The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon (Simon & Schuster)

In a world full of displaced people who search for home, Paul Yoon creates one for them in his universe of words. Whether he writes about an imaginary Korean island where war and progress have turned its inhabitants into exiles in Once the Shore (Asia by the Book, November 2023), about orphans in Laos who live in a derelict hospital and carry messages through a maze of landmines in Run Me to Earth (Asia by the Book, December 2020), or a Korean newly released from a POW camp in what was once his country and finds a tentative life in Brazil in Snow Hunters, he evokes heartbreak and hope as he unfolds his characters.

Yoon is a novelist even when he writes short stories, perhaps especially in his latest book, The Hive and the Honey. Each of the seven stories that fill this collection gives full measure to the glimpses of the lives revealed in them. Each feels as if it’s a chapter in a story that will never be fully told, but will remain alive in the imaginations of those who read them.

The stories range from rural New York to the coast of Spain, from 17th Century Japan to a dusty shop in a 20th Century English town, from a Korean mountainside to Siberian prison camps, tracing a pitiless diaspora. In each of them is a boy, all of them in different stages of development, all far from any home they’ve ever known. The worlds they inhabit are brutal and the currency they use to survive is pain and loneliness. Only one of them seems to be on the brink of happiness as he stands in a hayfield with a farm girl, “light on his heels.” The others are adrift in sadness, running, fighting, surviving.

A boxer with a broken nose and hands as “thick as mallets” clings to the hope of finding his Korean birth mother.  A boy who has known only the companionship of Japanese soldiers is turned over to his Korean countrymen whose language he no longer speaks. A Korean couple have the stillness of their lives disrupted when a young Korean boy bursts into their little corner shop, bleeding and confused. A man who has made a tentative sanctuary alone on a deserted mountain is threatened by the appearance of strangers who change him in ways that cling to him like scars. Near a Russian penal colony on an island, a boy is forced by starvation to search for the father who left him years ago while in another lifetime a Russian cossack who is barely out of his teens is steeped in the supernatural as he guards a Korean prison settlement.

All of these stories exist like spiderwebs in the rain, their intricate patterns glowing in an evanescent light. With brilliant words and unforgettable characters, Paul Yoon has created worlds of abstract expressionism, elusive, enthralling, and everlasting. The Hive and the Honey is a book for our time, when those who have homes in the world need to understand what it is to have none.~Janet Brown

Momoko's Illustrated Book of Living Things by Momoko Sakura, translated by James M. Vardaman, Jr. (Shueisha)

Momoko Sakura is a Japanese manga artist. She is the creator of one of Japan's longest running anime series titled Chibi Maruko-chan whose exploits are based on Sakura’s own experiences as an elementary school girl growing up in Shimizu, Japan in Shizuoka Prefecture. She is also the author of a number of essays and Momoko’s Story (Asia by the Book, January 2025)

Momoko’s Illustrated Book of Living Things or いきもの図鑑,as it was originally titled, was first published as a series of essays in the fashion magazine an an. When she was first approached to write a column in the magazine, she decided, “I’ll write about my memories of various living things. On a subject like this, I could write forever.”

However, she found that writing about “living things” every week wasn’t as easy as she first thought. She found that there were times when she had no special memories about a creature which made it hard for her to write. She says in her Afterword, “Memories are not something that can be forcibly manufactured and they do have to be related to the subject.” She takes her argument one step further saying, “Even if I had wanted to write about anteaters, for example, I couldn’t write an essay unless I had actually something to do with one.”

She has classified the animals she talks about into five separate categories—insects, fish, birds, animals, and everything else. As her family ran a vegetable shop, one of her earliest memories of “living things” is about the green caterpillar. Momoko writes, “Whenever my older sister’s shriek was followed by a head of cabbage rolling across the floor, it was the sign that she had found a caterpillar.”

Momoko liked bugs and she would collect the caterpillars. She liked to keep many of them in a box. She liked watching the caterpillars turn to pupa but wondered how wings could be growing under the thin skin and how the caterpillar would turn into a butterfly. 

Another “living thing” Momoko writes about is earthworms. When she was in the second grade, her family used to keep some small fish called guppies as pets. The guppies fed on the earthworms. She used to go out with her father to any ditch nearby and would find lots of earthworms. 

One day while she was out looking for earthworms with her father, a boy about her own age asked her what she was doing. She was too embarrassed to tell him that she was looking for earthworms and just replied, “Nothing.” What shocked her though was that the boy said, “If you aren’t doing anything, do you want to play.” It never occurred to her to play with a boy before. She was a little flustered and told him, “I won’t.” The boy was insistent until Momoko’s father’s voice could be heard saying, “Hey, there are worms over here!” The boy left without a word. 

Every memory Momoko has about a “living thing” may seem ordinary but the way she talks about each and every one of them makes the readers feel as if each and every “living thing” is special. I’m sure we all have our own memories of “living things”—that pet dog or hamster, the family cat or even an aquarium full of tropical fish, but Momoko has a way of making each “living thing” larger than life. ~Ernie Hoyt

毎日は冒険 (Mainichi ga Boken) by 高橋歩 (Ayumu Takahashi) Japanese Text Only

Ayumu Takahashi was born in Tokyo on August 26, 1972. He is an entrepreneur, writer, and the founder of Sanctuary Publishing. His book 毎日が冒険 (Mainichi ga Boken) translates into English as Everyday is an Adventure. 

In this book, Takahashi relates seven different life experiences he has had. His adventure starts when he is still a senior in high school. All of his friends and classmates are either studying for the university exams or at least have a general idea of what they want to do after graduating from high school. 

Takahashi has no idea what he’s going to do with his life after high school. He’s a little envious of his friends and peers. Some of them say, “I’m going to go to design school and become a famous designer” or “I’m going to university in Aomori to study to become a veterinarian”. It isn’t until Takahashi sees a commercial for the “Marlboro Man” that he’s inspired. 

When he sees the commercial advertising Marlboro cigarettes featuring the “Marlboro Man” (cigarette ads were still very common in Japan in the seventies), Takahashi decides then and there to go to America and become an American cowboy! Although he can’t speak English very well, his mother says she has friends who will let him stay at their house for his time in the U.S.

For his first three days in Los Angeles, his hosts take him through Beverly Hills. They go on a drive to Santa Monica Beach. He nervously watches Terminator 2 at a small movie theater while a number of Black people are making noise. His hosts also take him to Universal Studios. Before he knows it, three days have passed. He reminds himself that he came to America to work as a cowboy. He certainly won’t find them in Los Angeles. 

Takahashi believes he will find “real” cowboys in Texas. He books a flight to Dallas to go in search of some. His host tells him the best way to gather information is to go to a church whose members also speak his own language. 

Takahashi manages to find a church where there are people who speak Japanese. One of the people he meets is kind enough to drive him to Fort Worth where a cattle auction is being held. Takahashi thinks, “Real cowboys!”. Now he needs to have the courage to speak to one of them to see if they would take him on as an apprentice. It’s easier said than done. However, he does meet a cowboy who takes him in for the night. The following day, Takahashi asks if he could work at the ranch to become a cowboy, the cowboy gives him a flat-out no and that’s the end of Takahashi’s dream of becoming a cowboy. 

Takahashi goes back to Japan. He enrolls in a community college and also works part time as a delivery person for a pizza restaurant, since his dream of becoming a cowboy did not come to fruition, At the pizza joint where he makes more friends, one of his coworkers tells him that he’s going to take part in a “Hellish Success Philosophy Training Camp” and that Takahashi should join. 

Takahashi manages to complete the course but he still doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. As he is thinking about his future, he watches the Tom Cruise movie Cocktail and is inspired once again! “That’s it! I’ll open my own bar!”. In order to run a bar, you need to know how to make drinks. Aside from working part-time at the pizza place and going to college, Takahashi takes another part time job, working at a bar to learn more about the trade. 

He also finds that starting your own business costs a lot of money. He talks to three of his friends who also had taken part in the “Hellish Success Philosophy Training Camp” to become his partners, which sparks Takahashi’s next major adventure. The four entrepreneurs borrow money from friends, family, acquaintances, ex-girlfriends, and old classmates. They manage to raise enough money to buy the bar where Takahashi works part-time. 

Takahashi’s drive and enthusiasm for this new project encourages his partners as well. In a short amount of time, they re-open the bar under new ownership and call it Rockwells, named after Norman Rockwell, the American painter and also because they all like rock music. 

Once the bar is successful, Takahashi becomes restless again. He wants to start something new. His next idea is to write a book and get it published. However he can’t find a publisher willing to take on an unknown author who doesn’t even have a manuscript yet. So, Takahashi comes upon a new idea. He will start his own publishing company and publish his own books. He will start from scratch once again to challenge himself to another adventure. 

Takahashi’s story is inspiring. However, there are times when his actions seem to go against the grain of common sense. But with determination and perseverance, he overcomes the obstacles he is faced with. After successfully starting a publishing company, Takahashi is already planning for his next adventure. Where will life take him next???　~Ernie Hoyt

World Class by Teru Clavel (Simon & Schuster)

When Teru Clavel’s husband is transferred from New York to Hong Kong in 2006, she’s relieved. The oldest of her two young sons is approaching the age where preschool is in his future and in Manhattan, this is no trivial landmark. The right preschool will determine his future education, right up to his choice of university, and the application process is almost a blood sport. Parents begin this rigorous journey even before the future student emerges on a delivery table, moving to the right neighborhood, joining the right church, and finding the right consultants in tandem with “preschool prep” classes. 

The Clavel family falls into the category of “moderately to extremely wealthy” and both parents were educated at all the right schools but Teru had an additional advantage. Her Japanese mother sent her to public school in Japan every summer. With that background, she’s eager to give that same sort of opportunity to her children--and for the next ten years, she does.

At first her two-year-old son James is enrolled in a prestigious, private preschool but his mother begins to chafe against the affluent bubble that Hong Kong provides to wealthy expatriates. With her Japanese public school experience, she finds the same thing for James by the time he’s three and is delighted that by the time he’s four, he’s given homework and is a confident speaker of Chinese--or Mandarin as Teru terms it throughout her book.

When her husband is transferred to Shanghai, they all leave any form of expat lifestyle behind in Hong Kong and enter what Teru calls “family detox.” Their apartment is inhabited by rats, roaches, and termites and James, at six, becomes his mother’ s interpreter when they go to stores and markets. But Teru’s determination gets her sons into public schools, where James is the sole foreigner in his class and Charles is only one of several  in his preschool. There the family discovers that Shanghai invests in teachers’ salaries and continuing professional development, with generous resources given to English language instruction and education for students with special needs. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, schools don’t spend money on technology, attractive classrooms, or elaborate playgrounds. 

In  her sons’ schools, Teru finds, teachers concentrate on mastery of a subject for every student and they will stay after school with anyone who needs help to reach that point. “There is no ‘bad at math,’ Teru says, “any grade below 95 is considered a failure.” First grade students begin to learn the rudiments of algebra. While classes concentrate on rote memorization, speed drills, and repeating what a teacher has just said, this pays off. In an international test administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) that focuses on math, science, and reading, Shanghai was at the top in all three in 2009 and “ranked three full grade levels above the average score overall” in 2010. 

At the same time, James and Charles found a sense of community in their schools, to the point that when Charles was briefly hospitalized, his teacher, several of his classmates, and their parents visited him.

By the time the Clavels are transferred to Tokyo, a new addition to their family, Victoria, is almost ready for preschool. While James and Charles have learned discipline and self-control in their Shanghai school, Victoria at the age of three barely squeaks into a Tokyo preschool. “Make sure Victoria understands social norms here before she starts school,” the principal warns Teru. Her older brothers are given a crash course in Japanese before beginning their four years of public school.

Perhaps because Teru received a generous helping of Japanese education as a child, she spends less time describing the experience that her children underwent. She stresses the importance Japan places on educating “the whole child,” fostering independence and giving a thorough grounding in nutrition as well as providing curriculum that is stable and carefully planned system-wide. In Japan, she says, textbooks are written and approved by teachers. A parent-teacher journal comes home with each child every night and families are encouraged to come into their student’s classroom for observation days. “It was an efficient, transparent system that had stood the test of time.”

Returning to U.S. schools in 2016 is a shock to everyone. Although the Clavel children attend public school in the wealthy area of Palo Alto, the best ranked school district in California, they find sports are stressed above academic subjects. In James’s English class, seventh-graders are required to read no more than three books all year and their teacher will critique only three essays “because there’s not enough time.” Charles is delighted that he watched “ten movies in full” during his year of fifth grade. Both boys are two years ahead of their grade level in math.

The solution? Go full circle. Move to Manhattan and put the children in private school. 

Although World Class is a more cursory examination of education overseas than Little Soldiers (Asia by the Book, December 2022), Teru Clavel gives a surprising and often shocking comparison of U.S. education during a time when we need to hear this more than ever.~Janet Brown

The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok (HarperCollins)

A leftover woman, as a Chinese saying goes, is one that nobody wants, “leftover, like scraps on a table.” Jean Kwok presents two women from different continents, each one feeling like a leftover for different reasons.

Jasmine has come to New York from China after paying a group of snakeheads to smuggle her into the U.S. Now, faced with a balloon payment, she’s looking for work that will keep her from the threat of prostitution. She’s also here to find her daughter, a child whom she was told died at birth but whom her husband had given up for adoption to a couple from Manhattan. Jasmine’s willing to do anything to succeed in her quest, even working as a cocktail waitress in a Chinese-owned strip joint. She’s in flight from her rich and powerful husband and has no friends--except for a boy she grew up with in her village who now works in a martial arts school near Chinatown. She ignores him out of an excess of caution, concentrating only on recovering her lost child.

Rebecca is a highly placed editor in a publishing house founded by her father. Dogged by a scandal that almost scuttled her career, she’s frantically trying to regain her professional reputation to the exclusion of the two people she loves--her husband, a professor who’s fluent in Chinese and four other languages, and the daughter they have adopted through an agency in China. Rebecca has turned over her daughter’s life to a Chinese nanny who speaks limited English. Although Lily is unpolished and clumsy, she adores Fiona, the little girl who is under her care.When it becomes obvious that Rebecca, who’s the only one in her household who can’t speak Chinese, is taking second place in her daughter’s affections, she begins to hate the woman who has supplanted her.

The way Jasmine and Rebecca find each other is a dizzying story with twists that come without warning. Although Kwok at first seems to be following in the footsteps of Jackie Collins, she’s much too smart to take that route. Yes, she cloaks this novel in heavy scenes that reek of romance, but she’s done her research and that gives her book a whole other dimension.

In her portrayal of Jasmine, Kwok explores the dilemma of undocumented immigration and the gaping differences between fresh-off-the-boat Chinese and Chinese Americans. In a Chinatown cafe, Jasmine notes the confidence that radiates from women who look like her but who exude a sense of belonging--”their fearlessness, the way they’d seized their genetic peculiarities…and decided to wield them.” “Remember,” one of them tells her later, “appearances are everything.” When Jasmine follows up on an employment tip this women has given her, she discovers “Asians exploiting Asians,” in a club where a Chinese American woman hires women from China who have no other job options. In this place Jasmine and other immigrants satisfy “every cliche of male desire.” There is, Jasmine learns, “no room for subtlety in a strip club.”

Through Rebecca, Kwok glances upon issues of “race, feminism, and identity,” and the way both “women and immigrants need to split themselves into different personas and roles.” As Rebecca, Lily, and Jasmine come to a shocking intersection, questions of economic class arise in a conclusion that’s filled with violence and heartbreak.

The Leftover Woman confronts a multitude of stereotypes, including the ones that cling to genre fiction. Kwok, whose parents brought her to the U.S. from Hong Kong when she was five and who spent a large part of her childhood working in a sweatshop, earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard and an MFA from Columbia. In her fourth novel she draws skillfully from every part of her background to create a book filled with constant surprises and provocative points of view, one that belongs in an academic seminar as much as it does under a beach umbrella.~Janet Brown

The Peking Express by James M. Zimmerman ( Hachette Publishing Group)

Shanghai had a community of 35,000 foreigners in 1923 with many of them eager to travel on the newly launched express train to Peking. “A luxury hotel on wheels,” with its silk sheets and and its five-course banquets, the four-month-old train could make the 892-mile overnight journey in thirty-eight hours and attracted a multinational collection of affluent passengers.

On the morning of May 5, 1923, among those who boarded the train was an Italian attorney who represented the Shanghai Opium Combine, the owner of the Chinese Motors Federal Company who had left Romania penniless years before, a honeymooning couple from Mexico, a number of journalists, a couple of military families with their young children, and the aging sister-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr, heir to the Standard Oil Company.

At 2 am on May 6, over 100 passengers were kidnapped by 1000 bandits, who attacked and derailed the train. Although the victims were stripped of all their possessions, that wasn’t the goal of the man who was their leader. 

Sun Mei-yao was a twenty-five-year-old former soldier who had amassed a large company of bandits and planned to use them in an “economic insurgency” against China’s warlords and the corrupt military general who governed the region. Shrewdly he decided that the best way to gain attention and achieve his goal of becoming a general himself, leading a brigade of former bandits, was to take hostages. The Peking Express, filled with wealthy Chinese and important foreign figures, was his ticket to success and he grabbed it.

Marching his captives to his stronghold on Paotzuku Mountain, Sun knew the grueling trek that would take several days was beyond the abilities of the women and children in the party. He gradually released them all--except for the Mexican bride who was from a country where banditry was commonplace and refused to leave her husband. (Eventually Sun lost patience and told a group of negotiators “And take the Mexican lady with you!”)

As released prisoners made their way to safety, they provided the necessary details that would capture the imaginations of newspaper readers all over the world.  When Lucy Aldrich, the Rockefeller relative who was on her second journey around the world, emerged from captivity, her greatest fear was that her family would never let her travel again. She described her ordeal as “most dangerous,” yet “thrilling” and extremely amusing at times,” which probably launched 1000 headlines.

The remaining captives reached the bandits’ fortress and found “a beautiful quiet place with caves and the Temple of the Clouds.” “Our view is like an artist’s map,” one hostage wrote to his family.  However it certainly wasn’t summer camp.

Their treatment was far from idyllic; beatings were not uncommon and three of the strongest men were separated from the others and isolated as bargaining chips on the least accessible part of the mountain. There these men found a group of 23 kidnapped children huddled in misery, like “hopeless hungry little old men.” Sick and near starvation, the group of boys and one girl were like a subscription service; their parents sent money each month to keep them alive. (The 47 children whose parents stopped sending ransom were thrown over the side of a cliff.)

Although foreign governments chose not to directly intervene in freeing the hostages because it was a matter for China to resolve, they sent doctors and supplies to the mountain and instituted an improvised postal system. Letters from the captives and replies from their families, 50-100 letters a day, were carried by visitors and the bandits, along with newspapers and cameras. 

The hostages realized their only strength came from standing together, which kept Sun from using executions as a negotiation tactic. When they were finally released after five excruciating weeks, they made sure that the Chinese who had become part of their group were freed with them. Later all of the Chinese were brought to safety along with the imprisoned children.

Sun Mei-yao got what he wanted for a very brief time. When international attention veered away from the newly appointed brigadier general, he was beheaded, much to the rage of the men he had held hostage. The conditions of their release had been based on Sun’s safety and the violation of that infuriated his former prisoners, many of whom had come to respect him. So had Mao Tse-tung, who “admired Sun Mei-yao’s ability to mobilize the people.”

What came to be known as the Licheng Incident was perhaps the first use of international media to engineer worldwide public opinion. That it ended with much less bloodshed than the recent highjacking of a train in Pakistan is a sad commentary on current politics. 

Later the Peking Express would become the Shanghai Express in a 1932 movie starring Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong. The screenwriter? None other than Harry Hervey, the pulp novelist and author of Where Strange Gods Call (Asia by the Book, April 2024).

The site of their captivity is now part of the Baodugo National Forest Park where a “rickety cable car” takes hikers to the foot of Paotzuku Mountain. If they can manage the ascent, they can sit where Peking Express hostages once waited to be released.~Janet Brown

City of Fiction by Yu Hua, translated by Todd Foley (Europa, April 8, 2025)

Strangers are unusual in the town of Xizhen so everyone knows about the tall Northerner who has shown up for no apparent reason. The man arrives carrying an infant so young that he has to pay women who are nursing their babies to give milk to his motherless child. Although it’s difficult for the townsfolk to understand his dialect, his love for his daughter and his friendly demeanor wins them over, especially when he reveals a talent for carpentry that he offers for free. 

Li Xiangfu and his little daughter become an integral part of Xizhen, although his origins are still a mystery. He takes on the task of teaching, telling his students to “sit upright and walk straight,” words that he embodies in his own life. His daughter becomes the most beautiful girl in town, with people saying she’s as “lovely as Xishi,” the first of China’s legendary Four Beauties.

Nobody knows that Li Xiangfu had once fallen in love and married a woman whose dialect was identical to the people of Xizhen. She had run away with part of his fortune, leaving him with their newborn child, and he has devoted his life to finding the woman he still loves. Settling in Xizhen only because the town his wife said was her own seemed to be a place nobody has ever heard of, Li Xiangfu hopes that someday she might appear in this town where everyone speaks her language.

Life is idyllic in this prosperous farming region until the political instability that takes place after the fall of the Qing Dynasty leads to terrorism. Bandits roam unchecked, stripping crops and wealth from people who have never learned how to fight. With unspeakable cruelty, they murder and pillage, takin hostages who may yield substantial ransoms--or die slow and terrible deaths. After the leading citizen of Xizhen is captured, Li Xiangfu is the one who volunteers to buy his friend’s freedom.

What begins as a story of love and devotion turns into stories of stomach-turning torture, graphically described, with an abrupt ending that brings no feelings of hope or redemption. Much as Yu Hua did in Brothers (Asia by the Book, January 2010), he has written City of Fiction in what feels as if it should be in two separate volumes. The first has sweetness while the second has none at all. Even the beautiful daughter, the guiding hope of Li Xuangfu’s life, disappears from the second half of the narrative, safely ensconced in a Shanghai boarding school.

Beginning with fascinating descriptions of village ceremonies and wildly humorous episodes of magic realism, Yu Hua’s immediate plunge into sadism and grueling battle scenes is viciously jarring. Even when he brings his novel into a circular structure that gives the story of Li Xuangfu’s faithless wife and retells the events that began this novel in a way that offers another dimension, this brings no brightness to the book’s conclusion.

Still it’s impossible to stop reading City of Fiction, even as it swerves into brutality that is rarely leavened with any sort of mercy.  Yu Hua has brilliantly recreated life in China during the beginning of the last century, stunning readers with how much has changed in the past hundred years.~Janet Brown 

A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang (St. Martin's Press)

“Beauty is not so different from destruction.” Xishi has been shielded from what her beauty could inflict upon her since she was very young. Each time she leaves the house, her mother veils her face to ward off the attention that comes from being the most beautiful girl in the village. 

But beauty has its uses and in a region where two kings vie for power, the weaker monarch needs a weapon to defeat the man who has taken over his kingdom. Sending Fanli, his trusted political and military advisor, to find the loveliest girl in the area, he’s certain that great beauty will cause the downfall of his enemy. 

Fanli is a man who seems impervious to female charms but he knows how to assess them. He chooses Xishi to accomplish what the King of Yue has planned--to marry the King of Wu and charm that ruler into doing exactly what she wishes, leading her husband to unwittingly lower his defences and lose his kingdom.

Xishi is a peasant girl without refinement or sophistication so before she begins this project, she needs extensive training under the watchful gaze of Fanli. She falls in love with him but is bound to accomplish her goal. She hates the King of Wu almost as much as his rival does because she had watched Wu soldiers kill her sister. Revenge propels her away from the man she loves and into the treacherous life of a royal court. 

The King of Wu is seduced by her beauty and fulfills every wish she voices, wishes that weaken his kingdom, provide a gateway for the Yue invasion, and ensure that Xishi might eventually regain a life of freedom. But politics is a dangerous game and beauty can lead to destruction as well as cause it.

Ann Liang wrote A Song to Drown Rivers when she was twenty-one, basing it upon the legend of China’s Four Beauties, of whom Xishi was the first. Although the novel is being marketed as fantasy, it’s actually a carefully researched work of historical fiction. Its first sentence is crafted from the Chinese saying that great beauty causes the fish to sink, the geese to fall from the sky, eclipsing the moon and shaming the flowers. It recreates a turbulent chapter in Chinese history, when the state of Wu came into power and threatened neighboring kingdoms. The story of how a beautiful girl was used as a pawn by the King of Yue to eradicate this threat is told in the Spring and Autumn Annals which supposedly were collected and compiled by Confucius.

Often retold legends become cumbersome and ungainly, with language that weighs down the story. Luckily that isn’t the case with this version of Xishi’s life. Although Liang carefully describes the opulence and luxury of the royal lives and the intricacy of political plots, she never turns her heroine into “someone barely even human, a creature of myth.” She gives Xishi a spirit that resonates and enthralls through the centuries, telling her story in a fluid, fast-paced style that never flags or falters, while giving it the delicate grace of a fairy tale. 

Although she has written four novels for young adults, this is Ann Liang’s debut foray into adult fiction. Let’s hope it won’t be her last.~Janet Brown

Rosarita by Anita Desai (Scribner)

Our mothers are the ones who first teach us about secrets. They’re the ones who tell us the truth about Santa and the Tooth Fairy after hiding that from us during our earliest years. They slowly divulge other hidden stories as we get older, but it’s only after they die that we realize they’ve concealed the biggest secret of all, one we’ll never know. Who were our mothers in the years before we were born to them?

The narrator of Rosarita is certain she knows all there is to know about her mother and none of it is particularly interesting. Then she goes off from her home in India to San Miguel in Mexico, a place she’d never heard of before until she goes there to study Spanish. While sitting on a park, she’s accosted by a stranger who greets her effusively, saying she once was good friends with the narrator’s mother. “Rosarita,” she calls her vanished friend although the narrator assures her that her mother was Sarita. “Did I not say?” the stranger insists, and is delighted to learn that the narrator is named Bonita. “She would of course have given you a name she heard here,” the woman claims, while Bonita insists her name is similar to others given to girls in India. 

“You look just like your mother,” the stranger insists, “Are you an artist too?” Your mother came here to paint and we were good friends, is the burden of this stranger’s insistent story.

Although Bonita is convinced that this old woman is mad, she begins to piece together all she remembers of her mother and finds there are large gaps in her knowledge. Little unexplained scraps of her childhood reappear in her memory, the boxes of paper stored away and never unpacked in an unused room where she often finds her mother collapsed on the floor, in tears; the small unsigned pastel sketch that hung above her bed that was a picture of a woman sitting on a park bench with a small child playing in the dirt nearby. Yes, she admits to herself. This park looks much like the one where she was accosted by the eerie stranger.

She begins to see the old woman everywhere she goes and is persuaded to accompany her to places where her mother once lived during her Mexican sojourn. Disbelieving but still curious, she follows the person she’s begun to think of as The Trickster to spots that have been abandoned--a house her mother supposedly had lived in that’s now a piece of a tiled wall in a vacant lot, a place that had been a refuge for artists that has only the remains of a ruined chapel and a few dilapidated huts.

As she learns about the dreadful similarities between the Mexican Revolution and India’s partition, each with their trains carrying “unspeakable cargoes” of corpses and injured refugees through “barbaric landscapes,” she remembers her mother being disparagingly termed as one of the “railway people” by relatives of Bonita’s father. When asked about her past, her mother would say only “I can’t remember.” As The Trickster leads her to the Mexican coast, a relative of this strange woman might have details of truth about Bonita’s mother, but when her guide lapses into madness, the questions go unasked. The life of her mother becomes alive in her imagination, “a fragment of truth,” “unfolding like a scroll, its beginning and its end both invisible.”

Yet there is that solitary sketch that evokes Mexico, her mother’s unexplained misery and long absence, and the kohl-rimmed eyes, the arms filled with bangles, and the smell of a South Asian fragrance that The Trickster wears when she introduces herself at the beginning of this quest. Is this enough to establish a tenuous truth? It becomes enough to lead Bonita through Mexico, with her unanswered questions and the possibility of discovering her mother’s past.

Although Rosarita is a slender book with a size much smaller than the usual novel, it teases and haunts with that universal mystery of the secrets mothers never divulge. Desai makes Bonita’s Mexican journey irresistible with descriptions that beckon and entice, with a bright and sharp beauty. In an author’s note, she elaborates upon the parallels between the histories of India and Mexico that in the past drew an Indian artist to this other country, in the same way The Trickster claims it drew Bonita’s mother. Gently and inexorably, Rosarita demands more than one reading of a story that’s both tantalizing and satisfying, ending with questions and the joy of an unending adventure.~Janet Brown

Darkmotherland by Samrat Upadhyay (Soho Press)

Never before have I read a book simply because it’s an inexplicable train wreck but that’s what kept me going through the recent release from Soho Press, Samrat Upadhay’s 759-page novel, Darkmotherland. 

Set in a thinly-disguised Nepal after a devastating earthquake that has left many survivors homeless and housed in tents, the plot plunges into a coup that has put a minor bureaucrat in charge of a shattered country. Derisively nicknamed the Hippo but faced with little opposition, the new ruler is gleefully enriching himself and increasing the fortunes of the affluent, while everyone else clings to a precarious form of existence. He is strengthened by the tweeted message conveying support from the Amrikan leader, President Corn Hair. This inspires him to adapt a slogan from that country--”Make Darkmotherland Great Again,” while encouraging his citizens to wear red caps.

Although a cast of characters that rival the vast multitude found in War and Peace fill the pages of this book, there are two main figures. One is Kranti, the daughter of a dissident mother. Although her name means Revolution, Kranti loathes her mother’s politics and silently supports the Hippo. Her rich and handsome boyfriend, on the other hand, has become one of her mother’s supporters. The other leading character is Rozy, a gorgeous homosexual whom the Hippo adores and has elevated to a prominent position of influence. 

Slowly both of these protagonists take on different states of mind. Kranti, before marrying her boyfriend, becomes enthralled by a resident of the tent community, a poet whose politics are devoted to humanitarian efforts extended to the refugees he lives among. When Kranti’s husband is killed because of his dissident stance, she becomes openly involved with the poverty-stricken poet.

Rozy, privy to the Hippo’s secrets and regarded in a tacit form of awe by his cabinet, gradually learns that the national veneration of the Darkmother can become a political advantage. In a place where coups are easily accepted, no leader is secure--unless that figure becomes spiritually entwined with the goddess that has given her name to the country.

In this morass of characters and intrigue, a satirical allegory lurks. An Amrikan expat gives names to the dogs who cluster near his restaurant: Eric, Ivanka, Pence, Pompeo. When the Hippo makes a trip to pay homage to President Corn Hair, he discovers that the “Amrikan press has been cowed and tamed,” Political protests in Amrika have dwindled because “the people have simply exhausted themselves protesting.” The Hippo finds reassurance in President Corn Hair’s hints that future elections may be forever cancelled but when he returns to Darkmotherland, he finds everything has changed in his absence.

No character in this novel deviates from the repulsive and the only feeling they evoke is a horrified and nauseated fascination. Upadhyay gives free rein to an unfortunate predilection for clumsy wordplay and sentences that all too often rhyme. What at first seems to be an excursion into Orwellian satire becomes a quagmire of absurdity. 

The only reason to pay attention to Darkmotherland is to warn off any prospective readers. This is a contender for one of the worst novels written in English. Buyers beware.~Janet Brown

Thai Food by David Thompson, photography by Earl Carter (Ten Speed Press)

Do you remember life back in 2002? Internet cafes were a popular feature in big cities and email was considered cutting edge technology. Letters and postcards were keeping post offices afloat all around the world and bookstores were just beginning to worry about that online business, Amazon. Facebook wouldn’t be invented for another two years and wouldn’t be released to the general public until two years after that. Digital cameras were just beginning to catch on. Nobody had heard of Kindles because they weren’t invented until 2007. Many people had landlines and answering machines because cell phones were too cumbersome to use as a primary form of communication. Books were read on paper, not on screens. 

And in that year, Ten Speed Press, an upstart publishing house based in the Bay Area of San Francisco, released a 674-page cookbook with a simple title, Thai Food. 

At this time, Thai restaurants weren’t a common sight in American cities of all sizes and Thailand hadn’t yet become the world’s favorite holiday destination. David Thompson was a young Australian who had fallen in love with Thai food and with the country where it was eaten every day, whose Thai restaurant in London had received a Michelin star the year before. Outside of the culinary world, nobody knew his name. His new book cost $45.00, the equivalent to $78.95 in today’s currency. Why wasn’t it a flop?

The best cookbooks are the ones that people read for pleasure. M. F. K. Fisher, Laurie Colwin, Brillat-Savarin, even Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, are picked up because they’re all interesting—and often fun—to read. David Thompson knew that and wrote a cookbook that’s an encyclopedia of Thailand’s history, geography, culture, and food, along with detailed instructions on how to create its recipes.

The recipes, he’s quick to assert, aren’t his. He was fortunate to become friends with some of Thailand’s aristocratic matriarchs who had been rigidly trained in the art of royal Thai cuisine. Their standards were unyielding and painstaking. The food they had eaten all their lives had three unassailable components: taste, texture, and seasoning. In pursuit of these attributes, they tolerated no shortcuts and no skimping. 

Their own training came from “memorial books,” that collected recipes beloved by the deceased noblewoman to whom the book was a tribute. They shared these with Thompson and he took their standards as his own. “The best food of any country, “ he says, “has always been centered around the court, and this was certainly true of Siam.” Although Thai Food doesn’t ignore street food and rural staples, it has a primary goal: to preserve how to make the food that was eaten by those who could afford the very best, “before it is eroded, altered, and modernized.”

Thompson is an exceptionally fine writer and an opinionated one who sternly proclaims that Thai cookery is “not an instant cuisine.”  “Substitutions and shortcuts in describing the food would not only be disrespectful but debasing.”

Canned coconut cream he deplores as “bastardized” and he tells exactly how to extract milk and cream from a fresh coconut. Fortunately he ends his description of this agonizing process by saying that using a food processor is allowed. Almost every recipe that he provides involves making a curry paste from scratch, a daunting process for which he grudgingly allows the use of a blender. “Be patient as you make a paste,” he cautions, “The blender, regrettably, was not created to make curry pastes and therefore may expire under such spicy exertions.” When he turns to recipes from the Muslim population of Southern Thailand, such as oxtail soup, he insists on freshly made curry powder for which he provides a list of ten ingredients, most of them ground on the spot. (Thank goodness, using “a clean coffee grinder” is okay.)

On one subject he is adamant. “A meal without rice is inconceivable.” He then provides the necessary components for a proper Thai meal: a relish, a soup, a curry, a salad (which, he says, is a “mistranslation” of what that dish truly--not the salad Westerners include in a meal but “ a lively assemblage of ingredients” whose “sprightliness adds savor and contrast”), and perhaps a simple stir-fried, grilled, or deep-fried dish. No need to worry about the food cooling before it’s served because “flavor is at its optimum just above room temperature.”

In spite of his royalist leanings, Thompson is remarkably generous with recipes for street snacks, dishes made by more plebeian mortals, and ones that have migrated from other countries. He tells how to make Chiang Mai sausage and its distant cousin that comes from the Northeast. He gives recipes for dishes that are clearly spawned from poverty--minced rabbit curry and curried fish innards (the innards are discarded after making a stock but even so, the name does startle.) He divulges secrets that aren’t commonly known--a convenient source for prepared spices is any Chinese medicine shop, since these are regarded as medicinal and are kept in wooden apothecary drawers.

All of this is embellished with stunning food photography, full-page and in color, almost suitable for framing and definitely appetite-enhancers. Thompson concludes with an extensive bibliography, six pages of sources written in English and four pages that list cookbooks and memorial books that are available only in Thai.

Thompson wrote this to create a record of food that might easily succumb to global influences and modernization. He succeeded. His passion is contagious and his writing is absolutely delightful, while providing an invaluable tutorial in what Thai food has been and what it may no longer be again. ~Janet Brown

Aflame by Pico Iyer (Riverhead Books)

In a year that has begun with the horror of conflagration, Aflame seems to be an unfortunate choice of title, but Pico Iyer earned the right to use it. On the day his California home burned to the ground, he was in his car, “surrounded by walls of flame, five stories high…not even thinking that a car might be the least safe hiding place of all.” With no place to go, he was sleeping on the floor at a friend’s house when another friend told him about a monastery in Big Sur. There he would find a room of his own with ocean views, “no obligations and a suggested donation of thirty dollars a night.”

It was thirty-three years ago when Iyer first learned “the silence of this place is as real and solid as sound.” He’s been a regular visitor every year since then, so devoted to it that when he leaves his home in Kyoto to come here, his wife tells him she’s worried. Another woman she could contend with but “how can I compete against a temple?”

Iyer is a student of many spiritual disciplines, a man who has known the Dalai Lama since he was a teenager when his father took him to Daramshala.  Espousing no particular religious faith, he respects them all. His mother, a renowned religious scholar, asks with a fair amount of alarm when she learns where her son has found refuge,”You’re not going to get converted?” Iyer reassures her that the order of monks whom he is living among are heavily influenced by Hindu and Buddhist teachings. Proselytization is not their stock in trade.

What they offer is the gift of silence, in a natural sanctuary. Although every Fire Season brings smoke and the threat of flames to their community, they describe the fires as “incandescent,” “radiant.” As neighbors to 900 acres of trees and brush, they coexist with the danger of infernos, seeing them as the cost of living near a gorgeous source of fuel. Iyer, who has come to them fresh from a fire that “left its mark” on him, discovers this way of thinking is contagious, even though the monastery’s view includes a sweep of scorched hills.

The monks whom he lives with are contemplative, not ones who observe rules of Trappist silence. They’re all busily maintaining the domestic and spiritual life of their community, without disturbing the visitors who have come to find peace. Iyer immediately and reflexively falls into his own work, writing four pages without stopping within the first twenty minutes of sitting in his room. In a place of “silence and emptiness and light,” one without screens of any kind, he becomes attuned to the world around him “in all its wild immediacy.”

While steeped in the company of books written by connoisseurs of silence, Kafka, Admiral Byrd, Henry Miller and Thomas Merton (who became unlikely friends with Miller praising Merton for looking as if he were a former convict), Iyer also meets monks who “stay calm amidst the flames” and “trust the dark.” Walking through “knife-sharp light,” he hears a voice singing in a chapel, sweet music he’s certain must be coming from a young woman. When he catches a glimpse of the singer, the person he sees is an old monk, one who is usually silent, “deep in adoration.” In his song, Iyer hears everything the man has given up, transformed into pure clarity.

In the pages of Aflame, Iyer offers up the loveliness and the serenity that he finds in this community of monks, along with apt quotes from other writers whom he taps into while he’s there. With him, we see “stars stream down as if shaken from a tumbler,” “a turquoise cove, white frothing against some rocks,” “great shafts of light between the conifers.” As we follow him, we have a glimpse of what it is to “be filled with everything around” us and we gain a measure of true quiet, the kind that keeps spirits from starvation.~Janet Brown

First Love by Rio Shimamoto, translated by Louise Heal Kawai (Honford Star)

Rio Shimamoto is a Japanese writer who was born in Tokyo in 1983. She was the winner of the Gunzo New Writers’ Prize in 2001 for her book Silhouette while she was still a high school student. She was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize in 2002 for her novella Little by Little which did not win but did win the Noma Literary New Face Prize. 

Shimamoto was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize four times and she was nominated twice for the Naoki Prize. Her book, First Love, was first published in 2018 by Bunshu Bunko. The English language version was translated by Louise Heal Kawai and published in 2024.

Kanna Hijiriyama is a young college student whose goal in life was to become a television news anchor. She has just been arrested by the police for stabbing her own father. When she was being taken into custody by the police, she said to them, “You’ll have to discover my motives for yourselves”. 

You would think that Hijiriyama would be the main focus of the story but she’s not. The true protagonist is Yuki Makabe, a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with hikikomori, socially withdrawn children. The book begins with Makabe being interviewed on a television program titled After Hours Children Clinic which is hosted by a man with four children of his own. 

When asked if she thinks there is anything particular that strikes her about hikikomori, she tells the interviewers and the viewers at home, “Everyone believes that love is something that you have to show your children constantly. But in fact, sometimes that can be the root of the problem”. This scene foreshadows the plot of the story which starts out as a murder mystery but evolves into a courtroom drama focusing on filial piety. 

Makade was approached by a publisher to write a book about Hijiriyama from a psychologist’s perspective. Around the same time, she is contacted by Kasho, her brother-in-law, who wants to discuss an upcoming case about a certain young woman. Kasho has been appointed the defense lawyer for Kanna Hijiriyama. 

Makabe and Kasho are still pondering the motive for the murder. Makabe can’t believe that her parents' opposition to her chosen profession is motive enough to kill her father. Makabe believes there’s something hidden deep within Hijiriyama that triggered her actions. Makabe also doesn’t want to sensationalize the murder which may have an influence on the case. 

As the story progresses, we learn that Kanna Hijiriyama’s father is a famous artist. He is also a strict disciplinarian. Her mother is portrayed as being subservient to her husband and is quite selfish herself. Although Hijiriyama’s case doesn’t seem to be all that complicated, Makabe still cannot make sense of Hijiriyama’s motive. She believes that a “young woman would have to be very determined to kill her own father”. 

She also asks herself, “Why did an ordinary student, in the middle of the regular job-hunting-season, suddenly exhibit such violence”. As Makabe and her brother-in-law dig deeper into the case, we learn more about Kanna Hijiriyama’s past. It becomes evident that she did not have a normal childhood which may have been the root cause for her to kill her father. 

The problem is how can the defense attorney prove that Kanna Hijiriyama was not in a right state of mind when the murder happened. Can he gain sympathy for her even though she admits that it was by her hand that her father died. And will Makabe’s expertise as a clinical psychologist help in any way? The answers may surprise you. ~Ernie Hoyt

ももこの話 (Momoko's Story) by Momoko Sakura *Japanese Text Only (Shueisha)

Momoko Sakura was first introduced here with her travel essay またたび ‘Mata Tabi’, (Asia by the Book, October 2004). She was first and foremost a manga artist, the creator of Chibi Maruko-chan which has become one of Japan’s longest running television anime series. 

ももこの話 (Momoko’s Story) is the third collection of essays in her “Those Days” series which mainly focuses on her memories and episodes from her childhood. These essays were originally published by Shueisha in 1998. The essays were compiled and released in book form in 2006. 

At the beginning of the year in 1998, Sakura gets a call from her editor asking when she wants to hole up in a hotel to focus on writing her next batch of essays. Instead of staying at the Park Hyatt, Sakura requests the Hotel New Otani which surprises her editor. 

Her reason for staying at the New Otani instead of the Park Hyatt was simple. Although she likes both hotels, she really enjoys the room service at the New Otani and was looking forward to eating Chinese fried rice. She would also be able to enjoy the Otani’s annin-dofu (almond tofu) for dessert. 

Sakura has her editor make reservations for mid-February. She says it was fortunate that one of her co-workers came to pick her up as she always brings a number of items with her even if it’s for a short stay. As Sakura is a tea and coffee drinker, she needs her tools to make good tea —tea strainer, a special mug and tea and she needs her tools to make a good cup of coffee - coffee beans, coffee liquor, and filters. 

She also brings her favorite sparkling wine, chocolate, konjac jelly (also known as devil’s tongue, voodoo lily, snake palm, or elephant yam), cigarettes, health foods, CDs and CD player, work tools, and clothes. While she is holed up in the hotel, the offices of Shueisha are moving to a bigger and more convenient location. By the time Sakura finishes writing half of the book's essays, the office move has been completed. 

Sakura wrote half of the book's essays in the five days she spent at the Hotel Otani. She felt relieved that she would have enough time to complete the essays for another book in a reasonable amount of time. So she goes back to gardening, visiting flower shops and repotting pots in the garden, .

After she finishes her work in the garden, she takes care of her tropical fish. After the fish, she turns to her pet turtle. Once that is done, then it’s off to the department store to buy spring clothing. On weekends, she plays with her son at the park. He is at the age when he’s beginng to think that Momoko Sakura was his own mother, but his mother denies it. He won’t figure out the truth for another couple of years. February turns to March, March turns to April. 

Sakura shows her face at the office around the middle of April. Her editor asks how the rest of her essays were coming. Sakura is truthful and says she hadn’t written anything in a while. Her editor said the deadline for the book is the twenty-fourth of this month. Sakura is at the office on the fourteenth. 

Oh no! Sakura has only ten days to complete the book. She is a little nervous about finishing the project but being a professional, she finishes in the nick of time. Some of the things she talks about from her childhood are being a kid without a huge appetite, trying to teach her father the words to popular songs at the time while taking a bath together, her own forgetfulness, trying to stay warm under the kotatsu in the winter, her kakizome homework which is a special piece of calligraphy for the new year, buying sweet potatoes from the sweet potato truck even though her parents ran a fruit and vegetable shop. 

Sakura’s memories of her childhood are nostalgic for anyone who loves the Showa era of Japan or had lived in Japan during that time. Sakura was born in 1965, so she was only two years younger than I was when my family moved to Tokyo from Greece. I grew up watching the same television shows and listened to the same music she did. These essays brought back memories of my own childhood.~Ernie Hoyt

Sunny by Colin O'Sullivan

Colin O’Sullivan is an Irish writer who currently resides in Aomori Prefecture in the Tohoku region of Japan. He first came to Japan to teach English but has been living in Japan for more than twenty years. 

Sunny was originally titled The Dark Manual and was published in 2018 in Ireland by Betimes Books. It was also adapted into a television series and was aired on Apple TV+ but cancelled just after one season. As I haven’t had a chance to see the show, I cannot comment or make comparisons to the book.

In the book, Susie Sakamoto is an Irish woman who married a Japanese man named Masahiko. They have an eight-year old son named Zen. Her husband works at a high tech firm called ImaTech, a firm that specializes in robotics. 

Susie’s husband and her son were on their way to Seoul, South Korea where Masa was going to give a talk at a conference. It was Zen’s first ever flight. Unfortunately, due to the trajectory and interference of  a North Korean missile, the plane was sent off course and ended up crashing into the ocean. 

In the Sakamotos home, there is Sunny.  Sunny is a silver, one-meter-tall homebot (Model SH.XL8). Its eyes are two red orbs. At night, if the house is dark, this is all you see: “two red orbs from deep black”. “These are its eyes. Scarlet, but bloodless. It makes them strange. Eyes with no blood, no whites, are strange. No irises, no change, strange”. 

Homebots are the way of the future. Although the robots are not yet sentient, they seem to be on their way and ImaTech is in the lead to make it a reality. However, Susie doesn’t care about Sunny. All it does for her is remind her that her husband and son are no longer with her. 

In her grief, all Susie wants to do is join her husband and son. Sunny is a constant reminder of her husband. It was he who programmed it. Masa programmed it to help Susie around the house. She hates its efficiency. She doesn’t really want to think too much about the robot and its efficiency but lately she cannot help herself from not thinking about it. She wants to turn it off permanently, but doesn’t know how. 

She is alone with Sunny all the time and this makes her angry. She hates being alone and feels great animosity towards the machine. She wonders why her husband programmed it with such an annoying voice and such proper manners. 

To deal with her grief and loneliness, Susie goes to a local bar where she has become friends with a woman named Mixxie. She drowns her sorrows in alcohol and whatever else she can get her hands on just to cope. This continues until she hears rumors of something called the “Dark Manual” at the bar which helps her come out of her depression. 

Now with the help of Mixxie and the bar’s owner, they go in search of the “Dark Manual”. But they aren’t the only ones looking for it. When Susie discovers that it was written by her own husband, she makes an even more desperate search for it, believing that it is hidden somewhere in her own house. 

There have been many stories dealing with the concept of humans vs. machines. This is just one in a long line of titles with a similar plot. At times Sunny is reminiscent of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and is an excellent cyber-thriller. However, more than half the story focuses on Susie Sakamoto’s grief and anger. 

You almost wish she would end her life just so we could stop feeling her hopelessness and despair. Fortunately, the book comes into its own after Susie becomes determined to find the “Dark Manual” but will she be able to shut down Sunny for good? Will Susie and friends find it before the others? Are the robots on the verge of thinking for themselves? And what will happen to Sunny if Susie does find the “Dark Manual”? ~Ernie Hoyt

Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East by Gita Mehta (Vintage Books)

Blame it on the Beatles. When they found their popularity was beginning to fade as the Rolling Stones climbed to the top of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll pantheon, they turned to the mystical world of India. “The kings of rock and roll abdicated. To Ravi Shankar and the Maharishi.” Meditation, gurus, and sitars became cool and India became the new Mecca for hip westerners. While those who couldn’t afford the plane fare took refuge in reading Siddhartha and listening to “raga rock” with its tabla and sitar influences, the more adventurous and affluent descended upon the Subcontinent, looking for whatever enlightenment might descend upon them there. 

Suddenly pseudo-Hindus took their place among the Europeans who had traveled the latest version of the Silk Road in search of cheap drugs. The two forms of quests collided and merged, providing a convenient source of revenue for Indian entrepreneurs on every economic level. “From accepting the fantasies it was a very short haul to…manufacturing them.” Mysticism became “a home industry,” supplied to hordes of Westerners who were fleeing materialism and wanted to experience the spiritual cleansing of poverty.

A French diplomat claimed that 230,000 of his country’s citizens had arrived in India by the 1970’s, with at least another 20,000 who were there without proper documentation. Their numbers were swelled by other Europeans, Americans, Australians, and Canadians, “in pursuit of either mind expansion or obscure salvations.” 

Jung had arrived long before this influx and correctly assessed the risks of becoming an expat in India, saying that India was the essence of naked realty while the West was cushioned by “a madhouse of abstractions.” Without that cushion, Westerners would “disintegrate in India.”

Gita Mehta, born in Delhi, educated at Cambridge, a documentary filmmaker and a war correspondent for NBC who covered the war in Bangladesh, was fascinated and amused by this influx of privileged Westerners who eagerly gave up all privileges in search of whatever truth was offered to them. Mehta, herself a product of privilege, brought her cynicism and sharp wit to what she termed “entering a haunted house on a dare,” an ashram in Poona where God presides. His future successor is embodied in a smaller God, a Swiss five-year-old who runs in feral splendor with the neglected offspring of the acolytes. Two thousand followers give all their attention to absorbing God’s wisdom, taking on Hindu names that they’re unable to pronounce properly. 

“Sacred knowledge in the hands of fools destroys,” Mehta quotes from the Upanishads. She’s told by a young woman who left India in a state of diagnosed insanity, “I should never have trusted gurus who wear Adidas running shoes.” Others happily divulge their past lives to her--”the Buddha’s charioteer,” claims a woman who in another realm of existence was the mother of her own husband. A young French woman who still nurses a daughter who boasts a full set of teeth, idly speculates that she could become the next Mother of the utopian world of Auroville, since she and the present leader share a nationality--”famous, like a Pope!” In the sacred city of Benares, spiritual enlightenment is enhanced by hypodermic needles. “Everywhere now,” Mehta is told by a German photographer, “you find morphine.” 

Mehta’s breezy gallows humor and anecdotal narrative may lead to questions of exaggerated quasi-fiction. However everything she’s written in Karma Cola is backed up by Akash Kapur’s Better to Have Gone (Asia by the Book, 3/24/2022). He and his wife both grew up in Auroville as its utopia was being formed. His account of this community is as harrowing as Mehta’s depiction of 20th century enlightenment. Even so, he and his family have returned to what seems to have become a successful experiment, embodying every goal longed for by the spiritual seekers whom Mehta has pilloried. This may be the ideal conclusion to her satirical dissection--that a new city has been created in India, one that flouts every form of Indian reality that the spiritual seekers once embraced.~Janet Brown

Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe (HarperCollins)

When Emerald goes broke while living a wild life in New York, her request for help is refused by her wealthy sister, Bai Suzhen. Still, after Emerald’s venture into the world of escort services goes dangerously awry, Suzhen flies from Singapore to rescue Emerald and bring her to the safety of the island republic.

Since Emerald is as unconventional as Su is prudent, Singapore’s sterility isn’t where she belongs. Swiftly she uncovers the hidden side of the Lion City, hanging out with lesbians and eating at street stalls, while horrifying Su’s husband, a native-born Singaporean with political ambitions.

Sister Snake might seem as if Crazy Rich Asians has collided with the 21st century version of Sex in the City if it wasn’t for its opening sentence. “Before they had legs, they had tails.” 

Dipping deep into the Chinese Legend of the White Snake and her green counterpart,  Amanda Lee Koe has brought the story of shape-shifters into the modern world. Su and Emerald left the West Lake of Hangzhou as beautiful women, transformed from snakes after seizing the lotus seeds of immortality and meditating for eight hundred years upon self-cultivation, an art that allows them to take on a human form. Sworn sisters since they first met, when the green viper saved the life of the white krait, Su’s desire to become human only took place because of Emerald’s love of risk. Once they become women, immortal, beautiful, and able to move from reptilian to human form at will, Su’s pragmatic and goal-driven nature continues to collide with Emerald’s restless hedonism. “Moderation was too human for her,” while Su believes this is the key to success. Throughout the centuries, the sisters alternately co-exist and clash. Emerald’s feral nature always lurks at her surface, while Su represses her own, to the point that she undergoes plastic surgery to put the beginning of wrinkles into her perfect and unaging face.

A trophy wife in Singapore who brought her own wealth to her marriage, Su is horrified to discover she’s pregnant, a fact that she confirms when she comes to rescue Emerald. Frightened that the life within her may be a snake instead of a human fetus, she gets rid of the person who might reveal her pregnancy, Emerald’s best friend, whom she murders with the instinctive and deadly skills of her inborn nature.

Suddenly the shape-shifters change their human emotional states, with Emerald forming deep and compassionate links with human friends while Su’s releases her innate savagery. Although separated by their new transformations, they are still sisters and they are, under their glamorous exteriors, still viper and krait.

When the story of the White Snake first came into being in the Tang Dynasty, it was, Koe says, intended as “a cautionary morality tale.” In her retelling, she was guided by the vision of “a hot snake queen with an existential crisis,” which she turned into a pair. Throughout Sister Snake, Koe gives glimpses of who these women have been in their reptilian lives, gradually enlarging and deepening these views of the snake sisters before their human lives threaten to drive them apart. The ending that closes this novel is startling, satisfying, and a lovely surprise, taking the story from a guise of romance and fantasy into something that’s completely fresh and new.

With Sister Snake, Amanda Lee Koe joins a new wave of novelists from Singapore, taking her place beside Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation (Asia by the Book, January 2022) and Kirsten Chen’s Counterfeit (Asia by the Book, June 2022). These powerful voices give vibrancy to fiction, with novels that take conventional forms and give them unexpected twists.~Janet Brown

Since Fukushima by Wago Ryoichi, translated by Jody Halebsky & Takahashi Ayako (Vagabond Press)

Wago Ryoichi is from Fukushima City in Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. He is a poet and also taught Japanese literature at a high school in Minami Soma, a city located just thirty kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. 

His book, Since Fukushima, is not just a book of poetry. The catastrophe changed his way of thinking. Since March 2011, his poetry focuses on the devastation and ecological disaster caused by 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, known in Japan as 3-11 or the Great East Japan Earthquake. 

The earthquake had a magnitude of 9.0 and the epicenter was about 80 miles east of Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture’s largest city. The quake triggered a tsunami that measured over forty feet in some areas of the Tohoku region. The hardest hit areas were Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima Prefectures. A fifty-foot tsunami wave hit the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant causing a nuclear meltdown. It is one of the worst nuclear accidents in history.

Pebbles of Poetry Part 1 and Party were compiled from Wago’s tweets on his Twitter account where he started posting five days after the quake. He tweeted his feelings, his thoughts, and what he saw. His first sets of tweets were from March 16, 2001 from 4:23 am to March 17, 12:24 am. His second set of tweets were from March 27 from 10:00 pm to 10:44 pm. 

At the time of the disaster, he was still conflicted. Should he evacuate with his wife and children, could he abandon his home and his parents. Wago tried persuading his parents to leave but they refused so he also decided to stay in Fukushima. His wife and his children had evacuated to a safer zone. 

The event not only changed his way of thinking, it changed his style of writing. His poems not only focus on the human toll of the disaster, but the destruction and the ruination of the land, the pets and livestock that were left behind, and also about the people who decided to remain, such as he and his parents. 

There are poems that are told from the perspective of a cow abandoned by its farmer, a poem about how contaminated soil was dug up, placed in plastic bags, only to be reburied in the same ground. 

Following the series of poems, there is a conversation with American poet and teacher Brenda Hillman and Wago Ryoichi discussing Activism and Poetry. The interview was conducted at Hillman's home by the translators of the book, Ayako Takahashi and Judy Halebsky.

The two poets discuss the role of poetry in activism and also in teaching. Wago says, “Much of what I learned through teaching connects directly to writing poetry”. On the other hand, Hillman says she writes her poetry in a “very strange dream world”. She says, “The world inside and the world of my brain and imagination are very separate from the outer practical world”. 

Hellman says most of her poems are very political so she sees teaching as “a bridge between these inner metaphoric states of the poet, and the outside world which is sometimes very numb to poetry and art”. 

It’s a very interesting discussion on how natural disasters can be taught through the use of poetry. I was living in Japan at the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake and I watched the breaking news on television and constantly checked updates on Twitter. Although I was living in Tokyo at the time, the disaster affected the entire country. One of my friends mentioned that people I’ve never met were willing to pay for my plane ticket home to the U.S. However, I can relate more to Wago as Japan is my adopted home and there was no way I was going to abandon my new home or leave my wife alone in the country. ~Ernie Hoyt

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob (New World, Random House)

Barack Obama, America’s first biracial president, is nearing the end of his second term in office when Mira Jacob’s six-year-old son Z becomes aware of differences in skin color. Discovering that Michael Jackson, his idol, wasn’t born with fair skin, he wonders if his own white father had once been brown, as he and his mother are. When Michael Brown is killed in Ferguson, Z asks his mother if white people are afraid of those who are brown and follows it up with “Is Daddy afraid of us?”

Mira has been aware of skin color all her life. Her parents left India soon after they were married and made their home in New Mexico where “they were the third Indian family to move into the state.” Mira and her brother are born in Albuquerque, where they grow up assailed by questions and opinions about their brown skin. While their classmates want to know if they’re “Indian like feathers or Indian like dots,” when they go to meet their relatives in India, Mira, browner than her brother or parents is characterized as “a darkie.” 

“It makes you seem like a servant,” a cousin explains, “ and the good boys only want to marry wheatish girls so everyone is just feeling bad for your parents.”

“I’d been the wrong color in America my whole life,” Mira says, “but it hurt worse somehow, knowing it was the same in a country full of people who (I had thought) looked like me.”

Mira’s parents had never had a conversation together until after their arranged marriage. A happily-wedded couple, they’re certain the same solution will work for their daughter. Instead while living in New York City, Mira meets a man who had been her classmate in elementary school. When they marry, both Mira’s Christian parents and Jed’s Jewish ones are “warm and welcoming.”

Then in 2016 politics begins to divide them. Clinton versus Trump draws lines between people who love each other. Muslims face deportation and bigotry comes out into the open. What once were “microaggressions” flare into racial attacks. Mira is assaulted on a subway while none of the other passengers come to her aid. At a party given by her mother-in-law, some of the guests look at her skin and assume she’s one of the household help. And for Z’s new questions, Mira struggles to find answers.

Published in 2019, Good Talk is as painful to read now as it was when it was first written. When one of Mira’s friends asks in 2016, “Damn. What are we doing to the babies,” the question scalds with fresh urgency. When Mira tells her husband how she has copied his confidence in order to walk into a room alone but now the rooms are harder to get into, her pain echoes with renewed clarity.

Composed in the form of graphic literature with its art done by Mira herself, Good Talk conveys emotions and behavior through its drawings as vividly as it does in its honest and thoughtful conversations. This is a book that needs to be read and reread, staying in print and placed front and center on shelves in libraries and bookstores. It offers no easy answers but shows a thousand avenues for discussions, now more than ever.~Janet Brown

Masquerade by Mike Fu (Tin House)

Anyone who has made a round-trip flight across the Pacific knows the price exacted by these hours on a plane. The traveler often loses control of ordinary life at the end of these journeys, sleeping and waking at times far from one’s normal schedule, feeling ravenous hunger at four in the morning, finding the world at large has taken on an unfamiliar, almost hallucinatory, cast. “A legal drug,” Pico Iyer has called jet lag and when mixed with illegal ones or even alcohol, it removes even more controls.

Meadow Liu is well acquainted with jet lag. He’s been flying back and forth between the U.S. and Shanghai once or twice a year since he was ten years old. Even so he’s always felt that “he’s lost a piece of himself on these journeys” and on this latest one he has the feeling that not only is he “intensely disconnected” from everything he knows, he’s become “31 going on 13”.

He has many reasons to feel this way. His entire life has become a liminal space. He was given a job as bartender in a hip Brooklyn hangout after he abandoned his academic career. He was forced to move from his apartment and is now plant-sitting for Selma, an artist who is so perfect she seems like a “splendid illusion.” He was recently ghosted by a man who seemed to be the perfect boyfriend until he vanished without a word of explanation. To cope with his floating existence, Meadow drinks a lot and takes every drug that comes his way.

To complicate things even more, while searching for his passport several hours before his flight, he comes across an old book on Selma’s shelves. Drawn to it because the author and he have the same name, he’s intrigued that the story takes place in Shanghai, where he himself is going. Tossing it into his carry-on, he forgets about it in the flurry of living with his parents as their temporary guest and making contact with Selma who is here to launch an art show.

When he dips into the novel that he borrowed, he’s surprised that he and the narrator seem to be living parallel lives, with each of them attending decadent Shanghai parties. Things become stranger when he returns to Brooklyn. The book disappears and resurfaces at odd intervals. A man who shows up at closing time in Meadow’s workplace warns him to “pay attention to symbols,” an admonition that he later finds is also given to the narrator of the peculiar book.  Before this warning is given, Meadow finds a white switchblade that’s been left behind on one of the bar’s tables. The same knife is given to the narrator in the novel.

Selma has mysteriously vanished from Shanghai so Meadow is unable to ask her about the eerie coincidences that he’s found in the book that she owns. Meanwhile his life becomes increasingly bizarre, with a bedroom mirror almost liquefying as he stands before it one sleepless night. He’s followed by strangers as he makes his way through New York. Awakened by pounding on the apartment door one night, he looks out through the peephole and sees Selma standing there, only to have her disappear from view. Confronted with someone who looks disturbingly like him, Meadow follows his double who leads him to an off-off-Broadway theater. A poster near the theater’s entrance has photos of the actors. One of them is the man who ghosted Meadow.

And as his life becomes increasingly unhinged, Meadow finds it’s being replicated, page by page,  in the novel written by the man who shares his name.

Is this being scripted and manipulated by Selma, a woman who has always been enigmatic or is Meadow immersed in a form of psychosis that he’s nourished with cocktails, drugs, and jet lag? Is this a puzzle he’s meant to solve or is it a temporary state, a “translucent jelly,” that will eventually fade away?

Mike Fu is a translator based in Japan who in 2019 translated Sanmao’s classic travelogue, Stories of the Sahara (Asia by the Book, April 2021)  into English. Masquerade is his first novel, one into which he seems to have poured everything he’s ever observed and experienced. A smart writer and a skillful observer, Fu’s gift of creating atmosphere along with his well-turned phrases (“thunder purred with the malice of a sleeping cat”) make this book a compelling one—with an annoying ending.  As the narrator of the novel within this novel concludes, “If any trace of doubt remains--then write this story anew.” Every reader of Masquerade is given a chance to create their own explanation, their own end to the story.~Janet Brown