barton is dead wrong about why the victim was murdered. 

Clear across the globe, in the jungles of Cambodia is Army Corporal Isaac Johnson, known to everybody as Zach. He is listed as an M.I.A. from the Vietnam War. Johnson was held captive in the Cambodian jungle by the Khmer Rouge for over twenty years. After saving a fellow American and former POW Ev Ransom and illegal arms dealer who works as a broker for Parker Global. 

Ransom agrees to try to return Johnson to his home in the U.S. It is Ransom that sets in motion a roller coaster ride that affects Washington and its relation with Vietnam as Ransom sends the fingerprints of Johnson to an MIA/POW activist senator named Antel Grantham. This is the proof the Senator has been waiting for even though the Pentagon has denied the existence or knowledge of any MIAs. 

To complicate matters even further, Fink has taken a liking to the wife of the first victim and Marissa Grelling seems to have ties to Ev Ransom and Parker Global as well. And the was another murder. The victim is also an employee of Parker Global. The mode of operation was the same as that of Frank Grelling. 

Fink’s continuing investigation leads him to find that the killings were done by a professional. He has also determined that the assassin is Cambodian. The only piece still missing from the puzzle is why the assassin has singled out personnel from Parker Global. What is the connection between Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam and Washington? Does Corporal Isaac Johnson ever get to set foot in his home country again? These are the questions that will keep the reader involved in the story up until its ultimate end.

Salinger’s story is fast-paced and exciting. The character development is great and makes you want to help Fink solve the crimes. His descriptions of New York City and the jungles of Cambodia are detailed and make you feel as if you are in the middle of all the turmoil as well. The action may not be enough for fans of John Rambo but this story doesn’t get preachy about alleged MIAs still being held prisoner in Vietnam or Cambodia. The book will appeal to fans of W.E.B Griffin and other military and detective fiction. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Woman Who Fell from the Sky by Jennifer Steihl (Broadway Paperbacks)

When her old high school sweetheart persuades Jennifer Steihl to spend three weeks in Yemen’s capital city, Sana’a, as a volunteer journalism trainer at an English-language newspaper, she has no idea this will change her life. After all, she’s a fast-talking, flirtatious New York woman who is one of the founders of The Week and has been a senior editor there for the past five and a half years. Her life is successful and established, but when the owner of the Yemen Observer offers her the position of editor-in-chief, making $1500 a month at a newspaper where reporters’ salaries top out at $200, it takes her only a few months to give up her $60,000 a year position in Manhattan.

Steihl has succumbed to Sana’a’s 2500-year-old charm and she’s captivated by the Observer’s reporters, especially the young women who have taken a large step in becoming journalists. Her New York confidence keeps her from being quelled by the city streets that are filled almost exclusively with men, all of them wearing the traditional dagger, the jambiya. She’s done her research and knows that neither the abaya that obscures women’s bodies, nor the hijab that covers their heads, nor the niqab that veils their face is mandated by the government or the Qur’an. It’s a cultural practice, not a religious one, and the women who wear these shrouds usually are clad in jeans and t-shirts beneath the outer covering. The women she meets tell her the coverings are “a statement of identity, an important defense against men, and a source of freedom.”

Out of respect for the culture she’s immersed in, Steihl wears the hijab but forgoes the veil. Like Lawrence of Arabia, her blue eyes immediately brand her as an object of curiosity and the niqab would do nothing to forestall attention, even though it hides her pale skin. Without realizing it, she picks up a larger physical change within a matter of weeks. Her walk is transformed from a New York stride to a gait that prevents her hips from swinging and her face stares at the ground. Facing declarations of love each time she walks outdoors has taught her not to return a man’s gaze and she realizes she’s become “someone else” under unflagging public scrutiny.

Within the newsroom, she’s faced with deeper challenges. Although the men she works with treat her with deference, that, she knows, is because for them she’s not really a woman--she’s the human equivalent of a giraffe. The women reporters long to be recognized as professional journalists yet social restrictions keep them from interviewing men, until Steihl persuades them to work in pairs. The men use their freedom to prolong their daily lunches with bouts of chewing qat, a mild stimulant that’s an ingrained feature of Yemeni culture and is indulged in for a minimum of two hours.Although the reporters have all studied English and speak it with ease, their writing is lengthy, stilted, and subjective. Deadlines are a foreign concept and stories are often intended to bolster the government or enhance the status of advertisers. 

With fleeting episodes of a personal life, Steihl works twelve hours a day, six days a week, not only as the paper’s editor but still working as a trainer, while negotiating unforseen hurdles. Within her first two weeks she’s faced with “kidnappings, stampedes, and suicide bombings.This,” she decides, “is a news junkie’s paradise.” But within this paradise, one reporter refuses to cover a story because it could get him killed. When the Observer reprints three Danish cartoons, each obscured with a black X and placed next to an editorial that condemns them, Steihl’s Yemeni co-editor is briefly imprisoned and is on trial for ten months. The owner of the paper insists that opinion pieces should be placed on the back page because that’s the most important part of the paper. “Arabic is read right to left. So Arabs will naturally turn first to what for you is the back page.” Only by pointing out that the Observer is an English paper does Steihl retain an Op-Ed page in its customary place.

When her contract is up at the end of a year. Steihl is reluctant to leave Yemen. The story of how she is able to remain gives her work-laden life a romantic twist and provides a happy ending to a book that skillfully handles serious matters with a light touch. Jennifer Steihl is far from being Bridget Jones but her book wouldn’t be out of place on a sunny day at the beach.~Janet Brown

The Householder by Ruth Pravwer Jhabvala (Penguin)

The Householder by Ruth Pravwer Jhabvala was first published in 1960. It is the story of Prem, a teacher at a local college. Until recently, Prem was a student at university. His marriage to Indu was arranged by his parents and now he is a “householder” with a wife who is pregnant with their first child. 

Indu’s pregnancy is an embarrassment to Prem as “now everybody would know what he did with her at night in the dark.” Prem’s current salary at the college is 175 rupees a month. His rent is 45 rupees. Aside from becoming a new father, his new worry is the increase in expenses that would occur. What he needs is a better paying job. 

It finally occurs to him to look through the classified ads in the newspaper. However, Prem could not find any jobs he was qualified for. It appeared that nobody wanted a Hindi teacher, “or if they did, they wanted him to be a first-class M.A. with three years’ teaching experience, not a second-class B.A. with only four months’ teaching experience, such as he was.” His only option was to ask his boss for a raise. 

Asking his boss for a raise is not something he would like to do but he took his father’s advice to heart. His father had told him, “Put all your strength into the things you don’t like to do.” Prem tries to find the courage to talk to his boss but instead of coming straight to the point, he talks about his colleague, Sohan Lal. The more he talks about his colleague, his boss comes to the conclusion that Sohan Lal had sent Prem to ask for a raise in salary.

Prem is also having trouble at home with his wife who says she is going to her parents, due to her condition. At the same time, Prem has received a letter from his mother who says she will be coming to help her only son to prepare for the child’s birth. Prem is having a hard time establishing his authority as the head of the household and seems to have crossed an invisible line when he tells his wife that he forbids her to go home. 

As much as you like to support Prem, he sometimes comes off as being a Charlie Brown-like character. He has a very wishy-washy personality and doesn’t assert himself. He’s taken advantage of by his only friend in New Delhi who he grew up with. There are times when you may want to smack him and say, “Grow up!”, which is what he is trying his best to do. Still, the humor in Jhabvala’s writing makes you forgive Prem his wishy-washyness.

Jhabvala’s story has the universal theme of what it is to become an adult and all the responsibilities that come with adulthood. It is filled with humor and drama  and readers of all ages may identify with Prem as he goes from being a student to getting married and then becoming a father. Family ties can also be a very delicate matter as one tries to find a fine balance in pleasing your partner and keeping other relatives happy. 

Prem is no different from any of us who have dreams of making more money and living a comfortable life. However, being rich and famous doesn’t doesn’t guarantee comfort or happiness. One must do their best with what life has to offer them. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed (Penguin)

“You’re an Arab! An Arab! And you don’t know your own language,” a teacher screamed at Leila Ahmed when she was twelve. “I am not an Arab,” she replied with equal fury, “I am Egyptian! And anyway we don’t speak like this!” 

In 1952, the Egyptian Revolution that stripped the country of British colonialism brought with it shouts of “Arab nationalism! We the Arabs!” But Ahmed, born in 1940,  is already shaped by the final days of the British Empire that had vouchsafed only partial independence to Egypt. She and her siblings have grown up speaking French and Egyptian Arabic but English is their preferred language. That’s what they speak at school and when they’re with their friends. Their father is a man with a “colonized consciousness” who had gone to university in Birmingham, “cherishing things European and undervaluing the very heritage that had shaped him.” He teaches his children to love Western classical music and to place it above the Arabic music that their mother, who is staunchly and thoroughly Egyptian, sings. Ahmed and her siblings begin to see Arabic as inferior, although it’s the language they use when they talk with their mother. This, Ahmed admits, “in some way marked her too, in some way silently, silently in my child’s mind, as inferior.” She realizes much later that this is one of “the hidden, uncounted costs of colonialism” that her mother pays, as her children speak a language she doesn’t understand and go away from her to be educated, and to make their lives, in distant countries. 

Ahmed’s mother lives in a world of women, talking, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes with her sisters and her friends. She teaches her children that the core of Islam is to hurt no one, to harm oneself before injuring someone else. “He who kills one being kills all of humanity, and he who revives, or gives life to, one being revives all of humanity.” She, and the women around her, have distilled their own “essence of Islam,” separate from the stern, fierce “orthodox interpretation” that’s the male version. They live in houses surrounded by gardens that are rich with trees and flowers, wrapped in desert silence, light, and shadow, a world of beauty. It’s one that Ahmed learns to disregard as “women’s culture,” gentle, generous, and powerless, in which “women bowed their heads and acquiesced” to the men “who did things.” “The only escape from this,” she tells herself, “ would be for me to become either a man or a Westerner.”

Ahmed grows up immersed in politics, living through a bloodless revolution that turned into a dictatorship and then through a war that prompted Ahmed’s British and Jewish friends to leave Cairo. Her father falls out favor with the government and Ahmed is long denied permission to leave Cairo for England, where she has been accepted at Cambridge. When she goes there at last, she has the label of “Arab” thrust upon her by English society and begins “puzzling out what it means to be Arab.” 

“In Egypt,” she says, “I’d be just another Egyptian, whereas in the West it’s impossible for me to escape, forget this false constructed Arabness.” In a country whose colonization of her own has made her English in language and thought, Ahmed takes on an imposed identity that is foreign to her. Yet while she learns about being Arab, she sees more clearly what it is to be an Egyptian from Cairo, a city where, throughout its history “Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Morocco, Istanbul, Alexandria” were all blended into “its own unique Cairo brew.”

Discovering the beauty of Arab literature, written in a literary language that no one speaks, Ahmed recognizes the richness of oral culture, expressed in the “mother tongue” spoken by the women whom she once dismissed. Her journey is farther than from Cairo to an academic American life. Her struggle to achieve a wider knowledge of who she is and where she came from is long and painful, told through a memoir steeped in rigorous intellect that opens new worlds of thought to its readers. ~Janet Brown

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami (Picador)

Mieko Kawakami’s novel Breasts and Eggs was originally published in the Japanese language as 夏物語 (Natsu Monogatari) in 2019 as a novella. The Japanese title translates to Summer Story. She then expanded the story into a full length novel and is her first book to be published in English. It was translated by Sam Bet and David Boyd. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is the original novella. The latter half of the book takes place ten years later and follows the lives of three women.

In the first half of the book we are introduced to the main characters - a thirty-year old woman named Natsuko, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s 12-year-old daughter Midoriko. Natsuko moved from Shobashi in the Kansai area to Tokyo ten years ago to pursue a career as a writer. She works at a minimum-wage job, her blog gets only one or two hits a day, and she still hasn’t had anything published in print. 

Makiko works as a hostess and is really concerned with her appearance and sex-appeal to her male customers. Makiko has become obsessed with the size and shape of her breast and has come to Tokyo to find a clinic that will perform breast augmentation surgery. In simple terms, she wants bigger boobs. As Natsuko describes them when they went to the public bathhouse together, “Her breasts themselves were little more than a couple of mosquito bites, but her nipples were like two control knobs stuck onto her chest. 

Makiko is accompanied by her 12-year-old daughter although the two are currently not on speaking terms. Midoriko has taken to communicating by writing everything down. She keeps two notebooks. One to “talk” to people with and the other to write down her most private thoughts. Midoriko cannot understand her mother’s obsession with getting breast implants and writes about it in her private notebooki. She also writes about the changes in her body as well and wonders “Why does it have to be like this”.

We then fast forward ten years into the future. Natsuko is now a published writer and her editor is encouraging her to complete her first novel. Her older sister Makiko is still working as a hostess in a less than elegant bar and Midoriko is now a college student with a boyfriend of her own. 

Now that Natsuko has turned forty, she has been giving considerable thought to having a child of her own. However, she doesn’t have a steady boyfriend and there are no other prospects to be a potential father figure. She once had a boyfriend when she was in her twenties but they broke up because she could not have sex. It was too painful and the thought of someone or something penetrating her made her incapable of enjoying the act. 

Adoption is out of the question as Japanese law doesn’t allow for single mothers to become parents. She investigates artificial insemination but finds that this is also not allowed in Japan for single women. Her only other option is to go to a sperm bank in a foreign country or to make an illegal arrangement with a willing donor. 

Natsuko meets two people who were the product of sperm donors. The first person she meets is Aizawa who is suffering from an identity crisis and longs to know who his biological father is. Through Aizawa, she meets Yuriko who was abused by her stepfather and she believes bringing a new child into the world is irresponsible and is “an act of violence”. Natsuko finds herself in a conundrum. Is it right for her to become a mother, raising a child who may never know their father. Is it a selfish act to want motherhood? How will the child feel when they grow older and learn the truth of their origin? 

The story is thought provoking and disturbing at times but it is well written and if you’re a woman, I imagine that you cannot help but ponder the same questions that goes through Natsuko’s mind about having a child or Makiko’s obsession with beauty and self-image or Midoriko’s confusion about the changes in her body. These three women share their feelings of what it is to be a woman. These women defy the conservatism of a male-dominated world and it may be time for men to wake up and see the light. ~Ernie Hoyt

Married to Bhutan by Linda Leaming (Hay House)

When Linda Leaming told people that she was leaving the states to live in another country. a common response was “Butane? Where’s that?” Oh,” she began to tell people,” It’s near Africa. It’s where all the disposable lighters come from.”

A tiny, mountainous country that shares its borders with Nepal, Bangladesh, China, and India, Bhutan has an agrarian, cohesive population that would fill a medium-sized U.S city. Historically isolated by its geography that holds only five habitable valleys and its weather, that often makes any sort of invasion problematic, including aircraft landings, it’s a country that has developed on its own terms. Currency replaced the barter system in the 1960s, both the Georgian and the lunar calendars are observed, and time is cyclical, not linear, based upon the seasons and the belief in reincarnation. Its king voluntarily abdicated in 2006 to make room for a democratic form of government and espouses a system that prioritizes Gross National Happiness, rather than Gross National Product. It has never been colonized, with astute monarchs that made Bhutan one of the few winners in Britain’s South Asian Great Game.

Leaming fell in love with the place in 1994, when she was one of the scant number of tourists to visit it. After two weeks in Bhutan, this 39-year-old American, whose daily life was removed from it by twelve time zones, was captivated. After two more journeys that cemented her feelings, she found a job teaching English and moved there in 1997. It’s been her home ever since.

Candid about her initial difficulties with culture, language, and manners, which she describes as a time of facing “minefields, so many opportunities to make an ass of yourself,” Leaming is too busy learning what she needs to know to indulge herself in the usual expat self-pity. Dzongha, the national language of Bhutan, is her primary preoccupation in which she’s frustrated by her teacher’s insistence that reading and writing come before speaking. Her oral language learning is a clandestine activity, aided by a phrasebook that gives her crucial tools to use at work, in the market, and at a doctor’s office. Unfortunately she’s enchanted by phrases that she’ll never have reason to use, which stick with her and emerge at inappropriate moments. The day she thinks she’s asking a physician a routine pleasantry and discovers his shock when it comes from her mouth as “Take off your clothes and lie down,” ought to be quelling but probably was not. Leaming is too eager to assimilate for chagrin to stand in her way.

Her language acquisition becomes total immersion when she falls in love with another teacher, a painter of thanka, works of religious art that are highly prized in Bhutan. He’s a man from a highly traditional family who lives in a large apartment within his sister’s home and when he and Leaming decide to marry, he’s reluctant to take his bride away from the hot water heater of her Bhutanese home to a small town.

But Leaming is aware that when she marries this man, she’s also marrying his country and insists the two of them live in her husband’s home. Here she discovers that her domestic skills are decidedly below par and relearns how to sweep, wash clothes, cook, and sew. In a town where almost everything is made locally, with a husband who wore deerskin moccasins made by his father and clothes woven by his mother, Leaming feels that she’s married to “the Last of the Mohicans.”

Her personal anecdotes are quite funny and rather sparse. Leaming’s focus is on the country that has let her become a resident as much as on how it has changed her. Buddhism is integral to every part of Bhutanese life, a daily practice rather than beliefs espoused on Sunday. From the obscene, scatalogical 15th-Century monk whose used underparts are still enshrined near her house to the elaborate, medieval process of her husband’s thanka art, Leaming’s life is pervaded with a system that gradually becomes part of her. So does the beauty of her surroundings which she loves best during the severe cold of winter and the barriers against rapid progress that geography and weather still forestall. She learns to savor the slow pace of her life, in which buying stationery involves going to a spot where handmade envelopes are constructed as she waits, finding sealing wax in an over-stuffed shop with a patient shopkeeper, and falling prey to the seduction of Bhutan’s gorgeous postage stamps.  

Bhutan is under threats, Leaming describes in her final essay. Surrounded by a “geopolitical equivalent to a trailer park,” with its squabbling tribes, avaricious leaders, and drug problems, it works hard to avoid the fate of the former kingdom of Sikkim which is now an Indian state. Climate change is melting its glaciers and flooding is a constant danger. Conversely there’s a shortage of water that may destroy the country’s agriculture. And. as is true all over the world, globalization is closing in through the inexorable incursions of the internet. 

“The world needs Bhutan,” Leaming concludes. Certainly she herself needed it. As a Bhutanese friend told her early on, “You are the arrow that hit its mark.” Her lovely little book poses an irresistible question: how many of us are still arrows in search of our own marks?~Janet Brown

American Shaolin by Matthew Polly (Gotham Books)

Matthew Polly’s biographical novel American Shaolin has the long and amusing subtitle of Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of the Iron Crotch : An Odyssey in the New China. It is the story of an American man who drops out of a prestigious college and goes on a journey to learn the art of kung-fu from the Shaolin Temple in China.

Matthew Polly grew up in Topeka, Kansas. He was the epitome of the 98-lbs weakling who was tormented by bullies at his school and while many people have an inner voice telling what they ought to do, Polly was fifteen and had an inner “to-do list”. When he was fifteen, there were five main points on his list of “THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT”. 

Topping the list was “ignorant”, followed by “cowardly”, “stil a boy / not a man”, “unattractive to the opposite sex”, and “spiritually confused”. In dealing with his ignorance, he once picked up the New York Review of Books but even with a dictionary in hand, he couldn’t understand it. This inspired him to study and read more and his efforts led him to being accepted at Princeton University and was doing quite well, so he felt he could cross off being ignorant from his list of THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT.

However, number one on his list was being cowardly. Polly started learning kung-fu when he was in the ninth grade after seeing a rerun of David Carradine’s television series Kung-fu. He was inspired by Carradine’s character - “the half-Asian Shaolin martial monk who wandered the Old West righting wrongs” and “seemed to be as strange and helpless and yet was a total badass.”

Polly’s obsession with kung-fu led to his interest in China and Chinese culture. He took courses in learning the language as well. As Polly was busy with his studies, he didn’t have time to practice his kung-fu which he had been studying for three years. He felt even after three years, he would not be able to defend himself adequately. That’s when he came across Mark Salzman’s memoir Iron and Silk, a story about a Yale graduate who studies with a martial arts master in China. This sets his plan in motion.

In 1992, Polly left Princeton and using the money from his college which his father had set up for him, went to China in pursuit of dreams to learn martial arts from the birthplace of kung-fu - at the Shaolin Temple. It did not matter to him that he did not even know where the temple was located. 

So begins Polly’s real adventure as he first goes to Beijing, then travels north to the Shaolin Temple and learns that there are numerous forms of kung-fu and that foreigners are only allowed to study at one of the state-sponsored schools. He manages to find a school that accepts him and for the next two years training and studying and learning that there are different types of “iron kung-fu” in which “a part of the body (such as the head, neck, stomach, or, most frightening of all, the crotch) is made impervious to pain.”

This book is a must read for any fans of old Jackie Chan movies where the harsh training seems to be exaggerated, only it’s not as Polly can well attest to. The story is an inspiration to anyone who has a dream and to see that dream fulfilled. ~Ernie Hoyt

Ayo Gorkhali by Tim I. Gurung (Blacksmith Books)

There is no such word as Gurkha in Nepal. A corruption of Ghorka, coined by the British, it would never have come into existence were it not for England’s Great Game and the British East India Company’s desire to control trade routes into Tibet. The barrier to this goal was the Gorkhali Army of the powerful kingdom of Gorkha, a state that had conquered Sikkim, ruled over much of what is now Nepal, and controlled almost all of India’s northern regions.  

In the first battle between these two forces, 2,400 British soldiers were defeated by 1,400 Gorkhas. Over half of the British troops were killed by soldiers crying “Ayo Gorkhali” (“The Gorkhas are upon you!”), and brandishing their fearsome knives, the khukuri, (corrupted into kukri), with the aid of villagers who came armed with bows and arrows, nettles, and active hornet nests.  It took almost fifty years and an army of 50,000 for the British to finally defeat 14,000 Ghorka soldiers. 

Being no fools, the British Army was eager to bring fighters of this caliber into its ranks, “which took the sting out of the Gorkhali Army and made Nepal “a toothless tiger.” From that time on, “the youth and able men” of that country were served up to Great Britain, depleting the power of Nepal on many levels. 

From the Sepoy Mutiny up through both World Wars and beyond, the Gorkhali became the legendary Gurkhas, brave, fierce, and, to the British, expendable. They led the other soldiers into battle, after being given lashings of rum by their commanders to boost their courage, and, with their kukris, were the ones sent to “clear the ground at the end” in hand-to-hand combat. Many among what was popularly known as the “Gurkha Legion” received Victoria Crosses for bravery, but when they were forced to retire at the age of 35, they were sent back to Nepal without military pensions, regardless of the injuries and honors they carried with them. 

“Each little Gurk might be worth his weight in gold,” General Ian Hamilton said during World War One, but his assessment wasn’t reflected in the way the Gurkhas were paid. Even in the 1960s, when the Gurkhas were stationed in Hong Kong, they received $42 dollars a month compared to the $450 paid to their British counterparts. They were cheap, dispensable, and handicapped by the virtues instilled in them by their culture. The Gurkhas were taught from birth that honor, respect, and loyalty were essential; their motto was “Better to die than be a coward.” And die they did. Over 60,000 Gurkhas were killed, wounded, or listed among the missing in action during the two World Wars.

The ones who were wounded placed a terrible burden upon the country of Nepal, both on social and economic grounds. Men who had been given two choices in life, to farm or to fight, came back to the farms broken by war. Gone by the age of 18, back at 35, generations of Gorkhali men became burdens, uncompensated in any way by the country that had exploited them.

It wasn’t until 1969 that private funds established the Gurkha Welfare Trust “to alleviate poverty and distress among Gurkha veterans and their families,” 154 years after the Gurkhas had been made part of the British Army. And only in 2009 did Great Britain allow the Gurkhas “right of abode.” Slowly and grudgingly the “debt of honor” owed to the Gurkhas is being repaid to a people who were “betrayed by their destiny.”

A former Gurkha himself, Gorkhali Tim Gurung presents an almost dauntingly detailed military history, a full and truthful picture that rewards persistent readers, leaving them to echo  his last words on the subject, “Jai Gurkhas!”~Janet Brown

Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui (Pocket Books)

Wei Hui’s novel Shanghai Baby was first published in China in 1999 and was subsequently banned by the Chinese government for being too decadent. The English language edition, translated by Bruce Humes, was published in 2001 and received a lot of positive reviews. 

It is the semi-autobiographical story of the author. The main character is a twenty-five year Shanhainese woman named Nikki. Her friends call her Coco, after Coco Chanel, who she considers to be her idol, after Henry Miller. Nikki had found a bit of success after publishing a book of short stories titled The Shriek of the Butterflies. She has recently quit her job as a magazine journalist and now thinks of herself as a “bare-legged, miniskirted waitress at a joint  called the Green Stalk Cafe.”  She is also trying to write her first novel.

She meets Tian Tian at the cafe and the two start a serious relationship. Nikki soon leaves her parents home to live with Tian Tian, who is an extremely shy but very talented artist. He was raised by his grandmother after his father died, while his mother married a foreigner and moved to Spain. Tian Tian no longer speaks to his mother as he still believes she and her Spanish husband were responsible for the death of his father. His hatred of his mother and other problems makes him impotent so he cannot have normal sexual relations with his girlfriend. 

Nikki is a young woman who loves Tian Tian but desires to be fulfilled sexually as well. When she meets a tall and handsome foreigner from Germany, she has an affair with him, knowing that he has a wife and children. While Mark, the foreigner, who knows Nikki lives with her boyfriend, only seems to want her to satisfy his carnal pleasures.

Although Nikki keeps her affair secret from Tian Tian, he realizes something is wrong and decides to leave for the south of China for an extended time. This leads to his drug use as he becomes further and further removed from life’s reality. Nikki goes to see Tian Tian to bring him back to Shanghai to go to a detox center but she continues to see Mark as well. She feels guilty but feels no remorse when having sex with Mark.

The supporting characters who are Nikki’s friends and acquaintances are as shallow and selfish as Nikki. The reader may find it hard to empathize with any of the characters as they all seem to be two-dimensional beings, thinking only of themselves and their happiness. 

Although the story is well-written and fast-paced and keeps you interested to see how things turn out, I found the main character to be selfish, self-absorbed and a bit narcissistic as well. It was difficult to relate to the problems NIkki and her friends mostly bring on themselves. They don’t seem to know who they are or what they want out of life. Fortunately, this is just a fictitious account of contemporary Shanghai but If this is the new generation of hipsters in China, I fear for their country. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd (Perennial Classics, HarperCollins, Publishers)

“I have heard that people change east of Suez and that could be what is happening to me,” Mary MacKenzie writes in a notebook days after turning twenty-one. The sheltered daughter of a severe Presbyterian mother, she is on a voyage to China, in 1903, en route to marry a young diplomat whom she barely knows. As she travels further from Scotland, she’s startled to find she’s developed a taste for curry and has stopped wearing her corset. “It’s almost frightening,” she tells herself, “that you can travel on a ship and feel yourself changing,” an observation she knows she can never write to her mother.

By the time she reaches her fiancé in Beijing, Mary has discovered her own mind and isn’t reluctant to speak it—or write it in a series of private notebooks. Bored by her handsome husband and her new baby, within a year of her arrival she embarks upon an affair with a Japanese military officer, becomes pregnant with his child, and is banished from her house, her husband, and her daughter. Under the intricate and omniscient protection of her aristocratic lover, Mary is taken to Tokyo and placed in a comfortable house of her own, where she gives birth to a son.

An event that is still shocking even in this century separates Mary from her baby and his father but she’s determined to remain in Japan with hopes that she may someday see her son again. For the next thirty-six years, she manages to make a life for herself in Tokyo, through years of sweeping social transformation and several wars. On the periphery of her life is the man who brought her to his country, with whom she has a bond that goes beyond the physical. He is the only person who may someday reunite her with her lost son.

This would be an ordinary historical romance, were it not for the history told through the lively voice of Mary’s candid letters and journals. Oswald Wynd gives intimate descriptions to life in Tokyo that indicate a deep knowledge and experience of that subject. The Ginger Tree takes on a surprising depth of detail as soon as Mary arrives in Japan. From her “pretty little house” which is “really not a house at all but a flimsy box around a game played to quite simple rules,” to the varying degrees of comfort ranging from no chairs to the recent invention of electric lights imported by German interests, Mary’s new life is made up of hundreds of curiosities. She’s  wakened at night by the sound of the night watchman’s wooden clappers and his cries that all is well and learns to appreciate eight-hour performances of Kabuki in which an actor prepares to disembowel himself while members of the audience hiccup from too much rice wine. She shops in the Ginza where rich women buy European imports in a four-storey department store and becomes friends with a Japanese Baroness who was imprisoned for staring at the Emperor Meiji. She describes the night sky brightened to blood-red by neighborhood fires that can destroy six thousand houses in one night and recreates the sounds that punctuate her domestic life, “the hootings of small steamers and tugboats,” “the great bronze bell at the Hongwanji temple,” the mournful music played on a neighbor’s samisen. She gives a startling first-person account of the beauty and terror of a tsunami and a detailed look at the Emperor Meiji’s funeral procession. 

At a certain point, the question of how did Wynd know so much about his character’s Japanese life demands an answer, one that is as compelling as the novel he has written. Born in Tokyo to Scottish missionary parents in 1913, Wynd was given Japanese citizenship at birth. Japan was his home until he was in his teens (when his parents moved him to Atlantic City where he went to high school—a kind of culture shock that’s unimaginable) and he spoke fluent and faultless Japanese. 

After moving back to Scotland just in time for the start of the Second World War, Wynd became part of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps, no doubt because of his command of Japanese. He was captured by Japanese troops and under interrogation by their secret police, admitted his dual nationality. For what was perceived as a betrayal of his birthplace, he was threatened with execution but instead served as an interpreter while imprisoned in Hokkaido. Here “he was baffled by the Japanese treatment of prisoners,” the Independent reports with true British understatement. When he was released at the end of the war, he swore never to return to Japan nor to “recognize his erstwhile ‘fellow countrymen’ in civilian life.”

Using the pen name of Gavin Black, Wynd wrote fifteen thrillers and seven novels under his own name. Two of them were about women in Japan—The Ginger Tree with its remarkably feminine point of view and his first novel, The Black Fountains, which tells the story of a young Japanese girl who returns to Japan after being educated in the U.S., just before the outbreak of World War II, an opposite mirror image of Wynd’s own experience.

He died in Scotland at the age of 85, with twenty-three years of his life spent in Asia and three and a half of those within a prison camp. It’s extraordinary that his bitterness and anger toward his birthplace only surface at the very end of The Ginger Tree, when Mary, facing repatriation at the beginning of World War II says she will only return to Japan “when Tokyo and Yokohama lie in ruins.” Even then Wynd’s attachment to Japan and the Japanese is made stunningly clear in his concluding paragraph, which is a masterpiece of subtlety and heartbreak.~Janet Brown

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (Vintage Books)

The Memory Police is a science fiction story written by Yoko Ogawa, author of The Housekeeper and the Professor and The Diving Pool. It was originally published as 密やかな結晶 (Hisoyaka na Kessho) in Japanese in 1994 and was first published in English in 2019 and was translated by Stephen Snyder.

Set on an unnamed island, everyday items are slowly disappearing. The story opens with the narrator who “wonders what was disappeared first”. Her mother had told her there were many things in the past, before her daughter was born. “Wonderful things you can’t possibly imagine.”

Her mother kept some of these things in a secret drawer and would encourage her daughter to open one and would tell her about the different objects she held in her hands. One day it may be a kind of fabric called a “ribbon” that people used to tie up their hair. This object “was disappeared” from the island when her mother was seven. Another was called a “bell” that if you shook would make a lovely sound. “Stamps” had also “been disappeared” from the island. Her mother explained it was something you used to send a letter to someone. 

No one knows why these things disappeared and everyone accepted it as a part of life on the island. People will wake up the next day and know that something has changed but with the disappearance of any items, the memory of the items disappears from the people’s thoughts as well. However, there were some people who didn’t forget. Some families tried to run away. 

The Inuis were the narrator’s neighbors. They came to the house late at night as they wanted to escape the Memory Police. They were also friends with the narrator’s mother. To repay the kindness of letting them stay one night at the house, the Inuis gave back three sculptures that the narrator’s mother had gifted to them many years ago. 

The narrator’s parents both died and she had been living alone in their house for the past two years. She works as a novelist and her only friends include her editor R and an old man who lives on an abandoned ferry who was a family friend. Life continued as normally as possible with the exceptions of more and more things disappearing. 

It is the job of The Memory Police to enforce the disappearances of objects and who also sought out people whose memories survived. Nobody knows what became of them but they were never to be seen in town again. The narrator began to worry about what would happen if words or books were to disappear. 

The narrator learned that her editor, “R” was one of those people who did not lose their memories. She decided she wanted to help hide him from the Memory Police. With the help of the old man, they built a secret room inside the house. The narrator told her editor that he would have to leave everything behind and leave without notice so the Memory Police wouldn’t suspect a thing. 

Things continued to disappear but most of the people were so used to the losses that they didn’t give a thought to the things that were gone. Then an earthquake struck. In the disaster the narrator’s mother’s sculptures were broken and she noticed there was something hidden inside. She showed them to her editor who told her that they were things “that were disappeared” long ago - a ferry ticket, a harmonica, and some candy called ramune. 

As the narrator predicted, books “were disappeared” but her editor encouraged her to continue writing and to hold on to the things her mother kept hidden, always telling her that he believes “they have the power to change you, to alter your hearts and minds. The slightest sensation can have an effect, can help you remember. These things will restore your memory.”

But will it affect the narrator? Will more things disappear. What will happen to the Memory Police when there is nothing left to remember? This is a most unusual story and is very reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 but Ogawa writes with a voice of her own. What would you do to preserve your memories? ~Ernie Hoyt

Drawing on the Inside: Kowloon Walled City 1985 by Fiona Hawthorne (Blacksmith Books)

Fiona Hawthorne came to Hong Kong in the 70s when she was six. For the next eight years of her life, she roamed through the city with a freedom that finally alarmed her parents. Exploring Kowloon’s street markets was one thing but drinking San Miguel in Wanchai’s bars and coming home late at night in a taxi wasn’t the sort of adventure they wanted their daughter to have at fourteen. They took their family back to Ireland but it was too late. Fiona had Hong Kong in her blood and at twenty-two, she came back as a young artist.

Now she had the ability to satisfy a longing that had gone denied when she was a free-ranging girl. On childhood visits to her favorite market, the one so close to the Kai Tak airport that jets screamed above the heads of shoppers, almost parting their hair, she had seen a spot nearby that was forbidden territory. Naturally that appealed to Fiona.

The Kowloon Walled City had been a separate entity since the days of the British takeover. Initially left out of the original treaty that claimed Hong Kong, when it was included in the following year, it continued to exist on its own terms, under its own rules. In the 70s, it was flooded with mainland Chinese who spawned an explosion of cheap housing blocks, built without inside plumbing or elevators. Rumors that the place was run by triads and was riddled with crime made it a “no-go” area for the rest of Hong Kong. To Fiona, this community of 60,000, supported by mom and pop industries, was irresistible, “a patchwork of chaos with a strange and compelling beauty.” She was determined to go inside but she needed an introduction that would serve as her passport.

One of her old classmates had a friend who worked with drug addicts within the Walled City, a woman who approved of Fiona’s plan to explore and paint the life and surroundings of this private world. Accompanied by a former addict, Fiona spent three months there, carrying her watercolors, stacks of cheap cardboard that ordinarily formed a base for mahjong tiles, and two heavy cameras for photos and videos. The residents of the Walled City spoke Mandarin, which Fiona hadn’t mastered, but in a mixture of Cantonese and English, she managed to communicate with the people she met.  As she sketched and painted, she openly showed her work to her subjects and they encouraged her to continue. She was accepted.

Fiona was immediately frustrated by the “image of notoriety” that stigmatized the Walled City. What she found there was a place filled with hardworking people who spent their days making food, plastic flowers, shoes, clothing, in small dark spaces. She painted the dark, impenetrable wall of buildings that characterized the City, but she also showed the shafts of light that passed through the slivers of space between them and brightened a wealth of color within. Flowers bloomed on caged-in balconies and vegetable gardens flourished in vacant bits of ground. 

Her art reveal no traces of menace. Watercolor portraits show faces turned toward her in trust and her quick sketches capture moments of deep tenderness. A young couple gaze at each other, lost in love. A man and woman sit with their infant, pouring all of their attention upon the baby. Within the dark and narrow alleyways between buildings, children play and adults sit together, chatting. Fiona’s drawings, paintings, and photos show a community that’s strikingly similar to ones that still exist in Kowloon, its streets filled with traffic and pedestrians, a forest of signs looming above them; small crowded spaces where workers take a break to eat together, sharing dishes made by a shirtless man who cooks over open flames; false teeth arranged in a macabre shop window display.

When Fiona steps away from this bustling world to show its exterior, it’s a view that can easily bring on a feeling of seasickness. The buildings are jammed together, tilting against each other for support, teetering as if they’re drunk. At night, they take on a comforting look, with hundreds of windows beaming light into the darkness, each one a spot of domestic privacy.

Fiona herself appears only twice. On the book’s unjacketed cover, she shoots a video, youthful, slender, and intent upon what she’s recording. At the end of the book there she is again shrouded in darkness, her face hidden behind her massive camera and her mane of hair blazing in an errant beam of light. Less than ten years afterward, the Walled City was demolished, its space transformed into a city park. “I had no idea that I was recording a place that would someday be gone,” she says, but through her eyes and her art, that community is truthfully and skillfully memorialized.~Janet Brown