Wanting Mor by Rukhsana Khan (Groundwood Books)

Rukhsana Khan is a Canadian children’s book writer who was born in Lahore, Pakistan and currently lives in Toronto, Canada. She writes mostly about Muslim culture and the Middle East.

Wanting Mor is set in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Jameela is a young girl and a devout Muslim whose mother is her inspiration. She was born with a cleft lip and because of that she didn't have many friends. Her father is originally from Kabul and is currently helping to build a new road for the rural village that they live in. 

The story opens with the death of Jameela’s Mor, the Pushto word for mother. Without her mother’s guidance, Jameela doesn’t know what will become of her life. There is no school in her war-torn village so she can not read or write. Jameela often avoided her Baba, the Pushto word for father. He had an unpredictable temper and didn’t like the way he would look at her lip, “like somehow it was my fault I was born this way.”

A few days later as Jameela is doing the laundry, her father returns from work and says to pack up everything and tells her they’re leaving. He tells her he sold all their belongings and said they were moving to Kabul. Jameela couldn’t protest and the only thing she was able to take with her was a bundle of her wet clothes and a comb. 

She does manage to say goodbye to her Mor at her gravesite. Jameela who has never left her village feels that she can hear her mother saying, “Remember the man who asked the Prophet (peace be upon him) for advice. What did the Prophet (peace be upon him) tell him?”  “Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry.”

Her father takes them to a house where Jameela is immediately put to work. She can see her father getting money from the man who owns the house. The man’s wife first tells her to clean the pots in the kitchen. They need scrubbing but Jameela who has never lived in the city has never seen soap. The dishes are done by using ash. Jameela doesn’t know what soap is, she can’t believe that you can get water inside the house and don’t need a hauling bucket. 

Jameela tries her best to please the woman of the house. She quickly learns how to use a gas stove, how to use water and soap to scrub pots. What she can’t get used to is seeing her father act the way he does - drinking alcohol, getting drunk, dancing with another man’s woman at a party. She has to keep reminding herself - “Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry.” It becomes her mantra of sorts. 

Things do not work out at the house but Jameela’s father already had a new plan in motion. He drags Jameela to another house and tells her, “Jameela, this will be your new mother”. Jameela’s new stepmother is even more demanding than the previous woman. The mother treats her like a slave and doesn’t like her. Finally, one day, Jameela’s father takes her to a busy market with him. He tells her he needs to do something, then abandons her there. 

What becomes of Jameela is tragic and yet inspiring. A kind-hearted man takes her to an orphanage where she at least has a temporary home, makes friends and learns how to read and write. She is a testament to her faith and convictions. Her Mor always remains in her heart. Mor was her mentor, her role model, her pillar of strength. Now with no mother, and no father too, Jameela must face the world on her own. Her mother always told her, “If you can’t be beautiful you should at least be good.” She takes this advice to heart and endures a countless number of hardships before an orphanage takes her in. 

The author, Rukhsana Khan says that although the story is fiction it was based on an actual incident. She read a report on children in crisis that was issued by Afghanistan’s department of orphanages. In the report, it mentioned the story of a girl named Sameela. Her mother had died during the war, her father remarried and the new stepmother didn’t want her, so the father took her to the marketplace and left her there. 

It’s so sad to hear of reports like this and at times I found it irritating how governments refer to civilian deaths as “collateral damage” but the statistics doesn’t include the hundreds, if not thousands, of children, who are left as orphans. And the actions of the father in this story is as repulsive as the true life report. When will world leaders learn, “in war, there are no winners” or as the United Nations tweeted on their official Twitter account, “There are no winners in war, but countless lives will be torn apart.” ~Ernie Hoyt

Ghost Town by Kevin Chen, translated by Darryl Sterk (Europa Editions)

Keith Chen has escaped from Yongjing, the rural village in Taiwan where he grew up, a place so small that the only privacy the inhabitants know is found in the secrets they carry. Secrets, Keith learns early in life, breed violence. “We never held you,” his dead father tells him in a ghostly confession that no human can hear, “We hit you instead.” 

In Berlin, secrets haunt the lives of Keith and T, the man who wants to marry him but is constrained to a domestic partnership by German law. Unable to answer the questions his lover asks in the one language they share, Keith writes down what T wants to know, in stories that T is unable to read. T’s own secret emerges in acts of sadism that culminate in his death. His murderer goes to prison and when Keith is finally released, he returns to his village and the four sisters who survived their childhoods. 

Ghosts are commonplace entities in Yongjing: the woman who haunts a deserted bamboo grove, Keith’s father whose death fails to remove him from his family, the most beautiful of Keith’s sisters whose lush body encloses an aridity that drives her to suicide.  But when he returns, Keith discovers his own ghostliness, moving through a changed landscape, where odors provide his only orientation and his sisters prove to be his only anchors.

Kevin Chen tells this story through the voices of the dead and the living, each one unfolding a narrative that’s brutal, steeped in sensory details that rarely make their way into fiction, relieved by surprising bursts of humor and quick flashes of beauty. Every voice rings out with its own individual timbre, carrying its own particular burden of memories. Slowly secrets come into the open, bit by bit, until the facts appear in stark truth, losing their power once they’ve been told.

Ghost Town is a shocking novel in the way it toys with its readers’ emotions, while maintaining a stoic and matter-of-fact unveiling of its details. A child striptease artist becomes an unlikely savior; a girl is punished by witnessing her grandmother kill her dog and serve it as the family dinner; a nouveau riche mansion is described in satirical detail, right down to the waterbed that’s filled with “melted snow from the Swiss alps.” In prison Keith takes comfort in knowing that he’s “small fry compared to some of the guys” with whom he’s acting in a version of Hamlet. “The guy who is playing Ophelia in drag killed three people. Another of the Hamlets killed five. I only killed one.” Then there are the sisters, each one of them a small masterpiece of sibling rivalry, coming together “like bacon in a skillet…I know where your scars are, you know where I hurt…The sisters kept turning on the heat.” And it’s doubtful that any reader will fail to be surprised by what emerges at the story’s end.

Everyone in Yongjing, ghosts and survivors, exist outside of the world at large, “in a time zone all of their own.” The dead, observing the present, often seem more alive and aware than the living, who carry the weight of the past. As Chen asks in his Afterword, “Do you become a ghost only after you die? Or can you qualify as a ghost while you are still alive?” It’s a question that taunts and haunts, one that will keep this novel alive long after its last page has been turned.~Janet Brown

Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang, translated by Julia Lovell (Anchor Books)

Eileen Chang, also known as Zhang Ailing, was born in Shanghai, China in 1920. She was studying literature at Hong Kong University, but returned to her hometown in 1941 during the Japanese Occupation. Her stories are about life in 1940’s Shanghai and were highly acclaimed by the book buying public, although she was panned by critics for not focusing more on the political climate of the times, especially after the communist takeover. She first moved to Hong Kong then found her way to the United States. 

Lust, Caution was first published in 1979 and unlike most of her stories, focuses on characters involved in the radical and patriotic movement of the times. It is set in Shanghai and Hong during the second Sino-Chinese War. Radical Cantonese students plot to assassinate Mr. Yee, the head of intelligence in Wang Ching-wei’s government, a real historical figure who formed a collaborationist government with the Japanese occupying forces in Nanking between the years of 1940 and 1944. 

At first the students plan to assassinate Mr. Yee in Hong Kong but their plans are thwarted as Mr. Yee and his family unexpectedly return to the mainland. The students are going to abandon their plans due to a lack of funds and no chance of getting close to Mr. Yee again. This is also when the female conspirators denounce Chia-chih as being a whore for having sexual relations with Liang Jun-shung, also a student conspirator who trained Chia-chih in the art of seduction. However, Mr. Wu, a member of the underground resistance against Wang Chie-wei’s government, offers to sponsor the students’ plans in Shanghai. 

Wang Chia-chih is a student actress who is assigned the role of Mai Tai-tai, he wife of a fictional Hong Kong businessman named Mr. Mai who was made bankrupt after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the fall of Hong Kong. It is Chia-chih's task to seduce Mr Yee and lead him to his final demise. After the loss of Mr. Mai’s business, Mai Tai-tai decides to do a bit of smuggling herself and takes some luxury items to sell in Shanghai where she is soon introduced to Mr. Yee’s wife. 

Chia-chih’s becomes a member of Yee Taitai’s mahjong circle and has a secret affair with Mr. Yee. On the day of Mr Yee’s assassination attempt, Chia-chih has a change of heart and tells Mr. Yee to run.

The story was also made into a feature length film in 2007 and was directed by Ang Lee, who also writes an Afterword in the book. The character of Chia-chih is believed to be based on the real-life spy named Zheng Pingru, who gathered intelligence on the Japanese Occupying forces and attempted to assassinate Ding Mocun, the security chief of the Wang Ching-wei government. 

As Lust, Caution is a novella, the story is fast-paced and some of the supporting characters are not fully developed. As soon as they are introduced, they are never heard from again. Also lacking is the backstory to Chia-chih’s affair with Liang Jun-shung. Her act of betrayal to the student conspirators leaves the reader baffled. Has she fallen in love with Mr. Yee? Does she believe that his feelings for her are genuine as well?

In the end, it is still up to the reader to decide why Chia-chih did what she did as Mr Yee escapes and the students, including Chia-chih, are all captured and put to death. After the execution, Mr Yee realizes that he did love Chia-chih but did what he thought he must do to prevent any rumors spreading, and thus it can be said of their romance, “In war, there are no winners, but all are losers”. ~Ernie Hoyt

After the Last Border by Jessica Goudeau (Viking)

The United States is peopled by the descendants of immigrants. Despite this, U.S. immigration policy has historically been ungenerous. Emma Lazurus’s poem The New Colossus, written in 1883, has always been the ideal, not the reality. “The huddled masses yearning to be free” have received a grudging welcome through “the golden door.” Jessica Goudeau vividly reveals this in After the Last Border, through the stories of two immigrant women and a concise history of America’s stance toward immigration.

A year before Lazurus wrote her classic poem, the US slammed the door on Chinese immigrants with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. A battle between restrictionists and liberalizers of immigration has been raging ever since, with racism fueling the restrictionist side. Like the president who would come long after their first appearance, restrictionists wanted “literate, upper-class, white, Northern Europeans without disabilities.” Even those criteria failed to save the 937 Jewish asylum seekers fleeing Hitler on the MS St. Louis in 1939. Refused entry into the United States, the passengers were sent back  to Europe where 254 of them died in concentration camps.

Scarred by that act of cruelty and fueled by the Cold War, U.S. immigration softened to allow entry to refugees from Communism. First the Hungarians and Cubans arrived, and after the signing of the Immigration Act of 1965 came Southeast Asians. But the policy ignored Haitian refugees and Nigerians who fled the Biafran war. Racism still lurked under the surface, limiting immigration as best as it could.

Goudeau shows the mercurial nature of U.S. immigration policy through the stories of very different women whose experiences diverge because of the rapid changes that can come to that policy without warning.

Mu Naw is the lucky one. She, her husband, and their two children arrive as refugees in Austin, Texas in 2007. Karen villagers who had fled Myanmar for the safety of a refugee camp in Thailand, Mu Naw and her family have never known security and they welcome the idea of resettlement. Young and rootless, the young parents find their new life is one where they can make a living, as sparse as entry-level positions will allow, and where their children can be educated. Mu Naw had lived in refugee camps since she was five. In spite of the challenges and hardships that come her way in Texas, she proves to be more adaptable than her husband and eventually more successful. When they buy a house in 2016, her husband admits this achievement is because of her efforts.

Hasna is less fortunate. In her midyears, she too comes to Austin, nine years after Mu Naw, with her teenage daughter and a husband who has been so badly injured that he’ll never work again. War in Syria disrupted her life as an affluent, educated, proud matriarch, sending her across the border into Jordan. When she’s advised to apply for refugee status, she turns it down--until she learns that family resettlement is a key provision in immigration policy. Her husband’s objections to this plan are silenced by an explosion that tears his body apart and her adult children are scattered across different countries. The thought that they could all be together again, along with the promise of medical care for her husband, propels Hasna into the bureaucratic thicket of paperwork and interviews that will take them away from war to a family home in another country. She arrives four months before Donald Trump is elected president. Two months later, his ban against Muslim immigrants and his dismantling of the family resettlement policy turns Hasna’s dreams into a waking nightmare.

Jessica Goudeau’s skillful and intimate journalism gives the narratives of Mu Naw and Hasna the pace and detail of a novel, interspersing them with chapters that illuminate the policies that have shaped these women’s lives. What could easily have been a polemic is instead a quiet and heart wrenching history that is too little known by most of us and should be read by all.~Janet Brown

A Beautiful Lie by Irfan Master (Albert Whitman & Co.)

Irfan Master lives in London but has set A Beautiful Life in Gujarat, India where his family comes from. It is his debut novel. The story centers around the Partition of India. To understand the story, we need to understand this division of British India into independent nations—Hindu-dominated India, Muslim-dominated Pakistan, and East Pakistan which later became Bangladesh. Once the British left and the two nations were left on their own, it spawned one of the greatest migrations of people in history. There was also an outbreak of sectarian violence between Hindus and Sikhs on one side fighting against Muslims on the other and an estimated 200,000 to 2,000,000 people were killed. 

The year is 1947, approximately three months before Partition. Thirteen-year old Bilal is a young Muslim boy taking care of his father who is lying on his deathbed. Bilal’s mother has already passed away and his older brother is hardly ever at home. Bilal senses that there is something wrong with the neighborhood he grew up in. He can’t put his finger on it yet but he feels the tension in the air and recognizes the changes in the market. Two stallholders used to be partners, one making daal while the other made rice. Now, they each have their own stalls selling the same item.

Bilal opens the story by making a confession as an adult. “Everybody lies. We all do it. Sometimes we lie because it makes us feel better and sometimes we lie because it makes others feel better.” 

What was the lie that Bilal told? It was something he felt he should not let his Bapuji (father) know as he felt the truth would send his bapuji to his death early. Bapuji is not only Bilal’s father, he is also his guide and mentor. He is a well-educated man and well aware of his condition. He tells his son that he would need to make arrangements to live with his sister in Jaipur. 

Although Bilal agrees with what his bapuji says, he has no intention of moving or leaving his bapuji to die alone. Bapuji is always asking Bilal for news, especially on the issue of the government reaching a decision to divide the country. He tells his son, “the soul of India can’t be decided by a few men gathered around a map clucking like chickens about who deserves the largest pile of feed.”

The only thing Bilal wants is for his father to die in peace. So, with the help of his friends, Chota, Manjeet, and Saleem, they scheme to keep the news of India’s impending Partition a secret. They also devise ways to intercept potential visitors to Bapuji, even his own doctor. But how long can they keep this a secret? And will Bapuji die knowing his India is still one and the same?

I found the story to be very reminiscent of the 2003 German film Good-bye Lenin! which has a similar plot. In the movie, the story follows a family in East Germany. The mother is a dedicated socialist but falls into a coma in October of 1989 before the November Revolution. She awakes eight months later in June of 1990 not knowing about the fall of the Berlin Wall or that East Germany has reunited with West Germany to become the nation of Germany. Her son tries to protect her from the truth as he believes it may kill her. 

A Beautiful Life is about filial duty and having the courage to face inevitable changes…in life, in the environment where you live. It is about trying to understand the hatred between people just because they follow a different religion. The death and violence caused by the Partition of India may have been avoided if the British who were leaving didn’t just arbitrarily assign a line dividing the nation in two. A Beautiful Life is a beautiful and poignant story and although written for a younger generation, the ending will stick with you long after you have finished reading the book. ~Ernie Hoyt

All the Right Places : Traveling Light Through China, Japan, and Russia by Brad Newsham (Vintage)

Some men may cry, some may get violent, while others may calmly accept the situation. However when Brad Nesham’s wife asked for a divorce, his response is to buy a one-way ticket to Tokyo, and head east from there. 

Brad Nesham shares his adventure in the Far East in what will become All the Right Places. It is a journey of self-discovery as Newsham tries to sort out his marital woes and come to grips with the reality of his life’s problems. Some may think he is just running away and avoiding the truth. His wife had been asking for a divorce for months, she moved into her own apartment, and even mentioned that she was seeing someone else. 

Newsham believes that what his marriage needs is another journey. His wife was his former travel companion, going with him to places such as India and Nepal. He strongly feels that his wife will join him eventually and things will resolve themselves, but life isn’t all that simple. The year is 1985, a time that is slightly ahead of Japan’s bubble economy era and when the Cold War is a cold reality. Still, Newsham finds himself in Okubo House in Tokyo, Japan.

Okubo House is a relatively cheap inn popular with budget travelers and backpackers. It is located near Shinjuku in Tokyo. The start of Newsham’s journey is less than auspicious as he “cursed himself for not having researched Japan, for having come on the spur of the moment armed only with a budget traveler’s guidebook and a half-read copy of Shogun.”

In Japan, Nesham is reluctantly baptized by a Japanese Christian, hits the batting cage with another guest from Okubo House, and is approached by by a horny housewife who says to him, “Zex wiss you”, which he refuses as he still believes this trip may save his marriage. 

He cycles his way to Mount Fuji and spends about ten days biking around the Japanese Alps. He cycles all the way to Kyoto, stays at a place called Tani House and experiences zazen, a Buddhist meditation practice, at a nearby temple. Newsham then hitchhikes to Hiroshima, visits the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum where he is moved and saddened by what America did to Japan to end a war. 

On his way to Hong Kong, Newsham has a telephone conversation with his wife which still rings in his head. He keeps going over in his mind the words he hears, “I think we should just tear up the divorce papers.” followed by “I want you to come home now”. And yet Newsham chooses to stay on the road. 

Newsham checks into a monstrosity called the Chungking Mansions, located on the mainland side of Hong Kong Harbor. “Chungking is highly regarded by the sort of budget traveler who is unworried by pawnshops and girlie shows and men on nearby corners and in doorways, hissing, ‘Hash! Coke! Smack!’”. 

On his way to the Mansions, Newsham meets Amy, an American girl, on the bus. Unbeknownst to Newsham at the time, Amy will become his traveling companion in China. Amy had been waiting for her boyfriend Dylan, who she said was a former junkie but could kick the habit anytime. As Dylan never showed up or left a message, Amy decides to travel with Newsham…as buddies, not lovers. 

For the final leg of Newsham’s journey, he boards the Trans-Siberian Railway alone and will make his way to London, traveling through Mongolia and Russia, which is still known as the Soviet Union at the time. He will meet and have adventures with a host of characters also riding on the same train, with one of them being the epitome of the “ugly American” tourist. 

Newsham’s travels to mend his broken heart and to resolve the possibility of divorce are always at the back of his mind. He constantly writes affirmations in his notebook reminding himself that he is “in the right place, at the right time”. 

As much as I understand taking a trip to get away from your problems, I don’t believe it will help to solve anything. Yes, you may forget about them while traveling but the problems will still be there when you return. His divorce papers go through and although he and his wife still love each other, they decide to have an “amicable” divorce and continue to be great friends. 

Traveling after having your heart broken is quite common and is something I have done myself. Although I didn’t spend as much time as Newsham did on the road, I did decide to go to Shanghai, China for a week’s stay without any plan whatsoever. It may not have healed my broken heart but it was worth it for the experience of really traveling on my own. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa, translated by Louise Heal Kawai (HarperVia)

Rintaro Natsuki is a teenage orphan whose grandfather, the man who brought him up, has recently died. A reclusive boy, Rintaro is well on his way to becoming a hikikomori, a hermit who clings to solitude and is deaf to social cues. He spends almost all of his time in the secondhand bookshop that his grandfather owned and nurtured, a place where Rintaro is able to hide away and burrow into the pages of a book. Now that he’s alone in the world with only an aunt whom he barely knows offering him a home, Rintaro stays in the bookshop, ignoring both his school and the classmates who try to lure him back outside. Although he knows he needs to close Natsuki Books, he refuses to leave its walls until one night a visitor shows up--one who’s too unusual for even Rintaro to ignore.

“I need your help. There are books that have been imprisoned.” This statement borders on madness, especially because it comes from the voice of a large plump tabby cat.  

Not only is this a feline with the power of human speech, it’s one that’s mastered the art of sarcasm and quotes Antoine Saint-Exupery. Rintaro, despite his natural misanthropic inclinations, lets the feline draw him into four separate adventures, each involving the future of the printed word. 

There aren’t many writers who can bring adult readers into a world of youthful fantasy and keep them there, riveted and captivated. Sosoke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved Books takes its place beside C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time as a work of imagination that knows no age barriers. 

Much of this, at least at first, is due to the sardonic, sarcastic cat who keeps Natsukawa’s book from falling into an overload of sweetness and whimsy. This feline is no Disney character. He’s mean.

As he lures his teenage comrade into missions that are impossible for Rintaro to refuse, they sweep up anybody who loves bookstores, books, and the act of reading. The threats that the cat urges his follower to combat are ones that imperil the literary world even now and the weapons that Rintaro finds within himself to combat them will resonate with every reader.

Whether he encounters the speed-demon who believes the importance of reading is found in the number of books consumed rather than in the act of rereading, considering, and savoring them, or the man who tears books apart to distill them into one or two easily read sentences, Rintaro is able to point out the flaws in these beliefs. More difficult and more dangerous are the final two opponents that the cat brings to light.

The publisher who believes the only books that should survive are the ones that will sell in huge numbers brings to mind trends in current publishing houses and slows this break-neck plot into one that evokes into thought and terror. Not only could this happen, it is happening. Then comes the soul of a book that’s survived for almost 2000 years but realizes it’s losing its power. What can keep it from being “just another bundle of paper?” 

“I’m showing you the gap between idealism and reality,” it tells Rintaro, who feels the lure of cynicism and defeat. His response is one to remember and to reread, one that will shape young readers and hearten those who are older.

This quiet little book is one that will become a classic for everyone who treasures the art of reading, the solace of a bookstore, and the dazzling power exerted by pages that have been printed, bound, and brought to life.~Janet Brown

The Applicant by Nazli Koca (Grove Press, release date February 2023)

A prose poem that serves as a preface gives a misleading cast to Nazli Koca’s smart and enigmatic novel, The Applicant. “I will do whatever you ask…For Free.” Although this is the stereotypical image of immigrants who hope to come to the West, this isn’t Leyla.

Leyla is what used to be called “a slacker.” She comes to Berlin from Istanbul to gain the MFA that will give her credibility as a writer. Now after six years in a city that she’s allowed to intoxicate her, her thesis has been rejected and she’s lost her student visa. She’s spent all the money that was left to her from her father’s depleted fortune, wasting it gleefully on living a vagabond life, but Leyla still clings to the idea of privilege. Educated in international schools that gave her fluent English and an American point of view, she always knew she’d leave Turkey for Europe--she deserved it. Now she fights to remain in Berlin, on a temporary visa while waiting for her thesis to be reevaluated and approved.

Sharing an apartment with an expat from Cuba, Leyla works as a cleaner in a hip hostel, a clandestine job that she can skate through while concentrating on her real life-- the one that gives her the freedom to be high and drunk, while dreaming about writing. She drifts into an affair with a Swedish “good-hearted giant from a Grimm’s fairy tale.”, a man who’s never smoked a cigarette nor taken a drug, a right-wing conservative whose favorite food is “American cuisine.” The Swede takes her to his country, introduces her to his family, and wants to marry her. As Leyla’s dream of having her thesis approved seem less and less conceivable, she begins to cling to this man as her “antithesis,” not a dream but a pragmatic possibility.

It would be easy to dismiss this novel as a rehash of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll novels of the cocaine-fueled 80s as told by Jay McInerney, Brett Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz, but Nazli Koca is far too smart to fall into that category. Framing Leyla’s narrative in the form of her diary, she dissects the varying degrees of privilege, where all the winning cards seem to be held by “journal-published, MFA-holding, successfully employed” American men. She shows the exhilaration that comes from the freedom of living in a place where the only forbidden speech is the two words that come as a pair, both beginning with the letter h, along with the hope that comes with that freedom--and its accompanying threat of self-destruction. Most of all, she reveals the inequities that come with a passport--where some are allowed to travel as they wish while far too many others are caught in bureaucratic regulations and restrictions. 

“I’m so tired of the anxiety that’s attached to my passport,” Leyla complains, but she learns her Turkish passport is one that might only be good for pulling her back home. “Mastering the art of escape” is as much of an illusion as her belief that the life she’s adopted has given her the protection of invisibility. 

“A poor immigrant who wants to create art is irrelevant,” she says, but Leyla’s immigrant status is tentative, despite her background, her education, her fluency in English. “My weapons never stood a chance against death or life,” she says, as she discovers there are no easy solutions. Wisely Nazli Koca doesn’t offer any, concluding only with uncertainty and the uncomfortable truth that when it comes to immigration, the dice are loaded and the game is rigged.~Janet Brown

Kenji Miyazawa Picture Book Series by Kenji Miyazawa (International Foundation for the Promotion of Languages and Cultur

Kenji Miyazawa was a Japanese novelist and a writer of children’s books. He was born in Iwate Prefecture in the town of Hanamaki. He is known internationally for his novel Night on the Galactic Railroad which has also been published in English with the title of Milky Way Railroad, Night Train to the Stars or Fantasy Railroad in the Stars.

Kenji Miyazawa Picture Book Series consists of ten  books published by the International Foundation for the Promotion of Language and Culture (IFLC). The mission statement of the IFLC is “to translate and introduce Japanese literature to the world: to translate and introduce outstanding literature of other countries: to aid and encourage excellent translators of various languages: to provide scholarships to students of all nationalities: to sponsor seminars for language learning; and to conduct translation-proficiency examinations.”

To put it more simply, the aim of the IFLC is “to further linguistic and cultural exchange and mutual understanding throughout the world” and is authorized by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science of Japan. 

At the time of writing this review, the local library in Aomori Prefecture carried only three of the ten titles in the series. I will be featuring Books 1, 5, and 7. The titles of the books are The Shining Feet, The Bears of Mt. Nametoko, and Crossing the Snow. 

The Shining Feet, originally titled Hikari no Hadashi, was published in 1997 and is translated by Sarah M. Strong with illustrations by Miyuki Hasekura. This story centers on three characters. Ichiro, his younger brother Narao, and their father. The setting is the cold harsh winter of northern Japan. The father is making charcoal in the mountains as an extra means of earning income for the family. The boys are visiting their father for the weekend. As Miyazawa was a devout Buddhist, this story is all about karma and the enduring pain and suffering while still holding compassion for others—a little heavy for a picture book if you ask me. 

The Bears of Mt. Nametoko, originally titled Nametokosan no Kuma, was published in 1998. It was translated from the Japanese by Karen Colligan-Taylor and illustrated by Maso Idou. This story is about matagi culture. Matagi are traditional winter hunters of Japan’s Tohoku region. They mostly hunt deer and bear. In this story, Kojuro is a matagi and is about to kill a bear, but the bear begs Kojuro to spare her life for another two years as she is pregnant. In return, the bear will willingly sacrifice itself to Kojuro after the two years are up. 

Crossing the Snow, originally titled Yuki Watari was published in 2000. It was translated from the Japanese by Karen Colligen-Taylor and illustrated by Maso Ido. This story is about the relationship between humans and animals. However, in Miyazawa’s story, it is only children who are less than twelve years old as they are still considered quite innocent and pure. Crossing the snow is a metaphor for leaving the human world and entering a world where humans and animals live harmoniously together. 

I always find that children’s books are not only for children but can be enjoyed by adults as well. As a resident of the Tohoku area of Japan since 2016, I have become more interested than ever in the writers from this area. Whenever I find their publications are available in English, I can’t help but buy them or check them out from the library. I believe local writers often give you insights to their hometowns and if you decide to move and live there, what better way to get to know your neighbors if you can discuss stories they are most likely familiar with? ~Ernie Hoyt

Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie (Bloomsbury)

Vicki Mackenzie was taking part in a month-long Buddhist meditation course in Pomaia, Italy when she first laid eyes on a woman whose life story she would eventually write about, “a somewhat frail-looking woman in early middle age, with fair skin and a rather rounded back. She was dressed in the maroon and gold robes of an ordained Buddhist nun and her hair was cropped short in the traditional manner.”

It was late in the evening at dinner when a man sitting next to her at the table pointed out the woman again and said, “That’s Tenzin Palmo, the Englishwoman who has spent twelve years meditating in a cave over 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas.” 

It would be a few months later when Mackenzie would pick up a Buddhist magazine and found an interview with Tenzin Palmo. What Tenzin Palmo said in that interview would change Mackenzie’s life as well. Palmo had stated, “I have made a vow to attain Enlightenment in the female form—no matter how many lifetimes it takes.” 

Mackenzie feels that female spirituality is seriously lacking in role models. “The lamas who taught us were male; the Dalai Lamas (all fourteen of them) were male, the powerful lineage holders who carried the weight of the entire tradition were male, the revered Tulkus, the recognized reincarnated lamas, were male, the vast assemblies of monastics who filled the temple halls and schools of learning were male; the succession of gurus who had come to the West to inspire eager new seekers were male.” 

Mackenzie wants to know, “Where were the women in all of this.” Now here is a woman who says she is going to change that. From that article in the Buddhist magazine, Mackenzie seeks out Tenzin Palmo to find out more about her. Where did she come from? What had she learned in that cave? What made her take the vow?

Cave in the Snow is Tenzin Palmo’s story. It is about how an Englishwoman, formerly named Diane Perry, becomes an ordained Buddhist nun. It is the story of Palmo’s spiritual journey which takes her from her small town in England, to finding a guru in India, then making a vow to meditate in a cave high up in the Himalayas. 

Tenzin Palmo spends twelve years meditating alone in the cave, dealing with the harsh weather, wild animals, near-starvation and facing her own personal demons, all in the name of following the path to enlightenment. 

It is the story of her overcoming many obstacles along the way—people telling her it was too dangerous, monks saying women would not be able to survive the harsh conditions or cope with the solitude. But Tenzin Palmo is no ordinary woman. She proves all her detractors wrong. She’s very modest about telling what she has gained from her near isolation but her determination to help women on their spiritual path has not wavered one bit. 

I, for one, am a skeptic about the mysticism and seemingly supernatural powers of spiritual leaders and gurus but I find the spiritual journeys people take to be inspiring and admirable. It isn’t anybody who can give up their comfortable life, their family, their friends, and move to a foreign country whose language you don’t know or don’t understand to find the answers to your own question about “Who am I?” or “Why am I here?”. Tenzin Palmo is definitely an interesting individual. You will be moved by her courage, admire her perseverance, and you may even be inspired to take on your own spiritual journey. ~Ernie Hoyt

Ghost Music by An Yu (Grove Press, release date January 2023)

Even before the pandemic came to change the world, every body contained a city of ghosts, one that got rid of dead cells, facilitated the departure of those that were dying, and formed new replacements. Physically we’re all mixtures of what was, what is disappearing, and what is new. Mentally we struggle to reconcile memories of what’s past with the memories we make of a confusing present. In our external environments we’re faced with the same predicament each time we walk outside, working to make sense of death and flux. Seeing how quickly the memories of what once was in place fade away, we’re confronted with the inevitable question: When we’re gone will we be remembered? How can we ensure that we’ll survive in the memories of others?

Song Yan, a young urban housewife, is disturbed one night by a lucid dream, so vivid she can’t find her way out of it. Confronted by a small orange mushroom that has the power of speech, she asks it whether it’s real or a dream and is told “Sometimes these two things are not so different.” 

“I’d like to be remembered,” the mushroom says before it vanishes.

At one time, Soon Yan was once a gifted pianist.  Now she’s a piano teacher, a woman, still young,  who believes she has turned her life over to her husband. It takes a series of mysterious gifts, boxes of fresh mushrooms, to reawaken her curiosity, especially when a letter arrives that reveals the giver. The boxes have been sent by a legend from her past, China’s most famous concert pianist, who disappeared so thoroughly years ago that he’s been given up as dead.

The letter contains Bai Yu’s address and a request that she come to visit. When Song Yan musters enough courage to grant this wish, Bai Yu tells her, “Help me find the sound of being alive.”

Together the two pianists search for what lies within the cave of a musical composition and slowly Song Yan discovers a depth in her life that extends beyond the routine she’s fostered. Then Bai Yu goes away once more and the orange mushroom returns, larger and more invasive than when it first showed itself.

An Yu has written a novel that’s is as haunting and elusive as a musical composition played on a piano. Is Bai Yu dead or alive? For that matter, is Song Yan truly alive after submerging her musical talent in a life over which she has no control? And what the hell is that mushroom and its attending crop of orange fungi that eventually cover an entire room, along with the piano that stands within it?

In a story that’s both eerie and revelatory, dabbling in magic realism and yet firmly rooted on a real street in a real neighborhood in a real city, An Yu posits that in order to be remembered after death, it’s necessary to live a life of joy and purpose. Song Yan slowly recovers her authentic self in a process that’s both painful and exhilarating, a survival story for our time.~Janet Brown

Meatless Days by Sara Suleri (Penguin)

Sara Suleri Goodyear was born in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the daughter of Z.A. Suleri and Mair Jones. Suleri was a Pakistani journalist, author, and was also an activist for the Pakistan Movement, a political movement whose aim was to create an independent Muslim nation from British India. Mair Jones was from Wales and was an English professor who taught at a university in Pakistan. Suleri herself taught English at Yale University.

Originally published in 1989, Meatless Days is Suleri’s memoir. A new edition was published in the Penguin Women Writers series in 2018. However, this book is not just a biography of her life, it is about the people and nations that shaped her life. It is about living and experiencing life in the newly created nation of Pakistan, having an early education in the United Kingdom, and dealing with the mystery of the American Midwest. It also reads like a soliloquy on what it means to be a woman. 

In her discourse, Suleri says leaving Pakistan was the same as giving up the company of women. She goes on to say that “the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary: we were too busy for that just living, just living, conducting precise negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant”. 

In her numerous autobiographical accounts, she starts off with talking about her Dadi, the mother of her father, her grandmother. It seems to Sara that her grandmother had a special relationship with God. “God she loved, and she understood him better than anyone.” Sara’s Dadi could also be greatly moved by food. Sara and her sisters “pondered but never quite determined whether food or God constituted her most profound delight”. 

One of the most interesting chapters is about Suleri’s friend Mustakori, a woman who had an array of nicknames—Congo Lise, Fancy Musgrave, and Faze Mackaw. Suleri met Mustakori at Kinnaird College which she was attending. Her memory of Mustakori, although humorous, sometimes verges on the disrespectful as when she and her friend Dale were talking about her. Dale says, “That girl is amazing because…” to which Suleri responds, “Because…she was born stupid and will die stupid. And that’s the end of that.” What a thing to say about an innocent friend. Suleri and her older sister Ifat and other friends found Mustakori’s innocence confounding.

However, Suleri’s most profound chapters focus on her older sister Ifat. Early in the novel, we are told that Ifat was killed in a similar way as her mother. They were both the victims of being hit by a rickshaw. The rickshaw driver who hit Ifat never stopped and looked back and was never caught. The incident happened just two years after their mother died.

Suleri’s love for her sister is evident in the way she wants to avoid the tragedy and to focus on how her sister had such a big impact on her life. Ifat was four years her senior. She was born beautiful, according to Sara. It was one of her casual friends that told her she had to write about her sister’s death. She responded with a loud “Nonsense”, but after getting home she recalled the conversation, Suleri comes to the conclusion, “Ifat’s story has nothing to do with dying; it has to do with a price the mind must pay when it lives in a beautiful body.”

Suleri’s memoir does not follow convention. We learn of her mother and sister’s death, only to have them come to life in later chapters telling the reader how each of them has shaped her lives. Her prose is flowing and full of metaphors and at times are quite hard to decipher. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if she was actually talking about a person or some object of her imagination. And as Suleri jumps from one relative or friend to another, we find ourselves in Pakistan, Great Britain, the American Midwest, Kuwait, and back to Pakistan. Sara Suleri had definitely lived a full and interesting life so I was a bit sad to hear of her passing this year in March. I hope one day to be as passionate about my family and friends and all those who shaped my life. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Betrayed by Reine Arcache Melvin (Europa Editions)

The story flowing from the pages of The Betrayed has the thickened, sweet darkness of freshly drawn blood. Reine Arache Melvin has created three main characters who could easily take center stage in a Greek tragedy. They inhabit a place that everyone has heard of, during an unnamed time that many will think they can identify. But the portraits of the two sisters, Lali and Pilar, along with Arturo,  the man they both long for, reveal only enough of what takes place around them to create skillful traps. One quick snap and all that seems to be understood becomes a lie.

The death of their father brings Lali, Pilar, and their mother back from a U.S. exile to their home in Manila. “The General” has been ousted but politics are so convoluted that even the new female leader must honor his godson, Lali’s husband Arturo. As new alliances are forged, Lali and Arturo’s marriage weakens. Arturo has fallen in love with a seductress. Now his wife is soon to become a mother, a truth that shakes them.

Confused and floundering, they both take refuge in old habits. Arturo becomes attracted to his wife’s younger sister and pregnant Lali gives Pilar permission to comfort him. Lali, horrified by her changing body that no longer rivets the male gaze, comes across a foreign man in a shopping mall and decides he’ll become her prey. She fascinates him, but not for the reasons she expects.

Then both sisters are ensnared in the brewing revolution that lurks beneath the surface of the Philippines. Their story swiftly encompasses a burning village, a public decapitation, a dinner party with a man who would cheerfully see everyone at the table dead at his feet.

“I was wrong about Lali. People surprise you,” Lali once heard her father tell someone over the phone. She and everyone around her continues to surprise, going against easy assessments, right up to the conclusion of their stories. 

So does the novel’s setting. Arcache Melvin, in tactile detail, shows Machiavellian cruelty, casual corruption, and wealth that makes all wishes come true. Her trio are aristocrats, born into privilege and comfort that’s denied to the majority of Filipinos. Yet even with the insulation provided by their birth and breeding, both Lali and Pilar understand more about the people who surround them than does the foreigner Lali picked up in the mall, an investigative photographer who has steeped himself in places the sisters have yet to see, or the foreign missionaries who have made their homes in the middle of a revolution.  

“You don’t go deeper, “ Lali tells her photographer, “It’s all one-sided.” Yet within the kaleidoscope of violence and shifting loyalties of the Philippines, going deeper is like being hacked with a machete. The pain is excruciating and unfathomable.

Aracache Melvin takes her readers deeper. With skillful twists of her kaleidoscope, she shows one side, then another, with vertiginous speed and clarity. The Betrayed splits open a crack into a hidden world, quickly showing its brutality, its tenderness, its ghosts, and its darkest corners--and still by the end, readers will find themselves for answers to the enigmas they’ve been shown. “In the end, life gave more than it took away,” but for whom?~Janet Brown

Nuclear Blues by Bradley K. Martin (Great Leader Books)

Bradley K. Martin worked for decades as a foreign correspondent. He was mainly based in Asia. When he worked for Bloomberg News he was chief North Korea watcher. He gained his reputation on being a North Korea expert after writing the nonfiction bestseller Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader : North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, a comprehensive history of the country under the leadership of  Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

In Nuclear Blues Bradley has now turned to the world of fiction and has created a unique murder-mystery set in the Hermit Kingdom under the new leadership of Kim Jong-un. Included in his story is a Korean-American journalist-turned- blues musician, suspicious men from the Middle East, and a Christian college in North Korea, credit-default swaps, Russia, nuclear missiles, and a mysterious woman who may or may not be related to the current leader. 

Heck Davis is a photo-journalist but has decided to give up the profession and become a blues musician. He still takes on the occasional story and finds himself at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, also known as the DMZ. It is a strip of land that runs across the Korean peninsula separating the countries of North Korea and South Korea and was established as a buffer zone between the two warring countries.

Davis is on assignment for an Internet-based news agency called AsiaIntel, with three other cameramen visiting the Joint Security Area (JSA) located in Panmunjom. His journalist friend Joe Hammond is also scheduled to show up at the JSA. But because Pyongyang has a strong distaste for foreign journalists, Joe has come to North Korea as a member of an ordinary sightseeing tourist. Davis times his schedule to coincide with the tour group so he can see his friend. 

Davis’ current assignment is to take video for AsiaIntel. His editors want him to “gather military-themed footage from the southern side of the Cold War border relic.” Heck spots his friend Joe but he feels there’s something not quite right about him. “There was something wild in his eyes, something coiled and edgy about his posture.” 

Davis focuses his camera on his friend when Joe crouched, bends forward and rams his head into one of the North Korean guards. As Joe makes a run toward the South Korean side of the J.S.A., he flashes his passport and yells, “U.S. Citizen! U.S. Citizen. ” He looks at Davis and shouts “Sixty-seven twenty” before he’s shot down and killed. Davis also notices three letters scrawled on the palm of his friend’s hand—“CDs”. 

With the death of his friend, Heck Davis’s journalist instincts take over. He is determined to solve the mystery of what happened to Joe. He also needs to know what “Sixty-seven twenty” and “CDs” mean. But first, he must find a way to get back into North Korea. 

Thus begins one of the most original stories involving Kim Jong-un and a host of other characters. The further the story takes you inside North Korea, the more interesting and surreal the plot. Highly implausible but extremely entertaining, this book was impossible for me to put down. It may not be the true essence of North Korea but with Martin’s background as a North Korea watcher, he makes it as real as it can possibly get. You may even want to visit the world’s most isolated country just to see for yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (Ballantine Books)

We all need a dash of romance in our reading lives, no matter how cynical we believe ourselves to be. History buffs can read volume after volume of past events but are rarely moved to tears as they turn the pages. Is it important to cry? Yes. Tears are a sign that we’ve moved beyond empathy into sympathy--feeling the same pain. Without that, our understanding is still removed, dispassionate, and easy to forget. 

History and romance are a hard combination to unite in literature, since one frequently threatens to submerge the other, but Jamie Ford did it in his debut novel, published thirteen years ago and still in demand. Cleverly juxtaposing past and present, Ford makes the days that began World War II in the U.S. as real as anything we experience today, and he does this through the story of a childhood friendship that becomes a doomed love story--or is it?

Henry Lee and Keiko Okabe are both scholarship students at an exclusive almost all-white school, working together in the school lunchroom. Henry lives in Chinatown, Keiko in Japantown, Nihonmachi. Their two neighborhoods are adjoined but are divided by nationalism, prejudice, and privilege. The Japanese feel superior to the Chinese and the Chinese, like Henry’s father, hate the Japanese for atrocities Japan is committing in Nanjing and other Chinese cities. Even before Pearl Harbor brings the U.S. into war with Japan, Henry leaves his house every day with a badge his father has pinned to his shirt. that says “I am Chinese.”

Born in the same city hospital, Henry is the child of Chinese-born parents while Keiko’s parents were bon in the U.S. Even so, when headlines are filled with Japan’s act of war, Keiko is the one at risk. In Nihonamchi, bonfires in the streets consume anything that will link its residents with Japan. Family treasures are tossed from apartment windows and find their way into the flames. Signs for Mikado Street are replaced with ones with its new name, Dearborn. Japanese-owned businesses that have given economic life to the area are closed or usurped by new owners. Japanese residents from all over the region are rounded up under Executive Order 9066 and are shipped off to internment camps, with almost 10,000 removed from Henry and Keiko’s city alone. When the Okabe family is put on a train and sent to improvised shelters built from cattle stalls in the county fairground, Henry discovers a way to visit Keiko. When her family is transported to Camp Minidoka in another state, Henry finds her. But Henry is only thirteen. His parents bitterly oppose his friendship with a Japanese girl and the two of them lose touch.

Decades later, when Henry is in his fifties, a discovery at the Panama Hotel that was once the pride of Nihonmachi makes headlines. In the basement of this neighborhood landmark are trunks and boxes that had been left in safekeeping when their owners were interned with only the possessions they could carry. As these artifacts are unearthed so are Henry’s memories and as he remembers, a vibrant community that has vanished comes vividly into light.

Ford has based his novel on solid facts. The Panama Hotel that was the sanctuary for jettisoned treasures stands in Seattle’s International District/Chinatown with belongings that were never reclaimed still in its basement. Along with a scant number of businesses and restaurants, this is all that remains of the prosperous community of Nihonmachi that once spread over almost the entire district. Until very recently its history had been forgotten and was given an impetus for revival by the meticulous renovation of the Panama and, in no small part, by Ford’s depiction of the past. 

The area has never recovered from the expulsion of its Japanese American residents. After reading Ford’s descriptions of the jazz clubs, the Japanese-owned barber shops, photography studio, the Nippon Kan Theater, the Nichibei Publishing Company, all gone, a walk through the area is tinged with its ghostly past. Passing the historic King Street Station where Amtrak trains whisk passengers across the country, its carefully preserved architecture makes it easy to see the thousands of families being herded onto trains under the guns of soldiers. The cattle stalls of “Camp Harmony” haunt the shadows of the Puyallup Fairgrounds. The sadness of the past is palpable in the present, reawakened by Ford’s story of an interrupted friendship and a shattered community.~Janet Brown

Three Paper Charms by Shosuke Kita and Seion Yamaguchi translated by M. Owaki and S. Ballard (Shinseken)

Shosuke Kita was born in Aomori Prefecture, the northernmost prefecture of Honshu, the largest of Japan’s four main islands. He is a professor at a local university and researches folk tales of the Tohoku Region. Seion Yamaguchi is also an Aomori native whose occupation is an illustrator. Yamaguchi provides beautiful pictures to accompany the text.

Three Paper Charms is the English translation of Sanmai no Fuda. The tale is believed to have originated in either Aomori Prefecture or Saitama Prefecture in the Kanto area. Other scholars argue that the original telling of the story can be traced back to Niigata Prefecture. Although there are many variations, the core of the story remains the same. 

In the Tohoku region, the title is Kozokko ga Madadaga and was published in English in 2001. The story is about a mischievous little boy who is also an apprentice monk. As he is always causing trouble, the head monk decides to send the boy on a journey to learn self-discipline. 

The monk gives the boy three paper charms and says to use them only when he finds himself in trouble. As the boy walks and walks and walks, it becomes dark and he needs to find a place to stay for the night. 

He is fortunate enough to spot a light in the house and goes there to ask if he could have a bed for the night. A young and beautiful girl greets him at the door and says he was more than welcome to stay. She feeds him and he falls asleep shortly thereafter. 

The boy wakes up in the middle of the night after hearing a strange sound coming from another room. As he takes a peek, what he sees isn’t the beautiful girl who greeted him at the door. He sees an old hag sharpening a knife and hears her say, “How delicious the boy must be! He is young, plump and healthy! Let’s sharpen the knife, make it as sharp as possible, and then I can chop him up!”

The boy then tries to run away but the hag hears him and even though he says that he is just going to the bathroom, the hag ties a rope around him so he won’t be able to escape. This is when he remembers the three paper charms the head monk had given him. 

His first wish is for when the hag asks him if he’s done, to have it answer “Not yet”. He ties the rope to a pillar in the bathroom and then runs away from the house. After a while, the hag realizes she’s been fooled and chases after him. As she almost catches up to the boy, he uses the second paper charm and asks it, “Please turn into a big sand mountain”

The sand mountain has slowed down the hag but she eventually makes it over and soon catches up with the boy again. The boy then uses his last wish and asks it to turn into a big river. Once again the hag slows down and the boy runs as fast as he can back to the temple. The hag enters the temple as well and tells the monk to give her the boy. 

The head monk is a wise man and praises the hag for her magic. He says he will hand over the boy if she could prove how great her magic is. First, the monk asks her to become as tall as the ceiling. She does this and once again demands that priest hand over the boy. 

The priest is undeterred and asks if the hag can become as small as a pea and stand on the palm of his hand. She proved that she could do this too and shouts, “Now, admit your defeat, priest! Give me the boy!”

But as she is just a little pea-sized hag, the priest picks her up with his fingers and throws her into a burning candle. Even the hag can’t stop the heat of the candle and that puts an end to her life. 

Old folktales are timeless. It doesn’t matter if you're a child or an adult, they never go out of style. You can also enjoy them in all their variations. Reading old folktales and picture books can remind you of the child that still lives within you. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Many Daughters of Afong Moy by Jamie Ford (Atria Books)

I may be the only bookworm in the Pacific Northwest who has never read Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet and it’s all his great-grandfather’s fault. If Min Chung hadn’t changed his surname to Ford when he arrived in San Francisco from Hoiping, China back in 1865, I would never have unfairly categorized Jamie Ford as just another white guy following in the pathway of Snow Falling on Cedars. Since both David Guterson and Ford focused on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, with Ford speaking through the viewpoint of a first-generation Chinese boy, that wasn’t an unfair assessment on my part--except Jamie Ford isn’t just another white guy. He contains the genetic legacy that makes Chinese American history his own.

In The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, Ford blends history with genetics--and the result is fascinating. What threatens to become an ordinary family saga of fiction based on fact is given an intriguing depth with its interweaving of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, a theory that borders on science fiction but is based on reputable scientific research. Memories rooted in emotion and stored in the brain are capable of causing changes in DNA and can be passed on to future generations. Descendants of Holocaust survivors can inherit depression and anxiety spawned by memories of trauma that they have never experienced themselves. As Dorothy Moy, a descendant of Ahfong Moy, is told by a scientist, “We’re not individual flowers…we’re perennial. A part of us comes back each season, carrying a bit of the genus of the previous floret.”

Seven generations spin through this novel, appearing, fading, and reappearing like the bits of memory that tease and puzzle the descendants of Afong Moy. Based upon historical fact, Afong arrives in America at a time when Chinese women are banned from entering the U.S. She’s allowed entry because she falls under the category of exotic curiosity, an object to be displayed in theaters in front of a crowd that has paid to see her. Her story ends in an alley where she dies in childbirth, a woman whose life is as stunted and tragic as her broken bound feet. 

Ahfong’s unhappiness and blighted love life are replicated over and over in her female descendants. None of them find love. Each of them bears a daughter whose father was a matter of random choice; all are driven by the “broken compass of her heart.”

In 2045, the city of Seattle is bludgeoned by ARk-Storms, vicious typhoons that sweep in from the Pacific at 110 miles per hour, flooding the streets and shaking skyscrapers. In the middle of environmental turmoil, Dorothy Moy is racked by her own mental storms that she can’t understand. When she sees her little daughter drawing the same strange images that she drew as a child, Dorothy follows her therapist’s advice and explores a controversial new form of treatment, one that believes present-day difficulties may have been spawned by inherited memories. If the past memories can be changed, so can the behavior that is troublesome now.

From the plague-ridden city of San Francisco in the 1890s to England’s experimental and bohemian school of Summerhill in the 1920s, from a nursing hospital in the middle of World War II to a booming tech business in the beginning of the 21st century, Afong’s “daughters” meet and lose the men who bring them happiness. Their tragedies echo and repeat themselves in kaleidoscopic glimpses that become almost unbearable to read. Although the ending is one that’s rooted entirely in speculative fiction, it’s so welcome that nobody could ever criticize it.

Jamie Ford has written a novel that all but demands more than one reading, if only to see how he manages to fit those puzzle pieces together. He provides a bounty of research titles for anyone who wants more information about epigenetics, ARk-Storms, and the history that each “daughter” lives through, making this novel a portal into other times and an introduction to other ways of looking at memory.~Janet Brown

The Curse of Kim's Daughters by Park Kyong-ni, translated by Choonwan Knag, Myung-hee Lee, Kay Ho Lee, and S. Keyron McDermott (Homa & Sekey Books)

Park Kyong-ni is one of South Korea’s most prominent writers. Her best known work is her ten-volume epic Land which started as a serial publication in a literary magazine called Modern Literature. The story debuted in the September 1969 issue. It took her twenty-five years to complete.

The theme focuses on ordinary Korean people’s lives spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, through Japan’s occupation and up until the division of the country into North and South Korea. It has been made into a television series, a movie, an opera, and has been translated into several different languages, including English. 

The Curse of Kim’s Daughters was first published in 1962 in the Korean language as Kim Yakkuke Ttadeul. The book was translated into English by a four-member team of translators including three Koreans and one American. It was published in 2004 by Homa & Sekey Books, an American publisher that specializes in fine books on Asia, focusing mainly on China and Korea.  The translation was made possible by a grant from the Korean Literature Translation Institute (LTI Korea). 

The Curse of Kim’s Daughters is set in the town of Tongyong, a small fishing village near Tadohae Seashore National Park. It sits halfway between Pusan and Yosu. It is the story of one family’s struggle to live and survive in a rapidly-changing world. The Kim family’s patriarch is Songsu Kim, a man who was orphaned after his mother committed suicide and his father ran away from home after killing a man.

Songsu Kim was raised by his uncle and grew up to inherit the family pharmacy. He later sells the company and invests in a small fishing fleet. He marries a woman named Punshi who was chosen to be his bride by his uncle. Although Punshi gives birth to a son, the boy dies at an early age. Punshi then gives birth to five daughters, Yongsook, Yongbin, Yongnan, Yongok, and Yonghay.

We follow the lives of Songsu Kim, his wife and his daughters as they all deal with their own troubles. There does seem to be a curse set upon the Kim family’s daughters. The eldest becomes a widow, gets pregnant and is accused of killing her own baby after giving birth to it. The second daughter despairs of not being able to find a suitable husband. The third has a mental breakdown and goes insane, while the youngest meets with misfortune while at sea. 

I’m sure there are some aspects of Korean culture that I just cannot understand which may have biased my opinion on praising this novel. I can understand arranged marriages, respecting your parents and your elders, and not shaming one's family but the abuse and neglect fostered upon the daughters of Songsu Kim by their various spouses can only be described as abuse and domestic violence. 

The most heart-wrenching incident involves the third daughter who falls in love with one of the family’s servants. They elope but are caught. The servant is made to leave town and because their daughter is no longer a virgin, the parents force her to marry a rich man’s son who is not only abusive but is an opium addict as well. Whenever the third daughter tries to come back home, her mother forces her to go back to her abusive husband because that is her duty as a woman. 

Although well-written, the story is sad and depressing and doesn’t seem to leave any room for hope. The parents’ attitude towards their own children borders on child abuse. If you want to be depressed and believe that living life is a curse, then perhaps you will be able to enjoy this story. As for me, I believe in the pursuit of happiness and that all relationships should be based on love and trust. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Map for the Missing by Belinda Huijuan Tang (Penguin Press)

In this new century fiction has changed. Autofiction blends truth with stories, teasing readers with what’s been made up and what is fact. Unreliable narrators are normal and plots often need an electronic microscope to plumb their enigmatic depths. Chapters not infrequently are no longer than a single paragraph and sometimes are never there at all. A book waiting on my shelf right now is a novel told in a monologue of thoughts silently voiced in the matter of  an hour or two.

These are all interesting journeys into new forms of story-telling but once in a while all I want to read is a straightforward, chewy, smart novel, one written in a 20th century mode, with a beginning that links coherently to its end and with characters whom I care about. 

These aren’t easy to come by in the realm of what’s now called literary fiction so when I picked up Belinda Huijuan Tang’s A Map for the Missing, I had no idea that my wish was was going to be granted.

The book begins with a language that I can’t read, translated into the words “Your father’s gone missing.” A swift phone call from his mother sends Tang Yitian from his life at a California university back to the rural Chinese village that he left fifteen years ago. He returns with the last words his father ever said to him echoing in his mind: “You owe us a son.”

It’s Yitian’s brain that took him from the family farm to Beijing’s top university, that sent him to America and made a home for him as a professor in Palo Alto. It also led to the death of his older brother and made his father cast him out forever. He returns to China eight years after his departure, promising his mother that he will find her husband. 

Rapidly he realizes his promise is an empty one. He’s never learned how to negotiate the intricacies of a Chinese bureaucracy, even on its lowest levels. He knows only one person who might help him, a girl from his past whose letters he has ignored, whom he hasn’t seen since they both were struggling with China’s recently revived national examination, the gaokao.

Once a “sent-down girl,” one of the urban teenagers whom Mao’s regime whisked off to the countryside as laborers, Hanwen is now the wife of a city official, living in an affluent gated community of a provincial city,. A woman who has bumped up against corruption, she has just begun to question the limits of her life when Yitian appears with his plea for help.

Skillfully taking her story through China’s transformation from the 1970s into the 1990s, Tang has based her novel upon the life of her own father, who left his ancestral village to live in the U.S. and who spent a summer when he was seventeen searching for the man who had guided him through childhood. Her research has been both personal and scholarly, returning to her father’s village home as a stranger who’s welcomed by relatives she had never met, as well as unearthing primary sources written in Chinese to discover how it was to live through the dizzying periods of the Cultural Revolution, Reform, and Reopening. 

In her search for her own family’s history. Tang endows her characters with vivid and poignant life.  “Home,” she says in an interview, “is a place in your memory, more than a physical location.” Exploring what happens when memories are lost, she confronts the idea that places are defined as much by what is missing as by what now exists. The result is a deeply satisfying story of journeys back and journeys forward, an odyssey everyone can recognize and understand.~Janet Brown

Beaufort by Ron Leshem, translated by Evan Fallenberg (Vintage)

Ron Leshem is an Israeli-American television producer and writer. Beaufort is his first novel and was first published in Hebrew in 2005 with a title that translates to If There’s a Heaven. It was the winner of the Sapir Prize in 2006, Israel’s most prestigious literary award. The English edition translated by Evan Fallanberg was published in 2007. 

Beaufort or Belfort Castle was the site of a fort that was captured by Fulk, King of Jerusalem in 1139. Fulk was also a Crusader and it is believed that the construction began on the castle shortly after the fort’s capture. It is located in a remote area of Southern Lebanon. 

In 1982, the Battle of Beaufort was fought between the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). It was dubbed by the Israeli government as Operation Peace for Galilee and later came to be known as the Lebanon War or First Lebanon War. However, in Lebanon, it is only known as “the invasion”. 

Israeli Defense Forces attacked the fortress and captured it and for the next eighteen years, the IDF occupied the fort in Southern Lebanon to prevent attacks from Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and militant group whose primary goal was ending Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. 

Beaufort focuses on the final years of the IDF occupation of the fortress. It centers around the young soldiers who were all taught at a young age that the enemy are terrorists and the need to protect Israel from the “terrorists” is their duty to their country. 

The story is narrated by the unit’s commander, Liraz Librati. He has all his soldiers call him Erez because people think Liraz is a girl’s name and too feminine for an officer. The novel opens with the soldiers playing a game called What He Can’t Do Anymore. 

“Yonatan can’t see us growing ugly any more. ‘We’ll never be as handsome as we are today’ he’d say, and I’d ask if that was meant to make us feel better, because it didn’t.” Erez explains that this is a game everyone plays when a friend is killed. “You toss his name into the air and whoever’s there at the time has to come up with something he can’t do any more.”

Beaufort is an isolated area. The young Israeli soldiers defending the place have created their own world. They have their own games, they make their own rules, and at times clash with each other. But the infighting takes a backseat to the comradery when it comes to protecting each other against the unseen terrorists.

Erez and his men believe what they are doing is for the good of the country. But rumors have been flying that Israel is in negotiations to pull out of Lebanon. The soldiers are ready to fight, they are always ready to fight but lately, the soldiers feel that the Israeli government has long abandoned them. They are beginning to question why they are still in Lebanon, in enemy land without any support from their own government. 

When the order to withdraw comes, the team is given one last mission to accomplish. Will it be a sweet victory for Israel or will they be viewed as running back home with their heads between their tails?

Ever since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the Middle East has been a hotspot for the Arab-Israeli conflict and continues to be so today. Since Leshem is an Israeli, it’s only natural that the protagonists of the story would be the Israeli soldiers. They were taught at a young age that the Lebanese Hezbollah are nothing more than terrorists whose main goal is to destroy the country of Israel. 

There are no easy answers to solve the problem and the continued hostilities between Israel and Arab nations is not going to go away anytime soon. What a world it would be if as John Lennon said, “Give peace a chance”. ~Ernie Hoyt