The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff (Ballantine Books)

Nobody in her village is precisely sure of how to categorize Geeta. Is she a widow? Is she a witch? Is she a murderer? Or perhaps she’s all three possibilities rolled into one. 

The only true fact that everyone can agree upon is that several years ago, Geeta’s abusive husband Ramesh disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again.  Finding—or creating—an explanation for this has kept the village gossips busy ever since and Geeta’s tarnished reputation has kept her old friends at a distance. 

That Geeta doesn’t seem to miss her husband allows the stories about her to take on an even darker shadow. She has developed her own jewelry business and appears to be more than happy to live alone. Some of her neighbors call her a churel, possessed by a demon that eats children and makes both men and women unable to come up with replacement offspring. Others speculate that she must be “mixed with dirt,” abandoned because she had betrayed Ramesh with other men. However many women secretly envy her. Geeta has no husband to drink up her earnings, to beat her, or to make any demands upon her at all. At last one of the unhappy wives comes to her, begging that she “remove my nose ring,” a veiled plea to get rid of the woman’s husband the way Geeta is rumored to have disposed of her own. Suddenly a woman who was happy to have been abandoned becomes a reluctant murderer, not once but twice, at the behest of women who are trapped in miserable marriages.

With two murders to her credit, Geeta loses the pariah status bestowed upon her with her supposed killing of Ramesh. She even acquires a male admirer. In spite of her pangs of guilt and the threat of imprisonment, her life is good—until Ramesh shows up, alive and repentant, eager to resume his marital privileges and take his share of his wife’s financial success.

This is a promising beginning to a novel that’s quickly burdened with too many characters all talking at once and far too many social issues. Domestic violence, the injustices of the caste system, the preference for light skin over dark, the dangers of adulterated booze sold at a profit, the history of the Bandit Queen Phoolan who became an outlaw to wreak revenge after she had been gang-raped, even the intricacies of village council politics are all tossed into what at first seemed to be a pleasant little black comedy with feminist undertones. 

If that weren’t enough to sink the story, it quickly becomes burdened with a surfeit of unnecessary dialogue and an overdose of slapstick plot twists, giving the impression that Parini Shroff might have originally intended this to be a movie script or a television situation comedy. Even its dramatic ending falls prey to a never-ending conversation between almost all of the leading characters. What should have been suspenseful and maybe even thrilling goes on for an interminable thirty-five pages of threats and quips until at last someone mercifully takes action.

It’s tempting to tell San Francisco attorney Shroff not to quit her day job, but that would be cruel. Instead let’s hope that she concentrates on what she seems to do best, creating entertainment content where her crowd of characters and their jumbled lives will find themselves perfectly at home.~Janet Brown

その本は (Sonohonwa) by ヨシタケシンスケ (Shinsuke Yoshitaka) and 又吉直樹 (Naoki Matayoshi) (ポプラ社）

Sonohonwa is a delightful and magical fairytale that would appeal to book lovers all over the world. Unfortunately, it is only available in Japanese. The title translates into English as About that Book… It was written by popular children’s book writer and illustrator Shunsuke Yoshitake and the Akutagawa prize recipient who is one half of the comedy duo Peace, Naoki Matayoshi. 

It is the story of a kingdom whose elderly king loves to read books. However, in his old age, his vision is no longer what it used to be and he is nearly blind. The king summoned two of his subjects to the castle and said to them, “I love books. I’ve read many books in my lifetime. I’ve read almost every book there is to read. But now my eyesight is bad and I can no longer read books. Still, I love books. So I want to listen to more books. Therefore, I command you to go out into the world, find and talk to people about the world’s most fascinating books. Then, come back and tell me about all those books.”

So the men are given money and provisions and set out on their journey. They wander the world, collecting stories of the most fascinating books. The men return to the castle a year later. The king can no longer get out of bed but he can hear well, so the two men take turns each night, telling the king about the books they heard about. 

On the first night, one of the men tells the king about the fastest book in the world. It’s so fast that nobody can catch up and read it. The people get a cheetah to run after it just to read the cover. But the people are wondering how to get the cheetah to tell them what the book title was. Fortunately, that particular book has a twin. The shape and the contents are nearly the same. The book is being chased by the police and is finally arrested at the house of Volume 8. They had known that the book only had seven volumes.

But what’s the name of the book? The storyteller gives the king a hint. He said the book stretches from north to south, many people live in it, and it’s located in the middle of an ocean. He also told the king, in it you can see cherry blossoms in the spring, a Star Festival is celebrated in the summer, the leaves change colors in the autumn, and in the winter, people sit under a kotatsu while eating oranges. In the end, the storyteller tells the king, “about that book.” iIt is Ni-Hon (hon being the Japanese word for book). Nihon → Nippon → Japan!

The other storyteller tells the king about a book related to music. This story also uses a play on words. He tells the king sonohonwa (so no hon wa), which translates to, “The so book” can be found between the fa book and la books, which of course are part of the Do-Re-Mi solfege.

After the two men take turns telling the king all the stories, the king assembles them into one book. He tells the two men, “Yahari hon wa omoshiroi!” which roughly translates to, “It’s just as I thought, books are interesting.” On the following day, the king passes away with a satisfied look on his face. 

However, six months after their stories were assembled and published into one book, a surprising fact comes to light. The two men had never left their homes. They used the money the king gave them for their own living expenses and made up all the stories they told the king. They are taken to court and found guilty of two charges—not using the king’s money properly and lying to the king. The judge asks the two men if they had any final words they wanted to say. The two think about it and at the same time say, “About that book…”

You would be hard put to enjoy the story unless you have a firm grasp of the Japanese language. Many of the stories use puns and wordplay which would get lost in translation.  It reminded me of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, Khan asks Polo to tell him about one city he has never mentioned directly—his hometown. Polo responds by saying, “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” 

Of course Polo did travel all over the world so Khan would find it difficult to doubt Polo’s experiences. In the same way, the King believed that the two men traveled the world and collected all those stories. The King died a happy man which just goes to show you how strong the power of words are. ~Ernie Hoyt

Not Yo' Butterfly by Nobuko Miyamoto (University of California Press)

Misao was a picture bride who arrived in the U.S. to marry a man she’d never met in 1912. By 1914, she had two daughters, both born in Oakland, whom she sent to live with her parents in Japan for ten years. Soon after the girls returned to her, Misao died, leaving them to run the family household in a country they’d been separated from during their formative years.

Hatsue, the oldest, had been molded into a traditional Japanese girl but her younger sister Mitsue called herself Mitzi, studied fashion design, and insisted on marrying for love. The man she loved was half Japanese and half Caucasian, the son of a Mormon farm girl from Idaho who had fallen in love with a Japanese laborer and married him in spite of anti-miscegenation laws. Mitzi was as determined as her future husband’s mother had ever been. She defied her father, married the man of her choice, and gave birth to their first child two years before President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.

“I was born where I didn’t belong. At two, I became the enemy.” Although Nobuko’s first memories were of the hastily cobbled together internment camp at the Santa Anita racetrack in which the confined prisoners were housed in horse stalls, Mitzi knew a way out. Telling the authorities that her father-in-law had a farm in Idaho that her family could go to, she discovered that not only was the man she spoke to from Idaho, he had gone to the controversial wedding of her husband’s parents. Once again two rebellious women changed the life of Nobuko Joanne, known as Jojo. The little girl was given the freedom of farm life and the attention of everyone around her. She soon showed a love of music that seemed to pour into her and came out in the motions of dance.

When the war was over and the Miyamoto family returned to California, Mitzi turned her own artistic ambitions toward her daughter. Jojo was given tap lessons, ballet training, and began going to professional auditions by the time she was fourteen. At fifteen she was dancing in the filmed version of The King and I and a year after high school graduation, she was on her way to New York alone as a cast member of the Broadway musical, Flower Drum Song. Jojo became known as JoAnne Miya and the stage became her natural habitat—until she met an Italian filmmaker with an ambition to make a documentary about the Black Panthers.

This is how a rebel became a revolutionary. JoAnne Miya met and immediately gravitated to Yuri Kochiyama, the Japanese American activist who held Malcolm X on the night he was killed. Through this friendship she met the Black community leader who would become the father of her child and who insisted she return to her Japanese name, Nobuko. The glamorous performer became a protest singer who wrote songs that came from her own history and that of her parents, songs of rebellion that galvanized young Asian Americans and drew the attention of Yoko Ono and John Lennon.

This autobiography is a stunning social history, showing how America’s crucible of racism can bring rebellion into full flame in three generations, from a picture bride to a performer who uses her art to buttress her principles. It casts a bright light upon Asian, Black, and Latine activists, working together to bring change and transform their country.~Janet Brown

Aama in America : A Pilgrimage of the Heart by Broughton Coburn (Anchor Books)

Vishnu Maya Garung is an eighty-four-year-old Gurung woman from Nepal. Everyone in her village calls her Aama which is the Nepali word for “mother”. Author Broughton Coburn lived and worked in Nepal and the Himalayas for nearly twenty years. First he was a Peace Corp volunteer teacher, then an overseer for rural development and wildlife conservation projects for the United Nations and other agencies.

It was when Coburn lived in Nepal as a teacher that he met Vishnu Maya Garung (Aama). When he met her, Aama was a widow in her seventies. Coburn moved into a loft above a water buffalo shed that she owned. Aama became his landlady, and from these humble beginnings a friendship would form. Aama treated Coburn like her own son. Coburn says she saw him as a “dharma son, the male offspring she had never given birth to, sent from the heavens by the deities to be spiritually adopted”.  Coburn immediately felt a close bond to Aama as he had recently lost his own mother. 

He wrote a book about living with Aama and working and traveling with her throughout Nepal. The book was titled Nepali Aama : Portrait of a Nepalese Hill Woman, originally published by Moon Travel Handbooks in 1991. A new version was published in 2000 by Nirmal Kumar Khan with the subtitle being changed to Life Lessons of  a Himalayan Woman. 

While working in Nepal, Coburn met a woman from the U.S. who had been working in the country for more than ten years before they met. They soon dated and became a couple. After living together for four years, they decided to travel the U.S. together to see if they were as compatible as they had been while living in Nepal. However, Coburn wanted to see one more person before leaving the country. 

It had been two years since Coburn visited Aama. He went to see her with his girlfriend Didi in tow. Didi was well aware of Coburn’s relationship with Aama and was looking forward to meeting this woman who was well into her mid-eighties by now. When Aama saw Didi, she said to Broughton, “You’ve brought me a daughter-in-law”.

Relieved at finding Aama still alive and healthy, on an impulse, Broughton said, “Aama, how would you like to go to America with us?”. Aama’s only daughter, Sun Maya is the first to react. She looks at the two foreigners and just laughs, imagining her eighty-four year old mother in a land where she wouldn’t know anybody or speak the language. Even Didi thinks they should discuss it further.

Aama surprises all of them by answering, “Why wouldn’t I want to go? Why wouldn’t I want to see my dharma son’s and daughter-in-law’s home and meet their relatives?” And with those words, the preparation of taking Aama to the U.S. begins. 

Their travels throughout the U.S. results in Aama in America. The three unlikely travel companions spend time in Seattle, Washington—the start of their twenty-state tour of America. Aama is very spiritual and often questions why Americans don’t worship any deities or say prayers for their good fortune. 

With every natural wonder she sees—the redwood trees in California, the Pacific Ocean, the famous geyser, Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park, she feels awed and makes a prayer for each place. Coburn and Didi also take her to the “World’s Happiest Place”— Disneyland. 

Every experience Aama has—the places she sees, the people she meets, things we take for granted, are all given special attention. At times she’s humorous and at times a bit frustrating as Coburn and Didi are often scolded about their lack of spirituality. 

While mostly a travel journal of an extraordinary trip, Aama in America is also a very spiritual narrative. As the subtitle suggests, it really is A Pilgrimage of the Heart. However, this pilgrimage isn’t only made by Aama, it’s also a pilgrimage for the author himself who still has unresolved issues concerning his mother’s death, his relationship with Didi, and of course his bond with Aama. The trip may have been an unforgettable journey for Aama . It’s also a story you will not likely forget. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Thorn Puller by Hiromi Ito, translated by Jeffrey Angles (Stonebridge Press)

Hiromi Ito is a woman caught in a situation that’s a familiar scenario for many middle-aged women. She’s a mother whose youngest daughter is ten. She’s a wife whose husband is aging more quickly than she is. She’s a daughter whose parents can no longer take care of themselves unassisted. But Ito faces a complication that most of her counterparts don’t. She lives in California and her parents are in Japan.

Daily phone calls aren’t enough. Ito’s mother frequently begins these conversations with “When are you coming back to Japan?” This is a journey Ito makes several times a year, arriving in a fog of jet lag to face a city she abandoned long ago, and a new medical emergency that only she can cope with. Confronted with her past, a complicated present, and what will eventually be her own future, she does her best to make her parents comfortable. At the same time she takes care of her youngest daughter, who often accompanies her to Japan. Meanwhile she receives querulous phone calls from her husband who complains that he’s ill, her four-month absence is much too long, and isn’t it time for her to come home?

No wonder Ito becomes preoccupied with Jizo, the god who protects travelers, comforts children, and removes “the thorns of human suffering.” Although she’s no longer religious, she carries the rituals with her, clapping her hands to summon a god and tossing a coin as an offering, acts done reflexively when she passes a shrine. Visiting a temple where Jizu is venerated, she buys the amulet that’s said to banish pain, burns incense before the deity’s statue, and washes herself in the smoke, telling herself the smoke is what she believes in. She needs something to work with because her tasks never end--coming and going, back and forth, phrases repeated in Japanese and in English throughout the narrative.

This threatens to be a bleak and hopeless novel but that isn’t what this is. The author says it’s a long poem and she should know. Not only is The Thorn Puller based heavily upon her own life while using her own name, Hiromi Ito has been a well-known Japanese poet for the past forty years, famous for writing frankly about experiences that are exclusively female. 

Although American reviewers have categorized this book as a novel—or even worse, as “autofiction”—Ito’s U.S. publisher has refused to put it into any sort of pigeon hole. The cover bears only the title, the author, and the translator; not even the copyright page gives a name to what The Thorn Puller might be.

A poem? A memoir? A series of meditative essays? A novel dripping with surrealism? Every reader is given the chance to assign a name to what they’ve read. It’s a work that’s puzzling and at times repetitive, steeped in folklore and skepticism, with actions not usually encountered in fiction nor admitted to in personal essays. While taking an unflinching look at the cruel way that bodies age, Ito moves into her final pages with an examination of dying, observing that “everyone who dies is experiencing it for the first time.” Unlike pregnancy that comes with books like Lamaze Technique for Dummies, death has no instruction manual. But, Ito suggests without ever saying so directly, perhaps it’s death that’s the true thorn puller.~Janet Brown

Journey Under the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino, translated by Alexander O. Smith (Abacus)

Keigo Higashino is Japan’s premier mystery writer. He has written over fifty novels, more than twenty of which were adapted into feature-length films and television series. A number of his works have been translated into English . 

Journey Under the Midnight Sun is the English translation of Byakuyako which was originally written as a serialized story in the monthly literary magazine Subaru from 1997 to 1999 and later published by Shueisha. It was first written as a series of short stories following a chronology that spans almost twenty years. Higashino then connected the stories into one plot line and compiled it into a single volume. 

The story opens with a murder that happened in Osaka in 1973. A man is found in an abandoned building stabbed to death. Investigating the case is Detective Junzo Sasagaki. He discovers the victim’s name to be Yosuke Kirihara, the owner of a small pawn shop. In their investigation, the police uncover a connection with Fumiyo Nishimoto, a single mother barely scraping by, and her boyfriend Tadao Terasaki, one of Kirihara’s customers. They become the prime suspects. 

Unfortunately, the police cannot prove their involvement and setting the investigation further behind, the two prime suspects mysteriously die shortly after the murder. Nishimoto’s death is ruled as an accident caused by a gas leak in the house. Terasaki dies in a car accident. With the loss of their two prime suspects, the investigation stalls and is eventually closed, remaining as an unsolved case.

The two people most affected by the murder are two elementary school aged children who were also friends—Ryo Kirihara, the son of the murdered victim, and Yukiho Nishimoto, Fumiyo’s daughter. The story then follows the life of the two kids, as they become university students and then adults. 

Ryo grows up to be a man without emotions who doesn’t get close to anybody. He also has a knack for manipulating people to do his bidding. He gets involved with a series of less than legal activities such as a housewife prostitution ring and pirating and selling popular video games. He also manages to stay one step ahead of the police and is never caught for the crimes he has committed. 

Yukiho Nishimoto is adopted by her wealthy aunt, Reiko Karasawa. Yukiho receives a good education and blooms into a beautiful upper-class woman full of elegance and charm. She becomes the successful owner of an upscale boutique. However, those close to her seem to end up in misfortune. The hidden dark side of Yukiho is not revealed until the end.

The thoughts of Ryo Kirihara and Yukiho Karasawa are never mentioned directly and are revealed through the viewpoints of a number of characters whose lives all intersect with either Ryo or Yukiho. Detective Sasagaki never accepts the official reports on the death of Fumiyo Nishimoto or Terada Terasaki and continues to follow the lives of Ryo and Yukiho. As he slowly pieces together the twenty-year old puzzle of Kirihara’s murder, the end results may shock you. 

The plot twists and character relations will have your head spinning and may make you as obsessed as Detective Sasagaki in finding out the truth. And when you do, you may be in for quite a shock. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Interpreter's Daughter by Teresa Lim (Pegasus Books)

When Teresa Lim began to investigate her family history, she thought the primary figure would be her great-grandfather, He was a man who emigrated from China to Singapore when he was young, at the time that the British still controlled their island colony. Known to his descendants simply as Law, Law Foong-Siew’s father made sure that he and his sons paid for their tickets to Singapore. Although this decision put them in debt to relatives, that was preferable to having a future employer pay for their passage and bind them to a life of indentured servitude, working as coolies to pay off a never-ending debt.

Law had two other advantages working in his favor. He had received an education and he had a flair for languages. Immediately embarking on English classes that were almost free, Law stood out among his fellow students who were almost all without education or an aptitude for learning English. He eventually became part of the colonial bureaucracy, an interpreter for British officials and a member of the Chinese Protectorate. Even though he abandoned the life of officialdom when the pay proved to be insufficient to support his wife and children, the prestige of that post carried him into a successful business career.

Long before Lim began to excavate Law’s history, when she was a little girl she asked her mother if their family had a tragedy befall them when the Japanese occupied Singapore during World War Two. Yes, her mother said, it happened to her aunt. No more was said and Lim forgot about this until she saw this woman in family photos.

Fanny Law was Law’s youngest child, much younger than her sisters and brothers, and she seemed to have been erased from the family history. Nobody wanted to talk about her and it took Lim huge amounts of painstaking research to discover who her great-aunt was and why she had become a non-entity in her family.

Fanny is her father’s favorite, the one who remains with him after her older sisters married and her brothers pursued their careers. Law make certain she is educated, first by her oldest brother who steeped her in Confucian thought and codes of duty, then at an elite girl’s school where Fanny excells. She is a brilliant scholar, one of the few Singaporeans to be accepted at the University of Hong Kong.

But before any of this took place, Fanny persuades Law to allow her to take the vows of a “sworn spinster.” She has seen how one sister died within her marriage while the other left her husband when he insisted on having a concubine and is now, with her young children, dependent upon her father for shelter, food, and economic support. Fanny is determined to remain single and eventually persuades her father to agree. Standing before the family altar with guests in attendance, she vows to live a life of independence and celibacy, setting up her own household and taking on full support for her sister and her sister’s children. In return, her father ensures that Fanny would receive an education in English.

By the time she’s 26, Fanny has a teaching position in Singapore, owns her own house, and provides the sole support of her sister, niece, and nephew. She had spent a brief period at the University of Hong Kong, failing her examination in English at the end of her first year, but that is enough to launch her teaching career.

However World War Two is brewing, boiling over when the Japanese invade China and move onward to take North Vietnam. From there they have a clear path into Southeast Asia. Singapore, supposedly impregnable, becomes a target for Japanese bombers. “Singapore won’t fall,” Winston Churchill proclaims after the British lose Penang, but once Malaysia is invaded, Singapore is doomed.

The conquering Japanese have around 30, 000 troops to control more than 300,000 Singaporean Chinese men. They single out those whom they discover are leaders and they execute them. One of these men is Fanny’s oldest brother and Fanny reverts to the Confucian ideals that he had taught her. The decision she makes is enough to eradicate her memory—until her great-niece uncovers her story.

“I wish I had known Fanny,” Lim says but discovers that without her great-aunt’s fateful decision, Lim herself would never have existed. Lim’s mother had been given to Fanny with the understanding that she too would become a sworn spinster. But while Fanny’s adopted daughter took another path and couldn’t keep her aunt’s memory alive, her own daughter becomes the one to return her to the family history.

The Interpreter’s Daughter takes on too much and this sinks it. A biography mingled with a detailed family history and the writer’s personal memoir, along with a concise account of the opening years of World War Two would be a substantial weight for any book. The crushing addition comes when Lim embroiders upon a brief sentence spoken by her mother. When Lim asks about the conclusion to Fanny’s education, her mother tells her, “There was a young man.” From that Lim invents a romance between Fanny and a family friend, with stilted conversation and a melodramatic conclusion. Since this is the only attempt at a novelization of Fanny’s life, it falls flat and diminishes Lim’s careful research.

Even with this flaw, the Law family history and the woman who honored all who came before her is a remarkable record of how rapidly the world has changed in such a dazzlingly short time. Fanny Law was a woman born too soon and paid the price for that accident of birth.~Janet Brown

The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda, translated by Alison Watts (Bitter Lemon Press)

Riku Onda is the pen for Nanae Kumagai, a Japanese writer who was born in Aomori Prefecture and raised in Sendai. She has won several awards in Japan for her works such as the Eiji Yoshikawa Prize, the Japan Booksellers’ Award, the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, and the Naoki Prize. Many of her works have been adapted into television series and feature length films. 

 The Aosawa Murders is her first book to be published in English. It was originally published in the Japanese language in 2005 with the title Eugenia by the Kadokawa Corporation. The English version came out in 2020, translated by Alison Watts who has also translated Spark by Naoki Matayoshi, a book that won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize in 2015. 

The Aosawa Murders is also Onda’s first mystery novel. It is part psychological thriller and part murder mystery. However, the murders were committed over thirty years ago, on a summer day in an unnamed town in an unnamed Prefecture. However, there are clues to pin down the place as Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture, a fairly large town located on the coast of the Sea of Japan. 

There’s a celebration for three members of the Aosawa family who share their birthdays on the same day. However, the celebration becomes a tragedy as seventeen people die—by drinking soda and sake which is laced with cyanide. The only family member who survives is the Aosawas’ daughter—Hisako Aosawa. Unfortunately, Hisako Aosawa didn’t see the people dying around her—as Hisako is blind.

The story opens with a transcript of the police interview with Hisako Aosawa. In the interview, Hisako mentions a blue room and a white flower—a white crepe myrtle flower. This will become a clue as to what happened at that party. 

Although a suspect is later found, the case falls apart as the prime suspect commits suicide. As the years pass by, the detective who first worked on the case is convinced that Hisako played a part in the crime. A lot of the townspeople suspect Hisako as well, including one of Hisako’s childhood friends, a woman by the name of Makiko Saiga who was a little girl at the time of the tragedy and was one of the first people to witness the hellish scene.

Saiga would write a book about the incident more than ten years after that fatal day. It became a bestseller but the author herself would not say if it was either fiction or nonfiction. She tells an unnamed interviewer, “What do you think a person should do when they come across something they don’t understand? Should they reject it, pretend they never saw it? Be angry or resentful? Grieve or simply be confused?” 

She felt she had to write the book to make sense of what happened, but as with the case itself, the book doesn’t come to any real conclusions and leaves the reader with more questions than answers. 

This is the beauty of Riku Onda’s story. As with Makiko Saiga’s novel, which she titled The Forgotten Festival, The Aosawa Murders also ends ambiguously. Her style of writing may take a little getting used to at first. Even after you realize that each chapter is told through the perspective of several different characters who are somehow connected to the Aosawas or the Aosawa house, the book still leaves the reader with more questions than answers. Was Hisako Aosawa the mastermind of the poisoning? Did she have a role in what happened? And why did the prime suspect kill himself? Everything is left to conjecture. The story is very thought-provoking but frustrating as well. It is up to you to draw your own conclusion. ~Ernie Hoyt

We Have Always Been Here by Samra Habib (Viking, Penguin Random House Canada)

Samra Habib’s freedom becomes curtailed from the time she turns four. Left alone with a friend of her father’s while her mother runs an errand, she is sexually assaulted by the man who is supposed to protect her. Although she doesn’t say if the molester suffered any repercussions, she writes “I lost my right to be a child.” While her friends play without adult scrutiny, she has a constant chaperone, a nanny who monitors her whenever she leaves the house.

Other losses lie ahead of her. Her family belongs to one of Islam’s seventy-three sects, the one that is considered heretical. The Ahmadiyya believe in a Messiah who will succeed the Prophet Muhammed, a successor to Christ who will bring about a peaceful triumph of Islam, uniting it with other religions. This is disputed by other sects who refuse to acknowledge the Ahmadi as followers of Islam, often violently. Habib learns to keep her religion a secret but not even discretion allows peace. When her father’s life becomes endangered, he moves his family to Canada.

Fiercely homesick for Pakistan, Habib has that loss compounded by the role reversal that afflicts the children of immigrants. She becomes an English tutor to her parents and when her mother struggles with her efforts to gain a high school diploma, Habib frequently does her parent’s homework. 

Assimilation is difficult but slowly Habib works to become a Canadian teenager. Her parents—and her culture—have other ideas. By the time she’s sixteen, she’s caught in an arranged marriage.

This is too much. Before she moves in with her husband, with their marriage still unconsummated, Habib runs away from home. Taking refuge in the apartment of a classmate, she slowly begins to form her own life, with the privilege of her own freedom.

She earns her own living, discovers her own sexuality that awakens with her love of women, and explores the potential of her own brain. 

Her odyssey is a story of pain and discovery as she works to reconcile with her family and to find a way back to the religion that nourishes her. When at last she finds a mosque where gay Muslims are welcomed, she recovers an essential part of herself, her “desire to understand the beauty and complexity of the universe and to treat everyone, regardless of their beliefs, with respect.” It’s a path of heartbreak and inspiration, made vivid by Habib’s gift for detail and her sense of place.

A dozen years ago I sat in a room full of Muslim men who were asked what they would do if they learned their daughter loved women, not men. All of them talked about honor killing, except for one man who said although he couldn’t call for his child’s death, he would never be able to see her again. She would be dead to him.

Those men stayed with me as I read We Have Always Been Here. Their rigid form of Islam that demands the sacrifice of an errant child contrasts sadly and horribly with the words of Habib’s father as he finally accepts who his daughter is. “You can’t help it,” he tells her, “It’s just who you are.”~Janet Brown

When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433 by Louise Levathes (Oxford University Press)

Who could imagine that a ten-year-old boy, captured by Chinese troops in the Mongol-ruled state of Yunnan, would become China’s greatest explorer of the seas? 

Ma He was a lucky child. While many sons of China’s enemies were immediately castrated on the battlefield, he avoided that fate until he was thirteen, when he became the personal eunuch servant to a son of the emperor, Prince Zhu Di.

When his father died, Zhu Di launched a rebellion against the chosen successor, a long battle in which Ma He proved to be a skilled soldier and his master’s loyal ally. After Zhu Di took the throne as the Yongle Emperor, Ma He was given a new name. As Zheng He, he had a privileged position in the imperial court.

Over the past dynasties, eunuchs had gained power, rising from humble servants to form their own bureaucracy. Taking the lead as military men and heads of the emperor’s household, their influence eclipsed the Confucianist leaders who had held sway for centuries. The pragmatism of the eunuchs meshed well with the aspirations of the Yongle Emperor and trade soon became the major source of revenue.

Earlier when the Tang Dynasty had conquered Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria, and Korea, this expanded territory gave rise to more markets and formerly unknown prized goods. Slowly China moved beyond the Confucian beliefs that trade was a menial occupation and that the Middle Kingdom needed no contact with foreign countries. Chinese ships gradually became essential instruments for trade expansion and the Yongle Emperor grew eager to increase his trade borders by building more—and much bigger—ships.

Looking for a commander of his future fleet, he turned to Zheng He. His teenage servant had become a man with “glaring eyes” and “a voice as loud as a huge bell,” who towered above other men with extraordinary height. His military prowess and leadership skills prevailed over what was seen as his advanced age of thirty-five and made him the emperor’s choice to command the fleet that would accompany the newly created treasure ships.

Filled with porcelain, silk, brocades, iron, salt, and other luxurious commodities, the treasure ships were sumptuous and impressive, as befitted their status as representatives of China’s wealth and splendor. The largest of them is estimated to have been over 400 feet long and 166 feet wide; all of them were the only ships in China to have nine masts. 

They were accompanied by eight-masted “horse ships,” seven-masted supply ships, six-masted troop transports, and five-masted warships. Among the 27,000 men aboard these vessels were astrologers, Arabic translators, official secretaries and advisers in matters of protocol, skilled workmen for necessary repairs, and 180 medical officers, one for every 150 men.

This armada of 317 ships set off in 1405 on a journey that would last two years. “Our one fear,” Zheng He announced, “is not to be able to succeed.”

He returned in 1407, his ships laden with spices, ebony, ivory, pearls and precious gems. He had defeated and captured Southeast Asia’s most dreaded pirate and brought him back to China for execution. He also carried ambassadors from India, Sumatra,and the Malay Peninsula, all of them coming to pay tribute to ChIna’s emperor.

Six more expeditions followed, from 1407-1433, with Zheng He in command of all but the second. The number of ambassadors bearing tribute from the countries visited by the treasure ships became so numerous that a special compound was set aside to house them all. Technological advances were introduced by the fleet, such as a gift of magnifying lenses mounted on handles, along with “two skilled glassblowers, presumably from the Middle East.”What would become an enduring animosity between Korea and China was sparked when, along ginseng, gold,silver, and leopards, the treasure ships carried 300 beautiful Korean virgins for the emperor’s pleasure.

In 1418, the fifth voyage sailed beyond the coastal cities of the Middle East to the ports of East Africa, beating Vasco da Gama’s arrival by eighty years. Although Arab traders had told Zheng He about the riches found in Europe, he had no interest in expanding trade to that continent. The economic benefits found across the Indian Ocean and the China seas were more than enough to enrich the Yongle Emperor. What came back in the treasure ships financed the move of China’s capital from Nanjing to Beijing and made possible the creation of the Forbidden City.

Perhaps Zheng He knew the seventh voyage of the treasure ship fleet was going to be his last. Before his departure in 1431, he had two tablets made that documented the achievements of past expeditions. These proclaimed success in “unifying seas and continents,” with “countries beyond the horizon from the ends of the earth have all become subjects,” through voyages that made “manifest the transforming power of imperial virtue,” while increasing China’s “geographic knowledge.”

He was sixty when he set off on his final voyage and died on the journey home, his body consigned to the ocean.

His emperor followed him in death two years later. Under his heir,  both the tribute system and China’s maritime dominance withered. Confucians, with their belief that land was more important than the sea, regained their ascendancy. Zheng He’s ship logs were called “deceitful exaggerations of bizarre things” and in 1477 were destroyed to prevent others from following his example. In 1525 all ocean vessels were destroyed and it became a crime to go to sea on a multi-masted ship. 

But the treasure ship fleet had expanded the boundaries of those who sailed on them. At one time three Chinese envoys had jumped ship in Cambodia, never to return. Others illegally emigrated to Siam and to islands in the Philippines or made their homes in North Vietnam, Singapore, and Java. “The legacy of Zheng He was the diaspora of Chinese to Southeast Asia.”

The amount of detailed information revealed by Louise Levathes is almost overwhelming. She gives a concise history of China from Neolithic times up to the 16th century. Although her scholarship is rigorous,she can’t resist touching upon enticing conjectures, while carefully couching them in “maybe” and “perhaps.”

Did Chinese voyagers, long before Zheng He’s time, reach Australia and Africa, settling in Arnhem Land as “Baijini” and on Kenyan islands as “Bajuni”? Did they make contact with South America long before Columbus? Levathes dwells upon these possibilities just long enough to tease imaginations while wisely leaving any conclusions to future historians. 

Certainly the known history that she offers in just over 200 pages is more than enough to dazzle, inform, and enshrine Zheng He as a hero for all time.~Janet Brown

Kamusari Tales Told at Night by Shion Miura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (Amazon Crossing)

Shion Miura is an award winning Japanese novelist. Her second novel Mahoro Ekimae Tada Benriken won her the 2006 Naoki Prize. The novel and its sequels have been adapted into feature length films, a television series, and a manga as well. Her first novel to be translated into English was Fune wo Amu which translates to Compiling the Boat. It was published in English with the title The Great Passage and is about the making of a Japanese dictionary. You could call it the Japanese version of The Professor and the Madman. 

Her other novels available in English are the two books of the Forest Series, The Easy Life in Kamusari and its sequel Kamusari Tales Told at Night. The second book in the series can be read as a stand-alone novel.

Yuki Hirano just turned twenty. His father works for a company in Yokohama and his mother is a homemaker. After Yukio graduated from high school, he left home and came to live in a small mountain village in Mie Prefecture. Or to be more precise, he came to live in this town after he was kicked out of the house. 

Hirano wrote about the first year of his life in Kumasari, which became the first book in the Forest series. Why is he in Kumasari? Forestry. Yuki Hirano is a woodsman. He spends everyday on a mountain “planting cedar or cypress saplings, cutting underbrush, pruning, or chopping timber and hauling it off”. 

He was a trainee in his first year living in Kumasari. This spring, he became a full-time employee of Nakamura Lumber. Of course that puts him at the bottom of the pecking order. Hirano writes about his life in Kumasari on a computer. He writes it with the intention of having others read it, but is too embarrassed to make it public. 

As there is nothing to do in Kumasari, “no place to hang out, no convenience store, no clothing store, no restaurant. Nothing but mountains on every side, layer on layer, covered in green”, Hirano spends his free time writing about his life. He gives a little information about Nakamura Lumber, its owner, Seiichi Nakamura who is also his team leader. He then goes on to write about the other members of his team. 

Yuki lives with Yoki IIda’s family.  Yoki is a childhood friend of the owner of Nakamura Lumber. He has a wife named Miho, and his grandmother, Granny Shige also lives with them. They also have a pet dog named Noko. 

During his first year in Kumasari, Yuki wrote about what he saw in the mountains and what was going on in the village. After giving up writing for a few months, Yuki heard an old village story which inspired him to start writing again. He decided, “Why not record village legends, stories about the villagers, and other items” he came across. 

Shion makes you care about the villagers in this small village that has nothing to offer outsiders, except a job in the forestry. The characters are varied and interesting. The protagonist, Yuki Hirano, is neither offensive nor cool. He is a hard worker, enjoys his job, and gets flustered as he tries to get a date with the local school teacher, the only available woman in town close to his age. The simplicity of the story and the interaction between the characters, along with the legends and lore of the village makes this a very heartwarming read. The story might make you want to move to the countryside. ~Ernie Hoyt

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