Penance by Kanae Minato, translated by Philip Gabriel (Mulholland Books)

Kanae Minato may be the queen of Japan’s psychological thriller. She is the author of the award winning novel Confession, titled Kokuhaku in Japanese. Penance is her third novel and is her second to be translated into English. It was originally published in Japan in 2012 with the title of Shokuzai which is often translated as atonement. However, in this novel, penance is the more appropriate term. It was translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel who is a professor of Japanese literature in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. He has also translated short stories and novels by Haruku Murakami.

Penance was also made into a television mini- series. It is just as disturbing as her previous novel Confession. It is the story of five childhood friends. One summer during the Obon holidays while the girls are playing on the school grounds, they are approached by a man. Soon, one of the girls is dead and the man has disappeared. Unfortunately, for the grieving mother and the police, not one of the girls can remember the face of the man and he was never caught.

At the time of the incident, the young girls were only ten years old. Their names are Sae, Maki, Akiko, Yuko, and Emily. Except for Emily, the girls grew up together in a small rural town. The only thing the town was known for was having the cleanest air in Japan. And because of this, Adachi Manufacturing decided to build a factory there to make their precision instruments. Heading the factory was Emily’s father. 

Three years later, the police still have no leads and the killer is still on the loose. Asako, Emily’s mother, asks the girls, who are now thirteen, to come to her house. She tells the four girls that if they can’t find the murderer, then they should atone for their crimes in a way that will satisfy her. If they don’t, Asako said she will take her revenge on each and every one of them. 

Emily’s mother moves back to Tokyo and the four girls get on with their lives and gradually forget about the threat Asako made against them.  The statute of limitations for the crime against her daughter is about to take effect (although this law has been amended in Japan in 2010 for capital offenses) and the death of her daughter remains a mystery. Fifteen years later, Asako’s threat comes back to haunt all four of them.

Kanae Minato’s novels are dark and chilling. They also make you think. If you were as young as they were when one of your friends was killed, what would you do? Would you be able to take charge like Maki who gave her friends directions before seeking help as well? Would you have been able to go to the police like Yuka? Would you be able to sit near a dead body on your own like Sae? Would you have handled informing Emily’s mother more tactfully than Akiko when Emily’s mother asks her where Emily is only to be told, “She’s dead”? If you know the killer is still on the loose and has seen your face, would you live in constant fear until he is caught? 

And of course the biggest question remains. Will the killer be caught before the case reaches its statute of limitations? ~Ernie Hoyt

Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd (MacMillan)

There are catastrophic events that are just too big for the human mind to absorb. On March 11, 2011 an earthquake hit Japan, the fourth most powerful ever recorded, measuring between 9 and 9.1 on the Richter Scale. It lasted for six interminable minutes, during which it knocked the earth ten inches off its axis, moved Japan four inches closer to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, and generated a 120-foot tsunami that struck less than an hour after the shaking stopped.

Japan is accustomed to earthquakes and its national protocols are firmly in place. Swiftly all the country’s highways, airports, and railways were shut down. Along the coast, tsunami warnings were broadcast. However in that crucial period between quake and wave, nobody knew exactly how strong the earthquake had been. Nor could they envision the size and power of the approaching tsunami.

When the wave struck, it caused a meltdown of three reactors in Fukishima’s nuclear power plants. The death toll measured 18,500 and half a million of the survivors were left homeless. Richard Lloyd Parry, who lived in Tokyo with his family, described the aftermath as a “disordered dream…like a huge and awkwardly shaped package without corners or handles.” Despite his years as an Asian-based journalist, he found that this story was almost impossible to convey in words. It wasn’t until he went to Okawa, a tiny river town on Japan’s northern coast, that the horror became imaginable.

Seventy-five children died in the tsunami. Seventy-four of them died in the schoolyard of the Okawa Elementary School, where they had proceeded in an orderly fashion once the school stopped shaking. With them were eleven teachers. Out of 108 students, only thirty-four children and one teacher survived.

The school was located in front of a seven-hundred-foot hill. As parents dug their dead children out of the field of mud that the tsunami left behind, some began to wonder why the teachers hadn’t led their pupils up that hill. This issue became far more pointed when the time frame was widely known. The earthquake was over by 2:46. The tsunami arrived at 3:37, pushing its way up the nearby river.

A parent who came immediately after the quake to pick up her daughter had urged the teachers to take the children up the hill. She was told that she was over-reacting. Two boys later made the same suggestion. They were ignored. 

When the school’s emergency manual had been written, nobody thought of tsunamis as being a danger. The procedure recommended for one was almost criminally vague. 

The national ability to accept earthquakes without panic had leached into the reactions of the teachers at Okawa Elementary School and that, along with an ingrained deference toward authority figures, led to a tragedy that became a country-wide issue. But even as the facts slowly came to light, the parents of the dead children grew divided to the point of hatred. The ones who wanted justice through the courts were seen as betrayers of a national code of honor by the others. “Why lay blame,” asked one mother whose child didn’t survive, “What do you expect to come of it?”

By concentrating on one small area of Japan, Parry has made the disaster that wracked the entire country heartbreakingly comprehensible. Interviews with grieving parents, a student who survived, and a man who swam out of the wave through the front door of a friend’s house will make anyone who lives in a coastal community on a fault line begin their emergency planning while searching for the closest high ground.~Janet Brown

Little Soldiers by Lenora Chu (HarperCollins)

“I am a little soldier, I practice every day.” When Lenore Chu overhears her little son singing this in Mandarin, she takes it in stride. After all, he’s already serenaded her with The East is Red, extolling Mao as the “Great Savior.” This is Rainey’s second year as a student in an elite Shanghai kindergarten and he and his parents have all made sizable adjustments during that time.

Chu and her husband feel fortunate when their three-year-old is accepted at Soong Ching Ling Kindergarten, a “model school” with special rules. Although it’s part of China’s state-run public school system, it doesn’t have an open admission policy. Most of its small students are the children of Shanghai’s elite. Chu’s wealthy, influential uncle is flabbergasted. His granddaughter was denied entrance in spite of his connections that usually “made the impossible materialize.”

Born and raised in the U.S., Chu was taught Mandarin and received a strict Chinese upbringing from her Taiwanese parents. Her husband speaks fluent Mandarin which he learned as one of the first Peace Corps volunteers to show up in an isolated village in rural China. They want their child to become bilingual and they’re impressed with the accomplishments of China’s education system. Even so, they’re taken aback when Rainey tells them his teacher forces him to eat eggs, a food he detests, at lunch. When Chu tries to discuss this with the teacher, she’s told, “Eggs are good nutrition and all young children must eat them.” A week later, the teacher lets her know that Rainey now eats eggs and Chu doesn’t dash that triumph by telling that Rainey still refuses to eat them at home.

Meanwhile  Chu sees her son’s focus, attention span,and self-discipline soar. Academically he flourishes while at home his parents nurture his imagination and creativity. Chu begins to realize Rainey’s childhood is the mirror-image opposite of her own. She was given an American education and a Chinese upbringing while  Rainey has American freedom at home coupled with the rigorous life of a Chinese student. When the family returns to the U.S. during summer vacation, Rainey’s parents are relieved that their son fits in perfectly.

Chu begins to delve into China’s school system, visiting classrooms, making friends with teenage students, and researching the history of education through the centuries 

In 1949, she discovers, four out of every five Chinese were unable to read. Forty years later most children receive nine years of free compulsory education, with the goal of providing nation-wide preschool for all. However the historic dominance of tests that will determine success in later life still prevails, with the National College Entrance Exam looming over every student. Around 10 million teenagers take this annually. Only two-thirds of them will pass and go on to a university. The rest will become unskilled laborers or entrepreneurs.

The pressure of this exam permeates the lives of students, beginning when they’re only toddlers. One of Rainey’s three-year-old classmates is enrolled in three after-school classes where she learns English, Math, and Pinyin. One of Chu’s friends sends his six-year-old to eight after-school classes every week.

Chinese educators believe very young children are in a “golden period of memory expansion” which is essential for true learning. “You have to work hard to achieve,” a Chinese educator says, and effort is demanded of every student. Hard work is stressed over and above innate ability. “There is little difference in the intelligence of my students,” a teacher tells Chu, “Hard work is the most important thing.”

And yet Chu finds that Western methods are being incorporated within Chinese schools, while maintaining the core belief that learning depends on individual industriousness. “Maybe,” a Chinese educator concludes, “the hybrid of American and  Chinese systems is perfect.” If so, Rainey, whose parents plan to keep him in Chinese schools until sixth grade when the pressure of exams and political indoctrination becomes intense, is well on his way to becoming the perfect student.~Janet Brown

Confessions by Kanae Minato, translated by Stephen Snyder (Mulholland Books)

Yuko Moriguchi is a single-mother who teaches at a Middle School. She is thanking her students for participating in “Milk Time”, a program designed by the Ministry of Education to promote dairy products, even if it was without their consent. Moriguchi decides to tender her resignation and on the last day of class before summer vacation, she has one last lecture to give to her homeroom class.

The apple of her eye is her four-year-old daughter Manami. Unfortunately, her daughter died in an accident on the school grounds. She tells her students she was resigning, not just from the school, but from teaching. When one of her students asks if it was because of her daughter’s death, she says that’s part of the reason. She then shocks her students by announcing she’s retiring “because Manami’s death wasn’t an accident. She was murdered by some of the students in this class.”

So begins Confessions, Kanae Minato’s first novel, originally published in the Japanese language in 2008 with the title of Kokuhaku. It has received many awards including the Detective Novel Prize for New Writers, and the National Booksellers’ Award. The English version was published in 2014, translated by Stephen Snyder. The book was also adapted into a feature-length film in 2010 which became a major hit. 

Ms. Moriguchi also shares with her students why she became a teacher and how she ended up being a single mother. She tells them her engagement was called off by her fiance after she got pregnant because her soon-to-be husband discovered that he was HIV positive and didn’t want to burden her. He suggested terminating the pregnancy as he feared that the baby would be HIV positive as well. 

After making the shocking announcement that the killers were in the same room as their peers, she talks about Japan’s Juvenile Law. She asks her students if they were aware of why the law was implemented. She tells them, “it was written with the idea that young people are still immature and in the process of becoming adults, so when necessary, the state, in place of parents, needs to find the best way to rehabilitate those who commit crimes”. This means that a child under sixteen who commits a crime, even an atrocious crime as murder, is handed over to the Family Courts and usually doesn’t even end up in a juvenile detention center. 

Ms. Moriguchi tells the class that she’s surprised by their reaction or lack thereof, knowing full well that two of their peers are murderers. What they can’t understand is why their teacher didn’t go to the police. She tells them, “I’m not noble by keeping the identity of A and B a secret”. She hasn’t told the police because she doesn’t trust the law to punish them. For her parting words, she thanks the class once again for drinking all of their milk. She mentions that she added a little extra something to A and B’s milk that morning, a little bit of blood, blood from her ex-fiancee. And so begins Ms. Moriguchi’s revenge. 

After Ms. Moriguchi’s last lecture in her homeroom, the story shifts to a different character’s point of view. A powerful story of alienation, abandonment, bullying, mind-games, and murder., this is a psychological thriller that will keep you turning pages until the very end. It’s not a simple whodunit as you already know who the criminals are. It’s what happens after the teacher’s speech that makes this a novel that’s hard to put down. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Field Guide to Happiness : What I Learned in Bhutan about Living, Loving and Waking Up by Linda Leaming (Hay House)

Linda Leaming was a young American woman who left her comfortable life in Nashville, Tennessee and went to the small Himalayan country of Bhutan, the country known for its Gross National Happiness, to teach English. Not only did she fall in love with the country but she fell in love with one of its citizens and started a new life there. She wrote about it in her first book Married to Bhutan (Asia by the Book, November 2021).

Leaming has now written a follow up book titled A Field Guide to Happiness with the subtitle of What I Learned in Bhutan about Living, Loving and Waking Up. Leaming has lived in Bhutan since 1997. She married a renowned thangka artist, thangka being a religious painting usually depicting a Buddhist deity. She now shares what she learned and continues to learn in Bhutan about finding happiness. 

When Leaming talks about happiness in this book, she says she’s talking about well-being. She thinks of happiness as “being a state wherein we are ‘without want’”. Her four main points of what she thinks about happiness is, first, “Everyone wants to be happy.” Second, she believes “happiness begins with intent.” Her third point states “Happiness doesn’t just happen; it’s a result of conscious action (and sometimes that “action” is to do nothing).” Finally, she believes “this action involves doing simple things well”. 

One of the first things she says she had to learn was patience. This was before she got married and became more grounded in living in Bhutan. Her first visit to the Bank of Bhutan was emotionally challenging as she was the epitome of an American living in a foreign country. Americans are those people known for being busy, loud, obnoxious, demanding, and impatient. Perhaps it is an unkind stereotype but it may be an accurate description. She says, “In Bhutan, if I have three things to do in a week, it’s considered busy. In the U.S., I have at least three things to do between breakfast and lunch.”

Living in Bhutan has taught her more about herself than she would learn from any psychologist or self-help book. She has learned to be more patient, to “go with the flow”, to do without the modern conveniences of America, such as buying groceries at a supermarket or having a washing machine to do the laundry. She has learned to love and accept herself for who she is, she strives to be a kinder and generous person to others, and she can now talk about death without fear. 

To say this is a self-help book would be an overstatement. Leaming doesn’t push her beliefs on others, she just shares what works for her. She tells her stories in a way that’s delightful and amusing and never condescending. She shares her own weak points and tells the reader how she tries to overcome them or at least not worry about them as much as she used to. What works for Leaming may not work for everyone but I believe as Leaming does, that everyone just wants to be happy. ~Ernie Hoyt

Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63 by Marcelino Truong, translated by David Homel (Arsenal Pulp)

It was a normal 1960’s childhood in a Washington DC suburb, one filled with hula hoops, Play-Doh, and winter sledding “like a Peanuts cartoon…something that Norman Rockwell might imagine.” Suddenly this all changed and the Truong children were on their way back to Vietnam. Their father, a diplomat serving in the Vietnamese Embassy, was needed by President Diem, a career swerve that took his family from the land of “cherry pie, a corner store, and Coca-Cola” to Saigon, a city filled with soldiers and Skyraider warplanes, with a naval destroyer moored in the river.

Now the children eat pho at street stalls with the family’s driver, Chu Ba, while their French mother struggles to make her housemaid realize that fish sauce isn’t an ingredient in boeuf bourguignon. Their father becomes part of what American journalists call the “Diemocracy,” serving as the English translator for President Diem and becoming the director of Agence Vietnam-Presse. His children go swimming at the pool in the exclusive Cercle Sportif de Saigon, learn to live without glass in the windows of their modern apartment, and enact spirited battles with their captured crickets and Siamese fighting fish.

Western journalists come to report on the “lovely little war, with just enough adrenaline,” flying to battlegrounds for the day and returning to the peace of Saigon in time for dinner. Then an unsuccessful coup attempt by two Vietnamese fighter pilots brings the war to the capital and grenades become a routine danger. Caught in a traffic jam, the children and their mother smell “something charred” and learn later that it came from a monk who set himself on fire to protest what is now being called “the dirty war.”

This is too much for Madame Truong. Her nerves shatter, she becomes prey to manic depression, and the war enters the Truong home. The children overhear their parents’ bitter fights. Their driver is forced to sell his blood to cope with the rising inflation caused by the advent of U.S. troops. Soon he‘s drafted to serve as a soldier, one who rides at the front of an armored train.

Interspersed with this child’s view of the war is a concise history, much of it based on his father’s memories and excerpts from his mother’s letters to relatives in France. This provides a brief but detailed summary of the Diem regime, the machinations of Madame Nhu, the role of Catholicism in Vietnam, and the symbolism of the legendary Trung sisters. “We should have done it on our own, with American weapons but without their soldiers, the way the Communists did,” the father concludes years later.

The “graphic novel” format of this mingled memoir and history gives it a vivid depth that makes it emotionally wrenching, while the frequent use of Vietnamese sprinkled throughout the book gives it the feeling of watching a film with subtitles. Like Maus and Persepolis before it, Such a Lovely Little War takes what once were “comic books” into a whole new realm of literature, blending art and text to create another world of creative possibility and a work of art that should become a classic.~Janet Brown

Triage by Scott Anderson (Pan Books)

Kurdistan. Wikipedia describes it as “a roughly defined geo-cultural territory in Western Asia wherein the Kurds form a prominent majority population and the Kurdish culture, languages, and national identity have historically been based.” It is an area that covers northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northern Syria. The Kurds, like the Palestinians, hope one day to establish their own independent country. 

Scott Anderson, a veteran war correspondent who grew up in Asia, mainly in Taiwan and South Korea, has set his novel Triage in Kurdistan in 1988. This is during the Anfal campaign, also known as the Kurdish genocide, which was carried out by Ba’athist party of Iraq shortly after the end of the Iran-Iraq War. 

Mark Walsh is a photojournalist, on assignment in Kurdistan with fellow war photographer and friend Colin. The story opens with Mark lying on his back looking up into the sky. “He didn’t hear the artillery shell, but he believed he saw it”. He shouts for his friend Colin who doesn’t answer. Mark knows he will die if he doesn’t move. 

He does manage to move but slips and falls in a nearby river. The next time he awakens, he finds himself in a makeshift hospital in a cave. As he regains consciousness and looks around, he realizes where he is - the Harir cave, “a forty-bed ward and an operating theater carved out of solid rock, with no ventilation, no running water, no medicine.” 

Mark has been to this cave on many occasions and was thinking of creating a photo-essay titled The Worst Hospital in the World. And now here he is, not as a photojournalist, but as a patient., one who had previously met Dr. Talzini, a Peshmurga, who runs the place. 

Mark knows that the Peshmurga are the military force of the Kurdistan Regional Government. He was told by Dr. Talzani that the meaning of Peshmerga is “those who face death”. Mark also knows that Dr. Talzani holds a number of colored tags which makes Dr. Talzani a triage doctor, triage meaning “deciding the order of treatments or casualties”. 

Fortunately for Mark, he survives and makes the long journey home to his Spanish girlfriend, Elena. Elena is happy that Mark is back but she becomes worried as he seems to have come home a changed man. She talks to her mother, who then calls her grandfather who was a renowned psychiatrist in Franco’s Spain. 

Once Elena’s grandfather is in the picture, the story becomes a bit more complicated. Although Elena was close to her grandfather in her childhood, this changed when she learned that he was a supporter of Francisco Franco and his government. He ran a psychiatric institute and many of his patients were war criminals. He was called the “Fascist Father Confessor.” She said, “if you had wiped out a village, if you had tortured people to death, all you had to do was go see Dr. Joaquin Morales at the Morales Institute for Psychological Purification, and he absolved you of all guilt.” Of course Elena doesn’t want her grandfather to help Mark and cannot understand why Mark thinks it may be beneficial to him.

The book was also adapted into a movie in 2009 starring Colin Farrell. It is about the psychological effects that war has on people, on both participants and victims. It is also about forgiveness and letting go, in a very powerful story about the under-reported aspects of war. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Silent Dead by Tetsuya Honda, translated by Giles Murray (Minotaur Books)

Reiko Himekawa is tall, beautiful, and ambitious. Not yet thirty, she’s already made her way up through the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department to the rank of lieutenant and is leader of a homicide squad. She’s famous--and in some quarters infamous—for the preternatural knowledge she can garner from a murder victim which has propelled her rapid ascent through the ranks. Men in equivalent positions find her talent a direct challenge to their own methodical case work. To them, Reiko’s intuition seems like a kind of parlor trick--but her flashes of insight prove essential to solving cases. Many resent her but they grudgingly admit that this new addition to the homicide department is pulling her own weight.

When a body wrapped in a blue tarp is found carelessly discarded in a residential neighborhood, the police are puzzled. Why was the corpse dumped in a spot where it would quickly be discovered and why does it have a long cut in its abdomen that was inflicted after death? Reiko comes up with a plausible theory and begins the investigation, one leading to a horrendous online group that pays to watch a killer who is an artist of murder.

Reiko has a weakness; she makes certain that she’s off the street by nightfall, particularly in the summer. An older squad leader discovers the reason for this and uses it to taunt her, hoping to break her nerve and diminish her success. Instead he forces Reiko to face her memories and conquer her fear, as the two of them vie to discover the grisly game and its star performer.

This novel opens with a chapter that may deter squeamish readers but none of the later scenes match it for brutality and horror. Unlike novels by other Japanese crime writers (Natsuo Kirino immediately comes to mind), Tetsuya Honda is more focused on detection than he is on blood and guts. Even the culminating scene when the killer and her director almost come up with another corpse is less revolting than the sights and smells that dominate the book’s first pages.

A cast of characters is listed before the story begins but this is insufficient. It gives the names of only the fourteen police who figure prominently in the novel. A host of victims and the people who knew them offers sixteen additional names to keep straight—compiling a list for quick reference is highly recommended.

Reiko, with her “all-too-perfect looks” and her fear of “hot summer nights,” is the sort of detective that call for a series and this is only the first of several novels in which she appears. Her rival and tormentor, Lieutenant Katsumata, is equally compelling and his understanding of Reiko’s psychology provides a scene that upstages even the bloody solution to the crime spree. With luck, he’ll be a figure in the series because he’s a much more interesting figure than the two police officers who lust after Reiko, (each in different ways).

An unexpected strength in The Silent Dead is its close attention to details that are especially helpful to readers who don’t know Tokyo or the intricacies of its police hierarchy. Tokyo neighborhoods are crisply and vividly described, to the point that, for the first time ever, I’d like to explore this city. Full points go to Giles Murray, the book’s translator, a man who lives in Tokyo and who is able to escape the stilted dialogue that pervades many English versions of Japanese novels. From the first sentence of this thriller, “A putrid rain was falling, turning the whole world gray,” to its last scene when Kumata pinpoints the startling reason for Reiko’s success, Murray’s translation comes alive for western readers while always maintaining a strong sense of a distant and unfamiliar culture. 

Both Honda and Murray have introduced a detective to watch out for and Reiko Himekawa thoroughly deserves her own television series. Japan gave her one. Are you listening, HBO?~Janet Brown

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador)

All the Lovers in the Night was originally published in the Japanese language as Subete Mayonaka no Koibitotachi in 2011. It is the latest book by Mieko Kawakami to be published in English who first came to prominence on the international market with her book Breasts and Eggs (Asia by the Book, November 2021), published in 2020, followed by Heaven (Asia by the Book, July 2022), published in 2021. 

Her latest book focuses on a single woman living in Tokyo. Fuyuko Irie works as a freelance proofreader. Before that, she worked for a small publisher “that nobody ever heard of. Where they produced books that made you wonder who would ever read them”. It is the company where she started her career as a proofreader, “spending every moment of her day, from morning to night, hunting for mistakes.”

Irie is the type of person most people would classify as a social outcast. She has no friends, she rarely talks, and only speaks when she’s spoken to. The only thing that keeps her mind off her loneliness is walking by herself at night and looking at all the lights around her. “All of the lights of the night. The red light at the intersection, trembling as if wet, even though it isn’t raining. Streetlight after streetlight. Taillights trailing off into the distance. The soft glow from the windows. Phones in the hands of people just arriving home, and people just about to go somewhere.”

Her only friend seems to be her go-between between her and various publishers. Hijiri Ishikawa is almost the exact opposite of Irie. She’s young, beautiful, and full of energy. She wears the latest fashions and has a very active social life. She also has a reputation of being a loose woman and is described as difficult to work with. On the few occasions when Irie meets Hijiri for drinks, she usually lets Hijiri do most of the talking. 

One day, on her way home, Irie is talked into donating blood. Once she’s done and is filling out a survey, she catches a glimpse of her reflection in the window. What she sees there is “the dictionary definition of a miserable person.” It makes her think that she’s “just a miserable woman, who couldn’t even enjoy herself on a gorgeous day.” After that, Irie is determined to change her lifestyle.

She starts slowly by drinking a can of beer a day. With the help of alcohol, she’s able to come out of her usual shell. She even goes to a cultural center to see if there might be a class she would be interested in taking. Before she makes a decision, she feels a bit nauseous and heads to the ladies room. She doesn’t quite make it and vomits before she can get to a sink. At about the same time, a man exits the men’s room and Irie believes she threw up on his shoes. 

From this embarrassing incident, she meets Mitsutsuka. At first, they are both awkward with each other but over time, they develop a friendship. Irie feels something a bit more and she’s not sure how to go about expressing herself to Mitsusuka. 

As any single person living in a large city may know, at times it can be difficult to meet that person of your dreams—or even someone you just want to spend more time with. Kawakami writes with the average, everyday person in mind. Sometimes you may need a little push from your friends or acquaintances or some experience to take that first step in finding happiness. Even I spent my first year in Tokyo alone and experienced my first Christmas in my cold and sparse apartment watching a Christmas video while eating a seven-eleven burrito. I felt the same as Irie and thought I really need to get out more and interact with people. It was that sad Christmas that made me search for happiness and I’m happy to say that I was able to tear down my own walls. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara (W.W. Norton & Company)

Born with his eyes wide open to a mother who died soon after his birth and a father who is disliked even by his own family, the ugly new baby needs an advantage and his stepmother provides it. Raj, she calls him, and his educated uncle gives the name its English translation, King.

King Rao is “a big name for a little runt,” his family says, but within a matter of years the boy lives up to it. Through cleverness and chicanery his grandfather became owner of a coconut farm, even though he is a Dalit, one of the Untouchables. King Rao is the smartest of the grandchildren and he’s told often that someday Rao’s Garden will belong to him. 

This never happens. King Rao is sent to school, moves on to a university, and is sent to the U.S. for graduate school. Out of a village that is “a hot wet nothing,” comes a man who will change the world and will ultimately preside over it. 

Already known as a programming genius in India, in the U.S. King Rao becomes a software programmer who makes personal computers a staple in every household. He learns how to collect and use data in a way that gives him unprecedented power. When nationalism threatens to destroy the world, he presents his plan: Shareholder Government that unites every country and is guided by the Master Algorithm. “Algo” makes decisions based on the data provided by the Social Profiles that every Shareholder, as in every person on earth, has from birth. The most successful Shareholders sit on the Board of Corporations and the chairman of the board is King Rao, a man who has taken on the status of a god but who is human enough to fall.

It’s his own mind that’s to blame for his ouster. King Rao has developed a means to connect human brains to the Internet but fails to realize that old brains no longer have the plasticity to make this happen. People die, King Rao evades responsibility, and a revolution is averted only by his voluntary exile.

Although this may sound like a run of the mill dystopian novel, Vauhini Vara isn’t the sort of writer to follow that path. She’s braided together three separate strands that take their turns in forming an intricate and diabolically clever plot. Life on the coconut farm with its traditions and inevitable dissolution continually alternates with King Rao’s rise, success, and eventual dethronement in the outside world, and then lapses into the idyllic life he shares with his young daughter on a lonely island. 

Once again hubris gets in the way. King Rao has given his daughter the Internet connection that once led to his downfall but even more dangerously, he has devised a way to filter his mind into hers. Not only is Athena constantly deluged with the Internet, she’s also a receptacle for her father’s brain--his thoughts, his memories, his consciousness. As all this flows into her,  King Rao quite literally begins to lose his mind.

Athena escapes, but with a terrible and inescapable knowledge. Like the system it toppled, Shareholder Government is based on consumption which has brought the planet to Hothouse Earth. Ever-increasing temperatures will destroy the world in a few generations unless corporate greed is stopped. She’s also the only one who knows that King Rao is not immortal.

Vara has constructed a heart-wrenching tragedy that has nothing to do with her human characters. It’s the beauty of the world, in Rao’s Garden and on the dreamlike island that demands our love and grief. “The sun, spraying its sweet, glittering light;” the intricate white lace that covers the world and enchanted an astronaut when he viewed the earth’s clouds from outer space; the beauty of an island that has been reclaimed by forests and fields of ferns that reach shoulder-high, where raccoons and deer have no reason to be afraid; a Garden with a thousand trees, each one of them a source of food. 

The Immortal King Rao holds too many facets of contemporary life to be seen only as a novel. Vara, who was once a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal and then business editor of The New Yorker, isn’t just an astute observer. She’s put the pieces together in a way that feels uncomfortably like a prophecy—and a tragedy. This is a book that will keep you awake at night, staring into the dark and looking for answers.~Janet Brown

The Dragon Hunt : Five Stories by Tran Vu, translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong (Hyperion]

The Dragon Hunt Is a collection of five short stories, some of which are based upon the life of writer Tran Vu. The stories were translated from the Vietnamese language by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong. A couple of the stories have previously been published in other periodicals. 

The lead story, The Coral Reef, was first published in Granta: Fifty in the summer of 1995. The second story in the collection, Gunboat on the Yangtze is a slightly altered translation that first appeared in the anthology Night, Again : Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam which was published by Seven Stories Press in 1996. 

The Coral Reef is about a boat full of refugees that runs aground on a coral reef. The crew and passengers do their best to free the boat from the reef but their efforts seem to be in vain. After the first day of being stranded, there are already changes in the people as they scramble to find food and provisions from the wreckage and think only of their own survival. 

The Coral Reef was based on an incident in Tran Vu’s life. Tran was born in Saigon in 1962. When he was sixteen, he and his older brother fled Vietnam on a boat. The war was over but the siblings didn’t feel safe with the communist government. Their boat, filled with four hundred passengers, was shipwrecked on a coral reef. 

Tran escaped through a porthole and survived in the ocean for ten days, thanks to the life jacket that was given to him by his mother, who stayed in Vietnam. He was a refugee in the Philippines until he was granted asylum in France where he currently lives. 

Gunboat on the Yangtze is a disturbing story about a disfigured boy named Toan, and his elder sister who currently live in a small house in Paris. The boy suffers from extreme loneliness so his sister promises to find him a girlfriend. Once Elder Sister’s friend sees Little Brother’s face, she screams and storms out of the house, yelling for help. Even after leaving the house, “her ghoulish scream haunted the corridor for a long time.”

Elder Sister gives in to her brother’s demand about being loved and they start an incestuous relationship. Things get a bit more complicated when Toan says he wants to have a child of his own. What happens between them defies the imagination.

Hoi An is the setting for a love triangle between a married woman, a servant girl, and the man who lives in the same house with the married woman, although in a different rented room. Hoi An is a small forgotten town in central Vietnam. The married woman’s husband is an archeologist and has moved his family to Hoi An to continue his research into the Cham and Sa Huynh people. The husband seems to be oblivious of his wife’s actions which makes her bold and dangerous at the same time. 

Nha Nam is a story where Vu mimics the style of a well-known Vietnamese writer named Nguyen Huy Thiep. Vu’s story was inspired by Thiep’s Nha Nam Rain, but Vu points out that the two stories have nothing in common besides their titles. Vu says that Nha Nam translates to Delicate South and is both ancient Vietnam and the Vietnam of today.

The final story which the book takes its name from is about a group of Vietnamese exiles who gather together in a European nation to kill dragons and eat their flesh. In Vu’s notes he mentions The Dragon Hunt is a metaphor for the divide between North and South of Vietnam, not in the sense of a nation, but as a people. It’s the difference between those who remained in the country and those who left. 

This book is a good introduction to contemporary Vietnamese fiction. Vu’s own experiences add to the realism of his stories. Although a very short book, it will impress you enough to want more. ~Ernie Hoyt

Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road by Kate Harris (HarperCollins Publishers)

Kate Harris, like many of us, was struck by wanderlust at an early age. Marco Polo became her role model and even after she realized his explorations were prompted by commercialism and not adventure, she still longed to imitate his journey. However she became terrified that the world had become too settled to satisfy her desire for wild travel and at seventeen sent letters to every leading political figure of the time, pleading her case for a human mission to Mars. She of course planned to be in that spacecraft. 

Nowhere on earth meets her stern criteria for untouched wilderness until she stands on an Alaskan glacier in the Juneau Icefield. Going back to the trail set by Marco Polo, she discovers Fanny Bullock Workman, an early 20th Century traveler who reached the Siachen Glacier, once part of Tibet and now claimed by Kashmir. Still an unvisited piece of the world, due to the military dispute between India and Pakistan, this glacier claims Harris’s imagination. It becomes the subject of her master’s thesis and eventually sends her off on a bicycle in the company of a childhood friend, following Marco Polo along the Silk Road. Her goal is the Siachen Glacier, along a route that will take her from Turkey through the Middle East and into China, Tibet, Nepal, and India.

There’s something about bicycle travel that lends itself to travel literature. The boozy old Irishwoman Dervla Murphy wrote a whole library shelf full of books about her cycling around the undeveloped world. Andrew Pham launched his writing career with Catfish and Mandala, his emotional rediscovery of his native Vietnam on a bicycle. Barbara Savage’s Miles from Nowhere has become a travel classic, telling how she and her husband spent two years traveling around the world on their bikes. Lands of Lost Borders is different from any of its predecessors, however. Although Harris disdains Henry Thoreau, her book is much like one he would have written, had he ever pulled himself out of Concord.

Anyone who travels across countries by bicycle is an athlete. Harris takes that part of herself for granted. Instead she gives voice to her wide-ranging intellect. She’s a scientist, a historian, and a poet which makes this book a constant source of surprise. She’s a risk-taker, who happily crawls under a border fence into another country when she lacks the appropriate papers for a conventional entry. She’s also a very young woman with a tinge of bitchiness, an occasional lapse into whining, and a generous helping of humor. One of her heroes, Alexandra David Neel, would have loved her. 

“Fat grey birds scattered,,,like a toss of ball bearings…Clouds pinched the sky,” Harris says of the first moments of her journey. In Georgia, she looks at Mount Ararat and sees it as “less an upheaval of rock than a cold clump of stars.” She finds a vital link between environmental protection and trophy hunting—”Putting a price tag on wilderness can pay off.” And the farther she rides, the more she agrees with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement, “Nationalism is babyishness for the most part.”

Linking the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk to bicycling over the Caucasus Mountains isn’t far-fetched. Wilbur and Orville were avid cyclists before they developed their first plane and icy slopes occasionally send Harris and her companion into short flights that end in crashes. As they cycle into spring, the theme of her journey becomes clear to Harris:”No road was long enough to learn all I wanted to know and get where I wanted to go.” She learns to be tolerant of Polo’s unadventurous pragmatism since she is “so privileged, so assiduously comfortable that risk and hardship hold rapturous appeal.” Even so, as she crosses Uzbekistan’s desert, sleeping during the day and traveling after dark, she understands why “the Uzbek language has no word for fun.”

In Tibet they meet two elderly pilgrims who are crawling down a highway to reach Lhasa, their knees and arms protected with thick cloth but their foreheads sporting a thick callus “like a third eye.” In Nepal, the Buddha becomes an omnipresent entity after the cyclists pass through Lumbini. Any mystical connection is broken when Harris sees Siddhartha emblazoned everywhere on shop signs and wonders what he would think of the Siddhartha Internet Cafe. 

She’s too much a scientist to dabble in mysticism but her observations of the natural world come close to that of the “absolute unmixed attention” that Simone Weil called prayer. And in the end, Harris concludes that her goal was never “a place to reach to reach, but a reason to go.” She now lives near the Canadian-Alaskan border, not too far from the Juneau Icefield that had first satisfied her hunger for wilderness. With any luck, someday she’ll write about that—an adventure in which she stays in one place.~Janet Brown

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Granta)

In Sayaka Murata’s previous novel, Convenience Store Woman, (Asia by the Book, March 2018) the main character feels like she doesn’t fit into society and doesn’t understand why people won’t leave her alone. Now, in Earthlings, her second book to be published in English and translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, she has taken the subject of “fitting in” to an extreme as Natsuki, the main character, does her best to be a functioning part of society. 

However, readers should be warned that this is definitely a title that should not be judged by its cover. The image of the cute stuffed doll may have one imagining that this might be a heartwarming fantasy about an alien stranded on earth, like E.T., who just wants to go home. The reader would be so far off the mark and may be disappointed to find out that Sayaka Murata’s world is not that simple. Her world is much darker and more real than any fantasy. 

As a child, Natsuki thought she was an alien. She believes that she is a wizard and has magic powers, given to her by a stuffed animal she bought with her New Year’s money when she was just six. Her special friend is called Piyyut. She’s now eleven but still believes she is a magician,  “a real one with actual magical powers.” 

Every summer, Natsuki and her family leave their home in Chiba and go visit her grandparent’s home in the fictitious town of Akishina, located high up in the mountains of the Southern Alps. Along with Piyyut, she carries an origami magic wand and a magical transformation mirror in her bag. 

Piyyut is from the Planet Popinbopopia. “The Magic Police had found out that Earth was facing a crisis and had sent him on a mission to save our planet.” By now, we can either believe that Natsuki really does have magical powers or that she just has an extremely active imagination. It’s also hard to determine if Piyyut is just a stuffed animal that doesn’t say anything or if he really is an alien, come to help save the earth.

The only one who knows her secret is her cousin Yuu who lives in Yamagata. Summer is the only time when they meet. Natsuki calls him her boyfriend. They made a pledge to each other when they were nine. Yuu shares with Natsuki his own secret, telling her that he is also an alien. 

After returning to Chiba one summer and going back to cram school, Natsuki has an experience that will affect her for the rest of her life. She is molested by her teacher, a teacher who is popular among students. She once tries to tell her mother about the incident but her mother won’t listen.

The following summer, the family is once again in Akishina. Natsuki is happy because she will see her boyfriend who is also her cousin (of course their parents and relatives don’t know about their relationship). Unfortunately for Natsuki and Yuu, they are caught having sex together the night before Natsuki’s family is to return to Chiba. 

The book then goes twenty three years into the future. Natsuki is now a housewife. However her marriage is a marriage of convenience. Her husband is desperately trying to escape society while Natsuki hopes to become a “tool for the Factory”, meaning she hopes to be able to be a “baby factory” because that’s what society expects for women. Her husband thinks otherwise. 

Natsuki’s husband convinces her to take him to Akishina since he’s heard so much about it. The family feels it might not be the best timing as Yuu is currently living in the house. After the two were caught together, both families had refused to let them see or talk to each other. It was now twenty-three years since that incident. 

Will Natsuki’s husband be in shock if he learns about their secret? Does Yuu remember the promises they made as children? And will Natsuki become a “tool for the Factory” to produce “humans connected by flesh and blood”? 

Sayaka Murata’s new world in Earthlings is not for the weak of heart. She deals with a lot of taboo subjects—incest, rape, murder, violence, cannibalism, secrets, and spins it into a story that will stay with you long after you have finished reading it. I’m still not sure if Natsuki was an alien to begin with, like she said! ~Ernie Hoyt

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng (Riverhead Books)

At first only a small boy is able to find the islands. Ah Boon is on his father’s fishing boat when the first island appears, with its bounty of fish that will bring financial stability without effort. Elusive and mysterious, the island is gone when the next trip to it takes place, reappearing only when Ah Boon is on the boat to search for it. It turns out to be one of several islands, never before seen by the small village of fisherman who profit from this discovery. 

Money from the steady crop of fish sends Ah Boon to school, an unusual step for a child raised in a kampong, one of the many villages at the edge of the sea, surrounded by mangrove trees. There he meets Siok Mei, a spirited, smart orphan from the kampong.

Their friendship becomes a fiercely loyal one, even when politics drives a wedge between them. Siok Mei becomes a Communist activist while Ah Boon finds an opportunity to join the Gah Men, British-educated Chinese from the city who find an economic goldmine in the mangrove swamps on the coast. First lured by the air-conditioned coolness and the television set in the newly built community center that has been built in the kampong, the villagers begin to understand that a more comfortable life exists outside of what they’ve always known. When Ah Boon tells them about the apartments that will soon be built nearby, ones with electricity, plumbing, bathrooms, and refrigerators, slowly they abandon their fishing village for these newfound luxuries and the construction equipment moves in. 

Singapore, the island they live on, needs more land. To get it, the Gah Men remove the mangroves, fill in the swamp, and extend Singapore into the sea. The kampongs disappear, the fishermen who live in high-rise buildings lose their livelihood, and Communism becomes a threat to be eradicated. Ah Boon and Siok Mei are on separate and dangerous pathways but their friendship pulls them together again.

Rachel Heng juxtaposes a mythic way of life against the hard truths of history, taking her characters from 1941 into the Japanese occupation from 1942-1945 and up to Singapore’s independence from Great Britain and its short-lived merger with Malaysia. The Great Reclamation shows how Singapore stamped out kampong culture in the service of its expansion, an act that would lead to the island eventually increasing its land mass by 22%. Since 1965, Singapore has gone from 227 square miles to 277 square miles and plans to reclaim another 38 by 2030, bringing it to over 300. In the process people who have traditionally been rooted to the seacoast are now far from it, suspended in buildings that keep their feet from touching the earth.

Rachel Heng’s characters are all servants of this history, each of them representing a fragment of Singapore’s past. None of them go much beyond this and the tragedy that engulfs them seems pallid as a result. It’s the kampong that’s given vivid life with descriptions that are bound to make readers mourn its disappearance--and when the enigmatic islands become threatened, this has more resonance than what takes place between Ah Boon and Siok Mei. 

This is a fine introduction to Singapore’s modern history but as a novel it falls short. Rarely does fiction cry out for a timeline but this book definitely does.~Janet Brown

The Windfall by Diksha Basu (Crown)

What happens when a middle-class Indian family  becomes extremely wealthy overnight? That is the question Diksha Basu answers in her debut novel, The Windfall. She doesn’t specifically ask this question but she has created a situation that is plausible as it is hilarious. 

Mr. Jha and his wife live in a small complex called Mayur Pallin in East Delhi. The atmosphere of the place reminds one of the bar on the American sitcom Cheers, where everyone knows your name”. It is not a slum but a community where everyone knows everyone else’s business. The complex is filled with neighbors who like to gossip, where people still hang laundry on ropes from their balconies, and where you can hear the clatter of dishes as the neighbors prepare for dinner. 

The Jhas have lived in the complex for almost twenty-five years. He is fifty-two and his wife forty-three; their twenty-three-year-old son Rupak is studying for his MBA at a university in the U.S. He has asked his closest neighbors and friends to gather in his living room so he can make an announcement before the gossiping starts. The Jhas are “moving out, and not just moving out, but moving to Gurgaon, one of the richest new neighborhoods in Delhi.”

Mr. Jha created a website which became quite successful and he has managed to sell it for twenty million dollars. He overhears one of his neighbors saying the sale of the website and his newly acquired wealth was “a lucky windfall.” However, Mr. Jha knows that it was no “lucky windfall,” He had worked hard on the website for four years before selling it.

The Jhas are moving into a two-story bungalow with front and back yards. The house is located in a quiet area of Gurgaon, “away from the traffic and chaos of the rest of Delhi.” It’s a place “that hawkers and beggars avoided.” The houses in Gurgaon are widely spaced apart and interaction with the neighbors is minimal. “Mr. Jha knows he was supposed to want that-- that was how rich people’s tastes were supposed to be.”

Now that Mr. Jha is rich, he wants to fit in with his new neighbors. He recently bought a new car, a Mercedes, which was embarrassingly delivered to his home in Mayur Palli. After he meets his new neighbor, Mr. Chopra, he feels the need to one-up Mr. Chopra on everything, much to the chagrin of his wife.

Meanwhile, his son in America is failing his classes. He is currently on academic probation and if his grades don’t improve, he will have to return to India, a failure in his parents’ eyes. He also has a white girlfriend named Elizabeth that he knows his parents will not approve of. Elizabeth keeps pressuring Rupak to talk to his parents about them but he uses every excuse he can think of to avoid this particular conversation. 

Rupak’s parents are planning to visit him and he is at his wit’s end as he has no idea how to tell his parents that his real interest is in film, not business. He is afraid to introduce Elizabeth to them, and he’s having a crisis of his own. 

The Windfall is a satire about wealth. It’s an Indian version of “keeping up with the Joneses.” The comical antics of Mr. Jha will have you shaking your head as he thinks of different ways to let his new neighbor know that he is as good as or better than they are. At times, Mr Jha’s actions will irritate and annoy you, but you can’t help smiling as you try to picture yourself in his shoes. 

What it all comes down to is that this is a story about family and belonging. It is also about ambition and failure. Who’s to say what we will do if we unexpectedly become rich beyond our means. I must say, I wouldn’t mind finding out. ~Ernie Hoyt

Daughters of the New Year by E. M. Tran (Hanover Square Press)

Xuan “wears her American citizenship with discomfort,”  she marinates the holiday dishes of her new country in soy sauce because fish sauce is impossible to find in New Orleans, and she reads a book of Chinese horoscopes every year “like a very important yearly report.” She has to. How else can she monitor the lives of her American daughters, the Earth Goat, the Fire Tiger, and the Earth Dragon? A Metal Tiger herself, Xuan knows the importance of these annual predictions and it’s her responsibility to keep her children informed. 

Trac, the Earth Goat, has graduated from Columbia Law with the knowledge that New York shares New Orlean’s racism without realizing it. Deciding she prefers the clarity of Southern bigotry, she now practices law in her hometown while struggling with the truth that as a Vietnamese American, she’s “not we, not them.” In love with a woman who’s a white Southerner, Trac knows the only ones who can understand her position are her sisters.

Nhi, the Fire Tiger, is in the city where her mother had captured the title of Miss Saigon 1973. As a contestant in an American get-the-bachelor reality show, this girl raised in New Orleans knows Saigon is “no more home to her than Bogota or Brussels, but here she feels her ancestry. She’s surrounded by people who look like her, whose language she’s heard all her life but can barely speak, and she feels as though in Saigon she’s “both a stranger and an intimate.”

Trieu is the youngest, still living at home, the Earth Dragon who knows her sisters’ secrets and guards them from their mother. Graduating from a “magnet” school where the elementary students are all gifted and mostly white, Trieu is alien in middle school where she’s surrounded by Black and first-generation Vietnamese American kids. She’s the Twinkie, yellow on the outside, white on the inside—and as the outsider, Trieu becomes an observer whose ambition is to write. 

Just as these women begin to take shape, they dissolve into a family history, one that mirrors the history of Vietnam. Suddenly Xuan is in a boat with her mother, her sister, and thirteen other people, with jewelry and gold sewn into her clothing, imperiled by starvation, thirst, and the threat of Thai pirates. Tien, Xuan’s mother, prepares her own mother for burial and sorts through photographs of a vanished life, before their family’s grand house and their rubber plantation was destroyed by a never-ending war. And back through the centuries the story goes, revealing secrets that were never told, the heroic exploits of women whom the New Orleans sisters will never know. 

A family tree traces the existence of these women, from the legendary Trung sisters who led an ancient rebellion to rid their country of Chinese rule to Xuan’s three daughters who each rebel in their own fashion. (All on the family tree are provided with their own zodiac sign, buttressing the novel’s title.)

Anyone who has grown up American in a family based upon immigrant ancestors, which is to say all of us, will understand E. M. Tran’s attempt to recover her shrouded family history. Her novel is essentially a collection of linked short stories, with no single character developing into fullness. The wit and scathing observations that bring the first portion of her narrative to life fade into a patchwork of history, with characters who are as faded as blotched and deteriorating photographs from the past. This is a book that should have gone deeper—and should have been much longer—to give its characters the life they deserve.~Janet Brown

On the Front Line : The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin by Marie Colvin (Harper)

I really respect and admire people who are totally dedicated to their work, especially those people who often make sacrifices of their own to help the more unfortunate. I believe that being a war correspondent is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Journalists put their lives at risk to bring news of atrocities committed around the world. I am referring to the journalists who make an effort to go into the heart of a conflict, refusing to sit back in their comfortable hotels to report their stories secondhand from refugees, soldiers, and international aid workers. Marie Colvin was one of those people. 

Marie Colvin was an American who had been a war correspondent for the Sunday Times since 1986 when she covered the U.S. bombing of Tripoli in Libya. Since then, she reported on conflicts around the world. She covered the Iran-Iraq War, she stayed in Baghdad throughout the bombing during the first Persian Gulf War. She was also the first journalist to enter Kosovo from Albania with the Kosovo Liberation Army after the bombing by NATO planes.

She lost the sight of her left eye covering the conflict in Sri Lanka but that didn’t stop her from going back to other conflict zones after her recovery. She went back to the Middle East to report on the continuing problems facing Israeli-Arab relations, the departure of U.S. forces from Iraq and the resurgence of Al-Qaeda, on Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban fighting against Hamid Karzai’s government. She also sent dispatches from Iran, Egypt, and Libya, until she was killed in February of 2012 while covering the uprising in Syria. 

On the Front Line is a collection of her reports in the various conflicts she has covered. Several of the articles focus on the Middle East—the Iran-Iraq War, The Gulf War, Soviet Jews escaping persecution and finding refuge in Israel’s Occupied West Bank. She interviewed Yassir Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and was one of the three remaining journalists in Dili, in East Timor where the United Nations were planning to pull out leaving hundreds of East Timorese to fend for themselves against the Indonesian army and militias. However, thanks to her reporting, the U.N. reversed their decision to pull out. Colvin said, “I embarrassed the decision-makers and that felt good because it saved lives.”

Colvin’s long experience taught her that most governments lie or distort the truth to cover up what they are really doing and the only way for the world to know was for her to go in and report what she saw. The Sri Lankan government was a case in point. The northeast part of the island was controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), a militant organization that fought to create an independent Tamil state because of the discrimination and violent persecution of them by the majority Sinhalese who dominated the Sri Lankan government. 

The ban against journalists going to the Tamil-held areas meant they could not speak with any of the leaders of the L.T.T.E. “even though the government was involved in negotiations with them through a Norwegian envoy to begin peace talks. The only news of the problems with those negotiations came from the government.”

The ban also meant that reporters had no first-hand accounts of the nearly half-million civilians living there, more than half of them being refugees. The people “were suffering under an economic embargo that the government denied existed.” Colvin was the first foreign journalist to enter the Tamil-controlled area of Sri Lanka. After she filed her story and tried to make her way back to the government-held area, she was shot in the eye, thus causing the eyepatch that became her famous trademark. 

I am fascinated and repulsed by crimes against humanity. After Colvin’s narrow escape from Sri Lanka, she was often asked if the risk was worth it. Some people called her brave while others said she must be stupid. Colvin responded to her critics and supporters alike, saying, “there’s no way to cover war properly without risk”. She didn’t care about what kinds of planes were flown, what types of tanks were used or the size of the artillery being rained down. What she wass most concerned about was “the experience of those most directly affected by the war, those asked to fight and those who are just trying to survive.” 

It amazes me as to how barbaric people can become. Colvin’s articles do not whitewash any of the facts —random killings, looting, rape, violence, torture, friendly neighbors turning on each other because they are of the wrong party or race. It appears it will take the world another millennia or more before all people realize that in war, it is the average citizen, young and old alike, who suffer the most. What the world truly needs are more people like Marie Colvin to continue writing the truth about the atrocities of war. ~Ernie Hoyt

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press)

When Noah goes to the mailbox and finds a letter addressed to Bird, even though there’s no return address, he knows who it’s from. Only two people in the world still call him by his real name, Bird—his mother who vanished three years ago and his only friend, Sadie, who’s also disappeared. The handwriting on the envelope is his mother’s and so is the drawing that he finds inside--a single piece of paper covered with cats, an illustration from a story his mother used to tell him when she tucked him into bed at night.

After his mother’s departure, Bird’s father has demanded that he tell anyone who asks that she’s not a part of his life anymore. All traces of her have been destroyed and Bird’s memories of her are shadowed and incomplete. It’s Sadie who reawakens them by showing him an article she’s torn from a newspaper. His mother is Margaret Miu, a famous poet. The title of her poem, Our Missing Hearts, has become a battle cry for rebels and Miu is regarded as the leader of the rebellion.

PACT is what the rebels are fighting against—the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. This is an integral part of America, installed after The Crisis that almost wiped out the country’s economy, a disaster for which China carries the blame. Chinese Americans are suddenly under suspicion, Bird’s mother most of all through the power of her words.

Suddenly Bird sees those words everywhere, on scraps of paper, on posters tacked up by invisible hands, in gigantic white letters painted in front of an installation of crocheted red yarn from which dolls are suspended. 

PACT, Sadie tells him before she runs away, is why she’s in a foster home. She was taken from her parents because they were part of the rebellion—and, she says, she’s only one of many children who were forcibly stripped from their families. She and the others are “the missing hearts.”

As Bird searches for a book that might hold the story that he dimly remembers, he goes to the library where a friendly librarian helps him in his quest—and remembers both Sadie and his mother. She even knows his true name and the poem that has made his mother infamous. She’s part of an underground railroad that does its best to find the missing children and reunite them with their parents. 

Suddenly Bird becomes consumed by the thought of his own quest--to find his mother and bring her home. Armed with a mysterious address that he finds by chance and the postmark on the letter he was sent, he goes off alone on a bus from Boston to New York City.

Celeste Ng has recreated the turmoil, paranoia, and inhumanity of our present century in a novel that examines this with the soft and magical touch of a fairy tale. Bird’s journey is guided by the stories his mother read to him from books by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. From them he’s learned to trust in the guidance of strangers and to be undaunted by what appears to be matters of wild coincidence. The Duchess, the reappearance of Sadie, the bleak circumstances that govern his mother’s life are all part and parcel of the web of folktales that have informed his life.

Adult readers may find this magical construction more difficult to accept. In a world where children have been separated from their parents and may never find their way home, where Asian Hate is so prevalent that it’s featured as the cover story in magazines, and where China has become the scapegoat for many in America, one that’s responsible for everything from covid to rampant inflation, this gentle version of our reality may be offensive and infuriating.

But Ng has constructed a setting where cruelty can be combated with persistence and hope. Beneath her contemporary fairy tale setting is a call for individual action, buttressed by a sense of individual responsibility, conveyed by characters who could be real, who could be us.~Janet Brown

Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell (Doubleday)

I was shocked and appalled at my utter lack of knowledge on the history of the modern Middle East. The area has been a hotbed of controversy and conflict since ancient times. However the Middle East as we know it today was created after the end of World War I. 

Mary Doria Russell has created a novel in which a young school teacher comes into an inheritance, travels to Egypt, and meets and interacts with a number of historical figures, including Winston Churchill before he became Prime Minister, T.S. Lawrence, more commonly known as Lawrence of Arabia, and Gertrude Bell. Bob Hope makes a guest appearance as well. 

To be honest, I was familiar with Winston Churchill, only after he became Prime Minister. I had thought Lawrence of Arabia was a Hollywood creation, and I had no idea who Gertrude Bell was. But thanks to Mary Doria Russell’s meticulous research, I now know that before Churchill became Prime Minister, he was the Secretary of State for the Colonies and oversaw British foreign policy in the Middle East; that T.E. Lawrence was an actual person; and it was Gertrude Bell who was notable for helping to create the Kingdom of Iraq. 

Dreamers of the Day is narrated in the first person by Agnes Shanklin, an unmarried school teacher living in the Midwest and the eldest of three children. The time is 1918 when the “Great War and the Great Influenza fell on our placid world almost without warning.” Agnes’s family is not immune to the plague and she loses seven of her relatives, including her sister and brother-in-law, Lillian and Douglas, their two young sons, her Uncle John, her mother, and her brother Ernest. 

Lillian, Agnes’s sister, has married a professor at a college they both attended and he is offered a post to teach at the American Mission School in Jebail in Syria (which is today known as Byblos in the country of Lebanon). There she meets and becomes friends with T.S. Lawrence. In 1919 Agnes’s sister calls her and tells Agnes that she and her husband are taking her to a talk given by Sir Lawrence. It’s after this that she and her family contract the deadly virus. Agnes is the only one to survive.

After settling the affairs of three separate estates, Agnes finds herself “with plenty of money and no family of my own to support” so she books passage and takes the trip of a lifetime. She makes reservations to stay at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo.

The year is 1921 and the Semiramis Hotel has been chosen as the site for the Cairo Peace Conference, a secret meeting held by British officials to partition the lands of the defeated Ottoman Empire that would become the nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan.

Into this world comes a single, middle-aged lady who finds herself in the company of celebrities and dignitaries alike. Agnes also finds romance, albeit with a married man who is a German Jew. She surmises that he is a spy because she is taken in by his charm and chivalry.

Russell’s story is as entertaining as it is educational. It teaches us the rich history of the Middle East but it also sheds light on the arrogance and condescension against natives by the core of the British bureaucracy. Russell has one of her characters state, “They believe that freedom is an object to be delivered, like a parcel that arrives in the post.” 

The rebuttal by Agnes Shanklin is priceless as she replies, “They must surely know what freedom isn’t. It isn’t having British troops all over their land. It isn’t taxation without representation,” a major point for a lesson in American history. 

Unfortunately, the Middle East is still a land full of conflict. The Palestinians have yet to be given their own nation, the Kurds are still nationless as well. It may be another millennia before anybody sees any real changes in the Middle East. We can only hope. ~Ernie Hoyt

On Java Road by Lawrence Osborne (Penguin Random House UK)

Adrian Gyle hovers perilously on the edge of the old acronym, FILTH, Failed in London, Try Hong Kong, but in his case this is reversed. Although he’s lived and worked in Hong Kong since The Handover, he’s still known only as “a writer of something or other,” a self-described “excellent nonentity.” What has kept him afloat in his adopted city--and what’s kept him from returning to London as a failure-- is a bit of luck, a friendship from his university days with the son of a Hong Kong billionaire, a frivolous but loyal comrade. 

Jimmy Tang sees himself as a kind of Pygmalion, buying his old college chum the suits that will distinguish him from other journalist hacks, taking him to Hong Kong’s best restaurants, inviting him to parties where Gyle meets “useful friends.” But Hong Kong has changed over the past decades. “The disturbances”  have erupted and the divisions they have caused are jagged ones. Students, police, and Triad thugs battle it out on the streets while families like Jimmy’s, “servants of stability,” stay aloof, worrying that the revolutionaries will “spoil their paradise.”

Gyle is emotionally detached from the battles that he witnesses until he meets Jimmy’s latest girl. Rebecca To is beautiful, articulate, 23, and a rebel. From a family so closely linked to Jimmy’s own that the two of them are committing “social incest,” she comes to dinner bearing the scent of tear gas. 

Gyle, after three meetings, becomes infatuated with his friend’s girl and when she mysteriously disappears soon after she and Jimmy have broken up, he is haunted by Rebecca. Is she one of the many bodies who have shown up in Victoria Harbor? Could Jimmy’s visit to a morgue, one where a drowned girl has recently arrived, be a sign that this dead girl might be Rebecca? And who has sent an anonymous email to Gyle with details of Rebecca’s final days and of the way she died, an email that implies that Jimmy was complicit in her death?

The real mystery of On Java Road is the book itself. Is it a thriller or a tale of the supernatural? Is it an adventure steeped in class differences and political change or just a lengthy description of Hong Kong that’s been cloaked with an overlay of fiction? 

There’s a fine line between detachment and complete disinterest that Lawrence Osborne’s novel flirts with. He gives more details about the sartorial and gustatorial habits of Hong Kong’s plutocrats than he does about the revolution that’s tearing the city apart. When conversations between his characters threaten to illuminate local politics, he removes all quotation marks and gives a brief and superficial summary of reported speech. The book is rich with Gyle’s interior thoughts and observations while every other character exists in a shadow land, amorphous and allowed only brief moments of animation.

Much praised for his sense of place, Osborne excels in his evocative portrait of Hong Kong, a city that he clearly loves. His observations of its neighborhoods are vivid enough to make readers want to get on the next plane and see this beauty for themselves. Unfortunately it also gives rise to the feeling that On Java Road is a collection of lovely pieces written for a glossy travel magazine that have been grafted onto a slender novella. Although Osborne has often been compared to Graham Greene, this work is more reminiscent of the kind of short story written by W. Somerset Maugham. Appropriately enough for the season, this is a ghost story--and the ghost of a novel that never really comes to life.~Janet Brown