Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian (Flamingo)

Gao Xingjian is the first Chinese writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, two years after he became a French citizen. His novel Soul Mountain, first published as Lingshan in Taiwan in 1990, was partly inspired by his own experiences of traveling to rural China after mistakenly being diagnosed as having lung cancer. It was first published in English in 2000 in Australia and was translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee. 

There are two main characters who are only referred to as the pronouns “You” and “I”. It’s difficult to distinguish if these characters are one and the same. The reader may wonder if “You” means the person reading the story or if it's a manifestation of an imaginary self to hold conversations with.  

“You” finds himself in a small mountain town in the South. “You” is not exactly sure why he is even here. He explains that it was by pure chance that another person on a train sitting opposite of “You” mentioned that he was going to a place called Lingshan. The man explains that ling means “spirit” or “soul” and shan means “mountain”. 

“You’d been to a lot of places, visited lots of famous mountains, but had never heard of this place.” “You” becomes intrigued with this place that’s located at the source of the You River, another place “You” has never heard of. “You” asks what’s there, “Scenery? Temples? Historic Sites?” only to be told that it’s all virgin wilderness. 

On his journey “You” encounters a woman, only referred to as “She”. They become travel companions and as they become closer, “You” entertains “She” by telling her stories that he just makes up as they journey towards the mountain. 

We are then introduced to “I” who was diagnosed with lung cancer. While “You” goes in search of Lingshan, “I” is mistakenly diagnosed with lung cancer. At first, “I” is resigned to his fate as his father suffered the same outcome. However, once the error is discovered, “I” felt “Death was playing a joke on me but now that I’ve escaped the demon wall, I am secretly rejoicing”. 

“I” is an academic and after being misdiagnosed he decides to take a break from city life. “I” feels he “should have left those contaminated surroundings long ago and returned to nature to look for this authentic life”. It is “I”’s journey that makes up the autobiographical part of the story as “I” travels to the Sichuan province that lies along the Yangtze river to the coast. During his travels, “I” will meet minor ethnic groups such as the Qiang, Miao, and the Yi who are also known by the name Lolo. 

To be honest, I found Xingjian’s style of writing difficult to follow as it is hard to know who exactly are the protagonists. The blending of folklore, travel essay, history and anthropology are mixed into one smorgasbord of a story that seems to have no definitive plot and wanders all over the place. Is this part of the narrative or is it another story that “You” or “I” is making up? If existential psycho-babble is your thing, you might enjoy this. If not, it’s going to be a very difficult read. ~Ernie Hoyt

Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop (W. W. Norton & Company)

A couple of centuries ago, a British diplomat decided the Chinese were “foul feeders and eaters of garlic and other strong-scented vegetables.” Even nowadays, when nutritionists extol the Mediterranean Diet, the Okinawa Diet, and the eating habits practiced by long-lived peasants of the Caucasus Mountains, “Chinese food” is firmly linked in the Western mind with MSG, cornstarch, and fortune cookies. 

British writer Fuchsia Dunlop has spent much of her life debunking this misconception. A food anthropologist of sorts, she fell in love with the food of Sichuan when she was studying in Chengdu and went on to explore the varied cuisines of Chinese regional cooking.  While concentrating on the food of Sichuan (Land of Plenty) and Hunan (Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook), Dunlop has traveled widely throughout China--and wherever she’s been, she’s talked to people about the food they eat and how they cook it. The result of her odyssey is embodied in Every Grain of Rice, a book that’s as much a work of travel literature and a health manual as it is an encyclopedia of recipes and cooking techniques. 

Throughout Chinese history, people have been guided by the words of the philosopher Mencius, who advised “Do not disregard the farmer’s seasons and food will be more than enough,” two millennia before Michael Pollan ‘s famous maxim “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” During her travels, Dunlop, who comes from the land of boiled cabbage and mushy peas, is struck by the preponderance of vegetables in the dishes she eats, all of them made delicious by the flavors they’ve been given. From Beijing to Guangzhou and through the regions in between, meat and fish are used sparingly in everyday meals, almost as condiments that provide a side note of flavor. “It’s interesting,” Dunlop observes, “ to see how modern dietary advice often echoes the age-old precepts of the Chinese table: eat plenty of grains and vegetables and not much meat, reduce consumption of animal fats and eat very little sugar.” Spartan? Stringent? Time-consuming? Not at all. Dunlop describes food that takes “only fifteen minutes to make but is beautiful enough to launch ships,” “with flavors that still amaze me.” 

The secret lies in buying fresh ingredients, collecting an arsenal of flavors to construct a Chinese pantry, which Dunlop carefully explicates, and mastering a few simple techniques which she shows step-by-step in clear photographs. Then the fun begins. 

When was the last time you read a cookbook with an entire section devoted to leafy greens, another to garlic and chives? Have you ever prepared cucumbers or celery or radishes to take center stage in a hot dish? Or cooked with lily bulbs? Or used only two ounces of meat as part of a meal? Dunlop makes all of this enticing, easy, and healthful too--who knew?

As she finds food, she describes the beauty of the countryside: the piercing green of rice fields and bamboo groves in Zhejiang, the dizzying scent of osmanthus blossoms in Hangzhou where the blooms are gathered and used to sweeten meals, the mountainsides of Southern China where “every spare inch is sown with crops.” She tells how strangers happily share their recipes with her when she stops on the street to ask what they’re eating, with stories of the meals she ate while “hanging out with some artist friends and a bunch of local gangsters.” She delves into culinary history in a story of how pirates in centuries past decided who among a ship’s passengers was worth robbing by observing how their prospective victims ate fish. She’s clearly enchanted with the Chinese names for vegetables which turn kohlrabi into “jade turnip” and bean sprouts into “silver sprouts,” transform broccoli into “flower vegetables from the Southwest” and aptly call chard “ox leather greens.” And while she gives rice all the honor that is its due, she warns not to leave it out within four hours of it being cooked nor to keep it for more than three days after preparing it, even if it’s refrigerated. Food poisoning is a distinct possibility for those who ignore her advice.

Even potatoes, those mainstays of Western kitchens, take on a tempting new guise as stir-fried mashed potatoes with “snow vegetable” (preserved mustard greens), made in minutes from leftovers. For devotees of Westernized Chinese food such as the ubiquitous Kung Pao Chicken, Dunlop offers Gong Pao Chicken, the honest-to-god Sichuan original dish as it’s eaten in Chengdu--made with two chicken breasts and ingredients that bring tons of flavor.

Augmenting Dunlop’s recipes and stories are gorgeous photographs of almost every dish, taken by Chris Terry, each one guaranteed to send readers into their kitchens with a bunch of spinach or garlic scapes in hand. Bring on the Chinese Diet--and viva Fuchsia Dunlop!~Janet Brown

T is for Tokyo by Irene Akio (ThingsAsian Press)

Irene Akio was born in Japan but grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her mother and brother. In her youth, she spent time in Japan with her father and her Japanese side of the family. 

T is for Tokyo is an excellent introduction to the city for kids who have an interest in all things Japanese. In the book, Mina asks her father to tell her again about the city she was born in. He tells her it’s “a city halfway around the world where they speak a different language and eat different kinds of food”. Mina was born in a city called Tokyo.

He tells her about the archers called shashu, about shrines with pagodas. He tells her one of the most famous shrines is Meiji Jingu which is located in the center of the city. He says to her, you can go to temples “where you think you traveled back in time”. 

He tells her about the ravens that sometimes snatch food right from your hands and about the fashion center for young girls and boys called Harajuku where “they wear crazy and colorful costumes and you feel like you are in the future”. 

Mina’s father also tells her about the different kinds of food people eat. In the winter, you can warm your insides by buying roasted chestnuts. You can look for ramen noodle shops by searching for a red lamp called aka chouchin. Or if you’re not in the mood for ramen, you could try takoyaki which are little balls filled with octopus. Or you can buy onigiri, rice balls wrapped in seaweed, at almost any convenience store. 

Mina’s father also talks about the most ordinary things you can find in Tokyo—large green public telephones, bright red mailboxes, small police buildings called koban. He also talks about ordinary things you can only find in Tokyo, the maneki neko or beckoning cat, daruma which are wish dolls, and tengu which are demons with long noses. Everything Mina’s father talks about is colorfully illustrated and will be easy for children and adults to understand. 

Many of the things Mina’s father tells her can be found throughout Japan, shrines and temples, the police box, the ravens, and the different types of food.  Although I wasn’t born in Japan, I grew up in Tokyo during my elementary years. I have a Japanese mother so I can attest to the accuracy of Mina’s father’s descriptions of the things you can see and do in Tokyo. As an adult, I also spent twenty-one years living in one of the busiest areas of Tokyo, Shibuya, before moving north to Aomori City in 2016. 

I was surprised that Mina’s father mentions a park near her grandmother’s house which is famous for its cherry trees but neglects to mention that it also houses one of Japan’s most popular zoos where you can see the giant panda. 

There are many things that Mina’s father talks about which are becoming harder to find. The large green public telephones are almost obsolete as everybody carries their own smartphones. The illustration of the cylindrical red mailbox is also becoming just a memory of the past as the mailboxes are little red square boxes now. You can still find the old-style mailboxes in the countryside though. You can buy hot roasted chestnuts all year round and not as many ramen shops display the red lanterns anymore. 

The book is written in English and Japanese. Also, for those who still haven’t learned to read the language, following the Japanese text, the romaji version is provided (Romaji being the Romanization of the Japanese language). It is a good tool for learning how to read once you’ve learned the basics of the Japanese alphabet and are familiar with a number of kanji characters. 

Still, the book is a wonderful introduction to a city I once called home. If you’ve never been to Tokyo, this book will make you want to go and see all those things for yourself. Tokyo may be a bit overwhelming at times but I believe there is something for everyone, children and adults alike. It is one of my favorite cities in the entire world and if you visit, it might become one of yours as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen (William Morrow)

It’s easy to mistake Kirstin Chen’s Counterfeit as a bit of summer fluff, but this Singaporean American writer has other plans—and they are devious. What begins as a strange reunion between two women who once were college roommates at Stanford turns into a unique partnership with a criminal bent. Winnie is a Mainland Chinese glamour girl with a brain who has caught the eye of a Guangzhou business magnate. Ava is a Chinese American prodigy who recently gave up a prestigious position in a law firm to raise her difficult child. She’s bored out of her skull so when Winnie offers her a new and somewhat dodgy occupation, eventually she accepts the job.

Suddenly Ava is immersed in the world of counterfeit handbags, buying the real thing at upscale stores and then making a return at the same place with a gorgeous forgery. She and Winnie split the refund and sell the purloined designer bags on eBay at prices far below retail. 

When Ava has qualms of revulsion about this scheme, Winnie asks “What makes a fake bag fake if it’s indistinguishable from the real thing? What gives the real bag its inherent value?” Ava has no answer; the bags they use to defraud are not the “copy bags” hawked on the streets of Hong Kong or piled in the windows of dingy little shops. These are the “creme de la creme” of replicas, far above the “super A” and the mere “A” copies. The bags Winnie receives from China have been made with the same care and luxurious materials as their genuine counterparts. These are the replicas known as “one-to-one.” But while the genuine bag sells for five-figure prices, the gorgeous and identical copies go for a fraction of that. 

This is where Counterfeit becomes something more than the story of a bored housewife. The details of the replica trade are riveting and almost take over the entire novel. The makers of the world’s most coveted status symbols have contracts with manufacturing plants in China where labor is cheap, workers are skilled, and factories are state of the art. When Ava goes to Shenzhen on a quality-control mission, she’s taken to the Baiyun Leather World Trade Center, “the world’s largest retailer of replica designer leather goods.” There she finds gorgeous boutiques, one selling Fendi bags, another focusing on Birkin and Kelly. All of the world’s most exclusive brands are there, in luscious colors and displayed like jewels at Tiffany’s. However when Ava meets the contact who will show her the merchandise that she’s come to inspect, he takes her to a shabby building where she’s ushered into a room filled with black garbage bags. Her guide locks the door and opens the bag of fifty Chanel Gabrielle Hoboes which Ava examines carefully and then purchases. When she leaves Shenzhen, she carries a Kelly bag in amethyst leather, exactly like the real thing, for which she’s paid less than 900 dollars.

Later she visits a manufacturing plant where the genuine bags are made under heavy security to prevent replication. Within the compound is another factory, under the same ownership as the business that has contracted to make the real thing. Plans, materials, and labels all migrate from one plant to another and then return, while never going beyond the heavily guarded gates of the complex. 

Just when Counterfeit threatens to become the story of a fascinating trade, Chen switches gears. Her plot twists take over the narrative once again and few readers will be able to figure out where this novel is taking them. But one thing is certain. Kirstin Chen has concocted a fiendishly clever story—and anyone who reads it will probably find themselves yearning for a one-to-one replica bag, scruples be damned.~Janet Brown

Nujeen : One Girl's Incredible Journey from War-Torn Syria in a Wheelchair by Nujeen Mustafa with Christina Lamb (Harper)

“I don’t collect stamps or coins or football cars - I collect facts. Most of all I like facts about physics and space, particularly string theory. Also about history and dynasties like the Romanovs. And controversial people like Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover”. 

Nujeen Mustafa says she hates the word refugee more than any other word in the English language. She says what it really means is “a second-class citizen with a number scrawled on your hand or printed on a wristband, who everyone wishes would somehow go away.”  In the year 2015, Nujeen “became a fact, a statistic, a number.” As much as she likes facts she goes on to say that “we are human beings.” 

Nujeen is the story of one girl’s incredible journey from war-torn Syria in a wheelchair. It is written by Nujeen with Christina Lamb who was the coauthor of I Am Malala. Nujeen says her name means “new life”. Her parents already had four girls and four boys so her birth was rather unexpected. The age difference between her and her eldest brother is twenty-six years. 

The family first lived in a town called Manbij in northern Syria, close to the border with Turkey. She calls her mother Ayee and her father Yaba. They are not Arabic words. Nujeen is a Kurd. 

As one of the few Kurdish families living in a town that was mostly Arab who she says “looked down on us and called our area the Hill of the Foreigners”. The family was forced to speak Arabic. They could only use their own language, Kurmanji, in their home. It was most difficult for her parents who were illiterate and didn’t speak Arabic. 

Nujeen was born with cerebral palsy. Her family moved to Aleppo so she could get better healthcare than she did in Manbij. Life was a little better. She even taught herself to speak a little English by watching the American soap opera Days of Our Lives.

The Syrian Civil War started after the Arab Spring Protests (a series of anti-government protests against corruption and economic stagnation). However, unlike other Arab nations that managed to depose their corrupt government officials, the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, used violent force to suppress the demonstrators. 

This led to the Syrian Refugee Crisis where millions of Syrians left their country or have been displaced within their own nation. Nujeen is one of the millions of asylum seekers. She is an extraordinary young woman who escaped from Syria in a wheelchair. This is her story. 

Nujeen is a Kurdish Syrian refugee who traveled from the historic city of Aleppo to escape war and civil unrest to Germany where her brother lives. She made the perilous journey in a wheelchair with her sister, who pushed her most of the way. Since leaving Aleppo, the girls travel more than 3,500 miles across nine countries from war to peace—a journey to a new life, just like her name. It takes them a month after they left Gaziantep in Turkey where her parents remained. 

The trip cost nearly 5,000 Euros, mostly paid by her elder brothers who were already living abroad. Nujeen and her sister travel from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos in a dinghy. Then they go to Athens on the mainland of Greece, continuing to Macedonia and Serbia, with hopes of going through Hungary as well. However, their luck seems to run out as Hungary has closed its borders to all refugees. They have to change their plans. Their journey takes them through Croatia, Slovenia and Austria before they finally reach Germany. 

Nujeen and other refugees not only leave the comforts of their home, they have to deal with smugglers, bribe corrupt officials, and are persecuted by right-wing fanatics. Yet Nujeen retains her sense of dignity. She’s an inspiration and a role model who shows the world that refugees are not all criminals and will contribute to society if that society lets them. 

The Syrian refugee crisis still continues and Bashar al-Assad is still President of Syria. Now that the news is focusing on Russian aggression against Ukraine, people are seeming to forget the crimes committed by al-Assad and his regime. Why he is still in power is a mystery to me. Why can’t the international community depose people like al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and all the other tyrants around the world. Until we rid the world of these people, the world will never be a safe place. ~Ernie Hoyt

Ma and Me: A Memoir by Putsata Reang (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Ma is a woman with a “face spangled with light.” She took her children away from Cambodia’s genocide and brought them to a small town in Oregon, a place where she and her husband found a house and established their reputations as a leading Khmer family in the area. “Use your brain, not your back,” she tells her children, and shows them the consequences of ignoring her advice by taking them to the fields of berry farmers and harvesting crops for money every summer. Quickly they all learn to listen to Ma. All of them succeed in moving far from lives of physical labor.

On the ship that carries her family from Cambodia to a refugee camp, Ma holds tight to Putsata, her dying baby whom she manages to keep alive. “My first feeling was flight,” Putsata says of the memories she has inherited from that voyage. When she turns two, Ma teaches her a game, “Run and hide,” one that the little girl plays so often that it “forms into habit,” her “very best skill.”

“Both of us are storytellers,” Putsata  says. Ma carries a storehouse of Cambodian fables and myth, while her daughter becomes a journalist who quests for facts that might hold truth. The presiding fact in Putsata’s life is one she’s always known: Ma is the savior and Putsata is the saved. “I owed Ma my life,” and in return Putsata “tried to live an immaculate life.” She goes off to work in Cambodia, becomes fluent in Khmer, helps her relatives who survived the Pol Pot years. She turns herself into a model daughter and “Ma made a myth of me.” Nothing seems to shatter that myth, not even when Putsata tells Ma that she’s gay, right up until the day that she discovers that her mother never believed that disclosure was true.

When she finds that she needs to choose between the woman she will marry and Ma, Putsata becomes “the single flaw in the beautiful fiction of a family Ma spun for the Khmer community.” Without bathos or drama, she conveys the agony that racks her mother and herself in the moment when long after their voyage to safety ended, “Ma had cast me overboard.”

Memoirs have become a tiresome genre but Putsata has set an impossible standard of excellence with hers. Intertwining Ma’s folktales with the story of her mother’s life and her own, she burnishes this with the language of a poet. When her abusive father attacks one of her young cousins, the blood seeping from the child “lying like a broken bird on the floor”  is “the color of fresh berries.” When she visits the death chambers of Tuol Sleng, she feels “the million pinpricks of guilt, shame, and sorrow…calcify in me like a new bone.” The Cambodian monsoons strike as if “through a single slit in the sky, an entire sea crashed onto the land.”

Whether she’s a child working in Oregon’s strawberry fields, “zombie-like and without complaint,” or an adult alone in the country of her birth, seeing it as “an entire nation of the walking wounded,” “so physically beautiful and yet stained with such a grim past,” Putsata takes her readers with her, imbuing them with her sense of beauty, her scalding honesty, her refusal to indulge in self-pity, and her extraordinary history.~Janet Brown

The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger (Penguin)

The Newlyweds is a modern day romance novel. The author was inspired to write the story after meeting a woman on a plane. The woman’s name was Farah Deeba Munni, a Bangladeshi woman who met her husband on an international marriage-broker website. 

Amina Mazid is a twenty-four-year old Muslim woman who meets her husband, George Stillman, online. George is an engineer who works in a suburb of New York City. After a very short courtship, with George’s promise of converting to Islam, she moves from her native country of Bangladesh to live with George in a new house he has recently bought in the town of Rochester. 

Amina believes that finding her husband on an online website is not so different from the tradition of arranged marriages in her own country. In the past, Amina would be described as a mail-order bride. However, in this relationship, it is Amina who makes her own choice, not her parents. In fact, her parents encourage her to find an American husband so she will have a more prosperous future. 

Amina had learned British English at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka, which is different from American English. George had to correct her on many occasions. “Americans went to the bathroom, never the loo. They did not live in flats or stow anything in the boot of the car, and under no circumstances did they ever pop outside to smoke a fag.” 

This is just one aspect of the cultural difference Amina experiences by becoming an American housewife. It isn’t just the cross-cultural differences Amina and George are faced with. They also weren’t entirely honest with each other before they got married. 

Amina also has an ulterior motive for marrying an American which isn’t so much about love but about family. She discovers that her idea of family isn’t shared by George. Amina believes that her parents should be where she is. She took it for granted that George would welcome her parents with open arms. However, George is American. He doesn’t believe in living with an extended family. He only considers the nuclear family.

When Amina discovers George’s secret, he reluctantly gives in to her request that her parents come live with them. Now, Amina is heading back to Bangladesh to help her parents with the immigration procedure. But when she returns home, she must deal with her relatives, close and distant, who all believe she is now a rich American wife and can help everybody financially. One of her father’s cousins has gone so far as to try to extort money from the family. She must also deal with her own emotions concerning a man she was once in love with. 

Freudenberger writes a beautifully crafted story where you find yourself hoping that Amina and George will find happiness together and that everything will work out in the end. As with any relationship, cross-cultural or otherwise, I believe it is a simple matter of being honest and communicating from the start. As long as there is love and understanding, I believe any couple can make their marriage a happy and successful one. ~Ernie Hoyt

You’ve Changed: Fake Accents, Feminism, and Other Comedies from Myanmar by Pyae Moe Thet War (Catapult)

What happens when you’re taught a foreign language from birth at the same time that you’re learning your country’s own language? What happens when you’re praised for your success in English while your mother tongue languishes from disuse? What happens when your mouth accommodates sounds not extant in your native language, changing shape as it masters English? What happens when you’re told from the start of your life that English is more important than Myanmar and you’re sent away from home to perfect your mastery of the language of colonizers?

“Not all languages are created equal,” Pyae Moe Thet War learns at an early age. Later she reads in the National Geographic that “one language dies every 14 days,” with 230 vanishing between 1950 and 2010. With each death, a culture disappears. 

Pyae has spent her life fighting to keep her culture close at hand, even as her knowledge of her native language dwindles. In Yangon (still known more widely by its English name of Rangoon), her teachers at international schools struggle with the pronunciation of her name. While many of her friends and her little sister accommodate those in authority by adopting English names, Pyae keeps the name given by her parents, with all of its inherent challenges. 

“But what’s your Christian name,” the mother of her English boyfriend asks, happily ignorant that Pyae has never been Christian. When taking official examinations at school, Pyae is confronted with spaces for first, middle, and last name, while she has none of these. When she separates Moe, Thet, and War into these spaces, she’s faced with a name that isn’t hers. Her western friends stumble over the complexity of her name, although as she points out, “Elizabeth has no more syllables than Pyae Moe Thet War,” and nobody who finds the pronunciation of her name difficult has trouble saying “Elizabeth Taylor.” 

Living in English, Pyae exists without crucial external touchstones with Myanmar culture. In English, there’s no word for hpone, a concept that governs the way Myanmar women should do laundry. Hpone refers to the Buddha nature that every man is born with and every woman lacks. While the stupidest man in Myanmar could possibly embody the next Buddha, Aung San Suu Kyi never could—in fact her undergarments have the power to destroy a man’s hpone. 

For Pyae, hpone clashes with “slut walk” and the Vagina Monologues—and loses. Even in Yangon, Eve Ensler’s play has been staged, although the women in the audience probably still separate their underwear from male apparel when doing laundry. Pyae however does not. In this crucial way, she has stopped being “a good Myanmar woman.”

Instead she’s one of many “Brown people operating in white spaces,” for whom baking a cake becomes a small act of cultural transgression.  A much larger cultural gap destroys her seven-year relationship with an Englishman. If they were to marry, Pyae would lose her Myanmar citizenship and quite possibly her ability to go home again, while her U.K. residency would be predicated upon her husband’s income. Her marriage to a white man would break her father’s heart to the point that he might well disown her. Pyae makes her choice. She now lives alone in Yangon.

The very concept of “alone” is alien to Myanmar culture. Family is community in Pyae’s country and when she goes to a movie by herself, this is inexplicable, if not insane, behavior. Her friends understand but they too are “outside of the village,” as a Myanmar proverb describes nonconformists. When they’re together, they speak “Myanglish,” a hybrid language of English sprinkled with Myanmar phrases. 

Pyae is a writer who can’t write in her native language. Her grandmother and her father will never read her books. “I don’t want this to be a race book,” she tells her western literary agent. But as an English-language writer of nonfiction, from a brown-skinned country whose culture has been overlooked and exoticized, not even Pyae’s well-honed sardonic humor can keep race at bay. From “cake” to “laundry,” language reinforces race with one superiority strengthening the other.  Pyae will always be a “Myanmar writer,” a truth for which we should all be grateful. With English, she illuminates her culture and pillories our own.~Janet Brown 

Malice by Keigo Higashino, tranlated by Alexander O. Smith (Abacus)

Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s most prolific and popular mystery writers. He has written over fifty novels and many of them have been translated into other languages. A number of his titles have also been adapted for the silver screen. A 2007 television series titled Galileo was based on his series of novels featuring physicist and part-time sleuth, Manabu Yunokawa.

Malice was originally published in Japanese in 1996 with the title Akui. It was released in English in the U.S. in 2014 by Minotaur Books. The Abacus edition was published in 2015 and is translated by Alexander O. Smith. Malice is the first novel in a series to feature Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga.

The story opens with the death of a writer named Kunihiko Hidaka. Hidaka and his wife Rie were set to move to Vancouver, Canada and this was his last day of living in Japan. Osamu Nonoguchi, a children’s book author and friend of Hidaka and his wife, was scheduled to meet them before their impending move. However, Hidaka wasn’t returning Nonoguchi’s calls so he phones Rie to ask about his friend’s whereabouts. 

Rie was waiting at the hotel for her husband so she did not know he was going to meet with Nonoguchi. When she reaches their home, she and Osamu find Hidaka sitting at his desk in his home office, dead. 

Detective Kyoichiro Kaga is assigned to investigate the case. Nonoguchi is an acquaintance of Koga’s from their days teaching at the same school in the past. Koga became a detective while Nonoguchi became an author. As Kaga begins asking questions, Nonoguchi realizes that Kaga is not reminiscing about old times but that he’s being interrogated and the investigation into his friend’s death has begun. 

As Kaga investigates the case, he feels that Nonoguchi’s statements are a bit off. Something just doesn’t add up. The more Kaga looks into the case, it raises more questions than answers. All of the facts that Kaga uncovers leads him to suspect that it was Nonoguchi who committed the crime. Nonoguchi does not seem surprised to find himself under arrest and asks if he can write his confession. 

Although it seems to be an open and closed case, Detective Kaga is not satisfied with Nonoguchi’s confession. What bothers him the most is that there seems to be no motive for the crime. Kaga refuses to close the case until he can establish a motive. 

The story is written alternatively, as seen through the eyes of the writer Nonoguchi and Detective Kaga. It becomes a game of cat and mouse to see who can outwit who. Higashi not only focuses on the crime but incorporates other themes into his story—bullying, infidelity, extortion which ultlmately leads to murder. 

As we begin to understand the personalities of the characters, then it is we, the readers, who also become detectives as we try to determine the truth of what the characters are saying. Is Nonoguchi’s confession reliable? Does Detective Kaga determine what the motive was for the crime? Once you reach the end of the book, the answers may surprise you. ~Ernie Hoyt

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin (Knopf)

None of Mom’s children give her much thought until the day she goes missing in a busy Seoul subway station. One minute she’s clutching her husband’s hand as he’s forcing his way down the stairs and then she’s gone. Before he realizes her absence, he’s already packed into a crowded car, unable to leave. When he returns to the spot where he last saw his wife, she has vanished. 

As they begin to search for her, her children realize they barely remember the date of their mother’s birthday.  Mom had merged her celebrations into those of her husband’s, for the sake of convenience. In fact they don’t know her true age, their father tells them, because she’s older than her birth certificate indicates. They don’t have a recent photograph of her because Mom hated having her picture taken and nobody ever pressed the issue. 

When they think of the 69-year-old woman named Park So-nyo who turned out to be really 71, all they can think of is Mom, whose “house was like a factory,” filled with juices and sauces and pastes and fermented fish made by her own hands. All they remember at first when they think of Mom is how she perpetually worried that her children might go hungry and how she always made sure they were fed.

Their search is for a woman whom they barely know, one whose reported sightings are ghostly, in neighborhoods her children left long before.  As they try to understand the mystery of why she didn’t call any of them or why she hasn’t gone to a police station to ask for help, they begin to turn up fragments of memory—the unspoken knowledge that Mom is unable to read, the ignored signs of her ill health, the way she cared for her family unaided when their father temporarily abandoned his household.

As Mom gradually takes shape while still remaining elusive, each member of her family sees dimensions of her that they have constantly overlooked—her curiosity about one daughter’s trips abroad, her longing to read the books written by a child with whom she constantly battles, her hidden devotion to a brother-in-law who killed himself before her children were born, and her connection to “that man,” who is linked to her in a way that always remained a secret.

Mom slowly unfolds like a budding flower, in a shadowed fashion through the eyes of others. Only at the end of her story does she emerge with her own voice, and by then she’s taken on another shape, an unrecognizable form. 

In the relentlessly urban world of modern-day Korea, Mom is embarrassingly rural, only recognized for what she gives and how she nourishes once she has disappeared. Kyung-Sook Shin has created a delicate allegory, a fable built with spiderwebs, carefully and gracefully constructed. Her opening sentence echoes the stark lack of sentiment that characterizes the beginning of Camus’ The Stranger.  The famous “Mother died today. Or was it yesterday,” is matched by “It’s been one week since Mom went missing.” But unlike the narrator of the French classic, Mom’s children find their way into the compassion and tenderness of Shin’s final sentence, voiced to the Pieta, “Please, please look after Mom.”~Janet Brown

The Inugami Clan by Seishi Yokomizo, translated by Yumiko Yamazaki (ICG Muse)

Seishi Yokomizo is a Japanese mystery writer. He is the creator of the popular detective series Kindaichi. Kosuke Kindaichi is an unorthodox and unkempt man who is in his mid-thirties. He is “slightly built, with an unruly mop of hair” and wears “an unfashionable serge kimono and wide-legged pleated hakama trousers, both very wrinkled and worn - and he had a slight tendency to stutter”. 

He is the main character who solved the cases of The Honjin Murders, Gokumon Island, and Yatsuhaka Village, all previously published titles in Japanese with the titles of Honjin Satsujin Jiken, Gokumonto, Yatsuhakamura.

The Inugami Clan is his most popular and well-known novel once again featuring Kosuke Kindaichi. It was translated into English by Yumiko Yamazaki. The book has been adapted into a movie twice by the same director, Kon Ichikawa. The first adaptation was in 1976 which had the international English title of The Inugami Family and again in 2006 with the title The Inugamis.

Sahei Inugami is one of the leading businessmen in an area north of Tokyo. He is the founder of the Inugami Group and is also called the Silk King. His story is the epitome of rags to riches as he was an orphan as a child and a drifter as a young adult. He’s not even sure if his surname is really his own. He was taken in by a kind-hearted priest who nursed him back to health and treated him like his own son. 

Thanks to Daini Nonomiya, the priest of Nasu Temple, not only did Sahei recover. Under Nonomiya’s sponsorship and tutelage, he was educated and became the success that he is today. He never married but has three daughters who were all born of different mothers. He also adopted Tamayo, the granddaughter of his savior and mentor Nonomiya. 

Sahei Inugami is now on his deathbed and his children have gathered at the family home in Nasu. His eldest daughter Matsuko who’s husband died during the war is there with her son Kiyo. The second daughter Takeko and her husband Toranosuke arrive with their son and daughter, Take and Sayoko. The third daughter, Umeko, has come with her husband Kokichi and her son Tomio. 

Sahei Inugami has never trusted the husbands of any one of his daughters and he had no love for them as well. None of the family voiced their true concern—who would inherit the Inugami fortune?

Before Sahei Inugami could make his last wish known, he died. However, he left his last will and testament which is to be read on the first anniversary of his death. 

Kindaichi comes to the Nasu region almost a year after Sahei Inugami’s passing. He has received a strange letter from a man named Toyoichiro Wakabayasi from the Furdate Law Office in Nasu. The law office handles all legal documents associated with the Inugami Group. He has expressed to Kindaichi his fears that members of the Inugami family will be killed and asks that he come to Nasu to investigate the matter.

The day Kindaichi is to speak to Wakabayashi in person, the lawyer is found dead at the inn where Kindaichi is staying. Kindaichi had thought the letter might have been a prank but decided to come to Nasa to speak with Wakabayashi in person. Now he is dead and Kindaichi unwittingly finds himself investigating a new case concerning the Inugami family. 

Yokomizo creates a mystery involving all members of the clan that, without a family tree, may confuse the reader. Its main plot involves an inheritance dispute. Wakabayashi knew it would bring out the worst in all the family members After his death, a series of other murders will occur. Can Kindaichi solve yet another crime that he was only peripherally involved in?. Why did Sahei Inugami write such a convoluted will that leaves his entire fortune to Tamayo who isn’t even a blood relative? The secrets of the family may surprise you! ~Ernie Hoyt

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