Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang (Riverhead Books)

A cook, an exile, and “a hungry ghost, adrift,” a young Chinese American woman working in a London restaurant reads an advertisement for a “private chef in an elite research community.” Tempted by the thought of “one last taste of green” in a world that’s been overrun by grey—the pervasive smog that has killed crops all over the world and the grey mung bean flour that has become a nutritional staple—she lies about her work experience and enters what’s known to its envious neighbors as the land of milk and honey.

Set on an Italian mountaintop that defies the smog with bright bursts of sunlight, this is a place where food crops are bioengineered. When the young cook enters her workplace for the first time, she walks into a kitchen that is a “vessel of light” and the first food she tastes are strawberries that turn her mouth into “an orchard in the sun.”

She finds a bounty of ingredients to work with, food that’s vanished from every other part of the world, “a passage back through time.” With it she cooks elaborate menus that are only for practice, with nobody but herself to eat them. Her body rejects the richness of the meals she makes and, in a world that’s besieged by famine, every night she throws away all of the luscious food.

“I’d read the fairy tales,” she says, which means she recognizes the Bluebeard quality of her employer, a man who forbids her to leave the grounds of her workplace while promising her, “You may cook protected from the world’s distractions.” However a distraction finds her in her isolated state. Her employer’s daughter, Aida, brilliant, beautiful, and cynical, becomes her companion, friend, and lover.

Presented with a role to play at banquets where her employer feeds potential investors, the cook takes on an eerie persona, a silent woman dressed in white, who pretends to understand no spoken language and prays without words at the end of every meal. She’s a necessary component to her employer’s plans. He tells her, “They dislike me. Nor do they like Aida.” Posing as the employer’s former wife, the cook takes the vanished woman’s name, Eun-Young, and provides “an unimpeachable public image.” In return, her employer pays her a sum that will clear all of her considerable debt, so, she says, “I signed myself away.”

C. Pam Zhang has followed up her stunning debut novel, How Much of these Hills is Gold (Asia by the Book, March 2021) with an equally breathtaking work of imagination. Blending an apocalyptic future with a fantastic culinary world that’s rich with poetry, Zhang’s sentences sing with unexpected lyricism, burnishing the world that we live in today with a glow of miraculous good fortune. 

Her unnamed central character tells her story with wit and bitter truth. “It’s always been easy to disappear as an Asian woman…The woman I was to become was…a hollow, a receptacle, a mirror held at a flattering angle.” She views her employer with an unsparing eye, describing him as a vulgarian who disguises himself with orange self-tanning cream, “a man who studied pleasure” but derives no enjoyment from anything but humiliating others with his wealth and power. On a dying planet, he milks other wealthy men for the money he needs to safeguard those who are on his list and the money’s forked over by those who want to be on it.

A love story, a dystopian nightmare, a celebration of the bounty we take for granted everyday along with a tribute to life in all its messy and chaotic creativity, Land of Milk and Honey pierces the present to unveil a dubious future, while never releasing its grip on hope. “In certain lights,” Zhang tells readers, “ the past and present are indistinguishable.” Perhaps the future is as well.~Janet Brown

Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore (UBS Publishers)

Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet, writer, and composer. He was born in Calcutta to a very prominent family and was the youngest of thirteen children. The Tagores were known for their contributions to the Bengali Renaissance, a movement that took place in the Bengal region of the British Raj. 

Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European and the first Indian national to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his English translation of his book Gitanjali which translates to Song Offerings. He’s also known for writing books, short stories, and essays, writing his first poem when he was only eight years old.

Gitanjali was first published in his native language of Bengali in 1910 and contained one hundred and fifty-seven poems. Tagore translated his own poems into English and they were subsequently published by the India Society in England in 1912. The English collection only includes one hundred and three of the original poems. The “songs” are based on the themes of love, devotion, and the quest to find spiritual enlightenment. 

The book has been translated into almost all the languages spoken in India and many other languages around the world. There is even an edition available in Braille.

USB Publishers in association with Visva Bharati University decided to create a special edition of the book, including facsimiles of the original lyrics in Bengali, and published the book in 2003. The book includes one hundred and three of his poems, plus a message from the Prime Minister of India, and introductions to the book by W.B. Yeats and excerpts from Andre Gide for the French translation, Ivo Stornilol’s prologue to his Portuguese translation, and an excerpt from Suko Watanabe’s prologue to his Japanese translation of the book. 

Also included at the end of the book is Tagore’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech he gave on May 26, 1921 in Stockholm, Sweden. The gist of his speech is that not only literature, but education in general, should be shared throughout the entire world. The East and West should continue to exchange ideas and learn from each other and should continue to do so in the future.

Even if one is not religious, it is easy to understand Tagore's devotion to a supreme being. The first poem begins: 

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.

This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again.

and fillest it ever with fresh life.

The poems ends with: 

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.

Ages pass, and still thou poorest, and still there is room to fill. 

The only thing a reader may have difficulty with is the English that Tagore uses. The poems are filled with words which sound obsolete today and are often associated with the Bible. Almost all the poems include the words thee, thou, thy, etc, but one has to take into consideration when the poems were written.

The book is also a great introduction to Indian literature. Aside from the biblical-like words, the language is easy to understand and it makes for a pleasurable reading experience. ~Ernie Hoyt

Elephant Company by Vicki Constantine Croke (Random House)

Teak logging was a big business for Great Britain at the start of the 20th Century, with Burma producing 75% of the teak that was used by the world’s ship builders. It was a prime location for the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation, who sent  young British men, “nomads of the forest,” into the jungles to manage logging camps. 

This was a hazardous position. In 1920, 41 Englishmen were hired to work in “Upper Burma.” By 1927, only 16 of them were still alive. One of the original 41 (and the most notable of the 16 survivors) was Billy Williams, a young veteran, fresh from the trenches of World War I. He came because he was intrigued by the idea of working with elephants, an interest that would dominate his life for the next 25 years, giving him the nickname “Elephant Bill.”

Williams loved animals and had an understanding rapport with them that served him well in his new career. He soon became fascinated by the elephants that were an essential part of the logging business, particularly one named Bandoola who had a preternatural understanding of human language. If asked to hand a worker a particular tool, this elephant unerringly selected what was needed and handed it over without hesitation.

There was a peculiarly strong bond between Williams and Bandoola, perhaps because they had been born in the same month of the same year, and that bond led to an improved relationship with the other elephants that Williams worked with. Unique among his cohort, Bandoola was unscarred. When Williams discovered that this phenomenon had lived all his life in the camp, not captured in the wilderness and cruelly trained as the other elephants in the camp had been, he decided it was kinder, cheaper, and more efficient to raise baby elephants in the camp, training them with rewards and bringing them up with young boys who would later become their handlers. This humane standard of care became the norm in logging camps, along with elephant hospitals to cure the wounds incurred in this hazardous line of work.

When World War II began, the jungles of Burma became battlegrounds and elephants were a highly prized labor resource for both the Japanese and the Allies. Suddenly Williams was on equal terms with generals and guerrilla fighters, as the elephant advisor for the Allied forces. The Japanese put a price upon his head because he spirited away the pachyderms that they wanted for themselves.

At the height of his wartime career, Williams had 1652 elephants under his command, with Bandoola as their leader. In spite of his expertise and efforts, Burma’s elephants were sacrifices to warfare. Many of the British soldiers mistreated them, they were wounded in bombing raids and by landmines, and those that were under Japanese control were burned terribly by the acid from batteries that they were forced to carry.

“The more I see of man, the more I love my elephants,” Williams paraphrased and his love becomes contagious. Vicki Constantine Croke has done an immense amount of research and her lively writing style makes her facts irresistible. Elephants take center stage in this history, most particularly the one that was Elephant Bill’s pachyderm twin. Both Elephant Bill and Bandoola become unforgettable heroes in a biography that they companionably and equitably share.~Janet Brown

The Dark Side : Infamous Japanese Crimes and Criminals by Mark Schreiber (Kodansha International)

Japan has an image of being a very safe country. People say you can leave your bag or wallet on the train and nobody will steal it. The image most people have of Japanese people is that they are very polite. Then along comes Mark Schreiber to dispel many of those myths. 

Schreiber is a long-time resident of Japan and has worked as a freelance journalist and translator. His first book was Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan which was first published in 1996 by Tuttle Publishing. 

The Dark Side : Infamous Japanese Crimes and Criminals makes a nice companion piece to his first book. It is based on his series titled Crime and Punishment in Old Japan which he wrote for the Mainichi Daily News, publisher of one of Japan’s English language newspapers. 

In this book, Schreiber goes back in time. He starts with the crimes and criminals from the Edo Era (1603-1868) and explains the roots of Japan’s legal system and judiciary process starting with the age of the Shogun, the Tokugawa reign. He takes us through the Meiji Era (1868-1912), the Taisho Era (1912-1226), and ends the book with crime stories from the Showa (1926-1989) and Heisei (1989-2019) Eras. As the book was published in 2001, stories from the Reiwa Era (2019-present) are not included. 

According to Schreiber’s research, the roots of Japanese law date back to the Tokugawa era. In 1635, The Shogunate created the Roju, a group of five senior councilors from large fiefdoms, who served the Tokugawa shoguns. Below them was the Hyojosho, a judicial council that included three main departments, the JIsha bugyo which oversaw the Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. The Kanjo bugyo which was the treasury department, and the Machi bugyo, an office similar to that of the mayor or governor. It was the Machi bugyo that was responsible for ordinary civil and criminal cases.

One of the first criminals in seventeenth century Japan was a man known as Hirai (or Shirai) Gonpachi. He was a member of a low-ranking samurai family but had a very quick temper. A fight broke out between a couple of dogs owned by Gonpachi’s father and another samurai named Honjo Suketaro. The samurai said something offensive to Gonpachi’s father and when Gonpachi learned of that, he became very angry. He forced his way into Suketaro’s home and killed the man with a sword. He then became a fugitive and an outlaw but eventually turned himself in. Of course he was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was only twenty-five. 

As with any society, it isn’t only men who are criminals. Feudal Japan had their fair share of women who committed crimes. However, as women were considered second-class citizens, the courts were more lenient with them. They didn’t suffer from branding or flogging. They were usually let off with a kitto shikari, a severe scolding—like a big slap on the hand. 

The Meiji Era opened the country to foreigners so it goes without saying that more crimes were committed against the unwanted visitors by nationalistic samurais. However, the Western world was better armed and the Shogunate Era came to an end. The introduction of Western ideas was soon adopted as well. The West helped to change Japan’s feudal legal system. No longer was beheading a punishment for the convicted, nor was the severed head publicly displayed.

The Taisho Era lasted only fifteen years but another problem sprouted for the country during this time. It saw an increase in juvenile crime. However, instead of condemning these youths to death, a man named Kosuke Tomeoka set up a training school and farm in Hokkaido to reform them. His work is similar to Father Edward Flanagan’s creation of Boys Town, official known as Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home, with its belief that “children had a right to be valued, to have basic necessities of life and to be protected”.

Going into the Showa and Heisei Eras, Schreiber introduces the reader to a few notorious criminals. One of the most famous was Tsutomu Miyazaki. a serial killer who preyed on young girls. Between August 1988 and June 1989, he killed four girls, ages four to seven. After he killed them, he molested their corpses, then dismembered them, and also consumed some of their flesh. He was caught, convicted, and then executed on June 17, 2008.

In the Heisei Era, one of the most abhorrent crimes took place on Tokyo’s busy subway system. Members of the Doomsday Cult, AUM Shinrikyo, led by Shoko Asahara, released sarin gas on three different lines of the Tokyo Metro causing thirteen fatalities and injuring thousands of others. Fortunately, Asahara and most of those responsible for the sarin attacks were caught, tried, and convicted. Asahara was executed by hanging on July 8, 2018. 

Japan is currently in the Reiwa Era and one of the most shocking crimes was commited during this period., the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was shot and killed on July 8, 2022 in Nara Prefecture during a political event. How could this have happened? Where did the perpetrator get a gun? Why were the secret service so slow to respond? Although the suspect was apprehended, it reinforces the dangers of crime and criminals and the need for precautions against such people.

It doesn’t matter what era, what country or even what religion is invovled. As long as there are people with differing views, conflicts and wars will continue. The wish for World Peace may be an idealistic fantasy but it is something worth striving for. ~Ernie Hoyt

Totto-chan's Children : A Goodwill Journey to the Children of the World by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, translated by Dorothy Britton (Kodansha International)

Tetsuko Kuroyanagi is a Japanese actress, a popular television talk-show host, and is the author of the acclaimed book Totto-chan : The Little Girl at the Window (Asia by the Book, December 2019). In February of 1984, she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund), currently known as United Nations Children’s Fund, whose main purpose is to provide humanitarian and developmental aid to children all over the world. She held this position until 1996. 

Totto-chan’s Children is the story of her travels to countries in Africa, Asia, and other nations to visit the people who are most at risk from malnutrition, disease, and conflicts - the children. Originally published in 1997 by Kodansha as トットちゃんとトットちゃんたち (Totto-chan to Totto-chan Tachi). The title is a play on words. Totto-chan was what Kuroyanagi called herself when she was a child. Totto is also the word for “child” in Swahili, one of the official languages of Tanzania which was the first country Kuroyanagi would visit as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. 

Kuroyanagi visited Tanzania in 1984. The country was suffering from a severe drought. It hadn’t rained since 1981 and because there was no rain, no crops could be grown. “Everyday, nearly six hundred children under the age of five were dying of starvation and disease”. 

Kuroyanagi thought she knew a lot about starving children, being a child who grew up in wartime Japan. Her visit to Tanzania opened her eyes to what real starvation is. She met children who could neither stand, nor walk nor talk. However, none of the children she met shed any tears or said anything. Later in the evening she was told by a village chief who told her, “Adults die groaning, complaining of their pain, but children say nothing. They simply die silently, under the banana leaves, trusting us adults”. 

Her travels to Asia would take her to Cambodia and Vietnam in 1988 where she would see the children who suffered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and the Pol Pot regime, children whose parents were killed, children who were malnourished because there was no powdered milk or anything nourishing for the kids to eat. Many of the nurses themselves were orphans and did not know how to take care of babies.

In Vietnam, she visited a night elementary school. She was told there about a million school-age children in Ho Chi Minh City. Of these, “about sixty thousand either bravely went to work each day to contribute to the household economy, looked after their younger siblings or helped with the housework and, therefore, could not attend elementary school in the daytime. The night elementary schools were for their benefit”. 

An elementary night school for children—Americans would be hard-pressed to understand a need for such a facility. It may not seem as strange to the Japanese, where many elementary school students attend night classes at cram schools after their regular school. 

In 1990, Kuroyanagi visited Bangladesh, known at the time of this writing to be one of the poorest nations in the world. In this country about nine hundred thousand children under the age of five die each year. She visited the country after it suffered a severe flood wiping out nearly one-third of the nation. Many of the children were afflicted with diarrhea or diarrhea-related diseases. However, what really surprised Kuroyanagi were the children. She says, “There was not a child who had become lethargic and spiritless. They bubbled with the will to live”. 

Kuroyanagi also visited Iraq in 1991 shortly after the end of the Persian Gulf War. Most of us have seen footage of this conflict on television, but we have not seen the real tragedy of war. The ones most affected are the innocent children and news programs usually don’t focus on that aspect of military conflicts.

Every country Kuroyanagi visits is inundated with children in need. Fortunately, UNICEF continues to do what it was intended to do, that is to help children in need all around the world. It’s a sad state of affairs that throughout the world, war, conflict, disease, famine, and starvation continues. We are often left to think, “How can I be of more help?”, “Is there more I can do?”

The book provides a reference for those wishing to contribute to UNICEF through Tetsuko Kurayanagi’s goodwill ambassador account in Tokyo. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo (Henry Holt and Company)

“I exist as either a small canid…or a young woman. Neither are safe forms in a world run by men.” Snow, however, is well equipped to defend herself, no matter if she takes the form of a beautiful woman or a fox. Unfortunately her daughter is not. When the fox cub is captured by a photographer to sell on the open market, the baby is easily broken. By the time Snow finds her, the child is ready to die.

Now Snow is out for revenge, taking her human form to find the man who is responsible for her baby’s death. Her quest takes her to the home of an old woman whose son is a photographer and who knows the murderer. This old woman is attracted to something within Snow, an indefinable quality that reminds her of a fox she encountered long ago in the northern grasslands. She hires this enigmatic beauty to be her maid servant and companion.

Bao is an elderly man who long ago was taken to a fox shrine to save his life. From that time on, he is a lie detector in human form who can immediately distinguish truth from lies the minute the words are spoken. “Truth is a green garden hedged thickly with bamboo that he can’t escape.” He uses this blessing and curse in his work as a detective, a job that puts him on the path of a beautiful young woman who might be a fox. While on his hunt, he always keeps an eye out for the woman he loved when he was young, a girl who claimed she had once been rescued by a fox.

The Fox Wife suddenly becomes a mystery based upon myth, where three foxes find each other, all of them linked through time, history, love, and tragedy. Yangsze Choo makes them not only plausible, but absolutely possible and completely desirable. “We make our living beguiling people,” Snow says and anyone who picks up this book is certain to be beguiled.

Ancient Chinese stories, Choo explains in notes at the end of her book, were augmented by footnotes and in this book, she had wanted to include footnotes written by Snow. Instead she gives tidbits of information sprinkled throughout her novel and within her closing notes. Foxes are recognized as magical shape-shifters in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, beings that are capable of pursuing a thousand-year journey toward becoming celestial foxes. While on that journey they are known to humans as spirits, demons, and gods. 

First mentioned in the Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), a work of Chinese literature that dates back to the 4th Century B.C., foxes were believed to have the power to become a woman at fifty, a beautiful woman or an adult male at one hundred, with the ability “to know things more than at a thousand miles distance.” They could use sorcery to kill or to “possess and bewilder,” and often were the presiding spirit of villages.

Even without these historical facts, Snow’s story is skillfully interlaced with Bao’s in a novel that’s poetic, romantic, and steeped in adventure. Trapped in neither mystery nor fantasy, The Fox Wife brings a new depth to fiction, along with a yearning for a sequel—with footnotes.~Janet Brown

Kwaidan : Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn (ICG Muse)

Lafcadio Hearn was born in Greece on the Ionian island of Lefkada. His mother was a native of Greece and his father was a British Army medical officer. It was as an adult that Hearn moved to Japan to work as a newspaper correspondent. He fell in love with the country and managed to get a teaching position in Shimane Prefecture where he would meet and marry his wife, Setsuko Koizumi. He then became a Japanese citizen and took on the name Yakumo Koizumi. 

He is mostly known as the first foreigner to introduce Japanese literature to the rest of the world. His book Kwaidan is a collection of Japanese ghost stories, some of which have a Chinese origin. It was originally published in 1904 as 怪談 (Kaidan) in the Japanese language. 怪談meaning Ghost Stories. He appears to have made a play on words with the English title as kowai means “scary” and dan meaning “story”, “conversation”, or “talk”.

In the introduction of the book which Hearn wrote in 1904, he says most of the stories were taken from old Japanese books. He mentions that some of them have their origins in China but “the Japanese storyteller, in every case, has so recolored and re-shaped his borrowing as to naturalize it”. 

The lead story, Mimi Nashi Hoichi is a very popular story. Almost every Japanese person knows it. It is about a blind minstrel named Hoichi who could play the biwa, a Japanese lute, and was really good at telling The Tale of Heike. He was especially noted for his rendition of the Battle of Dan-no-Ura.

He made his home at a temple with a friendly priest. His skill was so great that he was called to perform in front of a noble samurai when the main priest was absent. The nobleman was so pleased with his performance that he sent his servant to call upon Hoichi again.

The priest thought there was something strange about Hoichi’s behavior and had some of his servants follow him the next day. They discovered Hoichi playing his biwa in a cemetery in front of the tomb of Antoku Tenno, Japan’s 81st Emperor whose grandfather drowned him when he was only seven during the Battle of Dan-no-Ura. He did this so that the enemy wouldn’t capture the child emperor.

The priest told him he was bewitched by ghosts but he would protect him by writing sutras over Hoichi’s entire body. He was to remain silent and motionless when called upon again. The servant of the nobleman, who we now realize is also a spirit, called upon Hoichi but was angered because Hoichi did not answer him. The sutras the priest wrote rendered his body invisible. The only part of Hoichi’s body the servant could see were Hoichi’s ears. He ripped them off to show his master that the ears were the only part of Hoichi that he could find. 

When the priest returned to see a bloody and injured Hoichi, he admonished himself and apologized to Hoichi telling that he neglected to write any sutras over his ears. However, the priest nursed Hoichi back to health and Hoichi became a famous musician. 

Other stories include Yukki-Onna which is about a woman who is dressed in white and breathes cold air onto sleeping men and takes their lives. Riki Baka is about a simple boy whose mother wished and prayed that he would be reborn into a happier life. 

It’s a great introduction into Japanese folklore. Not all the stories are ghost stories but they are strange. Aside from the bizarre stories, Hearn has included three essays on insects, butterflies, mosquitoes, and ants, telling how they relate to Japanese and Chinese beliefs.

The ghost stories are fun and might seem a little quirky to the Western reader. While I enjoyed the insect essays, I thought it was an interesting concept but a bit hard to absorb. ~Ernie Hoyt

Falling Leaves : The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah (Broadway Books)

Adeline Yen Mah’s book Falling Leaves is the story of her life. It is the true story of growing up in a family where she tries her best to please her father and step-mother but nothing she does changes their apathy towards her. It is a heart-breaking story of family bonds and how those ties are often broken. 

Adeline Yen Mah was born into a very wealthy family in a city just north of Shanghai, China. Her mother died at thirty, a couple of weeks after Adeline was born. Her dying words were to Adeline’s Aunt Baba, “I’ve run out of time. After I’m gone, please look after our little friend here who will never know her mother”. Adeline has no idea what her mother looked like, she has never seen a photograph of her. 

In 1930’s China, men were expected to have a wife while women were “expected to sublimate their own desires to the common good of the family”. In the past there was a double standard between men and women. Single girls who were not married by the time they were thirty often remained single for the rest of their lives. A man, on the other hand, was expected to take at least one wife, regardless of his age. 

Adeline’s father was thirty years old. He was the president of his own company. He had properties, investments and other successful businesses. He decided he would now do something to please himself. While driving around with his sons, he spotted a woman whom he became totally infatuated with. Her name was Jeanne Virginie Prosperi, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a French father and Chinese mother. 

He eventually married Jeanne and had the family call her 娘 (Niang), another term for mother, as the children often talked about their deceased mother and called her 媽媽 (Mama). As Niang became a part of life, great changes would come, and nothing would be the same again. 

It is now 1988 in Hong Kong. Adeline Yen Mah’s family have all gathered together for the first time in almost forty years. The only person who is absent is Adeline’s youngest sister, Susan. The occasion is for her father’s funeral and reading of his last will and testament. 

At the end of the will, the solicitor says, “It is my duty to inform you that I have been instructed by your mother, Mrs. Jeanne Yen, to tell you that there is no money in your father’s estate”. 

It is this reading of her father’s will which is the catalyst for Adeline to tell her story. She and her siblings could not believe that their father died penniless. Adeline Yen Mah says she had to go back to her grand- aunt and grandfather’s time to explain why this came to be.

Adeline Yen Mah’s bittersweet memoir of a happy childhood turned nightmare is heartbreaking as it is inspiring. It’s a story of finding one’s identity and the search for the most important things in life—acceptance, love and understanding. I believe it’s a goal we all strive for and those of us who have it should count our blessings. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Refugee Ocean by Pauls Toutonghi (Simon & Schuster, release date October 2023)

Marguerite has a passion for music and a gift for composing it. She is immersed in creating a sonata, one that she hopes may fulfill her deepest desire, a life that allows her to “live in music.” But instead she lives in the patriarchal culture of 1940’s Beirut and her father has charted her future. He’s decided she will marry a man who will rescue and buttress her family’s dwindling fortune. One tiny fragment of possibility exists that might rescue her from this plan, along with a different avenue provided by a man she barely knows but who understands her better than anyone else in her life.

As a strictly monitored young Lebanese woman, Marguerite is smothered in a claustrophobic life. Her beauty is a prison and her talent is ignored. She rebels in small ways: making her way alone in an opera house to meet a female singer whose freedom she longs to have for herself; accepting a cigarette from a woman who tells her to find a way to be herself; escaping the family house to go to her father’s place of business where she finally sees him as the flawed man he truly is. 

Naim is a child whose world is shattered to pieces when a bomb hits his home in Aleppo and sends him “twisting and spinning like a dead, dry falling leaf.” When he regains consciousness, he learns only he and his mother have survived the blast. Finding their way to a refugee camp, they are given asylum in the United States. But Naim has lost his greatest form of comfort. A musical prodigy in Syria, he can no longer find solace at a piano. His left hand was torn in half when he was caught in the maelstrom of the bombing. Now he feels useless, a drain upon his mother’s energy, a boy who can’t even keep a grip on the debit card that would buy groceries for the coming week.

Annabel Crandall is an elderly woman confined to a wheelchair in her large and comfortable home. With more space than she needs, she offers an apartment in her basement to a Syrian woman and her young son. When Annabel sees the child staring at her grand piano with a look of sorrow on his face, she becomes intrigued and when she finds him rifling through her kitchen pantry in search of food, she lures his story from him with a carton full of chocolate bars.

Naim isn’t the first Middle Easterner Annabel has met. When she was young and pretty, a contest took her to a tobacco plantation in Cuba, at a time when nobody realized the strength of the brewing revolution. Annabel was caught in the erupting violence, racing through the night to escape Castro’s guerrillas with a woman named Marguerite.

Each of these separate threads has the strength of a novel and when they intertwine, coincidences that border on the improbable have the power to overcome the bounds of strained credulity. Pauls Toutonghi has drawn upon the details of his own family’s history that make every setting, whether it’s in the opulence of a Beirut opera house or in a refugee camp so huge that it contains four hundred stores, vividly alive. Toutonghi’s parents had lived in a refugee camp before arriving in the United States and he has dedicated this book to his cousin who has the same name as his character Marguerite Toutoungi. 

Two people who were forced to leave places they loved; two stories, one that ends happily; two unforgettable characters who provide an essential window on the never-ending history of those who seek asylum--The Refugee Ocean is a book that anybody with a conscience should read and take to heart.~Janet Brown

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka (Picador)

Lois-Ann Yamanaka was born on the island of Moloka’i. She and her four sisters were raised on a sugar plantation by her parents. Based on her own experiences, she has managed to create stories featuring the local dialect of Hawaiian Pidgin. 

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers is her second book and her first full-length novel. It is narrated by a Japanese American girl named Lovey Nariyoshi. Her family is not rich and is not even considered middle class. They live on the edge of poverty on the Big Island of Hawai’i. 

Lovey has a younger sister named Calhoon. Her father’s name is Hubert and her mother’s name is Verva. She has two uncles, her father’s older brothers Tora and Uri. Lovey also has a best friend, an effeminate boy named Jerome whom everybody calls Jerry. 

The story is set sometime in the seventies. There are references to hit songs of the era such as Seasons in the Sun, I Shot the Sheriff and  Kung Fu Fighting. Lovey and Jerry talk about TV shows like Charlie’s Angels and The Dukes of Hazzard. At times it’s hard to determine if they are in junior high or in high school. 

Lovey doesn’t tell anybody but she is ashamed of her pidgin English. Her teacher tells the class for the umpteenth time, “No one will want to give you a job. You sound uneducated. You will be looked down upon. You’re speaking a low-class form of Standard English. Continue, and you’ll go nowhere in life”. 

Lovey cannot help the way she speaks. Her parents speak pidgin, her uncles and aunts speak pidgin, her grandmother speaks pidgin, All her cousins speak pidgin as well and “nobody looks or talks like a haole,”a term used by native Hawaiians to describe mostly white people. It is very similar to the use of the Japanese word gaijin which is the vernacular for “foreigners”. 

Her haole classmates often make fun of her and her friend Jerry. They are considered outcasts, or nerds if you prefer. Lovey is also not very good at math. When one of her classmates sees that she can not reduce the fraction 8/14, her classmate says, “You real stoopid for one fricken Jap”. And when one student starts, others join in—“Yeah, I thought all Japs suppose for be smut. But you cannot even reduce one stupid fraction, eh, you, Jap-Crap, Stupid, thass why, you Rice Eye, good-for-nuttin’ Pearl Harba bomba”. 

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers is a series of vignettes by Lovey Nariyoshi describing her life on the Big Island. It’s a coming-of-age story as Lovey deals with bullies, mean teachers and just trying to fit in to find an identity of her own. 

Sometimes the story is hard to follow as Yamanaka makes Lovey jump from one subject to the next. She may be talking about wanting to be a haole in one chapter, then she’ll be talking about hunting goats with her father or talking about going to a school dance and being one of the wallflowers as she waits for some boy to ask her to dance. 

As entertaining as the stories are, if you are not familiar with pidgin English it could be very difficult to read. Although I am not a full Japanese American, I am a half-Japanese, half-American person who grew up in Japan on an American army base. 

My mother is Japanese and often speaks English with a lot of grammatical errors. Her English wasn’t as difficult to understand as Lovey’s pidgin but a lot of times it did remind me of my mother’s speech. Perhaps if more haole were to read Yamanaka’s novel, they would be more understanding of people like Lovey Nariyoshi. One can only hope. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Future by Naomi Alderman (Simon & Schuster]

The Fall of Hong Kong sends young Lai Zhen to a refugee camp and on to the U.S. where she grows up to become an internet influencer whose specialty is survivalism. Martha Einkorn is a refugee from a religious cult who now works closely with an internet mogul whose mission is world domination. Lenk Sketlish is one of the three most powerful people on the planet, all of whom are determined to destroy what exists and start over from scratch.

Welcome to a world of hidden bunkers, womb-like suits constructed to provide every human need, and a special surveillance program that guarantees personal safety, even during an apocalypse. Religion, myth, and the ultimate in human greed all unite in a novel whose threads are intricate and nearly impossible to untangle. What begins as a satire with easily recognizable key characters swiftly becomes an end-of-the-world scenario. But wait! That’s only the beginning. Suddenly the book becomes a thriller, with Lai Zhen fleeing from a mysterious killer in the world’s largest shopping mall. This fades into a love story between Lai Zhen and Martha Einkorn that dissolves into a devious plan of revenge. It seems to culminate in an episode of Survivor, with four people on a deserted island where there’s no means of communication with whatever is left of the world. 

Naomi Alderman has an imagination that can only be described as diabolical. Drawing upon current events—the climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the overwhelming amount of wealth and power controlled by a very few people—she throws her readers into a morass of fiction that borders perilously upon fact. Not since H.G. Wells created The War of the Worlds has any writer so skillfully manipulated nightmares into what seems to be a prophesy—or reality.

“You think you can change something big about the world and it ends with destruction. Every single time….What do you call it when you can’t do anything, but you can’t do nothing?” This simple observation and desperate question are both resonant and provocative. Although even the smartest of readers may find themselves floundering in the nooks and crannies of The Future, Martha Einkorn’s words will keep them enmeshed in spite of their confusion.

This novel goes through dizzying transformations in a way that’s reminiscent of the Aurora Borealis. It shifts its enticing patterns as quickly as it abandons one character for another or jumps from narration to baffling conversations on a survivalist forum. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah comes into play as God is asked “Will you spare the city if ten good men can be found within it?” The Future inverts this question by asking “Can the world be saved if four people are sacrificed?”

It’s a well-worn cliche to say that a book is mystifying right up to its last page. The Future continues to tease and baffle its readers beyond the last sentence of its last chapter. Placed in a portion of a book that is rarely looked at are two sentences that upend whatever one might believe the ending is. Alderman goes beyond a cliffhanger into what amounts to literary sadism and makes a sequel inevitable. It looks as though she’s taken notes from Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past. If so, she owes us all two more novels, sooner rather than later.~Janet Brown

The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan (Simon & Schuster)

Cecily Alcantara knows precisely what the blessings of colonization are. In British-ruled Malaya she chafes under them every day. She’s Eurasian, “nearly  white, like them,” her mother often told Cecily when she was growing up. Cecily knows better. She comes in contact with “them” frequently and none of “them” see her as nearly white. 

Married to Gordon Alcantara, a Malay bureaucrat who has a low-ranking position with the local British administrator, Cecily frequently and reluctantly accompanies her husband to government social functions where she’s snubbed by Englishwomen. She’s an easy target for a Japanese spy who has come to their town under the guise of a Hong Kong businessman.

Bingley Tan is actually Shigeru Fujiwara, a man who will eventually become a general in the Japanese Army,  the Tiger of Malaya. He insinuates himself into Cecily’s household by befriending Gordon, visiting his house, plying him with whisky, and helping Cecily put her husband to bed after Gordon passes out. 

Quickly discovering Cecily’s resentment of the British overlords, Fujiwara lures her with thoughts of Malaya governed by Malays after the colonial powers are vanquished by the Japanese Imperial Army. Japan, he tells her, will bring this about but for this to happen he needs the help of patriots like herself. 

And help is what Cecily provides. Her life shimmers with new excitement as she purloins official papers from her husband’s study, eavesdrops on conversations he has with his superiors, has clandestine meetings with Fujiwara, and tucks information in secret hiding places for her spymaster to recover later. 

When the Japanese Army invades Malaya and routs the British troops who had expected them to launch a naval attack, not a march overland from Thailand, Cecily is overjoyed. But then matters go badly awry. The occupying Japanese aren’t eager to relinquish Malaya to the Malays. Instead they exert a brutal form of control that becomes terrorism.

Families hide their young daughters when Japanese soldiers enter their homes. Then the young boys begin to disappear. One of them is Cecily’s son. What she first thought was an act of heroism performed for the good of her country Cecily now realizes was a betrayal that demands her children as sacrifices.

Little is known in the West about the effects of the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia and much of the known history focuses on the plight of British prisoners of war. Vanessa Chan turns a bright lens upon the Asian prisoners who were slave laborers, forced to build the Burma Railway that was immortalized by the movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai. She vividly and terribly reveals the conditions of the “comfort stations,” put into place so Japanese soldiers wouldn’t reenact the rapes that took place in Nanjing, a collection of shacks where the “comforters” were barely out of childhood. She reveals what it was like to live under a military occupation, in a state of constant fear and hunger.

Chan grew up in Malaysia with grandparents who had lived through the years between 1941-1945. “In Malaysia,” she says, “our grandparents love us by not speaking,” specifically not speaking about life under the Japanese Imperial Army. When Chan asked her grandmother, who had been a teenager in those days, what her life was like at that time, she received the reply “Normal. Same as anyone.”

Slowly Chan’s questions received answers, fragmented details of her grandmother’s life during World War II. From these fragments, Chan began to construct her novel, one that is emotionally difficult to read but is so skillfully told that it’s impossible to set aside. The Storm We Made is her first novel. Let’s hope that it won’t be her last.~Janet Brown

Two Blankets, Three Sheets by Rodaan Al Galidi (World Editions)

According to the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees), at the end of 2022, there were currently over 108.4 forcibly displaced people worldwide. 62.5 million were internally displaced, 35.3 million were refugees, 5.4 million were asylum seekers, and another 5.2 million people were in need of international protection. (www.unhc.org)

Rodaan Al Galidi was an asylum seeker. He left his family, his job, his native homeland of Iraq to escape joining Saddam Hussein’s army. He is currently a Dutch national. Two Blankets, Three Sheets is his fictional account of a man named Samir Karim whose story is based on Galadi’s life. Galadi states in his introduction that “the narrator is not me”. In this way, he says he “can still be the writer and not the main character”. 

Galadi introduces us to a world that most of us have probably never heard of or experienced. He spent nine years in an ASC (Asylum Seeker’s Center) and before he made the decision to apply for asylum in a European country, he had spent seven years wandering the world. Before buying his way to Amsterdam, he spent three years in Southeast Asia just scraping by. His alter-ego, Samir Karim then takes up the story. 

Samir says his three years of living in Southeast Asia “was like searching through the wall of your cell only to find another cell on the other side, and then scratching through the next wall and ending up in yet another cell”. He would save up enough money to buy nearly expired passports of various different nationalities. At different times he was Dutch, German, Czech, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, British, French, and Swedish. 

He was on his second Dutch passport and wanted to end his odyssey without official documents. He was living in Thailand at that time. He bought a fake driver’s license with the same name as the passport for fifty dollars on Khao San Road, and then bought a Dutch student I.D. for another fifty dollars. He decided to request asylum once he reached Amsterdam. 

I think it would be hard for any one of us to imagine what it must have been like to cross borders using a forged passport. Samir Karim’s biggest fear (and Galidi’s as well) was being deported back to his home country of Iraq. With Saddam Hussein as president, he would surely be punished severely or worse yet, put to death, for not joining Saddam’s army. 

Once Samir reached Amsterdam, the first thing he did was tear up his fake passport and anything that would leave a trail to show where he came from. He still did not know how he was going to get out of the airport. He looked so anxious that when a policeman approached him and asked if he needed any assistance, to which he replied, “I am Iraqi”.

Thus starts his nine-year odyssey of living in the ASC. His story is not only Galidi’s story, it is also the story of the hundreds, if not thousands, of people seeking asylum away from their home country. In Samir Karim’s words, Galidi is able to convey how the asylum-seeker system works and how long the process can take. For some people, it may take a few weeks or months, for others, it may take years. 

It is much to the reader’s relief when Samir Karim receives his residence permit to live in the Netherlands. We can only imagine what went through Galidi’s mind while he was living in the asylum center. Galidi writes with humor and passion as he explains his plight and of those others he came in contact with during his confinement. 

I think it would be difficult for anyone to imagine what Galidi or the hundreds of thousands of other asylum seekers go through. All they want is to live a normal life, one that’s safe from persecution and war. This book sheds light on an ongoing problem that most of the world may not even be aware of. 

Galidi also states in his introduction, “This book is fiction for the reader who cannot believe it. But for anyone open to it, it is nonfiction. Or no: let this book be nonfiction, so that the world I had to inhabit for all those years will be transformed from fiction into fact”. ~Ernie Hoyt

Beijing Sprawl by Xie Zechen, translated by Jeremy Tiang and Eric Abrahamsen (Two Lines Press)

To country boys in China’s distant provinces, the ones who drop out of school and have no skills, Beijing is where the money is.  Opportunities in the capital are “like bird shit—it would spatter on your head while you weren’t looking and make you rich.”

Four boys have come from the same village to Beijing, where they live together in a room that holds only four bunk beds and a desk.  The rooftop is their living room, where they meet at the end of their work day. Sitting on stools, they drink beer, eat donkey burgers, and play cards, surrounded by a city that “spreads quick, like a tropical jungle.”

They all have the same job, pasting ads on empty walls night after night, making just enough to pay the rent for their room and to buy food for their rooftop meals. They’re young enough that this seems like fun--the oldest is twenty and the youngest only seventeen. But they know that life in Beijing for people like them is a “young person’s game.” While they can still be romantic, falling in love with girls whom they see at a distance and dreaming of forming a rock band, they’re well aware that their city life has an expiration date. They see it as it claims older people who came from their village to find wealth but watched their dreams die instead. 

One of these men works on construction sites, “wiping out everything that isn’t a skyscraper,” while back in his village his little son calls every man “father,” since he has never known the man who deserves that name. Another patches a car together, building it from scrap that is discarded in the garage where he works. It looks ridiculous but it runs and when he drives it to work, it draws customers to the shop and eventually leads to vehicular homicide. 

Occasionally Beijing succumbs to an attack of “urban psoriasis” when street vendors and the boys who paste ads become the itch that the cops are told to scratch. The cleanup brings an enforced leisure that turns into gang fights where different factions arm themselves with whatever they can find. “Sticks, iron coal shovels, furnace tongs,” all become weapons and one boy dies from tripping over the sharpened blade of a hoe, cutting his own throat. 

Boredom is a dangerous occupation. From their rooftop, the boys become enraged by the barking of a neighbor’s dog that is chained up nearby. First they tease it and then become more purposeful. What begins as a game turns into cruelty and then death. 

Even good intentions turn into tragedies. A young man who lets himself worry about a little girl who begs on the street is lost forever in his attempts to take her to safety. Another who falls in love with a girl whom he only sees when he peers through the window of a tavern ends up back in his village, a drooling idiot. 

“I’d sell blood twice for that,” one boy says after treating his friends to a restaurant meal. But in fact, all of these lost boys sell their blood every day in a different form, as they scrabble to keep their expiration dates at bay. They know that, for lives like theirs, there are no happy endings. Their stories are bleak and beautiful, stark and laced with humor, interlocking to form a novella that just might break your heart.~Janet Brown

Shutting Out the Sun : How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger (Vintage)

Michael Zielenziger is an American journalist who spent seven years as the Tokyo Bureau Chief for Knight Ridder media company. Before he moved to Tokyo, he worked as the Pacific Rim correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News. As Zielenziger moved to Japan in 1995, a few short years after the bubble economy burst, he was witness to disturbing social trends that may affect the future of Japan. 

Shutting Out the Sun is the story of the social trends and how Japan got to be the way it is. He argues that “Japan’s tradition-steeped society, its aversion to change, and its distrust of individuality are stifling economic revival, political reform, and social evolution”. Some of the trends he focuses on are the “hikikomori” and the “parasite singles”. 

Zielenziger says the purpose of this book is not to focus on politics or economics but “to unravel the unusual social, cultural, and psychological constraints that have stifled the people of this proud, primordial nation and prevented change from bubbling up from within”. 

He first focuses on the hikikomori, “young men who lock themselves in their rooms and find little solace in the larger society”. The other social trend he explores are the parasite singles, women who continue to live with their parents, refuse to get married, and choose not to have any children. 

Zielenziger starts off his book on Japan’s lost generation by sharing the story of Princess Masako who in 2004, eleven years after her marriage, disappeared from public view. The Imperial Household Agency acknowledged that the Crown Princess was currently suffering from an “adjustment disorder” whose symptoms are described as sleeplessness and anxiety. Although she is a woman, you could argue that she was the first person to become a hikikomori.

The hikikomori, mostly males who have chosen to withdraw from society, lock themselves in their rooms,  sometimes for months or years, and never come out. Zielenziger says they cannot be diagnosed as schizophrenics or mental defectives. “They are not depressives or psychotics; nor are they classic agoraphobics, who fear public spaces but welcome friends into their own home”. 

What leads these men to become recluses who seem to be afraid of their own shadows? The majority of the hikikomori whom Zeilenziger was able to interview all mentioned feeling alienated or different. Many of them were bullied in school or at work because they did not conform to the majority’s way of thinking. As Japan stifles individuality and creative thinking, those who do are usually ostracized, ignored or bullied. 

The other social disorder which became prominent after the bubble economy burst are the parasite singles. A term coined by a sociologist named Masahiro Yamada which he used in 1999 to describe “women who shop avidly, travel abroad on fancy vacations, and prefer to ‘live for the moment’ rather than marry or start a family. 

The reasons the women gave Zielenziger for their adamant refusals to marry and have children is the fact that the “Japanese system is not fully prepared for both men and women to work while having children. It’s the woman who raises the child”. One of them tells Zeilenziger she would have to choose between her baby and her job and she is not ready to give up her career. 

Another reason why many women refuse to marry and have children is because of the “feudal attitudes that still govern marriage and family life, the crippling economic costs of child-rearing, and a pervasive pessimism endemic to the nation ''. 

This attitude still holds true today. Japanese men want their wives to quit their jobs so they can keep house and raise children. It’s the same attitude of American males in the fifties when men believed that women should be “barefoot and pregnant.”

Until the nation as a whole changes its way of thinking, the social disorders of hikikomori and parasite singles are not likely to fade away. It’s currently 2023 and Japan doesn’t seem to have made any progress to keep up with the trend of globalization.

I’ve been living in this nation for almost thirty years but even I know I will always remain an “outsider” in this “closed society,” no matter how well I can speak the language and understand the country’s customs. 

As sad as it may be, I tend to agree with the author who concludes that “a nation unwilling to acknowledge—or adapt to—its internal dislocations ends up closing like a clam shell to preserve what it has”. ~Ernie Hoyt

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