All the Way to the Tigers by Mary Morris (Doubleday, release date June 6, 2020)

When Mary Morris shatters her ankle in seven places, she asks her surgeon, “Will I be able to go to Morocco in six weeks?” Instead she spends a year immobile and after another year she knows she’s unable to hike as much as a mile--she can’t even walk on a beach.

A travel writer and adventurer, Morris has been stuck at home far too long, suffering from travel envy. “I covet journeys,” she confesses. Turning to her husband, she says, “I have to get away”—and she knows where. During her motionless time, she read Death in Venice and was struck by the passage, “He would go on a journey. Not far. Not all the way to the tigers.” Reading these words over and over, Morris knows what she will do when she can walk again. She’s going all the way to the tigers.

To Morris, all the way doesn’t mean the heavily touristed area of Rajasthan. “Not Rajasthan, not Jaipur, no Taj Mahal,” she firmly tells her travel agent. Instead she heads for Madhya Pradesh in central India to the Pench Tiger Reserve, a place so cold “the bananas have frozen on their stems.” There’s no heat in her hotel except for the hot water bottle that Morris tossed into her suitcase instead of the warm clothing she was certain she wouldn’t need. Her throat hurts, her head aches, her cough is inexorable, and she has a six a.m. appointment with a car and driver that will take her off in search of the tigers. 

This could easily become a tiresome account of a white lady’s buffered travels to satisfy a whim but Morris is far too skilled a writer to let this happen. Her strength is in describing what she sees and everything she sees is interesting to her. “Real travelers, like real writers, move through the world like a child. With a child’s sense of wonder and surprise.” Although the sight of a tiger becomes more improbable with every tigerless day, Morris begins not to care. Instead she  marvels at the jackals and monkeys, the white-spotted and sambar deer, the birds with turquoise and black feathers and the ones with purple plumes. With lush and lyrical language, she makes the lushness that surrounds her palpable and thoroughly intoxicating.

In the same way, she intertwines stories of her life with her quest for the tigers in a quilt that is almost seamless, with colors that never jar. Her mother throwing her strings of pearls into the Mediterranean sea, laughing as she says. “I’ve been wearing them too long,” mirrors Morris’s release of her idealized tiger as she meanders, lost yet still observant, through a Mumbai slum.

“I am shaken by this fragile world,” she says while realizing that she will always carry the curse God gave to Cain: “You will be a restless wanderer.” Morris has turned that curse into the gift of “waking up each day afresh,” reaching for her passport, and heading off into a world that for her will always be new.~Janet Brown

The Emissary by Yoko Tawada (New Directions)

Yoko Towada’s satirical novel The Emissary tells the story of what life might be like in Japan “after suffering a massive, irreparable disaster.” Originally published as Kentoshi in the Japanese language in 2014. The English version was translated by Margaret Mitsutani in 2018. We can surmise that Towada is imagining a post-Fukushima Japan with greater disastrous results. In this new world, Japan has isolated itself from the world. People are no longer able to travel freely, the country accepts no immigrants and even domestic travel is strictly regulated. In this dystopian future, “children are born so weak they can barely walk.” Only the elderly thrive. The elderly remain healthy and active, living beyond their hundred years. People in their seventies and eighties are considered the “young elderly” who also continue to work and provide for their children.

Mumei, which means “no name” in Japanese, lives with his great-grandfather Yoshiro who constantly worries over Mumei. Mumei may be “frail and gray-haired, but he is a beacon of hope: full of wit and free of self-pity.”  Yoshiro has his own routine. Every morning he goes for a run along a riverbank for about a half hour with a dog that he rents from Rent-a-Dog place. One of the biggest changes in the new Japan is how the use of foreign words were no longer being used. The change is evident when we are told, “Long ago, this sort of purposeless running was referred to as jogging.” “It was now called loping down.”  The term physical examination was also no longer being used, it is now called a monthly lookover. 

Everyday life continues. Mumei goes to school. People go to work - mostly the elderly. At a bakery, the baker tells Yoshiro the even older man making bread is his uncle. The baker tells Yoshiro that his uncle says, “Anyone over a hundred doesn’t need to rest anymore.” He tells Yoshiro that his uncle scolds him for even suggesting to take a break. The two talk about an odd concept called retirement which they reminisced as a “way of handing jobs over to younger people”. They talked about how many breads used to be called German bread or French bread and don’t they find it strange that “bread originally came from Europe, but for some reason it’s still allowed.”

Yoshiro’s was thinking about the talk with the baker as he was heating soy milk for Mumei. “Mumei’s teeth were so soft he couldn’t eat bread unless it was softened by steeping.”  He was reminded of the time when he had seen Mumei’s baby teeth “drop out one after another like pomegranate pulp, leaving his mouth smeared with pulp.”  Most children were not able to absorb the calcium their bodies need and Yoshiro thought that humankind might evolve into a toothless species. Sensing his great-grandfather’s concern, Mumei says “You manage to eat plenty without teeth, Great-Grandpa, and look how healthy you are.” Mumei doesn’t seem to regard his loss of teeth as a tragedy and still manages to look on the bright side of things.

When Mumei reaches the age of fifteen, he can no longer walk on his own and is confined to a wheelchair. He knew that soon, he would also need a breathing machine to keep him alive. Around this time, Mumei is approached by his elementary school teacher, Mr. Yoshitani. Yoshitani had been keeping an eye on Mumei for years as he saw in Mumei, the potential to become an emissary. He felt that Mumei would be old enough to understand. He explained to Mumei that “to send emissaries abroad was not so forbidden as to be considered a crime.” and the main purpose for sending emissaries to other countries was to let them be able to “thoroughly research the state of Japanese children’s health” in the event that a similar occurrence happens in other countries.

It’s a thought-provoking story to make you wonder what the future will hold if the world could not be bequeathed to a younger generation. The story stays with you long after you have finished reading it. ~Ernie Hoyt

Hiroshima Notes by Kenzaburo Oe (Grove)

In 1965, Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe accepted an offer to write about Hiroshima and its people twenty years after the dropping of the Atomic Bomb. Hiroshima Notes is his thoughts and reactions to the ongoing political situation concerning the nuclear arms race. He would interview and hear testimony of atomic bomb survivors and also the victims of radiation sickness, a new disease that was then unknown to the world. The notes were originally serialized in a monthly journal called Sekai which translates to “world” and were taken over a two year period between August of 1963 through May of 1965. It was first published in Japanese by Iwanami Shoten in 1965. This current English edition was published in 1995 and was translated by David Swain and Toshi Yonezawa. It also includes a new introduction by Oe himself.

Oe’s first trip to Hiroshima was in August of 1963. The Ninth World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs was to be held but was unbelievably disorganized and Oe himself wondered if the conference was going to be held at all. The Directors organizing the event have been holding secret meetings and even the press were kept out. After the end of the war and with the proliferation of nuclear arms, in 1958 anti-nuclear conferences began to appear around the world. One of the main contentions about the Ninth World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs was the use of “any country”. This rift caused a split in the anti-nuclear movement into the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyo) and the Japan Congress against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikin). The dispute was over “whether to oppose nuclear tests by ‘any country’, capitalist or socialist, and over the value of the 1963 Limited Nuclear Test-ban Treaty.”

In these very personal essays, Oe mentions in his Introduction to this edition that he once didn’t believe in an old saying that “One’s whole life can be decided by the events of a few days.” However, as he reminisces about his visits to Hiroshima, he now believes it does. Before going to Hiroshima, Oe became a father. Unfortunately, his son was born with severe disability. The doctors told him, even if they operate, the chances of his son leading a normal life was not likely. It was Oe’s interviews with Atomic bomb victims who gave him the courage to not abandon his child and also changed his way of thinking. Oe often speaks of the “dignity” of the Hiroshima A-bomb victims - as “people who did not commit suicide in spite of everything.”

One of the most disturbing and thought-provoking essays is how Oe says that “people want to erase the memory of Hiroshima”. Oe says it’s not just the Americans but people all over the world want to forget. Oe states references a paper that stated “Hiroshima is the prime example not of the power of atomic weapons but of the misery they cause.”  Oe continues to tell us that “Powerful leaders in the East and West insist on maintaining nuclear arms as a means of preserving the peace.” 

The argument against the use of nuclear power remains relevant today, years after Oe’s collection of essays. In the news, the conservative Japanese government continues to try to revise Japan’s constitution allowing for more military might and of even becoming a nuclear power. It appears many politicians have not learned anything from Hiroshima or Nagasaki. We can only struggle to continue the fight to make the world free of nuclear weapons. ~Ernie Hoyt

China Correspondent by Agnes Smedley (Pandora Books)

“I have always detested the idea that sex is the chief bond between men and women. Friendship is far more human.” Agnes Smedley begins China Correspondent with this as her prevailing theme. Her search for friendship and what is human led her away from a life of intellectual and financial poverty to the farthest corners of the world in wartime China, an odyssey that began in 1919 and ended in 1941.

Escaping the example set by her father and brother, who “had lived like animals without protection or education,” Smedley left for New York when she was in her twenties where she was drawn into the world of exiled Indian intellectuals. Realizing that in America a woman who wasn’t interested in marriage or money was doomed, she took a job as a stewardess on a Europe-bound freighter, saying “Live the life of a cabbage I would not.”

Landing in Danzig, she embarked upon an eight-year relationship with an Indian revolutionary leader, which she said “almost drove me to the verge of insanity.” After leaving him, she began to study Indian history, attempting to gain a PhD at Berlin University but abandoning her dream when she realized she lacked the necessary preparation for it. An interest in Chinese history and in that country’s revolution took her to China and “into the Middle Ages.” Arriving in 1928, she stayed there for thirteen years.

From the beginning, Smedley was determined to enter into Chinese life “and let it strike me full force.” As special correspondent to a leading German newspaper, she gained access to people and places that most thirty-six-year-old Western women had no knowledge of or interest in. She argued with “Chinese patricians” in Beijing, was guided through Nanjing by Kuomintang officials, and became friends with the writer Lo Hsun in Shanghai who drew her sympathies to the “men who were fighting and dying for the liberation of the poor.”

After Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, Smedley turned her attention to the Chinese troops, traveling to them and frequently with them as much as she could. In a Yan’an mountain cave  she met Mao, “a tall, forbidding figure,” who immediately struck her as an aesthete. “I was repelled by the feminine in him” she writes but later is grateful for their “months of precious friendship.” Asking him if she should write a biography of a leading general or go to the front as a journalist, she was told by Mao, “The war is more important than your history.”

As the Japanese captured Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, Smedley marched with the Chinese army, often covering twenty-five to thirty miles a day. She worked with the Chinese Red Cross Medical Corps, trying unsuccessfully to gain them American aid. She argued forcefully with an American businessmen that when he and his colleagues sold war materials to Japan, they “were digging their own graves,” only to be told “Why shouldn’t we sell to anyone who will pay?”

Reporting with every scrap of strength and energy that she had, Smedley lost journalistic objectivity by allying herself with the Red Army and eventually lost her health. However she never lost her sense of humor. In an army camp, seeing troops march past bearing rifles, she asked where they were going and was told “To watch a movie.” 

“I liked the idea of taking artillery to the movies. For years I had seen many...that had left me completely frustrated, without any way of revenging myself. I now realized had I taken a heavy machine gun,,,I could have looked on with sweet patience, biding my time.”

At last, weakened by repeated attacks of malaria and a malfunctioning gall bladder, her toenails falling off and her teeth loosened by malnutrition, Smedley was put on a plane to Hong Kong. “What do you want or need?” she was asked on her first morning. Her reply was “Ice cream.”

Before she left for the U.S, an American pilot told her “Why honey, don’t you know you’ll be unhappy back there with all those foreigners?” But Smedley returned with a new battle to fight on ground that no longer felt like her own, “to tell America the truth about China.” Almost a hundred years after her time in China, her passion and her truth still is compelling and moving, fulfilling the promise she made to soldiers who had said “Tell your countrymen.~Janet Brown

Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse (Kodansha)

Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain, translated from the Japanese title of Kuroi Ame by John Bester, reads as an anti-war novel. The story is set in and around Hiroshima. Although it is a work of fiction, Ibuse bases his tale on written testimonies from people’s diaries and also on the  interviews with victims of the atomic bombing. The main character, Shigematsu Shizuma, was a real person, and the journal he kept also exists outside of literature. The novel was also adapted into a movie directed by Shohei Imamura.

Several years have passed since the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city. A man named Shigematsu Shizuma who lives in a small village called Kobatake, located about a hundred miles to the east of Hiroshima, is worried about his niece and not finding a suitable marriage partner for her. Whenever they receive an enquiry, a persistent rumor would abound. People would say Yasuko worked in the kitchens of the Second Middle School Service Corps in Hiroshima and because of that rumor people believed she was a victim or radiation sickness and her uncle and aunt were conspiring to conceal that fact. 

Yasuko hands her uncle a diary she kept before, during, and after the bombing which he decides to copy to send to go-betweens for an omiai partner in an attempt to assure the other party that Yasuko did not serve in the Second Middle School Service Corps and was not even in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped and therefore was not a victim of radiation sickness. In her entry for August 9th, Yasuko had written about meeting up with her aunt and uncle who had come looking for her. Her uncle was hurt on his left cheek but her aunt seemed unharmed. It was when her uncle mentioned that her face looked like she was splashed with mud. This reminded Yasuko or the black rain that fell after the bomb had dropped. It is the part about the black rain they decide to leave out. 

Having read Yasuko’s diary, Shigematsu decides to keep a record of his own account and titled his document “A Journal of the Atomic Bombing”. The story is then told during the present, a few years after the bombing, in conjunction with the journal he kept, starting with his entry on August 6, the day the bomb was dropped and the world was changed forever. It was the beginning of the “Atomic Age”. He concludes his diary with the final entry on August 15, the day the Japanese people were to listen to an ‘important broadcast’ on the radio. It was the words of the Emperor of Japan who said, “The enemy is using a new and savage bomb to kill and maim innocent victims and inflict incalculable damage. Moreover, should hostilities continue any further, the final result would be to bring about not only the annihilation of the Japanese race, but the destruction of human civilization as a whole…” It was the speech of surrender officially ending th

Shizuma’s story and journal give the essence of what it was like to live through the atomic bombing and its aftermath. Ibuse doesn’t make any moral judgements against America’s use of the atomic bomb, nor does he blame the Japanese government for its militaristic expansion. What he provides here is the story of an ordinary family, of the ordinary people who continue to live with the memory and fear of succumbing to radiation sickness and how they go about living their lives as normally as possible.  This highly descriptive novel of the pain and suffering of the atomic bomb survivors is as relevant today as it was when it was first published. ~Ernie Hoyt

In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami (Kodansha)

In the Miso Soup was first published in Japanese in 1997 under the same title and won the Yomiuri Prize for Fiction in the same year. The English translation was published in 2003 and was translated by Ralph McCarthy. The story centers around two main characters. The protagonist, Kenji, is from Shizuoka. He’s twenty years old and his mother believes he’s taking college prep courses in Tokyo. Frank is a heavy-set American tourist who found Kenji’s name and ad as a guide in a publication called “Tokyo Pink Guide”. 

Kenji works as an unofficial “nightlife guide”. In other words, Kenji helps gaijin (foreign tourists) expore the seedier side of Japan - the sex parlors, cabarets, hostess clubs, S&M bondage clubs, peep shows, “soap lands” and “pink salons”. He has been hired by Frank for three consecutive nights before New Year’s Day. The day Kenji receives a phone call from Frank, he was reading a newspaper article about the death of a young high school girl. The article said, “her corpse had been dumped at a trash collection site in a relatively untraveled area in the Kabuki-cho district of Shinjuku with arms, legs and head cut off.” 

Kenji meets Frank at his hotel and Frank definitely wants to be taken to Kabuki-cho. After exchanging pleasantries, Kenji gets down to business and asks what Frank wants to do tonight. Frank answers with a grin and says, “Sex!”  Kenji seems to find Frank’s grin unnerving but he can’t pinpoint why it makes him feel that way. Kenji makes small talk with Frank but he suspects that Frank is not telling him the truth and Kenji wonders why. 

Frank tells Kenji that he wants to build up his mood before going to one of the sex parlors. They start out the evening by going to a lingerie pub. A place where women just sit and talk to you while only wearing underwear.  Frank brought out his copy of the “Tokyo Pink Guide” book and begins reading the English-Japanese sex glossary. When Frank pulled out his wallet to pay the bill, Kenji couldn’t help but notice a dark stain on one of the notes. To Kenji, it looked like dried blood. Kenji thought of the newspaper article he read earlier and begins to have his suspicion that Frank is not what he says he is, however, Kenji has promised to be his guide for two more nights.. 

It would be the second day of guiding Frank which would lead to Kenji fearing for his life. Kenji had taken Frank to an omiai pub, a bar where you can meet available single women and negotiate with them if you want something more. When Kenji was handed the bill, it was much more than the quoted price they were given. The manager is given really filthy bills so Frank asks Kenji to translate to see if he can use a credit card. The manager reluctantly agrees. Frank tells the manager and girls at the place to look closely at the card. Kenji senses that he is hypnotizing them. Frank then tells Kenji to leave for a moment and calls his girlfriend that he would handle this. 

When Kenji comes back to the pub, he sees one of the girls  “who looked as though she had another mouth below the jaw. Oozing from this second, smiling mouth was a thick, dark liquid, like tar.” The woman’s throat had been slit from ear to ear and yet she still seemed to be alive. Kenji was paralized with fear and thought Frank might kill him as well. 

Kenji manages to keep his wits about himself but is confused when Frank tells him that he should go to the police and tell them what he has done. Kenji must make a choice. Should he go to the police and report what he has seen? Should he pretend he knows nothing about what happened inside the omiai pub? 

Murakami’s gruesome tale of murder and violence is disturbing and intriguing. The reader will be drawn to the seedier side of Tokyo and will be shown the darker side of the human spirit. Read at your own risk. ~Ernie Hoyt