Songs on Endless Repeat by Anthony Veasna So (HarperCollins)

“I have less in common with mainstream Asians, like Chinese, Japanese, the usual suspects, than say middle-aged Jewish people because…both older Jewish folks and young Cambos have parents who either survived or died in a genocide!”

Here is the voice of Anthony Veasna So, who died when he was 28, just months before his book of short stories, Afterparties, (asiabythebook.com 8/2021) was published and acclaimed by everyone from the New Yorker to popsugar.com. This offhand line from one of the characters in the recently published posthumous collection of work by So, Songs on Endless Repeat, echoes with absolute truth. The person who would most appreciate and envy that line would now be one of those “older Jewish folks” if he hadn’t, like So, died from a drug overdose--Lenny Bruce.  

So himself took the microphone as a stand-up comedian. He also was a scathing cartoonist, an artist who painted enigmatic self portraits, and a writer whose fiction was published in the New Yorker and Granta and who signed a two-book deal with HarperCollins when he was in his mid-twenties. At the time of his death, he was immersed in writing that second book, “a first novel draft [that] will definitely push the limits of digestible length.” 

HarperCollins paid $300,000 for Afterparties and for the novel that would follow. Determined to get their money’s worth, they scraped together pieces of fiction and nonfiction, tossing it all into the crazy salad that’s become So’s second—and last—published book. They should never have done this. They looted a grave.

Songs on Endless Repeat is an incoherent mixture of five previously published essays, both in print and online, one lengthy and unpublished piece that delves into reality television, and eight chapters of the first draft that was meant to become his novel, Straight thru Cambotown. 

With a stunning lack of respect for this novel that will never be finished, HarperCollins sprinkled those chapters with haphazard abandon among the pieces of nonfiction, as though each portion of what was intended to begin a novel were random short stories. When read as they’re presented on the page, these chapters become staccato. They jangle and chafe. The characters float in a disembodied context, smoking weed, exchanging obscene wisecracks, presided over by a ghostly figure whose funeral is in the offing. They deserve a better showcase than this scattershot presentation, but the only way they’re going to get it is if their readers ignore the nonfiction that gets in their way and encounter each chapter in order, one after the other, as one would when reading a novel. When this way of reading takes place, then the mourning begins. So’s unpolished rush of fiction, his nascent sketches of characters, his tumbled flood of thoughts give promise of a book that would have stunned the literary world.

Vinny, Darren, and Molly, cousins whose childless aunt just died in a fiery car crash, are the dead woman’s prospective heirs. Their aunt was the Counter, a leading figure of her Cambodian community. She headed an improvised bank, with members who contributed to, borrowed from, and earned interest from the communal funds. The Counter was the one who collected and distributed the money, while taking her cut, and it’s rumored that she possessed a fortune. 

An inheritance from her would be welcomed by the cousins. Molly is back home after an unsuccessful stint as an artist in Manhattan, reluctant to sacrifice her dreams to a lucrative career. Vinny is the lead of the Khmai Khmong Rappers, who spits out rhymes in a mixture of Khmer and English in rhythms that hold his memories of the cadence voiced by Cambodian monks. Darren is making his way through the academic morass of graduate student stipends and applications for fellowships, while his thoughts are still influenced by his days as a stand-up comic, terse and cynical, with a vicious bite. 

His is the voice that dominates in these early chapters and his words are the ones that resonate. Describing Cambodian men at family gatherings, he classifies them by what they drink, “Heineken for the humble, Hennessey for the ballers.” A deeper class difference emerges among the men’s children when they reach middle school--are they going to become yellow or brown, choosing academic success or gangster rhythms, “Asian” or “Cambo”? Or will they sink into the mushy definition of Asian American, which Darren derides with his usual scathing insight, “Seriously, we don’t even eat the same grain of rice.”

While Afterparties examined the legacy inherited by the children of those who survived genocide, what’s offered in the opening chapters of So’s unfinished novel is the unwieldy balance between how to succeed in America without jettisoning the cultural roots of the Cambodian community. His final sentences give hints as to how this might have happened for the three cousins, who are forced to immerse themselves in their dead aunt’s livelihood before receiving the inheritance she’s left them. The sketches of Cambotown and its inhabitants give glimpses of a rich and devastating plot that will never come into being, and the sadness of So’s death becomes a matter of literary grief.

But he buries his conclusion among his torrent of words, where it emerges like a polished knife blade flashing in sunlight: “Some things are just lost. So don’t waste your life thinking about it.”~Janet Brown

The Boy and the Dog by Seishu Hase, translated by Alison Watts (Scribner)

There have been a number of confirmed cases of animals saving their owners or becoming so loyal that they wait for them even if their owners have died. The most famous being the story of Hachiko, an Akita dog that waited for its owner, Hidesaburo Ueno, at Shibuya station for over nine years after Ueno’s death. 

Although Seishu Hase is known in Japan for mostly writing Yakuza crime novels, in his book The Boy and the Dog, he has written a story about a dog named Tamon that makes a five-year journey across Japan to find his beloved owner. 

The book was originally published in the Japanese language as 少年と犬 (Shonen to Inu) in 2020 by Bungeishunju Limited. It won the Naoki Award in 2020. This edition, translated by Alsion Watts, was published in English in 2023 by Scribner. 

It’s six months after the massive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that hit the Tohoku area of Japan on March 11, 2011. At a convenience store in Sendai, a man named Kazumasu, sees  a ragged looking dog standing on the corner of the parking lot. The dog is still there after he makes his purchase. The dog was sitting there just staring at him. 

The dog looks like a German shepherd mix and since there seemed to be no owner, Kazumasa decides to take him home. He notices the dog’s collar with only the dog’s name on it - Tamon, named after Tamoten, a guardian deity. Kazumasa lives with his sister and their mother who suffers from dementia. She sometimes forgets the name of their children. When Kazumasa visits his mother with Tamon, she immediately calls the dog Kaito. 

Although their mother seemed to be happy and in good spirits whenever “Kaito” was with her, Kazumasa knew he needed to make more money so he could help out his sister and be able to put their mother in a home. He accepts a job as driver for a couple of foreign criminals and brings Tamon with him on the job. The job goes without a hitch and the foreign thieves believes that Tamon is their good luck charm. 

Kazumasa’s lucky streak came to an abrupt end. Kazumasa and the three foreign thieves were being chased by a group of Yakuza and Kazumasa crashes the getaway van into a wall. Tamon and only one of the thieves survives. A man named Miguel.  

This is only the start of Tamon’s journey. Tamon will travel with the thief to Niigata who plans on stowing on a boat to leave Japan. He can’t take Tamon with him and Tamon is then brought home by a man who was training in the Japanese Alps when Tamon chased a bear away from him. The runner found Tamon continues his journey and is taken in by a prostitute named Miwa who finds him in the mountains of Shiga Prefecture. 

The day Miwa found Tamon was the day she killed her boyfriend. She decides to turn herself in and lets the dog go. Tamon is then taken in by a man who lives alone on the mountain but continues his journey south. 

In Kagoshima Prefecture, a small boy named Hikaru lives there with his parents. The family moved after the devastating quake. The experience was such a shock to him as he lost his friend Tamon. Since then, the boy has been unable to speak. 

Will Tamon and Hikaru ever be reunited? Can an animal and human be soulmates? Seishu Hase makes you think so. The story will make you believe in miracles. ~Ernie Hoyt

Tezcatlipoca by Kiwamu Sato, translated by Stephen Paul (Yen On)

Tezcatlipoca was originally published in the Japanese language in 2021 by Kadokawa Corporation. It won the Naoki Prize, a prestigious Japanese literary award and was heralded as one of the best mysteries to read by a number of other publications. It was translated into English and published in February of 2023 by Yen On Books. 

It is one of the most astonishing and disturbing novels you will ever read. It blends Aztec mythology and culture with a dose of the mystical and supernatural along with drug cartels, the Yakuza, organized crime syndicates, and illegal activities of the present. The story will take you from the drug cartel war zones in Mexico to the bustling city of Jakarta, Indonesia and ending up in the Kanto area of Japan. 

In order to truly understand the story, it may help to study up on the gods of Aztec culture. Tezcatlipoca is the God of Providence and is considered one of the four sons of  Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, two major deities known as the “Dual Gods”. The name Tezcatlipoca is usually translated as “smoking mirror” from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The festival celebrating Tezcatlipoca is called Toxcatl and involves a human sacrifice.

The story centers are three very different individuals. A Mexican drug lord on the run whose empire is taken over by another cartel, a neglected child who grows up to commit a terrible crime and is locked away for an extended period of time, and a Japanese heart surgeon who loses his license and becomes an illegal organ broker. 

Koshimo, the child of a Mexican mother and Yakuza father grows into a big strong teenager and when he finds his drunken father beating his mother, he easily overpowers him and breaks his neck with his bare hands. His mother was having a flashback of her brother being killed by a narco so she also attacked but Koshimo hit her with one hard slap and she was dead. He casually walked down the stairs to the first floor hardware store and asked the owner to call the police. Koshimo was only thirteen-years-old. 

September 2015, a newspaper article reports that the latest drug war is reaching its final stage after two years of fighting. As with the hometown of Koshimo’s mother, Sinaloa is now the battleground between old Los Casasola and replacing them will be the Dogo Cartel. “The amount of cocaine that crosses the border won’t change. And neither will the United States’ status as the biggest market place”. 

Valmira Casasola is the only surviving member of Los Casasolas. They’ve been ousted by the Dogo Cartel and Valmira has been fleeing for his life. However, he plans to start from scratch to build a new empire and vows to take down the Dogo Cartel as well. He has been in on the fun for quite a while but ends up in Indonesia working at a food cart that sells cobra satays. 

After their Catholic father died, Valmero and his three brothers were indoctrinated into the belief of their abuela, Libertad, who was a firm believer in all of the Aztec gods. As an adult, Valmiro also became more enamored with his indigenous heritage. His food cart in the market was just a cover for selling illicit drugs on the side so he can make contacts to build up his empire again. It is here that he meets a Japanese man who calls himself Tanaka. 

Tanaka or Suenaga as we find out later is an organ broker for a Chinese gang and a militant Islamic organization. However, his main desire was to go back to the operating room in a clean environment. He didn’t want to become just any back alley doctor. He believes his skills could be used in a more productive way.

The two men, former drug kingpin and disgraced heart surgeon, form a plan to corner the market on illegal heart transpants. They presented their plan to the Chinese gang and to an officer of the militant group and a nefarious web of evil was about to be loosed upon the world. What evil will befall the world? Only the God Tezcatlipoca might know the answer. ~Ernie Hoyt

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan (Simon & Schuster)

“We have your daughter,” are words that would strike terror in any mother’s heart, especially when they’re spoken over the phone by a police officer. Frida Liu is certain that whatever this statement might forebode, she’ll be able to clear it all up. She’s a solid citizen, employed by the  Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the possessor of two degrees, a Bachelor’s from Brown and an Master’s from Columbia, who contributes to a 401 (k) and a college savings account for her baby daughter. Although it’s true that she left her eighteen-month-old alone for over two hours, it’s also true that she’s a divorced mother whose brain was fogged from sleeplessness. Awake for the better part of two nights, comforting her daughter while she worked from home, she had gone to her office to pick up papers she needed to complete a job, began to check work emails, and lost track of time. Negligent? Yes. Criminally negligent? Of course not. Anybody would understand that this was a forgivable offense--even her ex-husband and his new wife have forgiven her lapse of judgment. Frida devotes her life to her child during the 3.5 days she has custody of Harriet. When she considers her own childhood and the stern upbringing given by her immigrant parents, she’s certain Harriet is being given an enviable life.

This isn’t the point of view taken by Child Protective Services. A social worker sends her to a psychiatrist who takes one look at her and immediately asks “Is English your first language?” He follows this up later with the condescending response of “Aren’t you a smart cookie.” Frida has become a lesser form of human life in the eyes of authorities and is sent to a year of rehab in a live-in facility with other women who have failed as mothers.

Although offenses range from letting an eight-year-old daughter walk home alone from the nearby library to posting a video of a child’s tantrum on social media to physically injuring offspring, the mothers are all lumped together in an indistinguishable mass, with a mantra that they all recite regularly: “I am a bad mother but I am learning to be good.” To help them achieve this goal, each of them is given a robot child of the same age and race as the child that was taken from them. Powered by AI, these replicas of children have the brains and emotions of their human equivalents. They also hold data taken from their “mothers” that’s scrutinized and assessed to see if progress is being made by the women who care for them.

While suffering from the separation from their own children, the women are given rigorous standards to meet as parents to robots. Submerging their own speech and personality in the melodic, gentle tones of “motherese,” they face demands that are progressively more difficult, with a new one appearing the minute they’ve mastered the last. But the progress they make is unmeasured. As they work toward a common goal, the women begin to nurture each other, a form of motherhood that goes under the school’s radar. As the mothers become softer and more tender, they become more vulnerable and this counts against them. They become emotionally involved with their robotic “children,” but are their words and actions being elicited by the robots as a form of entrapment?

Jessamine Chan has written a harrowing novel, based upon a true case in which a mother left her five-year-old child alone in the house for a few hours and lost him forever. Like Frida, this mother was raised by parents from another culture and like Frida, she was diminished by the way she was treated by authorities in the bureaucratic world of social welfare.

Layering and enlarging upon this history, Chan has added elements of dystopian and speculative fiction with dashes of pure horror, creating an Orwellian nightmare that seems perilously close to coming true. Her novel portrays every mother’s worst fear--that she’s not up to the task of keeping a child mentally and physically healthy, well loved, and securely cared for.

“Maybe people should have to work up to children, from plants to pets to babies,” Frida tells herself, “Maybe they should all be given a five-year-old, then four, then three, then two, then one…Why did they have to begin with a baby?” This question echoes throughout Chan’s novel as Frida painfully makes her way through the School for Good Mothers.~Janet Brown

君たちはどう生きるか (Kimitachi wa Dou Ikiruka?) by Genzaburo Yoshino, manga by Shoichi Haga (Magazine House) Japanese text only

The latest Studio Ghibli animation film borrows its Japanese title from a 1938 novel of the same name by Genzaburo Yoshino. However, the film is totally unrelated to the story. I read an updated version of the book in manga form in its original language. The title 君たちはどう生きるか (Kimitachi wa Dou Ikiruka) translates to ”How Will You Live”. The manga was drawn by Shoichi Haga and was published by Magazine House in 2017.

Although it is written in the manga format, about a third of the book is text only with no pictures. The story is set in 1937 in Tokyo. The main character is a fifteen-year old junior high school boy named Shoichi Honda, whom everybody calls Koper (short for Copernicus in Japanese). 

The story opens with Shoichi lying in bed with a fever. He wishes his fever would get worse. He can’t forgive himself for his cowardly action. He tells his uncle, a former editor who has recently moved into his neighborhood, everything that happened and is wondering why he is suffering so much.

Shoichi tells his uncle that he saw his friends being bullied by upperclassmen but he did nothing to help. He feels he betrayed his friends. The following day, his uncle hands him a single notebook. 

Shoichi’s uncle explained to him in the notebook the reason for his suffering is because Shoichi is trying to follow the right path. Shoichi knows what he did was wrong and believes his friends would be unforgiving and yet he knows he must do something to make things right with them. This is just a prelude to what his uncle writes to him in the notebook. 

The story then goes back to the beginning when Shoichi’s uncle moved into town. After helping his uncle move, they take a tram and go to the roof of a department building. Shoichi looks down on all the people and says to his uncle that they all look like molecules. After they get back home and part ways, his uncle says his great discovery today that people are like molecules was similar to Copernicus and thus he was given the nickname Koper. 

The book is mostly a coming of age story as Shoichi, or Coperu, makes new discoveries and learns more about human nature. His uncle continues to write him messages in the notebook about each and every discovery that Shoichi makes. Shoichi tries his best to understand what his uncle is trying to convey and in the end he writes his own response to his uncle’s words. He made a resolution as to how he will live his life in the future.

After reading the book, the thought that crossed my mind the most was what would I do if one of my uncles gave me a notebook with philosophical meanderings that are more than two pages long. I think I would set the notebook aside and not read it. I even asked one of my junior high students if they read the book in its entirety. The response - “Only the manga parts”. 

The manga form does make it a lot easier to understand and the book itself asks the readers at the end, “How will you live?” It is only up to you to decide.~Ernie Hoyt

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova (Graywolf Press)

Borders are mysterious and often troublesome divisions that shift according to political whims and military actions. Only continents, surrounded by oceans,  seem to have borders that resist argument--except for the blurred and amorphous line that separates Europe from Asia. According to the National Geographic Society, this is “an imaginary line, running from the northern Ural Mountains in Russia south to the Caspian and Black Seas.” But to Kapka Kassabova the border between the two continents is found where “Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey converge and diverge…where something like Europe begins and something else ends that is not quite Asia.”

If this definition has a tinge of magic to it, it’s because that’s what Kassabova found along that hidden border. She grew up within its periphery and it calls to her from her home in Scotland. Alone, she returns to the part of Bulgaria that shaped her early life and begins an exploration that’s both spiritual and geographic. She wants to “see the forbidden places of my childhood…that had been out of bounds for two generations.” What she finds is Stranja, an unimaginable wilderness of forest and mountains,scantily inhabited, filled with legends, impermanence, and death.

The history of this part of the world goes beyond the years of the Iron Curtain, when Russian rule turned the region into a “forested Berlin Wall.” Stranja is where people ignore dangers to find a new life in other countries, running from the Soviet bloc, from the Balkan Wars, from Syria. If they’re lucky, they find guides who will lead them along the treacherous paths of The Road to Freedom--or they may end up in unmarked graves.

Kassabova begins her journey by staying still, in one place, in a village of 200 people where women are rumored to have the power of the evil eye, and firewalkers converge upon a sacred spring in an annual ritual that unites Christians and Muslims, Greeks and Bulgarians. “Beware,” she’s told as she becomes a fixture in the village. Stranja is a place that’s hard to enter and is even more difficult to  leave. 

Yet Kassabova lingers there, learning the stories of residents, rediscovering myths, and finding details of lost history that may never have been true. As she delves into the past, the present becomes darker and she realizes “some things are beyond repair.” When she moves on, she’s haunted by the irreparable. “We are not Europe and we are not Asia,” an Eastern Orthodox priest tells her and his words are echoed in other ways by everyone she meets. Every village in Stranja is its own nation state, created by its unique and repetitive history and filled with “ a grieving sensation difficult to describe.”

In a village where people are famous for their longevity, Kassabova is accompanied by dogs that look like “shag-pile carpets on long legs” and as she eats a cup of sheep’s yogurt by the side of a road, a bear comes into view and vanishes into the undergrowth. Everyone she meets is given full voice in unforgettable character sketches, from the human-smuggler whom she flees from on a deserted mountain road to the beautiful woman who walked for a week to reach the Greek border and now lives on the Street of Widows, growing the roses that once were her dead husband’s favorite flower. 

Border is a trip back into the past, a foray into the future, a quest for home. In this undefined part of the world, it doesn’t matter which continent the region is claimed by. It’s a place that people pass through in search of safety and they have done so throughout recorded time. Because she was born into it, Kapka Kassabova was almost reclaimed by it. What she found there the rest of us can only discover through her words in her strange, illuminating, and seductive book.~Janet Brown

Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel by Shahnaz Habib (Catapult)

“I am basically the opposite of Anthony Bourdain. Not cool, not adventurous,” Shahnaz Habib confesses as she begins Airplane Mode. When she travels to a new place, she approaches it cautiously, venturing into it a few steps at a time and gradually increasing her explorations. Although she compares herself to a young, white, American female traveler whom she meets in Istanbul,  a girl propelled by ticking off sights she’s seen from a list of guidebook recommendations and who easily encapsulates what she was exposed to in a single sentence, Habib is brown, Muslim, who grew up in what is dismissed as the Third World. She’s  unaccompanied by this other girl’s sense of racial confidence and while she thinks of this as a deficiency, it’s truthfully an asset. Habib grew up outside of the Western bubble, in Southern India and she knows the world isn’t “neatly packaged” as it is presented in a guidebook. That viewpoint is a privileged one and its privilege is a barrier. “I didn’t want a veil between me and the world,” she says and does her best to ignore Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, and the rest of the books that offer packaged experiences. 

While she ponders the differences in travel that separate her from the woman she encountered in Istanbul, she begins to explore the history of travel, which began in the Western world as an aristocratic--and white male-- pursuit. Young noblemen were expected to make the Grand Tour of European capitals before they settled into their comfortable lives at home, while their female counterparts contented themselves with strolls down country lanes and visits to other people’s manor houses. 

Even those strolls were a recent embellishment. “Walking for pleasure” and savoring the beauties of the natural world became popular through the poems of Wordsworth and the heroines in Jane Austen novels in the late 17th century. Continental travel for the untitled inhabitants of the West sprang into being in the early 1800s with the first Baedeker guidebook published in 1827. Slowly the mass tourism industry, that now contributes eight trillion dollars to the global economy, was born.

In its nascent stages, travel for pleasure was reserved for white tourists who wanted trips that showed them the wonders of the world while embarking upon no adventures in achieving this goal. Comfort was paramount, as well as a carefully maintained distance between the observer and the observed. Baedeker was consulted as frequently as the Bible and perhaps with even greater fervor.

Although 19th century travelers couldn’t achieve the glamor of those who made the Grand Tour, they were still people of means. Using a passport became a status symbol and a class delineator, an ironic development when considering that this document used to be a way to keep people at home. Originally a passport served as a proof of residency, not as an invitation to explore. 

This was the underpinning of today’s “passportism” where scholars are denied entry to a country that welcomes them professionally because as one man put it, “the color of my passport was wrong.” As peasants in the 18th century were kept at home because of what was written on their passports, so are others three hundred years later if they fail to produce the required documents. 

Going back to the earliest travelers, Habib compares Marco Polo, an Italian merchant who had commercial reasons for his adventures with the North African, Ibn Battuta, who began his odyssey with a trip to Mecca. Each man spent twenty-four years away from home, but while Polo had a financial impetus. Battuta expanded his sacred pilgrimage into a journey prompted solely by curiosity, one that left “a legacy of wonder” as opposed to the “amused knowingness” conveyed by white Western travelers.

Habib continues her exploration and careful dissection of travel in essays that look beyond the stereotypical journey. She shows how motherhood turned her into a connoisseur of New York city bus routes, exploring different boroughs that make up the city by staring out of windows with a baby in her arms. She admits that her favorite form of public transportation is a carousel, which keeps passengers in perpetual motion while always seeing the same things as they ride. Cleverly and plausibly she links that activity to modern tourism, where “we are not moving from place to place” but “from one moment in time to another.”

Looking at the consumerist nature of travel, where we succumb to wanderlust because of its marketing schemes, Habib claims everyone--”travelers and nomads and vagrants” are tourists “who have bought into the ultimate tourist myth, that we can escape tourism and simply travel.” 

Early in her first essay, Habib compares her solo trip to Istanbul with the experience she had in that city years later when she moved there with her husband and daughter. Without “the confusion and loneliness of traveling,” the city that had baffled her no longer contained a shopping list of sites to see but opened up, “blooming out of the rich soil of daily life.”

This is what changes a tourist into a traveler, as Habib illustrates in her delightful essay on bougainvillea. It’s not enough to come and stare. The painful process of transplanting, renaming, relearning, and putting down fresh roots is the only way to learn a new place as it turns a newcomer into one of its own. How else to escape falling prey to what Habib terms “the colonial knowledge sandwich?” ~Janet Brown

The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura, translated by Lucy North (Faber & Faber)

Natsuko Imamura is a Japanese writer who has been nominated three times for the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. She won the award in 2019 for novel むらさきのスカートの女 (Murasaki no Skirt no Onna). 

The Woman in the Purple Skirt is the English translation of her Akutagawa Prize winner. It was published in English in 2022 by Lucy North, a British translator of Japanese fiction and nonfiction who also has a PhD in modern Japanese literature from Harvard University. 

The narrator of the story lives near the woman in a purple skirt. The woman being watched always wears a purple skirt which is how she got her name. The narrator has already found out where the woman in the purple skirt lives. She has also kept a diary of the woman in the purple skirt’s schedule; when she works, when she doesn’t work. Where she goes, where she sits in the local park. The woman tells herself she wants to get to know the woman in the purple skirt. She wants to become friends with her. 

Why the woman in the yellow cardigan wants to get to know the woman in the purple skirt is a mystery. It’s a mystery to herself as well. She thinks it would be strange to just go up to the woman and say, “I want to be friends with you”. She just wants to talk to her and tells herself, “it’s not as if I’m trying to make a pass at her”. 

The woman in the purple skirt doesn’t know she’s being watched. Even if she did, it appears that she does not give a care in the world. The narrator calls herself the woman in the yellow cardigan. As the woman in the yellow cardigan realizes that the woman in the purple skirt has been out of a job for a few months, she leaves a job offer magazine where the woman in the purple skirt will surely find it. 

A few days later, the woman in the purple skirt is hired by a company. lt happens to be the same hotel where the woman in the yellow cardigan works. The narrator continues to watch the woman in the purple skirt throughout her entire training period but has yet to introduce herself. 

The narrator almost didn’t recognize the woman in the purple skirt because she came to work wearing different clothes. At first the new employee was very timid and her voice wasn’t loud enough to satisfy the Hotel Manager. However, as the months pass, she becomes quite adept at her job. Her co-workers start talking to her more frequently and she is often invited out for lunch or for drinks after work.

The narrator has yet to introduce herself so she could become friends with the woman she formerly called the woman in the purple skirt. The woman was really good at her job and she was also very friendly with the Hotel Manager. Soon, rumors spread that she is seeing the Hotel Manager who is a married man. The other workers are also surprised at the speed of her promotion and also find out she is getting paid more than they are. 

Her co-workers who were formerly kind to her now began to ignore her and when the head of the Housekeeping Department suggested that some of the hotel’s employees were taking towels and other amenities from the rooms, the first one to be blamed was the former the newest employee. After being accused of stealing by the others, she left the hotel in tears.

The narrator goes to the woman’s apartment to see if she is okay. She notices a familiar car in front of the apartment as well. It is the Hotel Manager. The woman lives on the second floor of a pretty dilapidated building and when she and the Hotel Manager have a scuffle, the Hotel Manager falls down the stairs and looks to be dead. 

The narrator finally rushes to the woman and tells her she will take care of everything. She believes it was fate that she can help the woman leave this town. She would quit the hotel herself and they could become traveling companions. The narrator plans everything out very carefully, leaves a note and some money for the woman to leave first, saying she would meet her later. But not everything turns out as planned.

Imamura’s story reads like a thriller but the protagonist doesn’t seem to want to hurt the person she’s been stalking. It is one of the creepiest horror stories without any blood that you may ever read. It is up to the reader to decide what happened to the woman in the purple skirt. It’s also hard to consider the narrator as a villain as she doesn’t want to harm her obsession. She only wants to become friends with her. Yes, you should beware of strangers who want to become your friend. ~Ernie Hoyt

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Counterpoint)

“Shortly after Olivia went away with the Nawab,” her abandoned husband, an English bureaucrat who was “upright and just” met his second wife. She was from a family of “cheerful women with a sensible and modern outlook on life,” ones who became fascinated by Olivia only after they became elderly widows. They told the scandalous story to the second wife’s granddaughter, augmenting them with Olivia’s letters and journals that provided details of this shocking liaison with an Indian prince. The granddaughter, a woman with so little personality of her own that she narrates this novel without once vouchsafing her own name, takes Olivia’s private papers and follows in her footsteps to India forty years afterward.

She’s here to “do research,” she claims but instead she seems eager to lay claim to Olivia’s life. The Raj, however, is a crumbling memory. The Europeans who flock to India in the Sixties are a whole other species from the British who held sway over the country in the 1920’s. While Olivia was surrounded by solid and morally upright bastions of the Empire, her follower finds her fellow countrymen to be “a derelict lot” who congregate in the yard of the local guesthouse, looking like “souls in hell.” 

When she ventures to the palace that became Olivia’s home, she finds an empty shell with bits of discarded furniture. The Nawab’s descendants have abandoned it to live in London, disdaining its 19th Century discomforts in favor of 20th Century plumbing. However, through Olivia’s account of its romantic past, the narrator does her best to find those same influences in her own experience of India.

But Olivia was pretty and charming and silly, while the narrator is homely and passive and imitative. While Olivia was overwhelmed by a dashing aristocrat who was an “irresistible force of nature,” her follower drifts into satisfying the sexual needs of an Englishman who claims to be a holy man. She then becomes pregnant by her Indian landlord. There is no true parallel between Olivia and the woman who struggles to assume her adventurous life in a place where that sort of life no longer exists.

The only similarity is one that was presented by a Major who was a contemporary of Olivia’s. For those who love India, the dangers of the country’s many beauties makes them vulnerable. “India always finds the weak spot and presses on it,” he warned. Olivia would never have listened and her follower ignores them, eager for the immersion that she achieves in the cheapest way possible.

It’s a surprise to many that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was not in fact Indian by birth. The daughter of an affluent Jewish couple who fled to England from Hitler’s Germany, she married an Indian architect and made her home in New Delhi. She lived in India, raising her family and writing novels until 1975 when she and her husband made their home in New York. She is the only writer to receive both the Booker Prize and an Academy Award, earned when she joined the team of Merchant and Ivory as a screenwriter. 

Although her reputation was made by writing about the subcontinent, Jhabvala said her background as a British-educated German-born European made her “ill at ease with India.” That analytical separation is evident in Heat and Dust, making it a scathing examination of cultural appropriation and the people who profit from it.~Janet Brown

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Finger Bone by Hiroki Takahashi, translated by Takami Nieda (Honford Star)

Hiroki Takahashi is a Japanese writer who was born in Towada City in Aomori Prefecture. Finger Bone is his first novel. It was first published in Japan with the title 指の骨 (Yubi no Hone) in 2015 by Shinchosha Publishing and was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. Takahashi would win the Prize in 2018 for his book 送り火 (Okuribi).

Finger Bone is a war novel. Most war novels are often about battles or covert operations. The protagonist usually does something heroic and is rewarded for his efforts in helping to win the war. They are rarely told from the perspective of the losing country’s soldiers. This is a story told in the first person by an unnamed Japanese soldier. 

The soldier is stationed on the island of Papua New Guinea in 1942. The Imperial Japanese Army is on the retreat but since the soldier has no radio, he still believes that Japan is winning the war. In his pocket, he carries the finger bones of a dead comrade. However, on his march to his next destination he is wounded and sent to a field hospital. 

Before the soldier makes it to the field hospital, he was is to another facility built in a palm grove. There were men sleeping on stretchers suffering from the effects of malaria. Some of them might have been dead already. 

Once he makes it to the field hospital, he is witness to what he thought was kind of cruel. Whenever the medics did their rounds and one of the patients didn’t answer, the medic would slide a piece of wood under the dead soldier’s hand and cut off his finger.

Another soldier told him, “That’s a lucky man to have his finger taken for his family like that”. He was told, “Die in the jungle all alone, and all the family gets back home is three stones”. 

As the soldier recovered, he was able to walk around. Sometimes he and two other of his comrades would walk a little ways away from the hospital, always keeping an eye out for the enemy. They were confronted by a black man one time, but the man turned out to be a native and wasn’t hostile to the soldiers. One of his comrades was able to speak a bit of the native language and they were taken to the native’s village. 

However, the second time they saw one of the natives, they did not speak or exchange words. The unnamed soldier didn’t know why and shortly after that incident, the soldiers at the field hospital got their orders to move. That is when the unnamed soldier realized that Japan was losing the war and that most of the island was under Allied control.

The soldier wanted to keep his promise to his comrade and was determined to take the finger bone he had in his pocket to his friend’s home in Japan. Will the soldier survive the war? Will he be able to keep his promise? 

It’s often been said that “in war, no one wins”. This book illustrates that point. Those soldiers who died serving their country had families. Well, so does the enemy. It’s a sad fact that Japan’s militarism during World War 2 led to untold suffering for their soldiers, and for the soldiers fighting against them.

Unfortunately, as long as there are people with different values and ways of thinking, war seems to be inevitable. I wish it weren’t true but conflicts continue in places such as the Middle East and in Central Asia. North Korea testing their ICBM missiles is no light matter either. 

If only every country in the world could follow the message of John Lennon’s song “Imagine”, the world might be a better place. ~Ernie Hoyt

Idol, Burning by Rin Usami, translated by Asa Yoneda (Canongate)

Idol culture in Japan is a multi-billion dollar business. The Golden Age of idols is said to be the seventies with artists such as Momoe Yamaguchi and Akina Nakamori. The end of the seventies was the rise of idol groups such as Pink Lady, Candies, and Wink.

In the mid-eighties, an idol group with a large number of members was conceived by producer Yasushi Akimoto. He was the mastermind behind Onyanko Club, a group that consisted of fifty-two original members. Each member was assigned a number as well so fans could easily follow their favorites.

The nineties would see a revival of idol groups with a large number of members, the most popular being Morning Musume, produced by former lead singer of Sharan-Q, Tsunku. The group was formed on a television audition program called Asayan. The production company Hello! Project also produced groups such as Country Musume, Coconut Musume, Berryz Koubou, °C-ute, and Melon Kinenbi with most groups consisting four to eight members.

However, the 2000’s would see the rise of AKB48 and all its offshoots, once again produced by Yasushi Akimoto. The concept of the group was “Idols you can meet”. Their homebase was in Akihabara where the group had their own theater. Every year, an “election” would be held and fans would vote for their favorite members. The member with the most votes would be chosen for the center position for the next single. 

Fans continue to support their favorite members, not only in idol groups, but actors, voice actors, anime characters, sports figures, and a whole host of others. The current term being used is 推し (oshi), meaning your favorite. One of the most popular manga and anime series now is 推しの子 (Oshi no Ko) which roughly translates to "My Favorite”.

Idol, Burning takes the life of the superfan to a different level. Akari is a high school student who has only one passion in her life and that is her oshi, her idol. His name is Masaki Ueno and he’s a member of popular idol group Maza Maza. 

However, Akari’s world was being turned upside down. Her oshi was on fire. The news media said that Masaki punched a fan. Akari didn’t know if the news was true or just a rumor but the Internet was ablaze with people criticizing the star while others like Akari, continue to support him. 

In a news segment, Akari’s oshi admits to punching a fan but said it was a private matter between him and the victim. The Internet was soon inundated with comments about him after the interview.

Akari sees a number of negative comments on the Internet such as , “Who the f&*k does he think he is?” and “I’ve been going to his shows for years but I’m done. If you’re a brainwashed cult-follower victim-bashing the woman you’re not right in the head”. Of course there were some positive comments as well such as, “Learn your lesson and come back soon. We’re here for you Masaki”. 

Masaki Ueno had been Akari’s oshi for about a year. Everything centered around supporting him. She spent that time collecting as much information as she could so she felt she could predict most of his answers at a Q&A corner of his fan meetings.

She summed up her feelings by writing on her blog for other Masaki fans - “there is nothing you can really do about a fireball, is there?”, referring to the comments on the Internet after the incident. “The blaze gets fanned from all directions, and just when you think they’re starting to die down, someone tosses on more fuel, in the form of old tweets or photos, and sends the flame in a new direction”. 

Shortly after the incident, Maza Maza held a press conference to announce that the group would disband and that their upcoming concert would be their last. Masaki also announced that he would be retiring from the entertainment business.

Akari is now at her wits end as her life only held meaning because of her oshi. All the money she made from working part-time went to going to his concerts, buying his goods, and supporting him as any hardcore fan would. The support of her oshi borders on obsession. What will Akari do now that she has nothing to live for?

Rin Usami’s story is not only a coming-of-age story but also a parable about superfans and their oshi. Usami says in an interview, “To those who are not interested, the act of pursuing an idol can easily be dismissed as ‘only a hobby’ or ‘an unhealthy obsession’”. She further elaborates by saying, “But for some of those who do pursue an idol, it can become a reason to live or even be their salvation”. She wrote the book from the perspective of a superfan as she believes most people do not completely understand them and believes they are widely misunderstood. 

The main point of Usami’s story is for the reader to imagine what they would do, if the “meaning” or the “backbone” of their life were to disappear. How would they survive? What would they do? 

Imagine if you are a hardcore fan of former California Angels’ superstar Shohei Ohtani. What will do now that he is going to become a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers? Will the Internet go on fire because he decided to change teams?

In the age of SNS, there is no telling what people will say. However, if Shohei Ohtani was your oshi, even if he changed teams, wouldn’t he still be your oshi? It’s something to think about.~Ernie Hoyt

We Are Not Strangers by Josh Tuininga (Abrams Books)

Several years ago I was a guest in a Seattle house that was only a few years away from its one hundredth birthday. My host told me it had been built and owned by one family before he bought it. That family was Japanese and when they were sent to the internment camps, their neighbors made sure their house remained intact and in their legal possession until they were able to return home again.

When I told this story to other Seattle residents, they denied its plausibility. Japanese property was up for grabs after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the resulting incarceration in internment camps. The story I was told was a rosy little myth, designed to make Seattle feel less culpable in what was a national disgrace, according to people who were certain they knew the real facts.

And I believed them, until I was given a copy of We Are Not Strangers. Author Josh Tuininga is careful to note this is historical fiction that is based on oral history, written records, and an account told to him by his uncle, whose grandfather had helped his Japanese neighbors during their time in the camps. 

His story begins before 1942, when Executive Order 9066 imprisoned  over 120,000 Japanese Americans and those who had Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were native born U.S. citizens. The man who was the architect of this order spoke for President Roosevelt when he said “If they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp.”

In the city of Seattle, neighborhoods with racial covenants kept the most coveted parts of the city under white ownership. In an area known as the Central District, people who weren’t considered white made their homes. Sephardic Jews from Spain and the Middle East, known as “Oriental Jews” to many, lived side by side with Japanese families. Members of both ethnic groups who had recently immigrated to the U.S. were denied the right to naturalization by an immigration court and the state of Washington, which was a center of America’s pro-Nazi movement, made the position of Seattle’s Jews a precarious one.

The story of a friendship between two men who share a passion for fishing, a Sephardic Jew and an American-born Nisei Japanese, and the way one of them helped the other to keep his home is given depth and truth by the reproduction of headlines taken from newspapers of that time. Tuininga chose to put his book into the framework of a graphic novel so those headlines scream with the same force they held seventy years ago. Signs that greeted Japanese families when they were finally released from the camps a year after the end of World War II, “Japs Keep Out You Are Not Wanted” and “Japs Keep Moving This Is a White Man’s Neighborhood,” starkly illustrate the terrible hatred that Japanese Americans faced after living under internment for four years. (When the war ended, only 33% of Americans advocated the closing of the internment camps.)

Graphic novels are a robust and illuminating way to convey history. Blending words and art to show shades of emotion and the points of view revealed on the faces of every character makes this form of narrative cinematic and approachable in a way that a conventional novel can’t replicate. Tuininga created both the words and the art, frame by frame, in We Are Not Strangers, supplementing them with historical notes that will come as a revelation to many of his readers. Now more than ever, it’s crucial for us to know what happened in America’s past to keep it from recurring in the future.~Janet Brown
 

If an Elephant Loses Weight, It is Still an Elephant by Aftab Seth (Keio University Press)

Aftab Seth was the Indian ambassador to Japan from 2000 to 2003. He also spent a year as an exchange student at Keio University from 1962 to 1963 and also served in the Indian Embassy between the years 1970 to 1972. He once again returned to Japan in 2004 to become the director and professor of the Global Security Research Institute. 

After coming to Japan in 2000 as Ambassador to Japan, Seth was inundated with requests for interviews by different magazines and newspapers. He also met a number of editors from different newspapers as well. He was asked to summarize his discussions with various journalists by the Yomiuri Shimbun who later published the article. He was then approached by Shodensha (a publishing house) who asked him if he would consider writing about his experiences in Japan from the time he was an exchange student and to give his opinions on the current state of the nation. 

Seth had a series of interviews with the publisher starting in April or May of 2001 and was completed in October. The notes and manuscripts from those interviews became a book that would be published in the Japanese language in December of 2001. 

The English edition of If an Elephant Loses Weight, It is Still an Elephant was edited and revised as “there were several elements in it which would not be well known to non-Japanese readers and therefore would be of little relevance and even somewhat redundant”. Seth amended the text “keeping in mind a wider non-Japanese audience that may be interested in the English version”. 

Seth based the title of the book on a Hindi proverb - Agar Haathi dubla hoga to kitna dubla hoga to describe the Japan that he saw when he returned to the country as Ambassador. The proverb translates to “If the elephant is lean, how lean will it be?”. The author chose the title for this book because “despite 10 years of flat , or even negative growth in the economy, this is still a country with enormous reserves of wealth”. Seth further elaborates by saying that “while the Japanese elephant may be somewhat slimmer, it is still quite robust” He uses the elephant as a metaphor for Japan’s economy and says, “So while the Japanese elephant may have lost a little weight, it is still unmistakably healthy”. 

Seth arrived in Japan for the first time in 1962, a mere ten years after the Occupation of Japan ended. The country was having an economic boom as Tokyo was chosen as the site for the 1964 Summer Olympics. His second stay in the country was in the seventies when Japan was still experiencing economic growth. The World Exposition was held in Osaka in 1970. Plans for a new international airport were being discussed and Japan was on its way to its Bubble Economy. 

Seth’s third extended stay in Japan was in the 2000. The bubble economy had burst and the country was suffering a long period of recession. However, Seth believes that Japan will recover from any problems it may face. He has seen the change in the country by living here at different times and he always finds the spirit of the Japanese people to be positive for the most part. 

As a long time resident of Japan and someone who has lived here continuously for nearly thirty years, it’s more difficult to see the vast changes that Seth saw. Of course you would expect big changes in ten or twenty years time. For me, the economy seems to be taking another downturn as the yen has lost a lot of its value. There was a time when the exchange rate was 360 yen to the dollar. The current rate is now 147 yen to the dollar. At this rate, I may not be able to enjoy visiting my home country. I can only hope that as the Japanese people have prevailed through many hardships that the yen will become strong again so I won’t lose any money when going home! ~Ernie Hoyt

Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore (Archipelago Books)

More than a hundred men are crowded into a rail car on the Trans-Siberian Express. They’re conscripts, drafted into the Russian army, the unlucky ones who couldn’t bribe or trick their way out of this grim fate. They have no idea of where they’re headed, other than they’re in the middle of the “territory of banishment,” a place of “dead bodies under the permafrost,” a region of exile where few ever make their way back home. Siberia is “a world turned inside out like a glove.”

Aliocha was certain he would find a way that would keep him from conscription but he failed and at twenty, he’s certain his life is over. He’s heard of the unspeakable brutality that faces new troops under the guise of hazing; he’s already been beaten up by two of the other conscripts for no reason other than it amused his attackers. As he stares out the train window at the endless miles of forest, he becomes consumed with an urge that is far from a plan: “Run away, defect, jump.”

He has only a cell phone, a charger, and a hundred rubles, which has to be enough to let him vanish into a Siberian city. But when the train stops at the next urban station, Aliocha is surrounded by soldiers with no way to get past that barrier. Back on the train, watching the forest engulf the railway tracks as soon as the cars pass over them, he’s joined by a foreign woman who “smells of flowers and smoke,” and who provides another chance at escape. He grabs it.

Helene is escaping too, from a love affair that curdled when the Russian rebel whom she met in Paris chose to become part of his native country’s bureaucracy, “heir to the Soviet industrial epic.” Perhaps this is why she agrees to help Aliocha, a man she can communicate with only through pantomime and fragments of language. But what begins as a passing whim becomes deadly serious when the sergeant in charge of the conscripts realizes that one of them has vanished.

The search for Aliocha consumes the entire train, from the crowded third class cars that contain the conscripted men to the sanctuary of first class compartments. Everyone, whether they’re attendants or passengers, are drawn into the quest and are forced to choose sides.

Although Eastbound quickly becomes a thriller and  a psychological drama played out between two strangers who become so linked that eventually “they have the same faces,” the narrative is filled with moments of unforgettable beauty. Through the windows of a train that’s become a kind of prison, Lake Baikal stretches like “a liquid ribbon…immense and violet.” A lonely city is “two hoops of fire, thrown into a leather sky.” Log houses sprinkled through the dense and bleak forest are graced with carved wooden shutters and lace curtains, brightened with flowers and vegetable gardens, like something from a fairy tale.. The end of the rail line is announced by “a sparkling ethereal horizon,” and at one part of the journey when passengers are given time away from the train, “the silence is so great that each sound explodes.”

Eastbound is a tiny volume, the size that’s usually associated with an appliance’s user manual. It’s only 127 pages long, but it contains a mammoth journey, an adventure through cruelty, kindness, and the triumphs of soaring language on a legendary train that travels through the darkest edge of the world.~Janet Brown

Funaosa Nikki : A Captain's Diary by Hirochika Ikeda, translated by Richard F. Szippl (Chunichi Publishing)

In Edo Era Japan (1600 - 1868), there have been many tales of ships drifting away from the mainland. However, due to the isolationist policy of the Tokugawa government at the time, Japanese ships were only made for coastal trade. If the ships get caught in a storm, they are often blown off course or damaged beyond repair. The ships were not built for trans-ocean travel and many of the drifters have been rescued by Americans, Russian, and Englishmen as well. The survivors of these drifters often spent many years abroad before making it back to Japan. 

One of the best-known of these sea drifters was a man named Manjiro Nakahama who was rescued by an American whaling ship. Manjiro and four others were shipwrecked on the island of Torishima, one of the southernmost islands of the Izu Islands which are all part of Tokyo Prefecture. Only nine of the islands are inhabited. Torishima was one of the uninhabited islands. The five men were rescued by an American whaling ship and were taken to Honolulu.

Manjiro was only fourteen-years-old at the time. He wanted to stay with the ship so the captain of the whaling vessel, Captain William H. Whitfield took him back to the U.S. where Manjiro would study English. Manjiro would later return to Japan and become a translator and interpreter after the opening of Japan to the rest of the world

Funaosa Nikki : A Captain’s Diary is the story of a lesser known account of a ship drifting at sea. Led by a man named Jukichi, he and his crew of thirteen men were blown off course during a storm and drifted for seventeen months on the Pacific Ocean before being rescued by a British merchant vessel captained by Captain William J. Pigot. At the time of their rescue, the only remaining survivors were Jukichi and two of his crew.

As noted in the book’s subtitle, this is “Jukichi’s Four-year Odyssey across the Pacific, through California, Alaska, Kamchatka, and back to Japan, 1813-1817”. It was written by Hirochika Ikeda after he met Jukichi ten years after his ordeal. Many stories were already written about Jukichi’s experience but Ikeda was “more interested in the account of the year and five months he spent adrift than in the strange things in foreign countries”.

Ikeda listened to and made a record of Jukichi’s story which resulted in this book. He had intended to only share it with his family. He wanted them “to appreciate just how fortunate they were, being able to live without want, without starving or freezing, unlike people such as Jukichi, who have suffered such extreme and tragic hardships”. 

One must take into account that Ikeda wrote this forward to the book in the fall of 1822. The first English translation of Funaosa was done in 1984 by Katherin Plummer in the journal Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan.

Richard F. Szippl, a long time resident of Japan, was approached by Dr. Muramatsu Suzuki who asked for his cooperation in translating the book as one of former high school teachers discoverd the original manuscript in the year 2000. The new edition was to be published on the occasion of the 2005 World Exposition which was to be held in Aichi Prefecture, Jukichi being a native of the area.

Although the title translates to A Captain’s Diary, the book is not written in diary form. It is written in the style of a story “as told to” someone. It may seem like a tall tale as Jukichi relates to Ikeda how his ship’s rudder was damaged in a storm and then set adrift. He relates how his crew thought about taking their own lives and how he tried to remain positive in such a dire situation. 

Jukichi’s experience on the high seas is just as interesting as are his stories he tells of eating pork and beef for the first time, of meeting other foreigners, such as the Russians and Americans. His return to Japan seemed to be more tragic as the isolationist goverment held him under suspicion and often received the same treatment as a common criminal would. 

It is an inspiring story of surviving against all odds. One man who had to face the wrath of nature, the near mutiny of his crew, and of his own despair. And yet, something or some power pushed him to survive at all costs and make it back to his home and to his wife. It is a story that will make you appreciate what you already have. No matter how bad things may seem, there are always others who have suffered more than we can imagine, like Jukichi. ~Ernie Hoyt

Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong (Random House)

Linda Hammerick has been given a privileged upbringing in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina. She’s a Hammerick, following in the path set by past generations of her prominent family. As a Hammerick, she’s destined to become a “legacy” at Yale where she’ll be on her way to a career as a lawyer in emulation of the father she adores.

After reading To Kill a Mockingbird, Linda sees herself as Scout, although differences mar the similarity between Harper Lee’s heroine and the ambitious little girl in Boiling Springs. Linda has a condition that stands between her and the rest of the world. When she hears words, or speaks them herself, she tastes each one, something that breaks the concentration she needs to achieve academic success. To blunt the flavor of this strange sixth sense, she cuts its sharpness by anesthetizing her tastebuds with nicotine, hanging out with the school outcasts and puffing away at a cigarette before going to class.

In common with many Southern households as found in American literature, Linda’s home is laden with secrets and unspoken truths. Soon she learns to hide any experience of her own that might bring turmoil to her family. Even when she’s raped by a handyman when she’s eleven, she tells nobody except for her great-uncle, Baby Harper, a man who has undisclosed realities of his own.

“What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two,” Linda’s grandmother tells her just before the old woman dies,  taking any explanations with her. 

It’s only when Linda begins to practice law in Manhattan that she starts to reveal who she is and how her life was transformed when she was seven years old. Slowly memories that she had erased come back to her in “two sensations, one of my heart filling and one of it emptying.” The girl who has always seen herself as Scout begins to see herself as Boo Radley instead, a secretive hidden being disguised as the fortunate daughter of the Hammerick family.

Monique Truong has written a novel that’s stuffed with details of heartbreak and tragedy, love and survival. Linda Hammerick is an observer and what she sees and feel makes her life in Boiling Springs as evocative as Scout’s in Harper Lee’s classic or as Buddy’s in Truman Capote’s  A Christmas Memory.  Linda intertwines the story of her childhood with figures from Southern history: Virginia Dare, the Wright Brothers, a poet born into slavery, George Moses Horton--all of them people who were attached in some way to secrets. As she sees it, secrets are the legacy handed down to anyone who was born in the South.

This is a novel with very little dialogue. What Linda reports is as difficult to read as it is for her to hear, since every word is followed by the name of what carries its taste. “Don’t youcannnedgreenbeans wantsaltedbutter to stopcannedcorn by your mom’schocolatemilk placeroastturkey firstPeptobismol?”

Although this certainly conveys the difficulties faced by those with synesthesia, it makes the appearance of italics in a sentence something to dread and slows the progression of the narrative. It might have been easier if Truong had avoided dialogue altogether.

Still the characters and settings of Bitter in the Mouth are beautifully delineated by Truong’s gorgeous writing, putting her new narrator squarely beside the man in The Book of Salt  who also struggled with language and secrets or with Lafcadio Hearne in The Sweetest Fruits (Asia by the Book, May 2021) who lied and kept secrets in three different languages. Truong’s three novels interrelate in magical ways, making her readers wonder just what--and who-- she will bring to life next.~Janet Brown

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Simon & Schuster, release date May 2024)

You don’t like fantasy novels? You shy away from thrillers populated with members of His Majesty’s Secret Service? You’d rather be flogged than read a romance novel? Me too--which is why I almost didn’t pick up Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time. And that would have been a shame. This novel, based heavily upon time travelers who have been shanghaied from different periods of history and are placed, against their will, in the 21st Century, blends all three of the genres I despise and comes up with one of my favorite books of this year.

Graham Gore, an officer of the British Royal Navy who died during an ill-fated polar expedition in 1847, is only one of five “expats from history” who have been conveyed out of their own era into modern England. Each one of them is under intense scrutiny from the Ministry of Defense, who has chosen handlers who will live with them for their first year in another century. 

Gore’s handler is a young woman who has probably been selected for the job because her English father married a woman who had escaped Pol Pot’s Reign of Terror in Cambodia. A translator-consultant specializing in Southeast Asia and the Khmer language, she has lived with a displaced person all her life, a “mother who persistently carried her lost homeland jostling inside her like a basket of vegetables.”  

Gore, a thirty-seven-year-old military man who died as the Victorian era was just taking hold, is puzzled and frequently shocked by the young woman he will be confined with for a year. When she tells him that in their new residence, there’s “No maid. No cook either,” Gore turns pale. When his housemate utters “Damn,” within his hearing, he’s as horrified as he is when she tells him about the existence of germs. The two of them move through their living quarters like “clots in a lava lamp,” Very gradually, in ways that are both highly strained and very funny, they forge a friendship that begins to test the handler’s loyalty to the ministry that employs her.

Gore and the four other “expats” see themselves as “kidnap victims, mostly,” and as they learn about the time and place they’ve been forced to live in, they begin to question the motivation behind it. In rooms “designed to encourage bureaucracy,” they’re tested physically and mentally and come to realize they’re intended to serve a definite purpose, one that they and their handlers can’t fathom. Gore in particular resists this unknown result, “as if assimilation was a form of treachery to his past.” He, however, with his intelligence and charm, seems to be the most attractive candidate for the Ministry’s purposes, and his handler, against her better judgment, also finds she’s vulnerable to those same attractions.

When one of the handlers disappears and a mysterious Brigadier becomes part of the Ministry, both Gore and his handler become united in figuring out whatever plot is brewing, while at the same time they fall in love.

If this sounds hackneyed, guess again. Gore’s handler is the narrator of this convoluted story and she’s a woman with a sharp wit and a well furnished mind. Her observations are wide-ranging and piercing, acerbic and laugh-out-loud funny. Her Cambodian-English bloodline has given her a name that few people can pronounce so she goes without it throughout the entire novel. It also leads her to thoughts of inherited trauma and “how socially awkward it is live with.” “My face does a good impression of whiteness,” she says, grateful that her appearance isn’t “dragging a genocide around, which is good because that sort of thing makes people uncomfortable.” When her sister writes about her mixed-race background, the narrator wonders if the memoir is an act of “reclamation” or a way of leaving “all our wounds open to the dirty world.”

Her voice is interspersed with Gore’s memories of being trapped in the Arctic, on a ship immobilized by ice that “tilts queasily to one side,” and “bellows in agony.” Gore and his comrades are tortured by “the persistent grieving and shrieking of the wood…that robs them of sleep and silence.” “The northern seas are full of teeth,” and lead to terrible deaths.

 When Gore and the narrator fall in love, they hold each other “the way that poems hold clauses.” “He lives in me like trauma does,” the narrator says when the two of them are separated. Believe me, this is not the sort of romance found in the usual bodice-ripper.

British Cambodian author Kaliane Bradley has filled The Ministry of Time with writing that has devilish twists and carries a haunting depth, along with sentences that made me gasp one minute, laugh the next. Who else but this writer could resurrect a dim historical figure from the 19th century, use facts from his life and a single image of his face on a daguerreotype, and make him a figure unique in modern-day fiction? Bradley’s sharp, savage, and satirical voice is mingled with tenderness and brilliant flares of imagination. It’s addictive and I want more.~Janet Brown

Read Me a Story! : Magic Mango and Many Other Stories from Asia and the Pacific by Various authors (Asian Cultural Centre for UNESCO)

Read Me A Story! is a collection of short stories that should be read aloud to young children. The book was compiled by the Asian Cultural Centre for UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). Twenty countries contributed the stories and illustrations to this book which was first published in 1991. 

The contributing countries include Papua New Guinea, India, Japan, Iran, Nepal, Mongolia, Australia, Vietnam, Republic of Korea, Laos, Myanmar, New Zealand, China, Philippines, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Bangladesh. Some countries have contributed more than one story.

Magic Mango is the lead story which originated in Papua New Guinea. It’s about a mango that could think and talk. It lived at the top of a mango tree and could see many things. It could see the village by the river, it could see the mountains a long way away, and it could even see the sea. It was the mango’s wish to see all of these places but the mango couldn’t leave the tree. However, one day a very strong wind blew it off the tree. It found itself on the ground and decided to run off and see the world. During its travels, it was chased by a pig, a little boy, two women, and a hungry hunter. They all wanted to eat the mango but the mango ran and sang “I’m a magic mango, You can’t cat me. I’m off to look at the world, you see.” You will have to read the story yourself to see if the mango was eaten or not.

One of the stories contributed by the country of India is Matsya, the Beautiful Fish. This story is an Indian version of Noah’s Ark. Matsya was a small and beautiful fish that lived in the ocean. However, a bigger fish thought that Matsya might be delicious to eat. Matsya managed to run away. Another day, a fish with sharp, pointy teeth also wanted to eat Matsya but he managed to escape again. Matsya swam and swam until he came to the edge of the ocean where he met a kind fisherman named Manu. Manu and his wife watched over Matsya until he became a large fish. It was Matsya who warned the fisherman and his wife of a disaster that was going to happen. He said there would be a big flood and that Manu and his wife should build a boathouse where they will be safe. If you’re a Christian, doesn’t that sound familiar?

The story contributed by the Philippines is titled The City Mouse and The Barrio Mouse. It’s a Filipino version of the original Aesop’s Fable The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. Americans will know the story as The Country Mouse and the City Mouse. A thirteenth century priest, Odo of Cheriton, phrased the moral of the story as, “I’d rather gnaw a bean, than be gnawed by continual fear.”

The stories contributed by my adopted country of Japan include The Magic Drum and Topsy-Turvy Rabbit known in Japan as Fushigi na Taiko and Kenta Usagi. In the first story, a man named Gengoro had a magic drum. If he beat one side of the drum and chanted “Long be the nose, long be the nose!” the nose would grow. If he beat the other side of the drum and chanted, “Short be the nose, short be the nose!”, the nose would shorten. He used this magic to make people happy. However, one day he wanted to know how long a nose could grow. He beat his drum, saying, “Long be my nose, long be my nose!” until his nose reached the clouds. However, at the time in Heaven, carpenters were making a bridge over the Amanogawa (the Milky Way). His nose appeared right where a carpenter was fixing a railing on the bridge. Gengoro thought there was something wrong with his nose, so he beat the other side of the drum but instead of his nose shrinking, his body was going up into the heavens! What will happen to Gengoro.

Topsy-Turvy Rabbit was a little boy rabbit named Kenta who decided to play a game by doing and saying everything opposite of what he really means. I’m sure most children have played this game at home, annoying their parents and siblings. I know I have. Kenta’s father said that it looks like fun and said he’ll become a topsy-turvy rabbit too. He says, “Right, I’ll have Kenta Rabbit go to the office in my place. Father Rabbit will stay home and play all day.” So, with Father Rabbit’s reverse psychology, Kenta no longer decided to be a topsy-turvy rabbit. 

Every story will be sure to delight children and adults alike. Even if you have no children, all the stories should be read aloud. You may regain your sense of innocence from your childhood. ~Ernie Hoyt

Brick Lane by Monica Ali (Scribner)

Mymensingh District, East Pakistan, 1967. “Rupban screamed white heat, red blood”. Her husband rushed to her side to kill the man who was killing his wife. He knew it was her but when he got there, his sister-in-law, Mumtaz told him to fetch Banesa, a midwife who claimed to be one hundred and twenty years old. Since nobody can remember when she was born and as she was “more desiccated than an old coconut, no one cared to dispute it”.

So begins Monica Ali’s story of family, love, and tradition. Brick Lane is this and more. It is also about fitting into a new society and culture as an immigrant family. The main theme is the conflict between believing in Fate or being able to choose one’s own destiny.

Nazneen was stillborn, as she had been told all her life. Her mother thought she had a bad case of indigestion. Banesa said she would be happy to prepare for the burial, at an extra cost, but just then the baby let out a yowl. The old woman said it was a death rattle and Rupban could take two routes. Take the baby to the city, a hospital, where they “will put wires on her and give medicines” or “you can just see what Fate will do”. 

Mumtaz said of course they would take the baby to the city but Rupban refused, saying “No, we must not stand in the way of Fate. Whatever happens, I accept it. And my child must not waste any energy fighting against Fate. That way, she will be stronger.” Mumtaz had no choice but to accept what her sister said. As Nazneen grew up, she would often hear the story of “How You Were Left to Your Fate”. 

Nazneen’s sister, Hasina, was born three days after the death of the midwife. She grew up to be a beautiful girl. When she was sixteen she eloped with the nephew of a sawmill owner and left the family home. For two weeks, their father would sit and wait “cursing his whore-pig daughter whose head would be severed the moment she crawled back”. Needless to say, she never did come back.

Then one day, Nazneen’s father asked her if she would like to see the man she would marry the following month. She refused but out of the corner of her eyes, she saw the photo showing a man who was about forty years old and “had a face like a frog”. They would marry and he would take her back to England to live.

Tower Hamlets, London, 1985. Nazneen had been living in London for only six months. She still could not speak the language except for a few words. She and her husband lived in a neighborhood where a number of other Bengali people lived. Her husband had invited his friend, Dr. Azad, to his home for a nice dinner. Nazneen was nervous although “it was only dinner. One dinner. One guest.”

As Nazneen tries to settle into life in a new country, a new culture, she is at times overwhelmed. She would often recite passages from the Qu’ran to settle her nerves. She also receives letters from her sister Hasina whose lives a parallel life with Nazneen in trying to find balance and happiness in her own environment

The couple would eventually have a son Nazneen named Tariq although her husband always called him Ruku. Unfortunately, Tariq would not live into his adolescent years. The cause of his death remained unknown. 

Tower Hamlets, London, 2001. Nazneen and her husband Chanu are now the parents of two young girls. The older one is named Shahana. She is the more rebellious of the two. As she grows up in the U.K., she cannot stand it when her father teaches them or talks to them about the greatness of Bangladesh. She always retorts with, “I didn’t ask to be born here”.

Her younger sister, Bibi, is more acquiescent to her father’s demands and always tries to please him. Nazneen also questions her own values about being a good Muslim woman, “a nice village girl. Unspoilt”. She is having thoughts of a younger man while her husband is determined that the entire family will move back to Bangladesh. 

Monica Ali really brings to light about what it means to be Muslim in a mostly Christian country. However, I did find her male characters to be rather two-dimensional. As I am not a follower of Islam, I cannot say with confidence how true to life her depictions of the men in this story are. They all seem to be full of pride and believe that their word is law in the family. 

Ali also brings to light the plight of Muslim women. Many of their husbands forbid them to work even though the husband’s salaries are often not enough to feed the family. Yet, according to the men, if their wife is working, they will be looked down upon as a man who cannot provide for his family and their family would be shamed. 

In today’s world, it’s not enough to be “the man of the house”. Tradition is fine and all but must consider the time and circumstances to find true happiness. At least that it what I believe. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Liberators by E. J. Koh (Tin House)

“The fog drew rosefinches, like blooms in the low bush, whose cries I mistook for rainfall.” 

Yohan is a man obsessed with words, who can write them in six languages. During his lifetime, he has lived through the Japanese occupation of Korea, survived the horrors of World War Two, and “watched the country divided up as spoils of war.” What puts him into prison is a shadowed mystery with a partial disclosure: “To be a spy was to one day be known.”

Decades later, living in America, his daughter meets a man who draws a tiger on her bare back and tells her “It’s Korea,” “if the country had no stitches” and was reunified as a single nation. Although he knows “The South doesn’t want to rebuild the North. And the North doesn’t trust the South,” he is devoted to bringing the two divisions back together once more. His dream is rejected by the Korean men who come to his meetings in a local pool hall and when he returns to Korea, he’s imprisoned “for crimes of moral turpitude.”

Although politics is a hopeless quagmire that gobbles up idealism, Yohan’s daughter erases divisions in her own family by nurturing  her North Korean daughter-in-law. When she dresses the mother of her grandchild in the green hanbok that was once worn by her own mother, “the fabric folded smoothly..,the ribbon falling down the front, a new verdant path.”

Like Yohan, E.J. Koh is dominated by words. In her memoir, The Magical Language of Others (Asia by the Book, November 2020), she describes her life, lived in four languages, English, Korean, Japanese, and poetry. “Languages,” she says, “as they open you, can also allow you to close.” 

In her first novel, Koh lets the language of poetry open windows and then it slams them shut. Six characters are partially revealed in The Liberators but none of them are as fully realized as the images that surround them. In a gorgeous section entitled Animal Kingdom, Yohan’s grandson is given a dog, “a bright and curious joy,”  that’s “joined to the boy like a wish.” Later the boy is united with the woman he will marry in “the elaborate braid of our bodies.” Trapped in poetry, he and the other five characters that fill these pages remain “shadows that flew up and shattered across the ceiling.” Each of them is truncated by subtlety, as if they were created to convey Koh’s language rather than the reversal that would have given them life. They are pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, given just enough definition to merge into a whole pattern.

Mixed with Koh’s poetry is the harshness of political realities in which a country with millennia of history and tradition becomes sacrificed to global economic interests. When Koreans gather together in America to watch the TV coverage of the Olympic ceremony in Seoul, the doves that symbolize world peace perch on the flaming cauldron and are burned alive, “a memory that had to be erased…that had to be forgotten in our soft, closed palms.” 

“Why visit the past,  why go digging up its grave?” asks the man who dreams of Korea as a tiger, complete and undivided. Yohan’s daughter answers him by embracing the present in another country, unified with her North Korean daughter-in-law, a conclusion that escapes cliche because Koh has clothed it in poetry.~Janet Brown