The Woman Back from Moscow by Ha Jin (Other Press)

Yan’an, 1938: Two young women study dramatic arts in the place where Mao Zedong brews the ideas that will lead to China’s liberation in ten more years. Both women have recently appeared on stage, with Yomei in the starring role and Jiang Ching taking a secondary part. The older of the two by seven years, Jiang Ching, is ambitious and competitive. Yomei at seventeen is an incandescent beauty, glowing with life and in love with the theater.

The older woman’s jealousy is apparent but Yomei is under Zhou Enlai’s guardianship and knows she has nothing to fear. The daughter of a dead revolutionary, Yomei became Zhou’s adopted daughter when she and her mother moved to Yan’an. Already powerful, Zhou’s cloak of invulnerability shelters the girl he has taken into his family, leading people to call Yomei The Red Princess.

The community of rebels in Yan’an is small and closely knit. While Mao is a man whom Yomei is familiar with, Jiang Chang has to work to gain his attention. Yomei receives Mao’s permission to study drama in Moscow for seven years while Jiang Chang uses every advantage she possesses to become Mao’s indispensable helper and eventually his wife. 

When Yomei returns to Yan’an after struggling to survive in Russia during World War II, she has turned from acting to become a director. Steeped in seven years of theater arts training in Russia, where Stanislavsky has transformed the way plays are interpreted, Yomei has soaked up everything that her teachers could give her. Her intelligence allows her to enter into the heart of every play she directs and her enthusiasm and generous way of teaching others makes her a charismatic figure. Combining that with her fluency in Russian, her sophistication from her years in another country, her relationship with Zhao Enlai and his wife, and her glowing beauty, she is irresistible.

Jiang Chang, on the other hand, has become Madame Mao, China’s First Lady. She’s eager to use Yomei to her own advantage but Yomei has learned to be wary of politics. Seeing that Jiang Chang plans to use culture and the arts to increase her own power, Yomei keeps her distance.

Ha Jin has taken the life of Sun Weishi while giving her the name she called herself when she wrote letters to close friends and family, Yomei. “Reality,” he says, “is often more fantastic than fiction.” His research to uncover the truth in Yomei’s story carried him only so far, There were gaps in her life that he was forced to create, rather than recreate, so he calls this work a novel instead of a biography. 

As he carries Yomei through seven hundred pages, he brings her to life as an artist who had the power to enchant everyone she met, except for the woman whose goal was to “crush her spirit and destroy her beauty.” Slowly Ha Jin uncovers the politics that led to the horror of the Cultural Revolution and the insane power of the woman who brought it into being. What was at first the story of art and beauty becomes an inexorable tragedy of power and twisted political decisions that darkens the second half of this novel, as it does Yomei’s life.

Born In China in 1956, Ha Jin was a child during the Cultural Revolution and its tragic consequences. He came to the U.S. as a student of American literature in 1985 and made his decision to stay after the Tiananmen Massacre. A poet and a novelist, he writes his poems in Chinese and his novels in English.

In a book as lengthy as The Woman Back from Moscow, this is both an advantage and a handicap, especially when he writes dialogue, where his language becomes stilted. However, this slight lapse in facility simply accentuates the Chinese reality of the thoughts and words and actions that spawned terrible forces and engulfed the life of a brilliant and beautiful artist.~Janet Brown

Monkey Brain Sushi : New Tastes in Japanese Fiction edited by Alfred Birbaum (Kodansha International)

Monkey Brain Sushi is a collection of short stories by Japan’s up-and-coming talented writers. It was first published in 1991 and is a great introduction to contemporary Japanese fiction. Some of the writers have gone on to become successful worldwide, the most notable being Haruki Murakami.

American translator Alfred Birnbaum had this to say about the new crop of writers, “Starting from the early ‘80s, a new generation of Japanese writers has emerged to capture the electric, electric spirit of contemporary life in Japan’s mega-cities. Choosing to speak through the medium of popular magazines—rather than literary journals”. 

He further states that the new writers are more influenced by Western culture than their native land. The writers featured in this collection were all “born and raised in an Americanized postwar Japan. Their Japanese lifestyle they know has as much to do with jeans and hamburgers as tatami mats and miso soup.”

Monkey Brain Sushi includes eleven stories in all that are as diverse as they are entertaining. A wide range of genres are featured in this collection. Some have an element of fantasy while others may be hard to stomach for the weak of heart. There are stories that are mundane and ordinary and stories that may have you tilting your head as you wonder what the writer was trying to convey.

The book leads off with a story by Haruki Murakami titled TV People. This story is rather surreal as three TV People arrive unannounced at a man’s house on a Sunday evening. The narrator says the TV People are slightly smaller than normal, about twenty to thirty percent smaller. The TV People never knock or ring the doorbell. They don’t say hello. They just walk right in. One opens the door and the other two bring in an ordinary size TV. They leave as quietly as they came.

Sproing by Eri Makino is written as one long monologue with a woman talking to one of her friends who drops by her house. Not once does the woman give her friend a chance to speak. It’s one long story of her talking about different episodes in her life. It sounded as if she just needed someone to complain to about her less than extraordinary life. 

In Mazelife, Kyoji Kobayashi writes a story about a man named K creating his own God. In order to create his God, he comes up with six requirements. A God needs devotees who will worship it with their entire being. The God needs a priest to conduct its ceremonies, a God needs a place where it can be worshiped, a God needs commandments for its devotees to follow, a God needs a myth to give it divine authority and finally a God needs enough power to satisfy its devotees. Can K really create a God?

One of the most disturbing stories included in this book is Amy Yamada’s excerpt from her novel Kneel Down and Lick My Feet which was based on her two-month experience of working at an S&M club in Tokyo. Shinobu, who works at an S&M club called the Queen’s Palace, is teaching her younger sister, Chika, the ins and outs of working in such a place. She tells her sister, “it behooves us to use words that elevate our actions”, spouting off a phrase like, “Beseech the queen that you might grovel before her honorable legs and receive the venerated punishment”. 

Michio Hisauchi’s The Junglest Day is written in manga form and the main characters, Lieutenant Onada and Sergeant Yokoi are based on real Japanese soldiers who were discovered on a remote island in the seventies, almost thirty years after the war ended. 

Back in the early nineties, it was hard to find hard-edged fiction by Japanese writers. Most of the books available in English were Japanese literary giants such as Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe and Yukinari Kawabata. There were a few others but they pretty much followed in the same vein as Mishima and company. 

Now, there are many young Japanese writers for the Western world to explore. Murakami has written quite a few novels. The mysteries of Keigo Higashino and Miyuki Miyabe are also now available in English. If you thought Japanese fiction was dry and serious, it’s time for you to pick up a book by any one of these new generations of writers. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Apology by Jimin Han (Little, Brown and Company)

Jeonga Cha is an unlikely heroine.  Not only is she a sprightly 105, within the first few pages of The Apology she’s dead. But neither of those factors get in her way. Immediately she launches into the story of her life, one that’s both charming and duplicitous.

Jeonga has secrets, ones that she’s never disclosed to her sisters, Mina,the oldest at 110, and Aera who’s 108 but boasts the most beautiful hair in the family. These women have learned to coexist through their “territorial intuition and quest for harmony.” These traits show up primarily in the colors they choose for their clothes, which never clash. Otherwise the sisters often do, with Jeonga usually being the one who prevails.

“An epilogue is what I wanted in my own life,” she tells herself but when one turns up, it isn’t particularly welcome. A letter arrives from the U.S., addressed to Mina. Since Jeonga is the only sister who’s fluent in English, the language used by the letter’s writer, she’s the one who’s given the task of reading it and then translating its contents to her sisters.

As she makes her way through the English words, she uncovers a bombshell, the kind that works well in a Shakespearean comedy but much less so in ordinary life. Two separate branches of the Cha family had emigrated to America several generations ago, branches so separate that they were unaware of each other’s existences. Now through an annoying twist of fate, the great-grandniece of Jeonga’s vanished sister, who had long ago defected from the family home in Seoul to North Korea, and Jeonga’s own great-grandnephew both have chosen to attend Oberlin where they meet, fall in love, and are happily planning their wedding. This, Jeonga decides, is a scandal and she must prevent these cousins from marrying.

The backstory of this problem is rooted in Jeonga’s secrets and she’s damned if she’s going to let her sisters in on any of those hidden details. Still Mina and Aera are as determined as their baby sister. Even with the falsified details of why Jeonga is taking an unexpected flight to the United States., the other two insist on going with her.

The comedy becomes convoluted but quite delicious as the old women bicker their way across the Pacific and into a luxurious hotel in San Francisco. Jeonga’s hidden past unfolds as she casts her memory back upon it and the suspense of how she will solve the family dilemma without involving her sisters heightens and then swiftly dissolves when she has a fatal encounter with a moving bus. 

Now what? 

At this point, the author switches gears so thoroughly that The Apology becomes two separate narratives. Jeonga in a murky version of the bardo state roams through the afterlife, unsure that she will ever be able to forestall the catastrophe that continues to simmer in the world of the living. Unfortunately anyone who’s still reading this novel begins to feel unsure as well and gradually begins not to give a hoot.

A delightful beginning turns into a mass of tangled storylines and none of them lead to a satisfying conclusion. “All’s well that ends well,” Shakespeare insisted but a felicitous ending needs a better underpinning than what’s served up in The Apology. 

With luck, Jimin Han’s next novel will concentrate on these three centenarian sisters because they steal the story when they stand together. They’re far too marvelous to leave stranded as they have been in what becomes an annoying and unsatisfying attempt at fiction.~Janet Brown

In Search of Amrit Kaur by Livia Manera Sambuy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

When Livia Manera Sambuy wanders into a Mumbai museum, she has no idea that this random excursion will lead to an obsession that will dominate her life for years. Among the photographs of India’s past royalty is a portrait of a stunningly beautiful young woman, Amrit Kaur. Information posted nearby identifies her as the Rani of Mandi, born a Punjabi princess, who lived in Paris during World War II. She sold her jewelry to help Jews escape from the Nazis, was arrested by the Nazis, and, the placard claimed, died in a German prison camp.

Stunned by this brief biography, Sambuy wonders why she had never heard this story before. She remains haunted by it and by the strong and beautiful face that had lived this life--or had she?

When a friend puts Sambuy in touch with Amrit’s daughter, who’s now an old woman of 78, a portion of what would prove to be an elusive truth is revealed. Amrit didn’t die in prison. She was freed within a few months, but her health was weakened, and she died seven years later in London.

“Come and see me,” the daughter says and when Sambuy makes the visit, she’s shocked to discover that “Bubbles,” as the old woman called herself, knows nothing more about her mother. Amrit had abandoned her children when Bubbles was only four years old, and never returned. The Raja of Mandi’s second wife became the woman the little girl thought of as her mother.

Even more intrigued by a woman who left her children and never looked back as well as by the rewritten history provided by the museum placard, Sambuy begins to delve into Amrit’s life. The daughter of a maharajah who ruled the Princely State of Kapurthala, Amrit was born into a world of luxury and hedonism. When the British stripped all responsibilities from the Indian princes, they allowed them to keep their wealth and titles, thereby creating what Gandhi termed “a gigantic autocracy” and the Viceroy Lord Curzon reviled as “frivolous and sometimes vicious spendthrifts and idlers.”

Amrit’s father spoke six different languages, including French, and developed a strong affinity for Paris, where he maintained a residence. Bringing elements of French architecture back to his Indian domain, he dazzled the more than 100 Europeans whom he invited to his oldest son’s wedding. Placing 240 tents in the palace gardens, he created a luxurious community for his guests, complete with a post office and a bank created for the occasion, and hosted a lunch for 800 in the midst of “bejeweled splendor.” When his only daughter was married, Amrit’s wedding was equally drenched in lavish excess.

But the maharajah had made a mistake. He had given Amrit an English education at a British boarding school and she had returned to India with revolutionary thoughts. When she was twenty-three, the beautiful and articulate rani was interviewed by the New York Herald Tribune where she championed the right for women to be educated and advocated changing the minimum marriageable age for Indian girls. (Her own daughter would enter an arranged marriage at the age of seventeen, without complaint. But then Bubble’s father had refused to make his father-in-law’s mistake. Amrit’s daughter received her education in India, not in the West.)

A year after the interview, Amrit led a delegation of women to demand that the Indian Viceroy abolish child marriage altogether. Three years later her husband married his second wife and Amrit left him soon afterward.

The Raja class was reluctant to give up any of their power. Bubbles, herself the wife of the Raja of Bilkha, told Sambuy, “We printed our own money…We could hang anyone.” And their wealth was devoted to pleasure, in the same manner that once allowed the emperor who had erected the Taj Mahal to order the making of two pairs of eyeglasses, one with diamond lenses and the other with emerald.

Bubbles was the last of her kind to experience this extravagant life. When Indira Gandhi imposed taxes upon India’s royalty, they melted down their gold and silver furniture to meet the government’s demands. One of Amrit’s grandsons is now an auto mechanic who lives happily in Chicago.

When Sambuy tries to follow Amrit’s life in Paris, she finds it stunningly undocumented, until one day she receives a letter from a burlesque entertainer in the U.S. The woman has come into possession of a monogrammed briefcase filled with letters that were written by an Indian princess. With this discovery, some of the questions are answered—and rather shockingly—but not all. The follow-the-dots puzzle of Amrit’s enigmatic life will never be fully connected.

This book is a history, not a biography, and its details are revealed in piecemeal fashion, in the same way that the author discovered them. This adds to the quality of mystery that pervaded the life of Amrit Kaur but it creates a muddled narrative. Blithely skipping from Jacques Cartier learning Hindi so he could sell jewels to Indian potentates to the grisly details of life in a German concentration camp, Sambuy could have used a much more rigorous editor. 

Even so her book is a treasure trove of colorful details that will enchant future historians and enthrall anyone who has a penchant for the days of the Raj. As for Amrit, she undoubtedly rests easy, knowing that many of her secrets remain completely her own.~Janet Brown

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Bloomsbury Publishing)

W. Somerset Maugham was a writer with a talent that verged on the vampiric. Taking advantage of the human “urge to confess,” he kept a travel notebook filled with “anecdotes and character sketches [that can be] smelted and hammered into stories.” In the early part of the 20th century, he journeyed through the Straits Settlements of Malaya and Singapore, having adventures, sucking up stories, and feasting upon secrets. The book that resulted from this journey, The Casuarina Tree, made him a pariah among the British community of the Straits but Maugham was unlikely to care. He was obsessed with keeping his own secret, hiding behind an unhappy marriage to conceal his homosexuality. 

The House of Doors fictionalizes his time on the island of Penang, placing him as a houseguest in the home of a friend from his youth. Cassowary House is named after a casuarina tree in the garden, a corruption of the Malay word, kasuari. The tree, Maugham’s hostess, Lesley,  tells him, is believed to be a “whispering tree” that can tell the future if it’s approached in respectful silence. Maugham can relate to that, although the whispers he yearns to hear are ones that tell stories from the past or, even better, the present.

He’s not the first famous visitor to Penang. Herman Hesse beat him to it by thirteen years and more recently the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, came to garner financial support from the local Hokkein Chinese. Dr. Sun spent a great deal of time at Cassowary House and when Lesley speaks of him, she does this with a mixture of reserve and suppressed emotion that intrigues Maugham. Convinced that she betrayed her husband with the charismatic doctor, Maugham divulges a secret of his own and embarks on a series of late night conversations with his hostess, after her husband has gone to bed. What he is told provides a generous portion of his next book, with one startling omission—startling only because he chooses to maintain silence, out of respect for his old friend and the woman with whom he’s developed a deeper friendship.

In The House of Doors, Tan Twan Eng matches the master of literary larceny. Within the framework of a doomed clandestine love affair, Eng inserts some of the tales told in The Casuarina Tree into his own novel. Some are fragments of the stories Maugham purloined: the wife who runs away from her wealthy husband without leaving an explanatory note, the uncovered affair that demolishes a marriage, and the tidal bore that sweeps its way up a river and sends the occupants of a boat into deadly water. But the story that carries a substantial part of Eng’s novel is one of Maugham’s most famous, The Letter, that later became a movie of the same name. It recounts the true-life tale of  a notorious Singapore scandal in which an English wife killed a man whom she said had tried to attack her in a nocturnal encounter. She was put on trial, was found guilty., and served time in a Singapore prison.

Eng takes that piece of history and embroiders upon it. He turns it into a surprising subplot to the stories Maugham discovers about his hosts in Penang, upon whom Eng has bestowed the first names of the ill-fated husband and wife in The Letter. As Lesley divulges the intricate details of the victimized woman who once was her friend, her own revelations receive a kind of dispensation from a man who finds no shame in his violation of other confidences. 

Although Eng takes Maugham’s stories and folds them into his own, there’s nothing predatory about his hijacking. It’s done with the spirit of homage, while Maugham is given a full measure of respect and tenderness, with at least one unforgettable moment of humanity and communion in a sea gleaming with phosphorescence. 

But it’s Lesley who dominates this novel, a woman who has known no other home but the island on which she was born. Through her eyes, we see Penang in its full beauty, its “trees gauzed in mist,” a seaport where “seabirds dipped and wheeled above the swamp of riggings and swaying masts,” where “labrynthine streets sold a bewildering variety of goods”and where at sundown “the world faded to monochrome.” 

As he did in his debut of The Gift of Rain ( Asia by the Book, April, 2008), Eng makes Penang and its colorful, tumultuous history irresistible. He overlaps his first novel with this most recent one, with the father of Philip Hutton, the boy whose story is told in the first, making memorable cameo appearances in The House of Doors. Both of these novels have been longlisted for the Booker Prize, an honor that Eng would well deserve--and I’m certain that Somerset Maugham would agree with me.~Janet Brown






The Beast Warrior by Nahoko Uehashi, translated by Cathy Hirano (Pushkin)

The Beast Warrior is the sequel and conclusion to Nahoko Uehashi’s The Beast Player (Asia by the Book, May 2023). The story centers around the main character of Elin. As with the previous book, this was originally released in Japan in 2012 with the title 獣の奏者 III 探求編 (Kemono no Souja III Tankyu-hen) and 獣の奏者 IV 完結編 (Kemono no Souja IV Kanketsu-hen) by Kodansha. The English translation became available in 2020 from Pushkin and was translated by Cathy Hirano who also translated the previous volume. 

The story picks up ten years after the end of The Beast Player. Elin is now married to Ialu and they have a son named Jesse. They are living a quiet and peaceful life until Elin is called away to investigate the sudden deaths of the kiba, the most fearsome todas which are dragon-like beasts that the Aluhan have trained. Elin also has a special relationship with Royal Beasts which are the natural enemy of the toda.

Elin had become a beast doctor but it’s her wish that the wild animals, both toda and Royal Beasts alike, would not be used to fight for humans. She is constantly struggling with her conscience as the toda continues to be used as a defense against enemy forces. 

In the previous volume, Elin’s mother, Sohyon, was accused of dereliction of duty, and was sentenced to death after the todas she was entrusted with all died at the same time. Now, a similar incident has occurred in another toda village.

Elin was also shown documents that showed there were other mass kiba deaths in the past and they occurred in several villages at once. It proved that her mother was not at fault for the death of the todas she was in charge of. Now it is Elin’s task was to find out the cause of the mass kiba deaths.

To make matters worse, a foreign country that raised a toda army of its own is now invading Elin’s homeland. Semiya, the Yojeh, a title given to the Ruler of the Kingdom of Lyoza, is commanding Elin to raise an army of Royal Beasts to counter the attack. Yet it is still Elin’s wish to let the animals live in peace in the wild.

Elin had also found out that her mother and her people, the Ahlyo, kept many secrets concerning the toda and Royal Beasts to avoid a calamity that could affect the entire world. Elin questions the wisdom of the Ahlyo in suppressing the truth about the tragedy that happened many, many years ago.

She is determined to find out for herself why it is that the Ahlyo refused to divulge information concerning the animals, even if it means repeating a catastrophe from the past. Can Elin stop that tragedy from happening?

Although Uehashi’s Beast series is considered a children’s book, it can be enjoyed by both kids and adults alike. The Beast Player is more of a coming of age story, whereas the sequel, The Beast Warrior is more of a cautionary tale about the horrors of war and how people are forced to do things against their better judgement. In the end, it is up to us, the people, to strive for world peace and end all wars. Unfortunately, that day seems to be a long way from ever happening. ~Ernie Hoyt

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goosen (Knopf)

It could be easy for readers of Novelist as a Vocation, all of them presumably writers or people who want to write, to hate Haruki Murakami. He’s a man who decided, while he was at a baseball game, that he could write a novel and then immediately proceeded to do that, again and again over the next thirty-five years.  He has never suffered through a case of writer’s block because “I don’t make promises, so I have no deadlines,” and claims “I never write unless I really want to.” (When he doesn’t want to, he translates English writers into Japanese. Raymond Carver is a particular favorite.)

Obviously he’s wanted to do this every day of his life since that fateful baseball game because he’s published twenty-two books with America’s most prestigious imprint, Alfred A. Knopf.  The bulk of them are novels, with five short story collections, and four works of nonfiction: Underground, a collection of interviews with survivors of the Aum Shinrikyo bombing in Tokyo’s subway system; What I Talk About When I Talk about Running (reviewed on Asia By the Book, June 2023); Absolutely on Music, his conversations with the famed symphony conductor Seiji Ozawa; and Murakami T, a slender volume that’s an annotated catalog of his impressive t-shirt collection, with photographs of each shirt.

“The thing that makes novels different is practically anybody can write one if they put their mind to it,” Murakami says generously. He then proceeds to explain why many writers produce only a few, warning that writing a novel is “time-consuming and tedious work,” an “inefficient undertaking.” 

It’s also a demanding job that requires a high degree of physical fitness. “Once a writer puts on fat, it’s all over,” Murakami once proclaimed in an interview and although he admits that was a trifle harsh, he believes it’s true. Aerobic physical activity leads to an increase of neurons firing in the brain, which is why he himself has taken a run every day for the past thirty years.

A believer in schedules, his own is strict and modeled after the sort followed by an assembly-line worker. “I punch in, write my ten pages, and then punch out.” Those ten pages are written in Japanese and amount to the “equivalent of sixteen hundred English words,” every day. If he finds himself wanting to write more, he makes himself stop;  when he doesn’t feel like writing, he still produces his ten pages. Although he’s been told that’s not how artists work, he counters with “Why must a novelist be an artist?” 

A passionate reader, Murakami began to read novels written in English when he was in high school and when he began writing his first novel, he wrote it in English. When he translated it back into Japanese, he found he had hit upon a new style of writing, not conventionally literary but completely his own. He’s coupled this with his decision to “omit all explanations,” and to ignore “conventional logic and literary cliches,” using these principles to create novels that are unlike any others.

“Read,” he tells prospective writers, “Observe. Remember.” Quoting James Joyce, Murakami says “Imagination is memory…fragments of memory that lack any clear connection with one another.”

More than once, Murakami insists that he is a very ordinary person, “the type who’s always shown to the worst table in restaurants.” He may have that facade. In fact, as a man who treasures his privacy, he probably works hard to maintain it. But his extraordinary writing has taken him far beyond the ordinary—his agent, his editor, the men who have been his publishers, both at Knopf and the New Yorker, have all been glittering literary stars among whom Murakami does more than hold his own. Choosing to move from Japan to the East Coast, insisting on choosing his own translators and working with them to create a manuscript in English that he then presents to his agent, regarding literary prizes with an aristocratic disdain, the man may be ordinary. The writer is not.

Although he may never write his autobiography, Murakami has given abundant glimpses of himself and his opinions in this collection of essays. He reveals a man who rebelled against Japan’s educational system and chose his own way of learning, who turns his back on Japan’s aversion to those who “go against the flow” and praises originality instead, who submits his writing first of all to his wife for her opinion and then chafes against her constructive criticism. Anyone who reads this book is going to come away with a yearning to have a beer and listen to jazz with Haruki Murakami, that “ordinary guy” with a far from ordinary mind.~Janet Brown

The River by Rumer Godden (out of print)

In a family of four children that will soon expand to five, Harriet is alone. Her father is consumed with managing a jute mill, her mother is in the final stages of pregnancy. Bea, the eldest, is lost in a haze of beauty and the admiration that this gift has bestowed upon her. The only son, Bogie, is immersed in the natural world and the youngest daughter, Victoria, is reveling in her final moments as the baby of the family. 

Harriet has learned to find companionship within her thoughts and the words that emerge from them. An ardent observer of the life that swirls about her, she does her best to understand what she sees by chronicling it all in her journal and in her poetry.

What she sees is the extraordinary beauty of India, which is the only home she’s ever known. Growing up on the banks of Bengal’s Lakya river, behind the walls encircling a house that’s fashioned after an English manor and is surrounded by an English garden, Harriet goes beyond that sheltering enclosure to watch the river. 

The river contains “ life in and over its flowing,” crocodiles, porpoises, steamships, barges, fishing boats, under “a blue weight of sky.” In its depths are sunset river pearls, brought up by divers and wafting over it are the smells of incense, ghee, and honey. With the changes that are washing over her family, the river’s constancy comforts Harriet and gives substance to her racing thoughts. As she watches the moving water, ideas take shape and emerge in coherency as poems and stories.

Harriet is enraged at the thought of giving up her childhood and it puzzles her that Bea has relinquished it so thoroughly. At the same time, she feels pangs of jealousy that a young soldier, crippled by the war, ignores her in favor of Bea and she finds she’s unable to quell these feelings by playing with Bogie. In fact, she has unfamiliar feelings of responsibility toward the brother who has been her playmate. When he tells her he’s discovered a snake deep within the garden and is obsessed with watching it, Harriet is torn between telling her parents and keeping Bogie’s secret. Her decision will change her life forever.

A slender novella of less than 200 pages, The River is an extraordinary love letter to India during the final days of the Raj, as seen through the eyes of a thoughtful child. Harriet’s world is “not entirely European…not entirely Indian,” but “a mixture of both.” She lives in a conventionally English house but when Christmas comes, it arrives with the weather of “a cool fresh summer day.” Equally special to the family is Diwali when the river comes alive with thousands of floating lamps and the sky blazes with fireworks.

And yet when Harriet goes beyond the walls of the house, what she sees is a postcard. Walking through neighboring villages after dark, she passes through “a still life of figures and things, lit and quiet.” In love with what surrounds her, Harriet is a tourist, here for a while, then moving on.

Her life is patterned after Rumer Godden’s own Indian childhood. Forced to leave the country where she had lived since she was six months old, Godden returned when she was eighteen after going to school for five years in England. She remained in India until she was forty and her best novels are ones that reflect her life in that country: The River, Kingfishers Catch Fire, Black Narcissus. 

The most poignant of these is The River, steeped in the fresh and untarnished viewpoint of a child. Beauty and tragedy, perception and naivete, all combine to give a picture of the vanished lives of the English, yet Indian, children, like Godden and Kipling before her, who will always be torn between two cultures, two worlds.~Janet Brown



Salamander and Other Stories by Masuji Ibuse, translated by John Bester (Kodansha International)

Salamander and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by the author of the acclaimed novel Black Rain which was about the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Asia by the Book, March 2020). Salamander and Other Stories was first published as 山椒魚 (Sanshouuo) in the Japanese language in 1948 by Shinchosha. The first English publication became available in 1971 and was released with the title Lieutenant Lookeast and Other Stories, also published by Kodansha International in hardcover. The paperback edition was published in 1981 with a change in the title. Both versions were translated by John Bester. 

This book includes nine stories that were written between the years of 1923-1955. Ibuse uses a wide range of themes. Some are semi-autobiographical while others can be considered satire. The setting usually takes place in rural Japan where Ibuse writes about ordinary, everyday life which is often filled with subtle humor. 

Plum Blossom by Night is about a man who decides to go out drinking one night. It is February 20 around two in the morning. The man is looking for an oden restaurant or some other cheap eating joint when he is accosted by a man who shouts, “Is there blood on my face?” After ascertaining that he is indeed hurt, the man helps the drunkard concoct a story to tell his boss the following day. The drunk is so grateful that he presses a five-yen note into the other man’s cloak. The five-yen note begins to bother the recipient. He decides he will return the note to the drunkard the following day, but days, then months, then years pass before he calls the drunk man’s home only to find that the man had disappeared ages ago. 

Lieutenant Lookeast is a satire on Japan’s militarism era. The story takes place after the end of World War 2. Lieutenant Yuichi Okazaki (Lieutenant Lookeast) suffers from the delusion that the war is still going on and will often shout out military orders to people who pass by his house. We later find out from a local how Lietenant Okazaki got his name and why he behaves the way he does. It was when Lieutenant Lookeast was in Malaysia and overheard one of his soldiers saying something about war. The soldier said, “the enemy was dropping bombs as though they’dgot them to spare. So I said war was an extravagant business”. The lieutenant slapped the soldier but at the same time, the truck hit a bump, the tailgate flipped open and both Lieutenant Lookeast and the soldier fell out and rolled down into the river. The soldier fell on his head and rolled off in the river. The lieutenant hit his head and hasn’t been the same since. 

The title story, Salamander, is about a small amphibian that lives in a cave. But as its body grows, so does its head and whenever it tries to leave, the salamander’s head gets stuck, giving it only enough room to move its feet to and fro and from side to side. 

Old Ushitora focuses on a man’s grandchild who doesn’t approve of his grandfather’s job. Carp is about a man who is given a gift of a carp but has a hard time taking care of it. Savan on the Roof is about a man who finds a wounded goose on the roof, nurses it back to health, but then finds that he doesn’t want to set it free. There are three other stories that are just as enjoyable as the ones already mentioned—Pilgrim’s Inn, Life at Mr. Tange’s, and Yosaku the Settler.

Ibuse’s stories are fun to read and give light as to what life might have been like in a small town in old Japan. It is a great introduction to one of the lesser-known Japanese writers and the stories give you a feeling of nostalgia when you read them. ~Ernie Hoyt


Banyan Moon by Thao Thai (Mariner Books, HarperCollins)

Although Tolstoy may have been wrong when he said “Happy families are all alike,” he was definitely amiss when he decided unhappy families were all different. Unhappy families are the same in one crucial way—they all conceal secrets.

Secrets fill every corner of the Banyan House, a crumbling mansion in Florida that Minh purchased long ago as a family home. There her daughter Huong takes refuge from a dangerous husband, raising her daughter Ann in tandem with Minh, who quickly supplants Huong in Ann’s affections. From her earliest childhood, Ann has an adversarial relationship with her mother, much as Huong does with Minh. Only when Huong tells her daughter that her grandmother has died, does Ann leave her established adult life and return to the Banyan House, a place that no longer holds the woman whom she has always loved and trusted above anyone else.

She returns carrying a secret, one that she has yet to tell the man she thought she would marry, the one who has recently confessed to an act of infidelity. As her mother once did, Ann looks for a sanctuary in the Banyan House, but the child she brings with her is months away from being born. 

This secret is swiftly uncovered by Huong, who’s determined to repair the prickly, damaged relationship that she has with her daughter. United in the task of cleaning the Banyan House that Minh has filled with unused and unnecessary objects, the two women work under the oversight of an invisible observer, the restless spirit of the family matriarch. Slowly Minh discloses her secret, one that her family has never known. Huong and Ann are not descendants of the man they were taught to revere as their father and grandfather.

As a flood of secrets gradually comes to light, what begins as a run-of-the-mill beach book takes on a depth that’s surprising and puzzling. Although the subjects of greed, sibling rivalry, domestic violence, and the return to a hometown that no longer seems to fit have all been covered again and again in a multitude of novels, Banyan Moon carries an eerie magic that makes this all seem fresh, new, and riveting. 

How does Thao Thai manage to pull this off? From the very beginning, with its cliched friction between the privileged wasp background of Ann’s fiance clashing against her own artistic and “exotic” life, this story carries a luster that pushes readers into its many different layers of story. Although Thai is a writer who doesn’t shy from well-worn descriptions that are perilously close to being threadbare, she has the gift of creating irresistible characters—and it’s Minh, Huong, and Ann who carry this novel. Each of their voices is distinctly different and they coexist without the slightest trace of unease. Their stories flow and interweave, never feeling intrusive or inauthentic. Their lives flare into being, making the supporting characters seem almost nonessential and certainly pallid. The strength and complexity of their different personalities gives an edge to the end of this novel. Will these women be able to move beyond their history and their secrets, taking secure possession of what seems to be a happy ending?~Janet Brown

A Walk in the Darkness by Jon Land (Tor)

Jon Land is an American thriller writer. He has written two detective series—the Caitlin Strong novels about a fifth generation Texas ranger and the Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea series featuring a Palestinian Detective and an Inspector of Israel’s National Police. 

A Walk in the Darkness is the third book in the Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea series. The story opens with an incident that took place in Jerusalem in around 33 A.D. This relates to another incident which took place in Ephesus, Turkey almost 2000 years later.

“1948:  An archaeological team in Turkey is slaughtered after making an earth-shattering discovery. More than fifty years later, a group of American archaeologists is murdered in the Judean desert”. 

Inspector Barnea is investigating a crime scene in the desert. A member of the Israeli Defense Force says he wasn’t expecting someone from the National Police Force as the Judean desert falls under military jurisdiction. The Inspector informs the sergeant that would be true if there it were a security issue but the murder of foreign nationals is a civilian issue, unless terrorism is involved. However, the victims were part of an American archeological team who were invited at the request by the government of Israel. 

Fourteen people had been killed, shot at point blank range, in the back of the head, twelve Americans and two others. Barnea is given a list of the victims and is shocked to see the name at the bottom. It’s a name she recognized, the nephew of Palestinian detective Ben Kamal. 

Detective Kamal heads out to the Judean desert but is told by an Israeli army sergeant that he has entered a restricted area. He shows his ID and informed the Israeli army sergeant that he’s there at the request of Pakad Barnea of the Israeli National Police Force. The sergeant refuses to budge, insisting that his orders were to deny access to the area to all but those who have the proper authorization. Inspector Barnea intervenes and Ben is allowed to pass.

Although Inspector Barnea tells Ben that he’s not there in an investigatory capacity, the death of Kama’s nephew sparks in him a need to find out more. There is one witness but nobody can understand what he is saying as he speaks in a dialect the Israelis are unfamiliar with. However it’s a dialect that Ben’s father taught him when he was young. 

From what Ben can gather, the archaeologists had found something of great historic value. Barnea reluctantly recruits Kamal’s help in the investigation in which they find more than just the discovery of an item that could change the world as we know it. They uncover a conspiracy that is an even greater threat to the Palestinian people and the entire West Bank. 

The Middle East remains one of the most volatile regions in the world. The Arab-Israeli issue remains at the heart of the conflict. Land’s depiction of both the Israelis and Palestinians puts you in the heart of the region. His latest story blends a bit of Dan Brown-like history (as in The Da Vinci Code) with current day politics in the Middle East. It’s a fascinating blend of fact and fiction which will keep you on the edge of your seat. We can only hope that one day peace will come to the Middle East. ~Ernie Hoyt

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City by Jane Wong (Tin House)

Jane Wong is in college when she learns about the Great Famine, also known as the Great Leap Forward. When she looks at the dates of this tragic era in Chinese history, she realizes that when her grandfather told her his family had “disappeared,” and he was adopted by a man whose family had also “disappeared,” that in truth the “disappeared” had starved to death. Wong, who has never gone hungry, races from the classroom in the grip of a panic attack, “heaving tears as thick as wheat.” 

Too respectful to breach her grandparents’ “chosen silence,” Wong pieces together bits of information as it falls in conversational crumbs. “What happens,” she asks, “when your archive is a ghost?” Her reply to herself is “I have no choice but to let food haunt me.”

During the pandemic, she learns to make jook, that supreme comfort food, and dreams of the day when she’ll be able to make it for her grandmother. Later she learns that on the day she made jook for the first time, her brother did the same thing. This dish that “at its simplest core” is only rice and water holds the secret and power of a sacrament, comforting and connecting the two siblings.

Wong needs that comfort and connection. Although her mother and her grandparents feed, nurture, and love her, her father truly has “disappeared.” A man who gambles away the restaurant he owned and leaves his wife to support two children, the father gives his children only a collection of memories—the trips to the casinos of Atlantic City. There he parks his family in a squalid hotel room for days while he plays all night “in that red-velvet world of his.” After he loses everything he has, he buys a ping-pong table that’s meant to keep him at home but he and his friends eventually begin betting extravagantly on the matches. And then he vanishes.

Wong’s mother was the “village beauty,” who came to America for an arranged marriage with the wrong man. When she gave birth to her daughter a year after the wedding, she looked at the baby and said “She knows too much.” But even as she works two jobs in the wake of her husband’s abandonment, she fosters her daughter’s intelligence and takes pride in her beauty. 

Although this book has A Memoir emblazoned on its cover, it’s a collection of essays, deeply personal and fluid, not linear. Wong is a poet  and her poetic art burnishes the language of her narrative. She discloses the rage that filled her childhood home and that still burns within her when she thinks about her father. Her stories of the other men who have left her are told with agonizing honesty and she illuminates her mother with a love that’s almost blinding in its clarity, empathy, and truth.

She tells how it was to leave Hong Kong after living there for a year as a Fulbright Scholar, flying to Iowa, where she’s accepted in the legendary Writer’s Workshop. Trading the smells of soy sauce eggs and sweet egg waffles for the odors wafting toward her in a Midwestern airport that reeks of “old carpet and recycled air,” Wong realizes that she’s no longer surrounded by Asian people. In fact she is “the only Asian person” to be seen and she “immediately felt unmoored.”

Now the author of two volumes of poetry and a university associate professor, she asks “How did I get here, glistening with all this nourishment?” These brilliant, shining essays show every step of Jane Wong’s emotional odyssey, and “memoir” will never be the same.~Janet Brown

Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga (Knopf)

Aravind Adiga, author of the Booker Prize winning novel, White Tiger (Asia by the Book, October 2008), had his third book, Last Man in Tower, published in 2011. It tells the story of a real estate developer who has his eyes on buying out Vishram Society, an apartment complex which consists of Tower A and Tower B. The buildings are located in the city of Mumbai, in India. 

If you were to ask about Vishram Society, “you will be told it is pucca—absolutely, unimpeachably pucca. It is important for the reader to know because “something is not quite pucca about the neighborhood—the toenail of Santa Cruz called Vakola”. You will infer from the context of the passage that pucca means something solid or permanent. 

Tower B is the newer and younger of the two buildings. It is a seven-story building that was built in the seventies. It houses many young executives who work in the financial district which is located nearby. It is the more desirable building of the two to buy or rent. 

Tower A is what most people think when people talk about Vishram Society. It is a six-story building which was founded in 1959. Many of the residents of Tower A have been living in the same building for thirty years or more. 

Real estate developer Dharmen Shah has made a very generous offer to the residents of Vishram Society, both Tower A and Tower B. Most of the people living there had never seen or held the amount that the wealthy builder is offering. He believes that all the residents will agree to the offer and will move out as soon as possible so he can build his latest and best luxury apartment complex which he has already named Shanghai. 

Shah had the Secretary of Vishram Society post his offer on the complex’s notice board. There was only one stipulation written at the very bottom—“The last date for the acceptance of the offer is the day after Gandhi Jayanti: 3 October. (Non-negotiable.) The offer will not be extended one minute beyond this date”. All residents must agree to the offer. If only one person refuses, then the offer will be withdrawn.

It is a dream-come true for most of the residents, but one man, Yogesh A. Murthy, a 61-year-old retired teacher, known to all as Masterji, is not interested in moving. The apartment is a reminder of the life he shared with his recently deceased wife. The rooms are also full of memories of his only daughter, who met a tragic end when she was pushed out of the train when she was on her way to school. 

As the deadline approaches, the residents' true colors begin to show. Friends become enemies, rumors are spread, and threats are made. However, Masteri does not budge from his refusal to accept the offer. 

In short, Adiga’s story is how greed and yearning can corrupt even the best of people. When the builder’s left-hand man, the person that does the dirty jobs fails to change Masterji’s mind, the builder relies on the residents’ greed to do what must be done. If you lived in a similar complex, how far would you be willing to go in order to get what you want? ~Ernie Hoyt

Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang (Flatiron Books)

“Practice erasing and overturning and re-creating the self until all I have to do is disappear.”

Daiyu has been doing this all her life. Born to parents who named her after a doomed woman in an ancient story, she is loved and cherished by them until the day they disappear. Her beloved grandmother tells the twelve-year-old girl that she too must vanish, so the captors of her parents won’t come back to take her away. Cutting Daiyu’s hair and dressing her in the clothing of a boy, her grandmother gives her a boy’s name, Feng, and sends her off to a distant city. 

As Feng, Daiyu becomes a boy, finds work as a calligraphy master’s servant, and begins to learn the characters on her own. The Four Treasures of the Study become her implements: the inkbrush, inkstone, inkstick, and paper, and she’s taken on as an after-hours student at the master’s school. One day, while exploring the city streets alone, she falls into the hands of a stranger who drugs her, puts her in a dark room, and holds her prisoner for almost a year. During that time, an old woman comes every day to teach her English and when she’s fluent, her abductor covers her body with tar and stuffs her into a basket filled with coal. “You’re going to America, to a place called San Francisco. If anyone asks, tell them you came from New York.”

But nobody asks. Instead the girl is taken from the ship as soon as it docks, is stripped naked, put into a barracoon where slaves are sold, and is quickly purchased by a Chinese brothel owner. She’s given a new name, Peony, and eventually is assigned her first customer, a young boy who helps her to escape.

Once again her hair is cut, she’s dressed in men’s clothing, and is given papers that identify her as Jacob Li. Taken to Idaho where Chinese labor is needed, Jacob lives there for three years, never once betraying his true identity. Working for two Chinese shopkeepers,  Jacob struggles with his attraction to a young Chinese man who teaches the violin. The only feminine part that now clings to Jacob is the ghost of the woman with whom the girl he once was allowed to be shared a name. Lin Daiyu’s ghostly spirit takes shelter within the body of Jacob Li, as hidden as Daiyu herself.

Then the violence begins, with the white townspeople united against the Chinese residents. Suddenly “being Chinese is something like a disease.” When the Rock Springs Massacre is reported in the Idaho newspapers, a tragedy begins to unfold and a story that has the tinges of a romance novel becomes an account of terrible history.

In 2014, Zhang says in an author’s note, her father was driving through a town in Idaho where he saw a sign that said a “Chinese Hanging” once took place there. Five Chinese men accused of murdering a white store owner had been strung up by a mob of vigilantes. Later Zhang began to research the facts behind this brief account. The more she learned, the more she “wanted to tell the story, not just of the five Chinese who were hanged, but of everything—the laws, tactics, and complicity that enabled this event and so many others.”

Through Daiyu, Zhang tells this story in the form of a fable anchored in history. Through her different names and selves, Daiyu embodies the Chinese women who were forced into American brothels, the Chinese men who looked for work under identities that were not their own, the Chinese business owners who were forced to leave everything they had painstakingly built, the Chinese who faced death at the hands of white mobs. 

Four Treasures of the Sky is a smart and compelling novel that’s almost impossible to put down. Once it’s finished, it clings on, with sorrow and a terrible unveiling of whitewashed truths.~Janet Brown



Bangkok Shophouses by Louis Sketcher

There are travelers who are perfectly satisfied with big fat guidebooks that tell them exactly where to go, where to eat, where to sleep, and where they will always be in the company of other travelers. This book is not for them. Bangkok Shophouses is slender, idiosyncratic, and fits on a coffee table as nicely as it does within a backpack. It’s a book for people who want to wander through the older streets of Thailand’s capital city, while being given an understanding of what they’re looking at. Since these are the sort of people who like to roam around on their own, unhindered by a guide or a big fat guidebook, Louis Sketcher, aka Suppachai Vongnoppadongdacha, is the man for them. 

“Because each shophouse has a story to tell…” he has taken his sketchbook, pencils, brushes, and watercolors to two of Bangkok’s oldest neighborhoods. The first is an area that almost every traveler will have on their itineraries, the historic area of Phra Nakhon that holds the Grand Palace, the city’s most revered temples, and the raucous jollity of that infamous tourist paradise, Khao San Road. The second is less renowned, Thonburi, the Brooklyn of Bangkok, that lies across the river and has just recently attracted the attention of developers. 

Both of these areas are filled with streets that hold architectural gems and other secrets, which are beautifully divulged in this book.

Sketcher’s drawings are delicate and bright with soft colors and meticulous details. He shows the carvings and elaborate sculpted designs on pediments and balustrades, the lattice work on veranda railings, the creative use of stucco and concrete. He identifies the different styles of architecture and the reign in which the buildings were constructed.  Strolling through the labyrinth of streets, he finds the diversity that exists in the oldest part of the city—the Indian section, the lane that has been the Chinese trading center from the earliest days of Bangkok, and Talat Noi, a thriving urban village which has housed Chinese, Portuguese, and Vietnamese throughout its history. He shows where to find the three shophouses that contain Bobae Market, a wholesale clothing market that’s been bustling since before World War Two. His drawings reveal the shuttered Palladian windows that lie above Pak Klong Talad, Thailand’s biggest flower market. And he tackles the overwhelming drama that’s found in Yaowarat, Bangkok’s sprawling Chinatown, plunging beneath its neon glory to point out quieter beauties, including an elegant colonial-style gem that’s been refashioned into a hotel.

Across the Chao Phraya river,  Sketcher goes to a wooden house with an ornately peaked roof and latticed walls that’s now a riverbank cafe and to a shophouse with a concrete facade that looks like a giant honeycomb, within a corner of the city that’s famous for its desserts. In the neighborhood known as Kudi Chin which was once Portuguese, he finds Windsor House, owned by an English family long ago, a wooden house in the style known as gingerbread with a profusion of carved ornaments and “exquisite wooden fretworks above the windows, eaves, and canopy.” And he shows all the reasons why readers should brave the “long and narrow lane” that twists through the riverside Wang Lang Market.

The primary delight of this book lies in the illustrations that are scattered in the margins--sketches of the people who live and work in these shophouses, the food that can be found and eaten there, the treasures that are sold within their walls. A double-page spread of delectable specialties and where to find them, along with an index of some of the shophouses with addresses in English and in Thai, add to the usefulness of this section. Yes, you can stay in the baroque splendor of the heritage hotel, buy sarees in a 100-year-old shophouse in the Indian section of Phahurat, view the river traffic in all its chaotic splendor from the comfort of a cafe in the Wang Lang Market.

Because the text is bilingual, readers have a good chance of finding everything that’s pictured—and because there’s an illustrated list of shophouse styles and examples of architectural vocabulary, they’ll be able to understand what they see. Just in case they might want to fill their own sketchbooks, there’s a list of supplies and paints that were used in making Sketcher’s drawings. A small bibliography may not be helpful to everyone since it’s largely written in Thai.

I lived in Bangkok for eight years and have lost count of how many times I’ve visited Thailand. Bangkok Shophouses has made me realize how much I missed as I walked and stared through the areas that Louis Sketcher has illuminated. I can’t wait to go back--and when I do, this book is going with me, every step of the way.~Janet Brown

Points and Lines by Seicho Matsumoto, translated by Makiko Yamamoto and Paul C. Blum (Kodansha International)

Long before the popularity of Japanese mystery authors such as Keigo Higashino, Kotaro Isaka, and Miyuki Miyabe became known to the English reading public, there were Edogawa Rampo and Seicho Matsumoto.

Matsumoto is the winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Award in 1953 for his short story Aru Kokura Nikki Den (The Legend of the Kokura-Diary). He also won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1957 for his short story collection Kao (The Face). 

Although Edogawa Rampo is considered the first Japanese modern mystery writer, his novels are often described as being part of the “orthodox school” of detective fiction—stories that follow a very conventional formula. In contrast, Seicho Matsumoto incorporates social realism into his stories in which crimes are committed in ordinary settings. They often have motives related to political corruption and social injustice and popularize the detective genre which was later called suiri shosetsu (deductive reasoning fiction) which may include non-detective fiction. 

Points and Lines was originally published in 1957 as 点と線 (Ten to Sen) by Kobunsha. The first English translation became available in 1970. The first paperback edition was published in 1986 and was translated by Makiko Yamamoto and Paul C. Blum. In English, it was also released with the title Tokyo Express.

The story opens with three people standing on Platform 13 at Tokyo station. The people are Tatsuya Yasuda, the president of a precision tool company. Recently he has been doing a lot of business with government agencies and his company continues to grow. Yasuda is also a regular patron at a restaurant called Koyuki where he entertains many of his government contacts.  With him on the platform are two women who work at Koyuki, Yaeko and Tomiko.

All three of them witness Otoki, who also works at Koyuki, getting on the Express Train Asakaze with a man on Platform 15. A few days later, Otoki and the man she was seen with, a man named Sayama, are found dead on a beach in Fukuoka, apparently the victims of a love suicide. 

The local detective in charge of the case, Shigetaro Torigai, feels there’s something not right about the case. But at this point, his only clue is a receipt from the dining car of the Asakaze which was found on Sayama’s person. It also comes to light that Sayama may have been involved in a corruption case with government officials at a certain ministry. 

Detective Kiichi Mihara, who is investigating the corruption case in Tokyo, goes to Fukuoka to find out what happened to Sayama. Together with Detective Torigai, the two detectives discover another fact—that the Asakaze can only be seen from Platform 13 for a mere four minutes. The two detectives begin to have their doubts about Yasuda, but he has a rock solid alibi that puts him in Hokkaido when the alleged “love-suicide” occurred. 

Many of Seicho Matsumoto’s stories have been adapted into films or television series, including this one. The movie adaptation was released in 1958. It wasn’t until 2007 when the book was adapted into a television program.

The plot of this story continues to be used in crime novels and films to this day. The main theme is being able to disprove a suspect’s alibi. One of the things you must remember when reading this book is that it was written before the advent of the shinkansen or bullet train, when air travel was still uncommon. There were no smartphones or Internet either. Reading the book now, it may seem dated, but there is no doubt that it could only be set in Japan, seeing how the story is centered around the train schedules, which to this day remain very accurate. 

The story is also a great introduction to the Japanese detective fiction genre. You won’t be disappointed. ~Ernie Hoyt



Real Thai Cooking by Chawadee Nualkhair, photographs by Lauren Lulu Taylor (Tuttle Publishing)

When I first began using cookbooks, way back in the dark ages of mid-century Alaska, they weren’t embellished with photographs. Some had a few pages of garish colored photos bound into the middle of the book, others still offered dismal black-and-white pictures of a few of their dishes. Food photography wasn’t yet a category. What was in place were mere snapshots of completed recipes.

Maybe that’s why two of my favorite cookbooks have no photographs at all. MFK Fisher and Laurie Colwin provided something better. They wrapped their recipes in essays instead and as a greedy reader, I was enthralled. It wasn’t until 1982, when Christopher Idone came out with the stunning coffee table book, Glorious Food, did I begin to think that cookbooks could be objects of visual delight.

However I never cooked anything from Glorious Food because I was terrified that I would mar its pages. And I infrequently used recipes from MFK or Laurie, although I picked up their books often. Several hours later I’d pull myself away from their stories and slap together a meatloaf, just in time for supper.

It wasn’t until this year that I found the perfect ménage à trois of essays,  photographs, and recipes. Real Thai Cooking has it all.

I can hear the yawns now. Another Thai cookbook? Really? Why?

Here’s the flaw in that rush to judgment. This is a pioneer in the cookbook arena, because every portion of the trinity that lies between its covers is perilously close to perfect. 

I dare anyone to look at Lauren Lulu Taylor’s food photographs without immediately feeling hungry. But they aren’t just appetite snares--her thumbnail photographs turn the ten pages of essential Thai ingredients into a guide to shopping in Asian grocery stores and her shots of street food vendors are bright, evocative, and an irresistible invitation. This is food photography at its best.

And it has to be because those photographs exist side-by-side with some of the best food writing ever done about Thai cuisine and some of the most enticing--and often surprising— recipes. 

Chawadee Nualkhair is a food explorer. Yes, she tells how to make pad thai but she first gives the reason why it exists. (Hint: it’s a political creation, not a culinary masterpiece.) She gives two recipes for som tum but neither are the version most beloved by visitors to Thai restaurants in America or in Bangkok, where som tum, Chawadee says, is a form of fusion, adapted to the palates of that city’s residents. She provides a recipe for tom yum goong which is elevated by ingredients used in the dish as it’s made by Michelin-star-winning street vendor, Jay Fai.

The stars of her recipe collection illuminate Thailand’s multicultural underpinnings: jalebi that has Persian ancestry; a pumpkin custard invented by an enslaved Portuguese aristocrat who headed a palace kitchen;  oxtail soup that’s descended from Arab traders who brought Islam to Southern Thailand; a pork pâté that came to Thailand when Vietnamese fled French colonizers in the 1880s to settle into Thai towns along the Mekong. These culinary surprises coexist happily with a recipe for Chiang Mai’s famous sausage, sai oua, which may require a meat grinder, a sausage stuffing machine, and over two hours of prep time. And just in time to combat the U.S. Sriracha hot sauce shortage, she  comes to the rescue with a recipe for the real thing, calling for fermented chilies,  as it was first invented and still made on the Thai coast in Sriracha.

Not only are these recipes clear and undaunting, they’re fun to read. When using a Thai mortar and pestle, “pound like you have a grudge against the ingredients.” If you’re brave enough to mash Thai chilies in that fashion, protect your eyes from flying chili bits by covering part of the top of the mortar “with your other hand as you pound, like watching a horror movie through your fingers.” When making salt-encrusted fish, encase it in salt “like you have murdered it and are trying to hide the evidence.” Even making a humble omelet becomes high drama when the drops of egg “bubble up like the villain in an acid bath in a James Bond movie.”

If you gather from these phrases that Chawadee Nualkhair knows how to write, you’re absolutely correct. A former journalist for Reuters and for years the writer of a delightful food column called Bangkok Glutton (http://www.bangkokglutton.com), she has studded this cookbook with a bounty of essays that have turned it into a painless and pleasurable tutorial on food in Thailand. 

She explains the differences of Thai regional cuisine, along with the history behind it all. As an ardent champion of Bangkok’s street food, she tells how it came into being and why it must survive. In a frank and possibly controversial explication of “Thailand’s Fast-developing Drinking Culture” she hazards a debatable theory as to why drinks aren’t paired with Thai food: “That is because Thais simply drink to get drunk.” In another piece about eating larb prepared with raw beef, she presents a kinder reason for drinking while consuming this dish. The consumption of alcoholic beverages “are supposed to help kill any germs.”

Her voice is as seductive as her recipes and her recipes are as easy to enjoy as Chawadee Nualkhair is herself. Even readers who may never go to Thailand can immerse themselves in the country’s food, as it’s prepared and eaten within its borders, in the company of a woman who knows it well.~Janet Brown


What I Talk About When I Talk About Running : A Memoir by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel (Vintage)

In 2007, Japanese Nobel Prize nominee Haruki Murakami wrote a nonfiction book about running and writing. It was originally published as [走ることについて語るときに僕の語ること (Hashiru koto ni tsuite Kataru toki ni Boku no Kataru Koto] which translates to What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, published by Bungei Shunju. The English version was published in 2009 and was translated by Japanologist, Philip Gabriel. The title was adapted from a short-story collection by one of Murakami’s favorite writers, Raymond Carver. He was given permission by Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, to use the title in this way. 

In this collection of essays, which Murakami wrote between August of 2005 to October of 2006, as he was training for the New York City Marathon, he writes about what running has meant to him as a person. He says it’s “just a book in which I ponder various things and think aloud”. Murakami says this isn’t a book about his philosophy, it’s more a book about life lessons he learned by running. 

Murakami had the idea of writing a book about running ten years ago but it wasn’t a serious thought until he came across an article in the International Herald Tribune about running a full marathon. Famous marathon runners were asked by different interviewers what goes on in their head when they are running. Do they have a special mantra that keeps them going to complete the race? Murakami thought their answers were interesting and profound. 

The mantra that one runner mentioned stuck in Murakami’s head. The runner replied that it was a mantra his older brother said, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” Murakami has this to say about the mantra. “Say you’re running and you start to think, Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself”. 

Although writing is Murakami’s profession, he says he became a serious runner after moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts. His idea of running seriously means he runs an average of thirty-six miles a week. “In other words, six miles a day, six days a week”. “So at thirty-six miles per week, I cover 156 miles every month, which for me is my standard for serious running”. 

Murakami says since he’s become a serious runner, he has run one full marathon every year for the past twenty-plus years. He trains wherever his schedule takes him, be it in Hawaii, Japan, or in his current home of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has also expanded his interest beyond running, has participated in triathlons, and talks about readjusting his training for the cycling and swimming portions of the event. He is also aware that he is not as young as he once used to be and accepts the fact that it is nearly impossible to improve his times on subsequent marathons or triathlons. 

I’m no runner, nor am I a huge fan of Murakami’s works, although I have read a number of his novels. Even if you are not a runner and are not a big fan of Haruki Murakami, his easy-to-read journal on training for the New York City Marathon is interesting and introspective. It makes you think about your own thoughts when you are doing something that completely absorbs your mind. I exercise everyday but instead of thinking about my inner thoughts, I usually listen to music or watch a movie while working out on a treadmill. So far I haven't had any epiphanies while exercising but you never know…. ~Ernie Hoyt

Mott Street by Ava Chin (Penguin Press)

When Ava Chin first looked at a picture of the completed transcontinental railroad, she was puzzled to see no Chinese faces in the photograph. From the time she was very small, her grandfather had told her stories about his grandfather. Yuan Son came to America in the 1860s when he was still in his teens and was immediately hired as one of the many Chinese men who laid track for the railroad that would unite the country. He and his crew had won a bet for their employers by accomplishing the impossible task of putting down ten miles of railroad track in a single day. Why weren’t the Chinese laborers mentioned in her history book?

What she didn’t know was the continuing story of her great-great-grandfather who took his earnings after the railroad construction was over and moved to Idaho, a place that in 1870 had a population that was 30% Chinese. He opened two businesses and was a solid part of his community until economic turmoil struck and the Chinese Americans became a convenient scapegoat. After thirty years in the U.S., Yuan Son was chased out of his home by his white neighbors as they yelled “The Chinese must go!” He returned to his ancestral village where he was understandably reluctant to have his sons and grandsons retrace his journey to seek their fortune in the U.S.

This wasn’t the only piece of family history that Ava learned about as she was growing up. Although she often went to Manhattan’s Chinatown, she had no idea that the father she had never known lived around the corner from the building where her mother had grown up, 37 Mott Street. Nor did she know that both sides of her family, paternal and maternal, had lived for over a hundred years as neighbors in that same building. 

Long before Ava finally met her father, she learned about the tangled history of the Chins and the Wongs. It came to her in the jigsaw puzzle pieces of her grandparents’ stories about the Wong and Doshim families and through snatches of historical research about her paternal clan, the Chins. When she was in her twenties, she finally found her father, a prominent Chinatown resident who lived in the only remaining Manhattan townhouse that dated back to the days of the American Revolution, on Pell Street, only two blocks from 37 Mott Street. It was a place Ava had walked past countless times, never knowing that this place contained the hidden part of her family.

At this point, uncovering the history of the Chins , the Doshims, and the Wongs became Ava’s life’s work. Her academic training gave her the ability to do piercing and unflagging research, eventually sending her to live in China as a Fulbright scholar. However it was the torrents of memory, the oral stories, not written records, that held “the keys to truth” and revealed “the rich, loamy terroir” of both her family history and the history they inhabited on two continents.

The child of a doomed relationship between a beauty who had been Miss Chinatown and a dashing young playboy who drove a Triumph convertible, Ava’s lineage went back to the beginnings of New York’s Chinatown and continued throughout the terrible bastion of racism that was fostered by the Chinese Exclusion Act. From 1882 until 1943, her ancestors’ lives were battered and truncated by this legislation, denying them citizenship in a country they had made their home for five generations. It was only the fifth, Ava’s generation, that would have the full privileges of an American birthright from the moment they opened their American eyes.

As her ancestors worked and prospered, they did all they possibly could to prove themselves more than worthy of citizenship. During each of the world wars, Dek Foon, an uncle to Ava’s maternal grandmother and a Chinatown powerbroker and philanthropist, was at his local draft board as soon as his age group was eligible to sign up, although as a man in his late forties and then in his sixties, he wasn’t called for duty. He and his colleagues were indefatigable fundraisers for Russian Jews who suffered pogroms in !903, an act of kindness with political benefits as New York Jews took note. 

Foon’s wife, Elva May Lisk, became a pillar of strength and kindness to her husband’s family. Their marriage was a love match that was able to come into being because New York had no anti-miscegenation laws and it lasted until Dek Foon’s death. One of the most moving portions of the family history takes place when Ava discovers that Elva hadn’t been buried next to her husband. Stealthily Ava scoops earth from each of their burial sites, placing a portion of one spouse’s earth on the other’s grave, uniting them in the only way she can. 

The Doshims and the Wongs were people who married for love. The Chins were pragmatic Don Juans whose passion for gambling and fast living eclipsed anything they might have felt for the women in their lives. Ava’s grandmother Rose, the smartest woman in Chinatown, a graduate of Hunter College in a time when this was an anomaly and a stunning accomplishment for a Chinese American woman, told her granddaughter scathing stories about the Chins, who made and lost fortunes and squandered their expensive educations.

Through the pages of Mott Street is an overlay to this well-told family history. It’s the shameful history of the United States that Ava uncovers in a state of rage and grief, facts that have lived in a ghostly state of forgotten truths and are now brought to light. From Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay to the immigration hell that once thrived in the small New York town of Malone, there was no recognition of the propaganda written by Emma Lazurus. No Lady Liberty was there to “lift my  lamp above the golden door.” Even for Chinese residents who had the 19th Century equivalent of a “green card,” travel outside of the U.S. was a risky business that might ensure they could never return.

This shadowed history is beautifully and scaldingly interlaced with the stories of Ava’s families, making Mott Street a book that should be required reading for every high school civics class.~Janet Brown