The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit and Peril by Sarah Stodola (HarperCollins)

Blame it on the British. Stuck on their soggy little island with its chilly shoreline, bordered by a sea that could induce hypothermia if an intrepid adventurer immersed so much as a single toe into its frigid waves, once they learned that a beach could be pleasant, there was no stopping them. The south of France, the coast of Italy, even England’s sworn foe, Spain, were suddenly prime targets for English bodies yearning to be warm. Time spent on a beach became the fashion for cold and restless residents of northern countries until at last the words “vacation” and “beach” became almost synonymous, first only for the wealthy and then for the masses. Today there are over 7000 beach resorts on our planet, not including the ones that have fewer than ten rooms or aren’t directly on the beach.

When the invention of the air conditioner tamed the “soupy heat” of the tropics, new destinations opened up for the world’s sun-worshippers. First came the readers of Lonely Planet guides, followed by people with more money to spend who were reluctant to relinquish the comfort they were used to. Beach shacks were supplanted by more comfortable accommodations, built for the travelers who wanted to be “far from home while never having left.”  Local residents soon realized that their beaches yielded more money than any of their agricultural efforts and suddenly resorts studded coastlines all over the world.

Sarah Stodola, like many other tourists, became enthralled with the concept of a beach vacation when she went to Southeast Asia. Although she surveys seaside destinations from the Jersey Shore to Senegal, the bulk of her explorations take place in tropical Asia. This is where resorts range from rustic bungalows for surfers to entire islands that only the wealthy can afford, where the cheapest accommodations begin at $2,200 a night. 

People will pay for solitude. Some pay with the discomfort of discovering an undeveloped paradise while others yearn for “barefoot luxury,” “peace without challenges,” and a “frictionless experience.” Asia has both extremes and everything in between the two. It also holds the largest number of potential tourists. Before the advent of Covid, in 2018 150 million Chinese tourists traveled outside their borders and enriched the tourist industry with $255 billion dollars in 2019. China,” Stodola speculates, “has the power to remake the global tourism industry,” with India as a close contender.

Chinese travelers are already changing the beaches of Vietnam, their “fourth-most-visited destination, after Thailand, Japan, and South Korea.” (In 2017 4 million Chinese descended upon this small country.) Most of the Chinese tourists flock to Vietnam’s two thousand miles of coastline, where, a developer says, “you see a new resort opening every three months.” The perils of over-development have been slowed by Covid but the signs are clearly there. Dams have prevented the replenishment of beach sand while illegal sand mining takes place offshore with impunity. It’s a small indication of how the ravenous appetite for beach holidays are endangering the coastlines of the world.

An island in Malaysia points the way that disaster could be averted. One locally-run NGO is making recycling an island-wide practice. A machine that cost only $6000 takes empty beer bottles and turns them into sand. This is mixed with concrete and used in the island’s construction projects, eliminating the need to import expensive sand from outside the island and making illegal sand mining from the sea an irrelevant operation. With thousands of beer bottles emptied constantly by tourists, this is a vastly sustainable solution.

Others are less palatable and more difficult to bring into being. With a world full of paradise-seekers who are accustomed to jumping on planes to get what they want, how to stuff that genie back in the bottle by discouraging long-haul flights? Maybe by making beach holidays what they were at their very beginning, a privilege reserved for the wealthy.~Janet Brown

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot (Picador)

A dimly lit basement cafe with sepia walls, no windows, no air conditioning, three antique clocks that each show a different time, with seating for no more than nine customers at a time, Funiculi Funicula is as old-fashioned as the song that gave the place its name. Tokyo is filled with far more attractive places where there are far more choices of coffee, so why do people persist in coming to this drab little spot where the owner will use only Ethiopian mocha beans, the kind that makes a cup of bitter coffee? 

Although it’s received no publicity since an article in the paper years ago, this cafe’s famous. It’s the only spot in Tokyo where customers are promised a journey into the past, if they meet all of the stringent conditions for doing this. A prospective time-traveler must always sit on a stool at the counter which is almost always occupied, vacated only when the seated woman gets up to use the toilet. The traveler must order coffee and never leave this seat during their adventure. They can only meet someone who has at one time visited the cafe and they can’t change the present during their visit to the past. Most important is the timing involved. If they don’t drink all of their coffee before it gets cold, they will return to their present life as a ghost.

Within this rigid framework blooms four poignant stories of coffee drinkers who have submitted to all of the restrictions. A young woman goes back in time to say the words that she was unable to speak before, ones that can’t change the present but may, in the future, possibly bring back the man she loves. Others learn how to live with present tragedies, a fatal automobile accident that takes place in an estranged family, a memory so fogged by aging that a wife must reintroduce herself again and again to the husband she’s lived with for decades. Then comes the impossible journeys that no one has ever made before. A daughter comes from the future to take a photograph of her dead mother and a mother goes into the future for a glimpse of the daughter she will never know. 

Anchoring these sweet and charming episodes are the cafe staff, the mysterious woman who rarely leaves her seat, and the cafe itself which is gradually revealed to be the sort of sanctuary that every urban resident longs for—a refuge that’s quiet, leisurely, and comfortable, where eventually customers and staff become friends. Even if the only wish that’s granted is a plate of toast and a cup of coffee, in a metropolis like Tokyo this can be enough.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi at first wrote this novella as a play but the cafe and its denizens weren’t ready to leave his imagination. Before the Coffee Gets Cold was quickly followed by a sequel. Tales from the Cafe (Asia by the Book, February 2022). Recently the third volume in the series, Before Your Memory Fades, appeared in the U.S. with Last Chance to Say Goodbye slated for its American debut at the end of this year. 

Kawaguchi’s novellas have tapped into the regret and sadness of the Covid era with his delightful fantasies, each one posing the question, “If you could go back, who would you want to meet?” No matter how cynical any of his readers may be when they first open a book in this series, they’ll be possessed by that question long before they turn the last page.~Janet Brown

A Backward Place by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Fireside Book)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Germany. She married an Indian national and moved to New Delhi in 1951. She wrote many novels and several screenplays, including Room with a View which won an Academy Award. She is also the recipient of the Booker Prize for Fiction for her 1975 novel Heat and Dust. 

A Backward Place, which was originally published in 1965, is set in India, a comedic look at the life of a group of expats and one Indian national. It is the story of their lives, their hopes and dreams, and is also full of everyday drama which anybody can relate to. 

Bal, the Indian national and protagonist of the story, is a struggling young actor, who dreams of making it big in the theater. Although he is dedicated to his profession, he is married and has two children he must support. 

His wife, Judy, is an Englishwoman who works in a small office for the Cultural Dais and helps to support the family. While Bal is a dreamer, Judy is pragmatic and a realist. As Judy works with government officials and other important and wealthy people, Bal tries to convince her to receive support from the Cultural Dais in starting a new theater troupe and production. 

Judy is friends with Etta, a woman originally from Hungary who carries the attitude of a Parisian. She is not as young as she once used to be, tries desperately to hang on to her youth, and continues to use her charm and body to get the men around her to do her bidding. She still retains a colonial attitude and looks down on the natives while speaking her mind. 

Then there is Clarissa, a young woman who left her native Britain because she couldn’t stand the customs and attitudes of her own country. She feels as if she is more Indian than most Indians. For some reason, Clarissa enjoys being friends with the mean and spiteful Etta.

Finally, there are the Hochstadts, a German couple who had settled in England many years ago. They often think of themselves as English but still speak the language with a thick German accent and look very central European. Dr. Franz Hochstadt has accepted a two year appointment in India teaching economics at the University as an exchange professor. 

The story opens with Etta telling Judy she ought to leave her husband. Judy, who often comes off as timid or naive, is thrilled. Although she has no intention of leaving her husband, hearing Etta say it makes her feel worldly and proud. Judy loves visiting Etta because the older woman’s home is more elegant than her own. 

Judy’s husband tells her that he must work one particular evening. He tells her that he was called by the great Bollywood actor Kishan Kumar. Judy had met Kumar previously and did not like him. She knew he was a successful film star and has an entourage of hangers-on. Bal is one of them. 

The lives of these six characters take on a life of their own. Judy does get the Cultural Dais to support creating a new theater group, mostly at the persistent request of Bal, but when Bal’s dream seems to be coming to fruition, he tells Judy that he doesn’t want any part of it. Kishan Kumar has called him to Bombay with the promise of starting a new movie production office there. Now Bal is trying to convince Judy and the kids to move to Bombay. 

The story will make you laugh, will make you cry, and at times will even make you angry. If a story can make you feel all these emotions, you know you are in for a good ride and no matter what the outcome, you can’t help but support all the characters in their endeavors. 

Bal will certainly make you want to follow your dream! ~Ernie Hoyt

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff (Ballantine Books)

Nobody in her village is precisely sure of how to categorize Geeta. Is she a widow? Is she a witch? Is she a murderer? Or perhaps she’s all three possibilities rolled into one. 

The only true fact that everyone can agree upon is that several years ago, Geeta’s abusive husband Ramesh disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again.  Finding—or creating—an explanation for this has kept the village gossips busy ever since and Geeta’s tarnished reputation has kept her old friends at a distance. 

That Geeta doesn’t seem to miss her husband allows the stories about her to take on an even darker shadow. She has developed her own jewelry business and appears to be more than happy to live alone. Some of her neighbors call her a churel, possessed by a demon that eats children and makes both men and women unable to come up with replacement offspring. Others speculate that she must be “mixed with dirt,” abandoned because she had betrayed Ramesh with other men. However many women secretly envy her. Geeta has no husband to drink up her earnings, to beat her, or to make any demands upon her at all. At last one of the unhappy wives comes to her, begging that she “remove my nose ring,” a veiled plea to get rid of the woman’s husband the way Geeta is rumored to have disposed of her own. Suddenly a woman who was happy to have been abandoned becomes a reluctant murderer, not once but twice, at the behest of women who are trapped in miserable marriages.

With two murders to her credit, Geeta loses the pariah status bestowed upon her with her supposed killing of Ramesh. She even acquires a male admirer. In spite of her pangs of guilt and the threat of imprisonment, her life is good—until Ramesh shows up, alive and repentant, eager to resume his marital privileges and take his share of his wife’s financial success.

This is a promising beginning to a novel that’s quickly burdened with too many characters all talking at once and far too many social issues. Domestic violence, the injustices of the caste system, the preference for light skin over dark, the dangers of adulterated booze sold at a profit, the history of the Bandit Queen Phoolan who became an outlaw to wreak revenge after she had been gang-raped, even the intricacies of village council politics are all tossed into what at first seemed to be a pleasant little black comedy with feminist undertones. 

If that weren’t enough to sink the story, it quickly becomes burdened with a surfeit of unnecessary dialogue and an overdose of slapstick plot twists, giving the impression that Parini Shroff might have originally intended this to be a movie script or a television situation comedy. Even its dramatic ending falls prey to a never-ending conversation between almost all of the leading characters. What should have been suspenseful and maybe even thrilling goes on for an interminable thirty-five pages of threats and quips until at last someone mercifully takes action.

It’s tempting to tell San Francisco attorney Shroff not to quit her day job, but that would be cruel. Instead let’s hope that she concentrates on what she seems to do best, creating entertainment content where her crowd of characters and their jumbled lives will find themselves perfectly at home.~Janet Brown

その本は (Sonohonwa) by ヨシタケシンスケ (Shinsuke Yoshitaka) and 又吉直樹 (Naoki Matayoshi) (ポプラ社）

Sonohonwa is a delightful and magical fairytale that would appeal to book lovers all over the world. Unfortunately, it is only available in Japanese. The title translates into English as About that Book… It was written by popular children’s book writer and illustrator Shunsuke Yoshitake and the Akutagawa prize recipient who is one half of the comedy duo Peace, Naoki Matayoshi. 

It is the story of a kingdom whose elderly king loves to read books. However, in his old age, his vision is no longer what it used to be and he is nearly blind. The king summoned two of his subjects to the castle and said to them, “I love books. I’ve read many books in my lifetime. I’ve read almost every book there is to read. But now my eyesight is bad and I can no longer read books. Still, I love books. So I want to listen to more books. Therefore, I command you to go out into the world, find and talk to people about the world’s most fascinating books. Then, come back and tell me about all those books.”

So the men are given money and provisions and set out on their journey. They wander the world, collecting stories of the most fascinating books. The men return to the castle a year later. The king can no longer get out of bed but he can hear well, so the two men take turns each night, telling the king about the books they heard about. 

On the first night, one of the men tells the king about the fastest book in the world. It’s so fast that nobody can catch up and read it. The people get a cheetah to run after it just to read the cover. But the people are wondering how to get the cheetah to tell them what the book title was. Fortunately, that particular book has a twin. The shape and the contents are nearly the same. The book is being chased by the police and is finally arrested at the house of Volume 8. They had known that the book only had seven volumes.

But what’s the name of the book? The storyteller gives the king a hint. He said the book stretches from north to south, many people live in it, and it’s located in the middle of an ocean. He also told the king, in it you can see cherry blossoms in the spring, a Star Festival is celebrated in the summer, the leaves change colors in the autumn, and in the winter, people sit under a kotatsu while eating oranges. In the end, the storyteller tells the king, “about that book.” iIt is Ni-Hon (hon being the Japanese word for book). Nihon → Nippon → Japan!

The other storyteller tells the king about a book related to music. This story also uses a play on words. He tells the king sonohonwa (so no hon wa), which translates to, “The so book” can be found between the fa book and la books, which of course are part of the Do-Re-Mi solfege.

After the two men take turns telling the king all the stories, the king assembles them into one book. He tells the two men, “Yahari hon wa omoshiroi!” which roughly translates to, “It’s just as I thought, books are interesting.” On the following day, the king passes away with a satisfied look on his face. 

However, six months after their stories were assembled and published into one book, a surprising fact comes to light. The two men had never left their homes. They used the money the king gave them for their own living expenses and made up all the stories they told the king. They are taken to court and found guilty of two charges—not using the king’s money properly and lying to the king. The judge asks the two men if they had any final words they wanted to say. The two think about it and at the same time say, “About that book…”

You would be hard put to enjoy the story unless you have a firm grasp of the Japanese language. Many of the stories use puns and wordplay which would get lost in translation.  It reminded me of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, Khan asks Polo to tell him about one city he has never mentioned directly—his hometown. Polo responds by saying, “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” 

Of course Polo did travel all over the world so Khan would find it difficult to doubt Polo’s experiences. In the same way, the King believed that the two men traveled the world and collected all those stories. The King died a happy man which just goes to show you how strong the power of words are. ~Ernie Hoyt

Not Yo' Butterfly by Nobuko Miyamoto (University of California Press)

Misao was a picture bride who arrived in the U.S. to marry a man she’d never met in 1912. By 1914, she had two daughters, both born in Oakland, whom she sent to live with her parents in Japan for ten years. Soon after the girls returned to her, Misao died, leaving them to run the family household in a country they’d been separated from during their formative years.

Hatsue, the oldest, had been molded into a traditional Japanese girl but her younger sister Mitsue called herself Mitzi, studied fashion design, and insisted on marrying for love. The man she loved was half Japanese and half Caucasian, the son of a Mormon farm girl from Idaho who had fallen in love with a Japanese laborer and married him in spite of anti-miscegenation laws. Mitzi was as determined as her future husband’s mother had ever been. She defied her father, married the man of her choice, and gave birth to their first child two years before President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.

“I was born where I didn’t belong. At two, I became the enemy.” Although Nobuko’s first memories were of the hastily cobbled together internment camp at the Santa Anita racetrack in which the confined prisoners were housed in horse stalls, Mitzi knew a way out. Telling the authorities that her father-in-law had a farm in Idaho that her family could go to, she discovered that not only was the man she spoke to from Idaho, he had gone to the controversial wedding of her husband’s parents. Once again two rebellious women changed the life of Nobuko Joanne, known as Jojo. The little girl was given the freedom of farm life and the attention of everyone around her. She soon showed a love of music that seemed to pour into her and came out in the motions of dance.

When the war was over and the Miyamoto family returned to California, Mitzi turned her own artistic ambitions toward her daughter. Jojo was given tap lessons, ballet training, and began going to professional auditions by the time she was fourteen. At fifteen she was dancing in the filmed version of The King and I and a year after high school graduation, she was on her way to New York alone as a cast member of the Broadway musical, Flower Drum Song. Jojo became known as JoAnne Miya and the stage became her natural habitat—until she met an Italian filmmaker with an ambition to make a documentary about the Black Panthers.

This is how a rebel became a revolutionary. JoAnne Miya met and immediately gravitated to Yuri Kochiyama, the Japanese American activist who held Malcolm X on the night he was killed. Through this friendship she met the Black community leader who would become the father of her child and who insisted she return to her Japanese name, Nobuko. The glamorous performer became a protest singer who wrote songs that came from her own history and that of her parents, songs of rebellion that galvanized young Asian Americans and drew the attention of Yoko Ono and John Lennon.

This autobiography is a stunning social history, showing how America’s crucible of racism can bring rebellion into full flame in three generations, from a picture bride to a performer who uses her art to buttress her principles. It casts a bright light upon Asian, Black, and Latine activists, working together to bring change and transform their country.~Janet Brown