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, 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 being 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 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 got a call from her editor asking when she wanted to holed up in a hotel to focus on writing her next batch of essays. Instead of staying at the Park Hyatt, Sakura requested the Hotel Otani which surprised 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 for to eating Chinese fried rice. She would also be able to enjoy the Otani’s annin-dofu (almond tofu) for dessert. 

Sakura had her editor make reservations for mid-February. She said it was fortunate that one of 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, filters, etc. 

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 being holed up in the hotel, the offices of Shueisha were moving to a bigger and more convenient location. By the time Sakura finished writing half of the book's essays, the office move had 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 went back to gardening, went to flower shops, repotting pots in the garden, etc.

After finishing taking care of the garden, she took care of her tropical fish. After the fish, her pet turtle. Once that was done, then it was off to the department store to buy spring clothing. On weekends, she would play with her son at the park. He was at the age when he began to think that Momoko Sakura was his own mother. February turned to March, March turned to April. 

Sakura showed her face at the office around the middle of April. Her editor asked how the rest of her essays were coming. At the time, Sakura was truthful and said she hadn’t written any in a while. Her editor said the deadline for the book is the twenty-fourth of this month. Sakura was at the office on the fourteenth. 

Oh no! Sakura had only ten days to complete the book. She was a little nervous about finishing the project but being a professional, she finished in the nick of time. Some of the things she talked about from her childhood were 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 me when my family moved to Tokyo from Greece. Which means 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. It isn’t 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 sex, drugs, and rock and roll, 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 and 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,” 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 became 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, with Emerald’s feral nature always lurking 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. In her fear that the life within her may be a snake, not a human fetus, she kills the person who might reveal her pregnancy, a man who is Emerald’s best friend, whom she murders with the instinctive and deadly skills of her inborn nature.

Suddenly the shape-shifters change into each other’s human emotional states, with Emerald’s deep and compassionate links with human friends and Su’s release of 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 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 10:00pm to 10:44pm. 

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.” Their son and daughter were born in Albuquerque, where they grew 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 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 and 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 now as it was when it was 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.

Written as graphic literature, illustrated by Mira Jacobs, 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 a thousand avenues for discussions, now more than ever.~Janet Brown