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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

World Class by Teru Clavel (Simon & Schuster)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok (HarperCollins)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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