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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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