Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back by Janice P. Nimura (W.W. Norton and Company)

The wife of the Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito, Empress Hiroko, was by all accounts a child prodigy. When she was three she could read, she wrote poetry by the time she was five and was a student of calligraphy at seven. Now at 22 in 1871, she is “a modern consort” who joins her husband in welcoming the opening of Japan to Western industry and education.  Under her patronage, five Japanese girls are chosen to live in the U.S for ten years, all expenses paid by Japan, with the goal of receiving Western educations and returning to teach women in their country. 

Of the five, only one has any familiarity with English; six-year-old Ume is able to say “Yes. No. Thank you.” None of them are able to communicate with the American woman chosen as their chaperone during the voyage nor with the stewardess who was meant to bring them food and clean their cabin. Until one of the Japanese diplomats finally comes to check on them, the girls live on the boxes of desserts that were given to them as gifts when they boarded the ship.

In America the girls qre treated as exotic curiosities in San Francisco and on the train journey that takes them to Washington DC. On the train, they are so entranced by the vast outstretches of snow that the oldest becomes snowblind, damaging her eyesight so badly that she’s sent back to Japan along with the girl closest to her in age. Now the remaining three are headed by eleven-year-old Sutematsu, followed by Shige who’s just ten and Ume who had turned seven soon after arriving in the states. The 24-year-old diplomat who had traveled and lived abroad for years and was described as “a Westerner born of Japan” is horrified when the girls are presented to him, especially taken aback by Ume. “They have sent me a baby,” he says with an undiplomatic display of horror.

It becomes obvious that the girls need to be placed in separate homes if they are ever to learn English and become acculturated to Western  ways. Ume remains in Washington with a childless couple who immediately welcome her as their daughter. Sutematsu is placed with the family of a Yale professor and Shige in the home of one of the professor’s friends. All three quickly adapt to the freedom and comfort of Western clothing and and the unaccustomed softness of pillows that aren’t made of wood. Although their hosts receive money for their upkeep, the arrangements made for each girl are “more familial than financial” and within a year of their arrival in America, they have become part of their American families.

They flourish, becoming adept at croquet, chess, and lawn tennis. Ume, alone without Japanese friends, begins to forget her language. Sutematsu has a brother attending Yale who’s adamant that she remain Japanese, keeping her “moral code,” which he ensures by giving his sister lessons in Japanese culture, history, and language. Shige’s family welcome a young Japanese student into their household who is smart, handsome and four years older than Shige. He provides an incentive for her to practice her native language as well as giving her a reason to look forward to returning home.

After several years at Vassar, she is the first one to go back to Japan at the end of her ten year commitment,  engaged to the handsome student. Not as driven as the other two girls, Shige happily becomes a piano teacher in Tokyo. 

Sutematsu however is an academic star. Both she and Ume apply for an additional year in the U.S. in order for them to graduate, Ume from high school and Sutematsu with a bachelor’s degree from Vassar. On the voyage home, they’re both apprehensive. Ume, high-spirited and indulged, finds herself wishing that the missionary passengers aboard ship were “not quite so quiet or good.” Sutematsu, when considering her imminent homecoming, says, “I cannot tell you how I feel but I should like to give one good scream.” 

Japanese public opinion has changed in the decade the girls had spent in America. Western ideas and education are viewed by many as a threat and the idea of educating Japanese daughters is being challenged. Shige, happily married and with limited ambition, repatriates with little difficulty. Sutematsu quickly discovers that marriage is the way to repay her debt to her family and her government. When a highly placed nobleman proposes, she puts aside her idea of having her American sister join her in Tokyo, with the two of them forming an independent household and launching a Western school together, and marries a man much older than she.  “What must be done is a change in the existing state of society, and this can only be accomplished by married women,” she writes to her “sister” in America.

Ume has become thoroughly American and she refuses to give that up. Her value, as she perceives it, is in her mastery of the English language--no matter that she’s without any real fluency in Japanese. Her ambition is to be a spinster, independent with a teaching career, but she soon discovers that in Japan there is no word for spinster and old maids are pitied and disdained. Her stubborn willfulness pays off however. While Sutematsu’s brilliance is turned to the service of enhancing her husband’s career and Shige becomes blissfully domestic, it’s Ume who uses her charm and her determination to become an educator whose name is still known in Japan, with her family name emblazoned on Tsuda College for women and her accomplishments taught in elementary school social studies classes.

Janice Nimura has constructed a framework for the lives of these girls, delving deep into the tradition and history of the samurai class from which they came. Sutematsu was the one most steeped in this background of rigid discipline, having lived through the war between royalist progressives and feudalist warlords when she was old enough to help her family make the bullets that may have wounded her future husband. It was her iron-bound training that made her diverge from the career she trained for into the life of nobility, where her influence extended to establishing charity bazaars and hospital volunteers among the aristocracy. Ume, who had little discipline imposed upon her before her American life, was the one to break through traditional barriers, the ones that Shige welcomed. The stories of three displaced girls and how they prevailed and succeeded is one that deserves greater attention than it’s been given, and through Nimura’s skill and scholarship, this has finally taken place~Janet Brown

Tall Story by Candy Gourlay (David Fickling Books)

Candy Gourlay is a Filipino writer based in the United Kingdom. Tall Story is her debut novel, originally published in hardback in 2010. It has won the National Book Award of the Philippines in 2012 and the Crystal Kite Award for Europe in 2011. It was also shortlisted for a number of other literary awards. 

It centers on the story of two siblings or more precisely, a half-sister and a half-brother. Bernardo, named after his father, lives in a small village called San Andres in the Philippines with his aunt and uncle. He has a mother, a sister named Amandolina, and a step-father named William who all live in London. Bernardo has been waiting for years to get approval from the British government to allow him to move to the U.K. to be with his family. He has been waiting for sixteen years and…he’s still waiting.

Amandolina is thirteen years old but goes by the name of Andi (with an i) and loves playing basketball. Although she’s the “shortest and youngest on the team” she’s chosen as the point guard for her school’s team. It’s a dream come true for her…until her dream is shattered when her mother tells her that they bought a new house and will be moving in two weeks. 

The other biggest news is that the Home Office has finally approved Bernardo’s papers. He will be coming to live with the family in London in two weeks. But here is something special about Bernardo. He isn’t your average, ordinary sixteen-year-old. He is rather tall for his age. In fact, he is taller than any of his peers or the adults that surround him. Bernardo is eight feet tall!

Andi hasn’t seen her brother in ten years. She has only been to the Philippines once in her life, when she was three years old. The only thing she remembers from the trip is that there was a massive earthquake. After that, her mother refuses to take Andi with her to see Bernardo. 

The last time Bernardo’s mother visited, she was surprised by how tall he was. His father was only five-eight, and here he was at fourteen years old and already six foot tall. She took him to the doctor and the doctor said, “There’s nothing wrong with this boy”. Before she flew back to London, she made her sister promise to tell her if Bernardo got any taller. He did, but Auntie and Bernardo never did mention that to his mother, and now this eight-foot young man will be headed to London. 

The people in Bernardo’s barrio believe he is Bernardo Carpio reincarnate. Bernardo tells them that no, “My name is Bernardo, after my father. And my surname is not Carpio. It’s Hipolito. Hi-po-li-to. Bernardo Carpio is a giant, everyone knows that. He’s a story, an old legend.”. But the people look at his eight-foot frame and just laugh. 

It was Old Tibo, the local barber who told Bernardo the story of Bernardo Carpio. He recited the story as he cut Bernardo’s hair. It was a time when Gods and mortals lived together and some fell in love. The children of these mixed marriages were giants, “who looked human but were of a magical size. They may not have been gods but they were immortal - unlike the human side of their families.”.

The giants who chose to stay on earth with their mothers lived peacefully for a time. But as they were immortal, after their mothers died, they people turned against them. Bernardo Carpio decided to fight back with kindness and had become a folk-hero to the people of San Andres. They believe that Bernado Carpio has returned to keep them safe from earthquakes. Who knows what will happen if they find out that Bernardo will be leaving them to live in London? 

The story is written through the eyes of Bernardo and Andi in alternating chapters. It is a coming-of-age story as well as a story of adjusting to a new culture and foreign culture. Gourlay also blends a bit of folklore and magic to add a bit of spice to the story that you won’t want it to end. ~Ernie Hoyt

Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej (Bloomsbury Publishing)

She’s thirty. He’s in his fifties. He’s established in his art, a  famous choreographer. She’s still emerging into the art she practices, her one novel published by a small press that immediately went out of business. He has a country house in the Berkshires and an apartment with a view in Brooklyn. She lives with a roommate in a Boston suburb. He has a “clean, austere” beauty. She describes herself as “slump-backed and shabby…a hobbity gremlin.” His art is rooted in his body. Hers is within her brain. He leaves bruises behind when they have sex, during which she wears a soft, pink collar. He’s a white cis male. She’s gay, with tinges of bisexuality from encounters with “beta” men; her ethnic background is revealed only in passing, with her description of her mother—”the only Asian American-language poet of her generation.” He calls her Rabbit. She never says his name. 

It’s an easy matter to categorize this novel as 9 ½ Weeks meets “Me Too” but Little Rabbit  takes every assumption and turns it into confetti. “I’m not exactly Lolita,” Rabbit tells the choreographer at the beginning ot their liaison, “You don’t have to treat me like an egg.” In fact, she’s the one to initiate their sex and she’s the one who pushes to learn what lies on the other side of the choreographer’s “careful force.” She’s the one who’s eager to respond to pain and who demands that the choreographer abandons all restraint. She carries her bruises as though they’re gifts, and from this man who insists she’s “not a summer fling,” they’re reluctantly given to her.

He calls her Rabbit, not because she’s cute and tiny, but because he sees her as “small and wild and determined to survive.” “You have a master’s degree, skills. You can have a desk job, do other things, go anywhere. I can do only one thing,” he tells her. When she insists he rip her dress as they have sex, afterward he says “Let me fix it.” She says, “Break me.” He says “I love you.”

Both of them inhabit different forms of art, his made from physical motion, hers from words, and both of them marvel that the other can “take the thing we all use every day and make it art.” When each brings the other into their own work, they approach a painful boundary. When asked if she uses her husband in her poetry, Rabbit’s mother laughs. “Completely. But he knew what he was signing up for.” The choreographer seems to know that too but Rabbit is unsure.

This is a book about differences in economic class, education, sexual preferences, and age. What it is not about is differences in race. During a time in publishing when #ownvoices is the magic hashtag and fiction relies heavily upon racial identity, Rabbit is a writer, a sexual adventurer, a fierce and independent artist. Her bloodline isn’t one of her markers. 

Alyssa Songsiridej makes a bold leap in her first novel. She ignores race and she ignores victimhood. Only in the conclusion does she disclose the names of her puzzling couple, giving them parity without cruelty. Little Rabbit, I promise you, is like nothing you’ve read before. Don’t pass it up.~Janet Brown

Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton (Soft Skull)

Aoko Matsuda’s book Where the Wild Ladies Are, translated by Polly Barton, won the 2021 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. It contains seventeen short stories inspired by Japanese folk legends, kabuki theater, and rakugo, a type of comic storytelling art. At the end of the book is a short summary of the inspiration for each story. Originally published in the Japanese language as Obachan-tachi ga iru tokoro by Chuokoron Shinsha in 2016. All the stories have a common theme. The obachan-tachi or “wild ladies” are all ghosts. 

Smartening Up is inspired by the Kabuki play Musume Dojoji (The Maid of Dojo Temple) about a woman named Kiyohime who falls in love with a temple priest. After being rejected a number of times, Kiyohime’s love turns to hatred and she becomes a fire-breathing dragon. The priest runs to Dojo Temple and hides in the temple bell. The dragon coils itself around the bell, breathing out fire until the bell melts and the priest burns to death. 

After coming home from a beauty salon, a young woman is visited by her aunt who hanged herself the previous year after being spurned by a lover. Instead of seeing her son who was the one who found her, the dead woman turns up at her niece’s house to prevent her niece from following in the same footsteps as she herself had and the niece discovers she has a dark power of her own.

The title story, Where the Wild Ladies Are was inspired by a rakugo story titled Hankonko (Soul Summoning Incense). The original story is about a ronin who rings a bell every night much to the consternation of the neighbors. They send a steward to complain to him but he informs the steward that he is saying the rites for his dead wife who gave him the “soul-summoning” incense. Whenever he uses it and rings the bell, she appears before him. The steward asks for some of the incense so he can see his dead wife as well, but the ronin refuses. The steward buys incense with a similar name but when he puts it on the fire, the neighbors only come to complain about the smoke. 

Shigeru, the son of the woman who hanged herself, has started a new job at an incense making company. His job is really simple. All he has to do is “watch the sticks of dried compressed incense that went streaming past him down the conveyor belt, and check that they weren’t misshapen or broken.” But he lost all motivation for work after discovering his mother had hanged herself with a bath towel. After that, he notices that all the employees he works with are middle-aged women. He senses something strange about the company but can’t put a finger to it. He even hears a song from his youth that his mother used to sing to him. As he listens closely, he also realizes it’s his mother’s voice. 

The best description of the entire book can be summed up in one word—quirky! The title of the book seems to be a play on the Maurice Sendak children’s book Where the Wild Things Are which also makes an appearance in one of the stories. There are fifteen other tales which are all linked to each other. Matsuda’s use of well-established stories and interpreting them in her own style makes a unique reading experience. The stories can be enjoyed even more by reading where the inspiration for each story originated. ~Ernie Hoyt

Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat by Veeraporn Nittiprapha, translated by Kong Rithdee (River Books)

Memories of memories, we all have them--stories of when we were small, told to us so often that they become a real and vivid part of our remembered pasts; events we’ve invented, so certain they occurred that they become embedded as false memories; tales about great-grandparents whom we never met but whose exploits are part of our own pantheon of stories that we tell and retell. 

Memory is a realm of evanescence, highly prized and easily lost. It’s the province of ghosts, spiderwebs, soap bubbles. A story emerges, shimmers, and vanishes, crowded out by many others. Which is real? Which is fantasy? 

This is the world where fiction was first invented. This is the world that comes alive in all of its gleaming spirals in Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat. 

Thai author Veeraporn Nitiprapha was brought to the attention of western readers when Kong Rithdee translated her first novel, The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth, into English. Several years later Rithdee has done it again, translating Nitiprapha’s lapidary magic realism while never sacrificing the distinctive flavor of Thai storytelling.

This novel begins slowly with the pace of a tropical afternoon when a boy named Dao explores “a melange of tattered, warped memories,” ones he thinks perhaps were never his own but were given to him by someone else. His world is one of stories told to him by a grandmother who has disappeared from a house where he lives with his mother, a woman whose presence is spectral. Only when he enters the Rain Room does he ever see anyone else, a girl within a large mirror who looks oddly familiar to this boy who has never left his house and has never met a stranger.

Dao is a vessel for memories. He’s the last of what was meant to be a family dynasty, begun by Tong, a man from China whose body is covered with “black freckles like lightless stars…burnt-out constellations.” Tong’s success in his adopted country makes it possible for him to buy the big house near a pond covered with pink lotus blossoms, next to a forest of acacia trees that fill the air with blankets of yellow pollen. Through his house Tong’s children come and go, leaving only their stories behind. 

Truth and lies, success and failure, and the curse of death by water--none of Tong’s children lead happy lives, nor does the generation that follows them. The memories of the family are anchored by history and suffused with poetry. Their stories float through the house and into Dao’s mind like curls of smoke, defying linear rules of time or place. Not until the final pages of the novel is there a shadowy explanation, offered just after the shocking acts of violence that precede Dao’s existence.

Nitiprapha has the gift that made Virginia Woolf famous, one that lets her bend time to her own uses without sacrificing her story. Although Woolf and Garcia Marquez both come to mind while reading her novel, the world Nitiprapha creates is vividly and viscerally Thai. The history, the food, the ghosts, the lingering image-filled descriptions all provide entry points to a place that lives in the memories of memories, fading fast, seen in a blink of time before dissolving into “a fragment of deep longing.”~Janet Brown

The Rice Mother by Rani Manicka (Sceptre)

The Rice Mother is the debut novel by Malaysian-born writer Rani Manicka. It is the multi-generational story of one family, beginning with Lakshimi, the matriarch to six children, three grandchildren, and a great-grandchild. It is a story of love and loss, betrayal and deceit, and of remorse and redemption. 

Lakshmi was born in 1916 in Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka..At the age of fourteen, Lakshmi is married off to a wealthy man named Ayah who has a job in what is then called Malaya. The man is much older than she, a widower with two children. Unknown to Lakshmi or her mother, they’re deceived by the man’s mother. Lakshmi discovers that he is not the wealthy businessman as he was described to her before the marriage. But with no option of returning home, Lakshmi decides to make the best of her life in this new land. 

Lakshmi has six children. The eldest are the twins Lakshmnan and Mohini. Lakshmnan is everything Lakshmi could hope for in a boy but it’s Mohini that she’s most taken with. She’s given birth to the most beautiful girl the heavens could provide her with. After the twins comes Anna, the strong and reliable daughter, followed by Sevenese who becomes enamored with his neighbor, the snake-charmer’s son. Sevenese also realizes that the snake-charmer’s son is in love with his sister Mohini. The youngest is Lalita, everyone’s favorite. 

Life is mostly peaceful and grand. Then the Japanese come and for the three years of the Japanese Occupation, the Imperial Army commits a number of atrocities that the citizens won’t soon forget. The most devastating blow to the family is the kidnapping and killing of their daughter Mohini. This act will change the lives of all the members of the family. 

Lakshmi becomes inconsolable and turns into a cruel and nearly intolerable presence. Lakshmnan blames himself for his sister’s capture and loses himself to loose women and gambling even though he is married and has three children. Ayah, the father, was also taken by the Imperial Japanese Army, tortured and left for dead. He survives and is only a shadow of his former self.

Of Lakshmnan’s three children, Dimple is the spitting image of Mohini. For Dimple, this is more of a curse than a blessing. Dimple decides to make a “dream trail” by asking and taping everyone in her family to tell their stories so she can understand herself. It isn’t until Dimple’s daughter Nisha grows up and is bequeathed a key from her father that the secrets of the past are unlocked. 

I can’t imagine the suffering of losing a loved one during a time of war or how that death will affect everyone surrounding them, but even if the story is fictional, it can make your own family problems seem trivial in comparison. 

Manicka’s beautiful prose of this family epic sometimes reads as an ongoing storyline of an American soap opera such as Days of Our Lives or One Life to Live, not that that’s a bad thing. She writes in such a way that will have the reader gain an understanding of the customs and manners of Tamil and Malay culture. ~Ernie Hoyt

Walking to Samarkand: The Great Silk Road from Persia to Central Asia by Bernard Ollivier, translated by Dab Golembski (Skyhorse Publishing)

The Turkish bus driver thinks he has a madman on his hands when the French passenger of mature years asks to be let off on a deserted stretch of highway, fifteen minutes from any town. But Bernard Ollivier isn’t your typical lunatic; he’s touched by divine madness. Ten months earlier,  he had succumbed to a violent case of dysentery that stopped him from traveling to Tehran on foot. Now he’s back to health and back on his journey, but this time around he’s going to walk to Samarkand.

When Ollivier became a widower, he submerged his grief in a grand plan. After completing a hike down the Santiago Trail, he decided he would walk the length of the Silk Road, from Istanbul to Xi’an. Now at the age of 62, he’s prepared to complete the second leg of this project and nobody’s going to stop him—not police, immigration officials, nor a dumbfounded bus driver. “I refuse to skip even one inch of this road,” he says, and except for one four-mile jaunt in a friendly Iranian’s jeep, Ollivier keeps his word.

With a portion of his first stage still waiting for him to complete it, he faces an additional 560 miles on top of the 1300 miles of his second trek. Afflicted with what he calls “reckless optimism” and what others might say is pure lunacy, Ollivier, aided with a generous supply of anti-diarrheal medication. is taking this stroll in the summer on a route that will lead him into three ferociously hot deserts. At this time of year, he discovers, the desert is even too hot for camels.

The amount of water Ollivier will need is far too much for him to carry but this man is ingenious. Cobbling together a basic cart from bits and pieces that he finds in local markets, off he goes, managing as much as thirty miles a day, under an “inexplicably blue sky.”

He rapidly falls in love with Iran, a country where people turn radiant with “the sheer joy of meeting a passing stranger.” This possibly saves his life, or at least his journey, because there are only a scant number of places where he can sleep or eat along the Silk Road route. Instead he’s met with hospitality that is culturally ingrained and generously practiced. In addition to food and resting places, Ollivier is offered clandestine vodka, served warm, and puffs of opium. In Iran, smoking taryak is commonplace among laborers and is offered as a matter of course, and although he risks a flogging by accepting the vodka, he turns down the opium.

Instead water becomes his primary addiction; he drinks 12 liters in a matter of hours while making his way through the “fire pit” of the deserts. Facing temperatures that soar as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit, he goes through a “baptism of solar fire,” learning to walk in the early and the evening hours, with a break between 1 and 4 in the afternoon. His skin is rubbed raw by his sweat-soaked clothing as he walks through sand “as soft as skin,” in “waves of shifting gold.” 

“I’m getting high on walking,” he confesses and has to force himself to stop for the day. He finds that six p.m. is the hour of conversation in desert villages and the men who gather to chat at day’s end bring him into their circle, offering hospitality that is often wordless. When a translator is part of the scene, the questions can become unexpected. “Are your teeth your own,” Ollivier is asked by one elderly gentleman.

Ollivier loves Iran, “a welcome interlude of relative cleanliness” between the “pervasive filth” of Turkmenistan and Turkey. But. as a true Frenchman, he’s enchanted by one of his first sights in Turkmenistan, a girl with long blonde hair, wearing a miniskirt. “After three months of chadors, it’s a magical sight,” he admits. And he’s astounded when he reaches the Amu Darya, “not a river, it’s a sea…rushing between two barren banks.”

To cross it, there’s no bridge, only a string of linked barges with a narrow passageway for pedestrians, “more like a horizontal stairway than a bridge.” But soon after he reaches its end, Ollivier is at the Uzbekistan border where the officer in charge allows him entry with a jovial “OK. Go, boy!”

His goal is announced rather prosaically with “a concrete mushroom the size of a water tower,” a far cry from the turquoise-domed roofs Ollivier has dreamed of, but after four months and 1706 miles of walking, he’s not complaining. Samarkand ensnares him. He sleeps for two days, moving only from bed to table and back again, looking back on his “marvelous, extraordinary harvest of encounters.” He spends hours in the bazaars where sensory overload  leaves him “wearier than if I had spent the entire day on the road.” “I could never,” he concludes, “have dreamt of a more exciting, exalting destination than this.”

Still the road beckons. In ten more months, Ollivier will set off on a 1600 mile journey that will take him to China, the Turfan Oasis in Xinjiang Province, the Taklamkan Desert, and into Kashgar. What if, he wonders, instead of educating, “travel actually ‘de-educated you,” by having you think and do things you never thought possible? It’s a de-education that Ollivier, with his humor and his stunning descriptive powers, makes unbelievably enticing. After he completes his four-volume account of his long walk, of which this book is the third, armchair travel will never be the same again.~Janet Brown

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga (Free Press)

Between the Assassinations is Aravind Adiga’s second published novel, although he wrote it before the acclaimed book, The White Tiger. The title of the book refers to the time between the assassination of India’s then-Prime Minister, Indira Ghandi in 1984 and the assassination of her son, Rajiv Ghandi, who became India’s Prime Minister that same year. It is a collection of short stories set in the fictional city of Kittur which is modeled on Adiga’s hometown of Mangalore in the state of Karnataka.

Kittur is located on the southwestern coast of India, between Goa and Calicut. It is bordered by the Arabian Sea on the west, and by the Kaliamma River to the south and east. The monsoon season starts in June and lasts until September. After that, the weather becomes dry and cool and is suggested as the best time to visit. 

Before each story, we are given a little history of the city and how the town is laid out. In the middle of the town is a pornographic theater called the Angel Talkies. Unfortunately for the town, people give directions by using Angel Talkies as a reference point. We learn that the official language of the city is Kannada, but many of the residents also speak Tulu, which no longer has a written script, and Konkani, which is used by the upper-caste Brahmins. The city has a population of 193, 432 and “only 89 declare themselves to be without caste or religion”. 

The story takes place over a week in the city starting with a visitor’s arrival at the train station. We are first introduced to a twelve-year-old Muslim boy named Ziauddin. He is hired by a man named Ramanna Shetty who runs a tea and samosa place near the railway station. The man tells Ziauddin “it was okay for him to stay. Provided he promised to work hard. And keep away from all hanky-panky”. However, Ziauddin begins to work for a Muslim man who pays him for counting trains and the number of Indian soldiers in them. It isn’t until Ziauddin asks why the man has him counting trains that he understands that his employer is not as kind as he thought.

We meet a man named Abassi who has a case of conscience. He is a shirt factory owner whose employees are going blind from their poor working conditions. He must decide if he should close the factory to save his workers from doing further damage to their eyes, while having to deal with corrupt government officials. 

Ramakrishna, known to the locals as Xerox, sells counterfeit copies of books. He has been arrested a number of times and has been told to stop what he’s doing but he lives to make books and sell them. His latest goal after getting out of jail is to only sell copies of The Satanic Verses by Salmon Rushdie. 

Adiga’s stories are full of characters who deal with an array of problems still affecting India today. Class struggles and religious persecution, poverty, the caste system, and political corruption are just some of the topics covered. The stories reads as satires on Indian life and are filled with humor and angst. Although his description of Kittur makes it seem like a dirty, crowded and dangerous city, you can’t help but want to go and visit it to see it for yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt

Another Bangkok: Reflections on the City by Alex Kerr (Penguin Random House UK)

Alex Kerr made a name for himself as a leading foreign expert on Japan when he won the Shincho Gakugei Literary Prize in 1994 for the best work of nonfiction published that year in Japan. Kerr was the first foreigner to have won this prize with Lost Japan, a book he wrote in Japanese. By that time, Kerr had lived in Japan for seventeen years, the country he had chosen as a home when he was still in his twenties. 

Three years later, Kerr established a second home in Bangkok, dividing his time between Thailand and Japan.  Within five years of that decision, he published Bangkok Found, a book of essays about his new life and what he discovered there. Twelve years later, he expanded upon that theme with new discoveries and a different focus, one that echoes the theme of Lost Japan, “the past and what it has to teach us.”

Another Bangkok is Kerr’s search for the “wellsprings” of culture that underpin the “chaos and ugliness” of Thailand’s primate city. He finds a wealth of “kaleidoscopically complex cultural traditions” that were originally adopted from India, Cambodia, and China and were transformed into an amalgamation that is completely Thai. Sri Lankan stupas and Angkor’s towers have become slender and elongated in their Thai incarnations. The Buddha rose from his seated position and began to walk gracefully under the hands of Sukkothai sculptors. The ceramics of China were translated into vessels of riotous color when Thai craftsmen began to use Benjarong’s five colors, bright, controlled, and dazzlingly ornate. Even Western skyscrapers have taken on surprising shapes as they dominate the Bangkok skyline, using the traditional Thai features of teak pillars and delicately curved roofs. 

Bangkok, Kerr says, is rooted in this sort of adaptivity. The enshrined city pillars are based on the lingam of Angkor. “They’re really Khmer,” a Thai aristocrat told him. The Grand Palace, Thailand’s primary national symbol, is a “treasure house” of elements from different cultures, combined into a glorious extravaganza of “exotic fantasy.”

Kerr finds quite a bit of exotic fantasy in his examination of Thai traditional culture and he writes about it beautifully. His essay on the Grand Palace alone is stunning, giving a whole new view to what has become a visual cliche. But in his following essays, his focus becomes diluted. Traffic jams and tangles of electrical wires invade his examination of Thai floral art and a discursion into sex tourism interrupts his look at classical Thai dance. His own experiences in Bangkok are mentioned in passing, along with some of his memories from Japan, in a way that’s frequently more annoying than it is illuminating. Why, for example, are expats even discussed in a book that purports to be about traditional Thai culture? Not even Kerr seems to know, torn as he is between regarding his own kind as a form of beneficial and creative “yeast” in the city or “a hair in the soup.”

Kerr seems to find comfort in the creation of “a beautiful surface” that’s more important than substantial content, a practice that he finds in Thailand as much as he has in Japan. Another Bangkok slides gracefully over its own beautiful surface, a fusion of memoir and research that’s essentially “charming but trivial,” much more like a series of articles written for a variety of magazines than a thoughtful and coherent book. ~Janet Brown

A Bridge Between Us by Julie Shigekuni (Anchor Books)

Julie Shigekuni is a fifth-generation Japanese American and her first novel, A Bridge Between Us is the story of a Japanese immigrant family. It isn’t about the struggle of being Japanese in America, it is the story of one family, four generations of an immigrant family all living under the same roof. 

The story focuses on four generations of women who live together in a house in San Francisco: Reiko, the matriarch, whose father traveled from Japan with his wife to the U.S. in 1898, Rio, her daughter who is always at odds with her mother, and Tomoe, the wife of Goro, Rio’s son. Tomoe is the mother of two daughters, Nomi and Melodie. 

Each chapter is told through the eyes of one of the main characters. It opens with Reiko talking about the death of her father and how he told her, “Never forget who you are. You are the daughter of a princess.” Reiko has never met her mother. She only knows her through the stories told by her father. She knows that her mother’s name was Misao and whenever Reiko would ask her father, “Where’s Misao now?” Her father would always respond, “She’s visiting her mother in Japan” or “She is in a boat on her way home”. 

Rio starts to tell her story from the bed of her hospital room after an attempted suicide. She starts to reminisce about her relationship with her mother. Tomoe, her daughter-in-law visits her in the hospital and tells her that Granny (Reiko) has been causing trouble again. Nobody in the family understands why she tried to kill herself. It’s Tomoe who says to her, “I know that you must want to live or you would have let go long ago.”

Nomi is only seven years old when her grandmother Rio tried to kill herself. This is her earliest memory. We follow Nomi as she deals with growing pains, trying to please her mother by helping her take care of Grandma Rio and Granny Reiko. She sometimes feels trapped and finds solace in the arms of different boys. She has dreams of going to Japan but doesn’t speak a word of Japanese. At times, she seems to suffer from an identity crisis. 

Tomoe is the pillar of strength among the four women. She is the second oldest of her eight sisters. Her father was a fisherman who one day went out to sea and never came back. She remembers her older sister Miwa taking care of her, while she watched over her six younger sisters. She is the woman who takes care of Reiko and Rio. She also raises her two daughters as best as she can. 

A Bridge Between Us is a story about secrets and betrayals, hopes and dreams. It is not about the difficulties of being Japanese in America or being an American with a Japanese face. It is a story about family and the bonds that bind them—four strong women with four strong personalities covering a span of more than fifty years. 

The story can be dark and depressing at times as Shigekuni takes you on a roller-coaster ride of emotional highs and lows. As with any family, there will always be love and conflict. It is only a matter of how you react to any family situation that you find out what kind of person you really are. ~Ernie Hoyt

Clara’s Diary: An American Girl in Meiji Japan by Clara A. N. Whitney (Kodansha)

Two decades after Commodore Perry’s “Black Ships” came to Tokyo, William Whitney arrived in that city to establish its first national business college in 1875. His wife Anna saw this as an opportunity to advance Christianity in Japan and insisted on coming with her husband, along with their three children. Her daughter Clara was fourteen when she came to the country that would be her home and from the first day of her arrival she recorded the details of her new life with enthusiasm, humor, and careful observation.

It’s easy to be ensnared by Clara’s charm and her honesty that verges on the indiscreet. Within minutes of clearing Customs, she embarks on her first jinriksha ride which she finds “absolutely too ridiculous for anything,” particularly when her father, slower than the rest, is forced to race behind his wife’s conveyance, yelling “Stop!” After two weeks, she’s entrusted with the “keys and apron” of housekeeping, adapting to cooking stoves that are roughly the same size as a flowerpot, noticing the number of handsome Japanese men on the street, and struggling to describe beauty of the purple and gold sunsets that illuminate Fujiyama. Clara is obviously made for living in Japan, and she does that, eventually marrying the son of a highly placed Japanese statesman with whom she had five children, according to the lengthy introduction to this book.  (The Library of Congress brief biography says she had six.)

Her diary is as lively and fascinating as a good romance novel but Clara is too observant to lapse into that category. On her fifteenth birthday she’s taken to the Akusa Kannon Temple,  where she’s fascinated by a statue of the god of health whose face has been so smoothed by the hands of worshippers that it has “neither eyes, nor nose or mouth.” Her Christian viewpoint at first emerges in a ridicule that fades rapidly as her diary progresses--although Clara’s faith is palpable, her interest in rituals and ceremony becomes almost anthropological, without condescension or censure. An earthquake that lasts a full minute and a fire that consumes twenty thousand houses within a six-mile space does nothing to quench her enthusiasm for a place that, within two months, she knows she’ll be sad to leave. 

Political and economic matters are largely ignored by Clara, although a Christmas visit from a young prince of the powerful Tokugawa clan leads to her assessment of his appearance, “very dignified.” Months later she and her mother are invited to the prince’s mansion, where the prince, his attendants, and all of his servants are assembled to greet them. The unexpected reception throws Clara into an unusual speechlessness until everyone takes refuge in the informality of croquet. “Mr. Tokugawa won, of course. (I wonder why he always won?)”

The Whitneys fall under the protection of the Katsu family, whom Clara will later became part of by marriage. Her friendship with the family provides insights into the domestic lives of the Japanese nobility, as well as a bloodcurdling eyewitness account of the earthquake of 1855 that killed 10,000, told to Clara by a survivor. Clara herself is an eyewitness to the funeral procession of the Emperor’s aunt, a parade of foot-soldiers, cavalry, infantry, professional mourners, priests, maids-of-honor, and the nobility taking part in “perhaps the last funeral pageant which shall ever pass through the streets.” 

After three years in Tokyo, Clara is rather harsh in her assessments of the foreign visitors that she meets. Isabella Bird she characterizes as “a very disagreeable old maid,” and when former president U. S. Grant comes to town, she hopes “he will give up drinking so hard.” It’s thanks to the hard-drinking president that she’s witness to a jousting tournament : fencing, archery by mounted horsemen, and equestrian feats, concluded with daytime fireworks in the shape of “ladies, fans, umbrellas, fish, gourds and other amusing things.” A visit to Mrs. Grant takes Clara into the Summer Palace, a place that has the president’s wife in awe. Even Clara is impressed with the “doors and woodwork lacquered with gold molding” and “the walls covered with elegant Japanese screen paper.” She’s less impressed with Mrs. Grant, who “has very few ladylike traits,” when regarded by a young woman schooled in Japanese etiquette.

Although Clara describes several Japanese weddings, she fails to give a picture of her own, or of her life as a wife and mother. When she’s forty, Clara returns to the States with her children and without her husband. She begins to write articles about Japan to supplement the money her husband sends to her from Tokyo.

After almost twenty-five years in Japan, this must have been a difficult, painful transition for Clara and her children that deserves a whole other volume of its own. Her published diary is only ¼ of its original length, part of a “lifetime record” written in English and Japanese that one of her daughters has given to the Library of Congress. Her papers, 75 items in four containers taking up 1.6 linear feet, including speeches, short stories and an unpublished novel, are open to researchers.

However Clara at forty had learned the discretion that Clara at fourteen had yet to acquire. Her journals, at least the ones that have been passed down, end in 1887. Clara left Japan twelve years later, wrapped in the self-containment that she had learned in her adopted country.~Janet Brown

The Complete Story of Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Sue DiCicco and Masahiro Sasaki (Tuttle)

There are many books about the story of the thousand paper cranes which were first created to commemorate the children who lost their lives during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and for those who suffered afterwards, even many years later, from their exposure to radiation. They have become an international symbol of peace. 

Sadako Sasaki was a twelve-year-old girl whose story has often been repeated in a number of publications. However, author Sue DiCicco says in the preface of this 2020 publication, “So much of what I’ve read about Sadako was contradictory and felt incomplete.” The author wanted more details about her life story, what she went through, and how her family remembers her. 

DiCicco’s curiosity led her to contact Sadako’s brother Maashiro Sasaki. Together, they collaborated on bringing new light to Sadako’s story as seen through the eyes of someone who was there with his little sister when the atomic bomb dropped. Now Tuttle has published The Complete Story of Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Paper Cranes. 

Sadako Sasaki was born on January 7, 1943. Her father Shigeo owned and ran a barbershop. Her mother, Fujiko, gave birth to her in a neighbor’s rickshaw when he was doing his best to take her to the hospital at four in the morning. They named her Sadako whose kanji character, 禎 means “happiness”. 

On the morning of August 6, 1945 an air raid alarm sounded and all the citizens of the city hurried to go to one of the shelters and listen for the “all clear” signal. The plane had only passed over the city and the “all clear” was sounded. 

As the family was about to eat breakfast, they heard people yelling outside. They also went to investigate. The grandmother was not interested in the airplane and called them back to the table. Just as they sat down at the table, “the city lit up with what seemed like the brightness of a thousand suns, followed immediately by an enormous explosion”. 

The unthinkable had happened. For the first time in history, an atomic bomb was dropped on a populated area of a city, killing an estimated 80,000 people instantly. Sadako Sasaki was only two years old. 

It would be almost ten years later when the affects of the atomic bomb manifested in Sadako. Although her parents did not want to believe it, Sadako was diagnosed with leukemia. It was 1955 and back then leukemia was incurable. 

One day Sadako received a long string of colorful cranes folded for the patients by the Red Cross Youth Club at Aichi Shukutoku High School. Sadako didn’t yet know the significance of its meaning. Her father explained that “giving paper cranes to someone in the hospital means that you hope they’ll get well soon”.

He also told her the legend of the crane. It is said that it can live for one thousand years. “An ancient Japanese legend promises that anyone who folds one thousand cranes, one for each year of a crane’s life, will be granted a wish. This story made cranes a favorite gift for anyone experiencing a life event, especially someone getting married or suffering from an illness.” 

The story inspired Sadako to reach the goal of folding one thousand paper cranes herself. She wanted her wish to come true. She “wanted to be well, to return to school, and to live with her family again”. 

Sadako accomplished her goal but she didn’t get any better. Instead of feeling bitter or sorry for herself, she thought she would just fold another one thousand. Sadako Sasaki died on October 25, 1955 at the tender age of twelve. 

Her death inspired her friends and schoolmates to build a monument in memory of her and of all the children who died from the effects of the atomic bomb. They raised enough money and on May 5, 1958 it was unveiled. It is located in the Memorial Peace Park in Hiroshima, Japan. It has the title of 原爆の子の像 (Genbaku no Ko no Zo) which directly translates to “Atomic Bomb Children Statue”. The title of the monument in English is the “Children’s Peace Monument.” 

Sadako’s story is a story of inspiration and courage. It is also a testament to the horrors of war. The story of her life carries an important message, one that we should take heed of, to strive for peace and to work together to accomplish that goal. ~Ernie Hoyt

Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie (Knopf)

Chinese French writer, Dai Sijie, author of the highly acclaimed book Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is back with another morsel of literary delight, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch. It is his second novel which was originally published in French in 2003 with the title Le complexe de Di. 

It is the story of Mr. Muo, a psychoanalyst who has studied Freud in Paris for a number of years. He has returned to China to ply his trade as an interpreter of dreams. However, Mr. Muo has an ulterior motive for going back to his homeland. He wants to save his unrequited love from his university days, whom he calls Volcano of the Old Moon, who is currently being held as a political prisoner. 

It was a few months prior that Mr. Muo pleaded his case for his university crush to a man known as Judge Di. His argument “rested mainly on ten thousand dollars in cash”. The judge, whose full name is Di Jiangui, was known to be a former member of an elite firing squad during Chairman Mao’s China during the Cultural Revolution. Judge Di had “been the first to establish a fee of one thousand dollars for his pardon of a criminal offence”. 

Unfortunately for Mr. Muo, keeping in step with the rising cost of living, Judge Di had increased his fee tenfold by the time his university crush was arrested. As luck would have it, the lawyer appointed to Volcano of the Moon’s case informs Mr. Muo of an alternative. He tells Mr. Muo,  Judge Di has a weakness for young virgins. If Mr. Muo can find a suitable candidate, he might be able to free his love. 

Mr. Muo convinces his neighbor, a forty-year old embalmer, to help him in his quest to save the love of his life. The Embalmer is a widow whose husband jumped out of the window to his death on the same day as their wedding before consummating the marriage. It turns out he was a closet homosexual. The Embalmer agrees and a date is set but things go awry.

Judge Di has one other passion besides virgins. He is fond of playing mahjong and will often go without eating or sleeping for twenty-four hours. At a recent mahjong game, he had been playing for three days straight, again without eating or sleeping, which caused him to keel over. The Embalmer is given the task of conducting his autopsy. 

The autopsy is a disaster as Judge Di is prematurely declared dead. He woke up believing that the woman in front of him is his virgin to deflower. The Embalmer screams and is later arrested. Mr. Muo believes the authorities will come for him and charge him with being an accomplice to commit murder. And yet, now that Mr. Muo realizes Judge Di is still alive, he feels he might once again be able to help Volcano of the Old Moon. 

And thus begins Mr. Muo’s real journey. His search for a virgin will lead him to a wildlife preserve which is home to one wandering panda. He will visit an insane asylum in the countryside. He will manage to set up shop in the Domestic Workers Market, a place where Mr. Muo “never imagined such a dreamscape existed—a realm of only girls”.  In his quest, he will also face a hostile tribe of men called the Lolo. 

Dai Sijie’s Mr. Muo can be aggravating at times. He is a brilliant intellectual but is lacking in social skills, especially when it comes to women. We learn that he is also a forty-year-old virgin who can discuss sex but has never had sex himself.

Will Mr. Muo be successful in his search? Will he be able to free his university sweetheart? Will communist China welcome the Western study of psychoanalysis? The only way to find out is to follow Mr. Muo in his extraordinary adventure. ~Ernie Hoyt

Take No Names by Daniel Nieh (HarperCollins, release date July 5, 2022)

Fasten those seatbelts and hold on tight. From the first page to the last of this puzzling thriller, Daniel Nieh keeps readers guessing with unanticipated twists and hairpin curves taken at breakneck speed. 

Dennis Lao is almost an invisible man in Seattle’s Chinatown, one in a crowd of waiters and dishwashers who are paid under the table, rent rooms filled with bunkbeds, and sleep in shifts. Lao has lived this way for sixteen months. Before that he was Victor Li, an affluent guy who “grew up with a white mom, a free-spirited sister, a golden retriever, and a Playstation 3.” That came to an end when his father is brutally murdered and Li learns where the money came from. Sun Jianshui, a “mild-mannered assassin,” arrives from China, introduces himself as an enforcer employed by Li’s father, and takes Li on a quest for revenge that ends in another death. Now Victor Li is Dennis Lao, on the run with a warrant out for his arrest.

But the guy is a self-confessed adrenaline junkie. With a friend he’s met at a martial arts gym, he ends up rummaging through storage units run by Homeland Security, scavenging the confiscated belongings of deportees. That’s how he ends up on the run once again, in possession of a sizable gemstone, painite, the rarest in the world, worth $65,000 a carat. His friend drives the getaway car and Li has the address of a potential buyer. They’re headed for  Mexico City.

Once they cross the border, they’re plunged into a morass of pulque bars, political dissidents, a controversial Chinese construction project, American goons named after cheap beers, and head-spinning deceit. These boys simply cannot catch a break or make a good decision. Lucky for them that Li’s sister manages to track them down, accompanied by the assassin who killed her father. Jules and Sun have formed an unlikely alliance--and with her brains and his array of talents, (not all of them homicidal), the Hard Luck Twins just might come out of this alive.

Sprinkled generously through this noir adventure are looks at geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China, the economic hegemony that China is weaving across the globe in competition with the U.S., the political power of drug cartels, and some fascinating glimpses of DF, Distrito Federal, the 573-square-mile capital that’s known as Mexico City.

Nieh is quite obviously enthralled by this metropolis and was fortunate in having the thirty-two-year DF resident and author, David Lida, as his friend while he was there. Under Lida’s guidance, Nieh was given the background that he uses to depict dive bars, street markets, and religious shrines in enticing and sometimes harrowing detail. He has the observation skills of a good journalist, deftly describing the Seattle sky, “always near at hand, bearing down, making problems bigger,” the carnivalesque vibrancy of Mexico City streets, and the presiding saint of the city, Santa Muerte, “a black-robed skeleton with rhinestone eyes and a Mona Lisa smile.” 

Even more frightening than the Saint of Death are the economic strangleholds that threaten Mexico, exerted by mammoth corporations owned by Chinese and American magnates. When Nieh takes readers inside the Baoli Tower, home of a global construction empire with Chinese ownership, this is a place even more chilling than the palatial compound of the foremost cartel leader. Deftly he turns real-life threats into fiction, believe them or not. 

With equal skill, Daniel Nieh has perfected the art of the cliffhanger ending and the ability to transform a sequel that’s possibly part of a series into a free-standing adventure. Although it’s a fine idea to read Beijing Payback, the novel that introduced Victor Li, that’s only because it’s such a good book. Take No Names stands on its own without a required preamble, one of the books most likely to be tucked in a suitcase after its publication in July--especially if vacation plans include a trip to Mexico City. ~Janet Brown

The Prince, the Demon King, and the Monkey Warrior retold by Janet Brown (ThingsAsian Press)

The Prince, the Demon King, and the Monkey Warrior is the retelling of a Hindu epic called Ramanaya which is attributed to a fifth century B.C.E. poet named Valmiki. It tells the story of the life of Prince Rama, the first-born son of King Dasarat in the country of Ayodhya. The story opens with King Dasarat speaking to one of his advisors. 

King Dasarat is a wealthy man without any enemies. He has four wives and yet says to his advisor, “I am sadder than the poorest peasant in my country.” He believes the peasants are richer than he is. They may be poor and have no possessions of their own and they live grueling lives but they have one thing that King Dasarat doesn’t have—a son. 

The wise man helps the king and his four queens each had a son within a year. The oldest is Rama, who “from the day he was born, made everyone feel happy.” Barat is the second son, a righteous individual who supported those around him. The third son is Satrugan and the youngest is Lakshaman who is always very loyal to his eldest brother Rama. 

The King informs his sons that the land is being torn apart by two demons and that the wise men of the forest have told him that only his oldest son would be able to defeat them, yet he did not want to burden his child with this news. 

Rama is a dutiful son and does not hesitate to take up the challenge. His youngest brother says he would join Rama on his quest. The two sons travel far and wide and defeat the demons without any problems. On their way home, they set foot in another kingdom whose king is said to be as wise as their father. 

Rama meets his soon-to-be wife, Sita in the kingdom. The two marry and live a happy, peaceful life for many years. Rama’s aging father tells his son that he is going to abdicate and Rama will be King the following day. However, the mother of Barat, Kaikeyi, is fooled by her evil maidservant Mantara. The distressed Kaikeyi pleads with the king to fulfill one of her wishes that he had yet to grant her. 

So it comes to pass that Rama is exiled from his home for four fourteen years while Barat is crowned King. Lakshaman follows his brother and his wife into exile. They settle in a land surrounded by evil demons. A She-Demon that has the power to transform herself into anybody she wishes tries to trick Rama into making him believe she is his wife. When he tells her he already has a wife, she then shows her true form but is disfigured by Lakshaman and runs back to her home. 

One of the She-Demons brothers is Ravan, the Demon King. He sends an army of demons to kill Rama but they all end up dead except for one. It is this demon that convinces King Ravan that the best way to defeat Rama is to kidnap his wife and make her his own. 

The King of the Demons manages to kidnap Sita and now Rama finds himself on a quest to save his wife. With the help of Hanuman, the Monkey Warrior, Rama defies all odds to save the love of his life. 

This modern retelling will appeal to everyone, young and old alike. The full-color illustrations by Vladimir Verano bring life to the story. It is a beautiful introduction to the culture of India as seen through one of its most popular stories. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Artisans: A Vanishing Chinese Village by Shen Fuyu, trans. Jeremy Tiang (Astra House)

Forget about Wordle. Dismiss Quordle as a puzzle for amateurs. If you really want to send your brain into convulsions, pick up The Artisans and enter a never-ending maze.

This book begins innocently enough—it traces the past hundred years in a village that’s been in place for six centuries. Founded by a distant ancestor of the author, Shen Village was a community held in place by “rules formed around customs, ways of thinking and agreements,” where the residents were either related by blood or by proximity. Self-sufficient for most of its lifetime, it is now dying out, with its children leaving for the opportunities of urban life and factories encroaching upon its farmland. Shen Fuyu hasn’t lived there since he was eighteen but he says “When our hometowns vanish, we become rootless people.” Drawing upon stories from his grandfathers and his father, as well as his own memories, he recreates a web of craftsmen who formed and strengthened the fabric of Shen Village and whose deaths ensured the death of their community. 

At first the villagers’ stories seem like a form of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, without the magic but with all the familiar characters—The Tailor, The Carpenter, The Blacksmith, The Clever Girl, The Village Beauty. The fortune of two different families are both destroyed in fires; one family recovers, the other disintegrates. A feud over property rights and a political execution are both touched upon in passing and later are shown to be linked. All of these misfortunes are the roots of pivotal events, with the connections between them revealed slowly and tortuously in convoluted tragedies. 

Imagine working on a jigsaw puzzle where all of the pieces keep shifting. At a certain point, it becomes obvious that this book needs to be read with paper and a pen close by. Mrs. Fifth Life, introduced briefly at the very beginning as the powerful widow of The Scale Operator’s Son, shows up near the end as a girl whose courage and brilliance rivals Scheherazade’s. The toothless old woman who was once The Village Beauty is the leading figure in a multi-generational tragedy. Craftsmen identified only by their trades are called by their real names much later, bringing them into complex family relationships that are as intricate as spiderwebs.

“That’s how life is, a series of interlocking circles,” Shen Fuyu says as he nears the end of his social history. Suddenly the interlocking circles of Shen Village become part of a galaxy, one of hundreds of thousands of similar communities across China, and the jigsaw puzzle becomes immense, a taste of infinity.

Shen Fuyu’s hometown, in common with other dying villages in China, has a shrine that holds the ancestral tablets, “a place to worship the ancestors of long ago, everyone’s common forbears.” If this shrine disappears, the villagers are left “all alone in the world.” The Artisans exists as a record of what once was. Through the stories of the people whose work kept a community alive, it serves as a modern form of ancestral tablet, anchoring the descendants of Shen Village to their own history and to the history of the world.~Janet Brown

The Sushi Economy : Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg (Gotham)

Sasha Issenberg takes us on a journey to learn the history and evolution of a culinary item that people once discarded or used as cat food. The Sushi Economy introduces us to the world of tuna from its humble beginning as a cheap and easy to make street snack in Edo, the old name for Tokyo, to its prominence in the culinary world as a must have and must eat item for the jet set. 

Issenberg makes it clear that this is not the first book about sushi. It is not a cookbook “filled with glamorous food photography and do-it-yourself instruction on how to reproduce those delectable morsels. These books tend to suggest that all one needs to make sushi are a sharpened knife, plastic-wrapped bamboo mat, traditional wooden spatula, and Japanese pantry staples such as short-grain rice, vinegar, and dried seaweed.”

Issenbert believes that to understand the world of sushi culture, one needs to read about what goes into the making of suchi. It has to be “a narrative about the development of twentieth-century global capitalism”. He further states, “A book that wants to revel in the beauty and deliciousness of sushi must be a celebration of globalization. This is that book.”

Issenberg sets up the book in four separate sections. Part One deals with the freight economy and the logistics of moving bluefin tuna from the Atlantic to the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, Japan. It describes in detail the birth of modern sushi. Before sushi became a familiar item around the world, it was considered worthless throughout the world, the only market for the red tuna was as pet food. 

Part Two covers the food economy and how many young and ambitious entrepreneurs went about setting up sushi restaurants around the world and about their efforts to receive the best cuts of tuna from the world’s oceans. 

Part Three deals with the fish economy. The job of catching tuna in the wild is sporadic and uneven. The fisherman is never sure if his or her catch is going to win the jackpot for him. In order to make it possible for diners around the world to enjoy fresh tuna year round, Issenberg investigates the development of fish ranching for Bluefin Tuna. 

Finally, in Part Four, Issenberg discusses the future of the Tuna industry. The Atlantic Bluefin Tuna and others are in danger of being overfished and the world’s supplies are dwindling at a rapid rate. To solve the problem and to find more sustainable solutions, an organization called the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna was formed. The organization is known by the moniker of ICCAT and is called “eye cat”. 

Unfortunately for ICCAT, the organization has a high hurdle to overcome. The group has set rules for signatory nations but has no way of enforcing them. “Tuna is, like air, a placeless common resource, so it suffers from what economists call the commons problem : An individual nation has no motivation to limit its catches alone, since everyone else will continue to benefit.”

“The national fisheries that should be implementing ICCAT rules end up doing little but protecting their own lawbreakers against foreign intruders.” An American environmentalist, Carl Safina, had this to say about ICCAT. He said that ICCAT “might as well stand for International Conspiracy to Catch All the Tunas”. 

This book will appeal to foodie and economists alike. It is an interesting look into the world of how the tuna business evolved. As Michiyo Murata said in a 2010 New York Times article, “Originally, fish with red flesh were looked down on in Japan as a low-class food, and white fish were much preferred. ... Fish with red flesh tended to spoil quickly and develop a noticeable stench, so in the days before refrigeration, the Japanese aristocracy despised them, and this attitude was adopted by the citizens of Edo.”

As the child of a Japanese mother, I was exposed to sushi at an early age. However, I adopted the position of my American father who believed that raw fish was only good for fish bait or cat food. It wasn’t until I was older and perhaps wiser that I began to realize what I was missing. I will never forget my first taste of tuna, or magura as it’s now known. My mother jokingly offered me some while believing I would never eat it. I surprised my mother and myself saying, sure, I will try it. I dipped the maguro sashimi in soy sauce with a bit of wasabi, and said to my mother, “It’s not bad. It’s pretty good” to which she responded, “NO!! Don’t say that, It’s too expensive!!” She certainly didn’t want to share any of her maguro with me!! ~Ernie Hoyt

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville by Akash Kapur (Scribner)

History puts Utopia in a bad light. The concept has never worked very well, drenched as it is in failure, death, and tragedy. But what if the effort to achieve the ideal community simply has never been given the time it needs to evolve? The process isn’t pretty, as Akash Kapur shows in his story of “the quest for Utopia” in a barren region of India, but the end result is a town with an international population that thrives in a setting of “vibrant forest.” What was once “a moonscape” is now “a global model of environmental conservation.” But are the results worth the human sacrifice that this achievement demanded?

The “intentional community” of Auroville was born because of the unlikely meeting of three very different people: Sri Aurobindo, a Cambridge-educated Indian mystic, a wealthy French matron, Blanche Alfassa who believes in visions made incarnate, and a young Frenchman who spent his youth in concentration camps. Madame Alfassa recognizes Sri Aurobindo as the Indian seer who came to her in her dreams. She becomes his leading disciple and is known by the name he gives her, The Mother. Bernard, weighted to the breaking point by his years in the death camps, meets The Mother just before Sri Aurobindo dies, putting her at the forefront of the seer’s following. She gives Bernard a new name and, as Satprem, he becomes her primary henchman, propelled by the belief that The Mother is divine.

The Mother has a dream and at the age of 87, she reveals it to the world. She buys 90 acres of barren ground and announces this will become a “Tower of Babel in reverse,” an international community” that will belong “to humanity as a whole.” Three years later, the first settlers arrive, finding an empty desert.

Others join them, from India, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States. They become obsessed with finding shelter, water, and food; they dig wells and build huts with their bare hands. They gather seeds that they find within animal droppings and nurture crops of native plants. An administrative group formed by The Mother raises funds and disburses money to Auroville’s inhabitants, who espouse a subsistence economy that has reduced them to peasants. Then The Mother dies and the money begins to trickle away. 

Political schisms crack through the utopian surface of Auroville and a form of cultural revolution blazes through the hearts and minds of the residents. Satprem has convinced most of them that The Mother is a divinity and the prevailing belief is she will provide them with what they need. She will heal the sick and bring up the children while the healthy adults work to venerate her memory. Medicine and education are regarded as unnecessary and the energy of Auroville is spent in building a multi-storied  edifice that will house The Mother’s spirit. 

Within this maelstrom of belief and chaos, two people become the poster children for disaster. A devout member of Auroville, a young Belgian beauty, falls from the heights of the construction project and is permanently paralyzed. The man who loves her, a wealthy patrician from New York who devotes his fortune to Auroville, becomes ill. Both of them refuse the medical help that would save them and they die young, with one survivor.

The woman’s daughter, Auroalice, has known no other world but Auroville. At fourteen she’s semi-educated and semi-feral, having grown up in a tribe of free-range children. She’s adopted by the sister of the wealthy patrician, is taken to live in The Dakota where Lennon and Yoko are her neighbors, and by chance meets a man who had been a childhood friend in Auroville, Akash Kapur. They marry.

Well educated and well off, the two of them live happily in Brooklyn until their pasts begin to claim them. Returning to Auroville with their young sons, they find it’s become a place where they can raise their children safely and happily, as well as a place where their own childhood histories have found peace.

Unsettling and uncomfortable, Better to Have Gone raises troubling questions. Kapur turns to Mao and Robespierre: “Revolution is not a dinner party.” “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” To create this ecological triumph, people died and children were sacrificed. 

Kapur says, “Children of utopias, I’ve come to understand, are like exiles.” He and Auroalice were each rescued in different ways. Kapur’s parents never truly espoused the demands of Auroville; Auroalice became an orphan who was whisked into the wealth of Manhattan after fourteen years of a helter-skelter upbringing. Other children weren’t so fortunate and their stories go untold, “mere expedients on the journey to a new world.”~Janet Brown

Tokyo on Foot : Travels in the City's Most Colorful Neighborhoods by Florent Chavouet (Tuttle)

Florent Chavouet is a graphic artist who spent six months wandering around different neighborhoods in Tokyo while his girlfriend Claire was interning at some company in Japan. This was the only reason why he found himself in Japan.  He would go out with a set of sketchbooks and colored pencils along with a mamachari (a term used for the bicycles that most housewives use) and a folding chair. The result of his stay and his sketches led to the publication of Tokyo on Foot : Travels in the City’s Most Colorful Neighborhoods.

Chavouet’s opening statement in the book is “Tokyo is said to be the most beautiful of ugly cities.”  He also mentions in the beginning, “So this is a book about Japan. About a trip to Tokyo, to be precise. It’s neither a guide nor an adventure story, but that doesn’t mean you’ll avoid the out-of-date addresses of one or the digressive confidences of the other.” 

The six months period of Chavouet’s stay was between June and December, 2006. All the sketches included in the book are Chavouet’s interpretation of what he saw and how he saw the city’s neighborhoods. He has organized the book in which every chapter focuses on a certain neighborhood he visited. “The respective lengths of chapters in no way indicate the relative importance of the neighborhoods in the life of the city but rather my familiarity with them.” 

Each chapter is announced by a koban, a small and very local police station, often referred to as a police box whose officers main job is community policing. The illustration following the koban is a hand drawn map of the area listing the places that Chavouet thought were interesting 

Once you read the blurbs on the map and take the time to absorb it all into your head, then Chavouet then provides full color illustrations of those various neighborhoods, along with the people who inhabit the place, such as the owner of a small shop in Machiya, located in the northern part of Tokyo. He also meets and draws pictures of a woman who runs an okonomiyaki stand in Takadanobaba at the Kotohira-gu Temple. This is where Chavouet also meets a Canadian graphic designer who tells him about his lung operation and meditating on the banks of the Ganges in India. The Canadian leaves and comes back later and handed Chavouet two-thousand yen for no apparent reason. Chavouet jokes it’s “the first money I earned in Japan.” 

In between many of the chapters of the book are “interludes” where Chavouet just indulges himself such as drawing his interpretations of the Strict Salaryman and the Cool Salaryman or the difference between Math Nerd Junior-High Student and Physics Nerd Junior-High Student. These are amusing and humorous and will put a smile on your face. 

He also draws from his experience as he tells us his impression of visiting a manga kissa, a shop that carries manga books, and guessing what the topics are just by looking at the covers. He surmises that the main themes are, “porn (soft, hard, kinky, gay, etc.), romantic stuff, and some sports.” 

As Chavouet mentions, this is not a guidebook, just what he saw and sketched when he wandered around Japan. He explores the neighborhoods of Machiya, Ikebukuro, Takadanobaba, Shinjuku, Shibuya, and more. He visits trendy neighborhoods, downtown neighborhoods, old neighborhoods, and new ones. Every page is a visual treasure.

As a former and long-time resident of Tokyo, I can attest to the accuracy of the neighborhoods Chouvet has visited. His eye for detail is amazing. His illustrations draw you in and make you feel like you’re exploring the neighborhood on your own. If I feel homesick for Tokyo, I can always browse through Chavouet’s book and return anytime I want to. ~Ernie Hoyt

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au ( New Directions)

A dream you can’t quite remember, a path you know well that’s suddenly hidden by fog, a glimpse of a person you think you recognize who turns out to be a stranger--this is the disorientation that comes when reading this slender little book. Is it a mystery, a ghost story, jagged bits of travel memories transformed into a novella? 

A daughter and mother float through an enigmatic sojourn in Japan, together but barely connecting. They are ageless and unnamed, each born into a different language and each living in separate places that go unidentified. The mother carries memories of an early life in Hong Kong, one she left long ago and has shown to her daughter only through fading photos and fragmented stories. The daughter offers her own fragments, using bits of her education to explain things her mother never learned.

But are the two of them really there, together? A hotel clerk insists only one person occupies the room that the daughter and mother share. The mother, after the two spend a day apart, walks toward her daughter as if she were approaching a “ghost she did not want to meet,” her breath released “in a little cloud, like a small departing spirit.” 

“It was strange at once to be so familiar and yet so separated.” This feeling pervades the entire book, filled as it is with the familiar and the disembodied, “halfway between a cliche and the truth.” Slowly the distance between the mother and daughter becomes a visible chasm, their lives so divergent that there’s no middle ground. As the novel unfolds, the daughter takes shape through her stream-of-consciousness memories, while the mother “might as well have been an apparition.” Perhaps she is. The pain of that possibility is never enlarged upon.

Instead readers are whisked along on a strange journey, one that’s so devoid of emotion that it’s almost numb, but embellished with intense and vivid sensory details that come as a constant surprise. “A strong, deliberate wind,” the taste of green tea ice cream that’s “bitter and pleasant,” a lake set within a crater, “uncanny and almost artificial,” persimmons lying “on the ground in a sweet pulp,” are alive and real, with the evocative precision that is usually found only in a poem. The story in its formlessness becomes inclusive, enveloping readers in a world that becomes their own, wrapping them in its avoidance of pain and its fluid impressionistic images.

Writing,” the daughter tells her mother, is “the only way one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been…” As she travels with someone who may not be there, making things as she wished they had been, she offers a space in which others can travel in their own way, with their own companion, “as we wished they had been.”

With the delicate tenacity and strength of a cobweb, Cold Enough for Snow lingers after it’s been read, teasing and tugging, calling for explorations of  its puzzling beauty just one more time. Its sentences carry the weight and comfort of a freshly washed blanket, “fragrant and thick.” in a meditative quest into what’s real, what’s imagined, and how the two realms overlap.~Janet Brown