Once and Forever : The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa by Kenji Miyazawa (Kodansha)

Kenji Miyazawa is a very popular Japanese writer who was born in Hanamaki, Iwate Prefecture. He is a novelist and a poet, however, he is mostly known for his children’s literature. He is as popular as A.A. Milne and Lewis Carroll are in the West. One of his best known stories is “Night on the Galactic Railroad”, which is also known as “The Milky Way Railroad”, “Night Train to the Stars” and “Fantasy Railroad in the Stars”. The story was also made into a feature length animation film and inspired Leiji Matsumoto to create his manga “Galaxy Express 999”. 

Once and Forever is a collection of twenty-four of Miyazawa’s short stories and was published in 1993 and were translated from the Japanese by John Bester. Sixteen of the stories were previously released in another book titled “Winds from Afar” which was published in 1972. All of the stories in this collection have been revised for this edition. The stories range from the humorous to the tragic, including the story of the origin of a traditional dance and a story that incorporates local superstitions. 

“The Restaurant of Many Orders” is about two hunters who are walking in the mountains with their two bear-like white dogs. They are very deep in the mountains when their guide disappears and their dogs freeze to death. They are lost without their guide and they find that they are hungry as well. Luckily, they find themselves standing in front of a brick building with a sign that says RESTAURANT WILDCAT HOUSE. They enter the restaurant and find themselves opening one door after another, each door with a sign making a specific request to the guests. The two hunters finally realize the “Restaurant of Many Orders” is not a restaurant where you can choose from a menu but is a restaurant where orders are given. They finally realize that they are being prepared as the main dish!!

The whimsical tale of the origin of a folk dance can be found in “The First Deer Dance”. One day, a man falls out of a tree and hurts his left knee. He goes to a hot spring in the mountains which is said to have healing powers. On his way home, he stops for a short rest and eats some chestnut and millet dumplings. He decides to leave a little piece of dumpling out for the wild deer. He realizes that he had dropped his towel when he left the snacks out for the animals. As he goes back to get it, he sees a group of deer walking in a circle around his towel. He notices the deer seem puzzled by the towel which they think is alive. The longer the man watches the deer, he begins to hear their voices consulting with each other on what kind of animal it is that’s keeping them from getting to the dumpling. He finds that he can hear the deer sing and watches their movements thus establishing the basis for the shishiodori or “deer dance”. 

“The Ungrateful Rat” is a story about what can happen to you if you are discourteous to all who help you and don’t reciprocate the kindness. In “The Thirty Frogs” there is a lesson in how not to abuse your strength or authority. It epitomizes the proverbial saying, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”. “Kenju’s Wood” is about patience, persistence and following one’s convictions. “The Dahlias and the Crane” is another cautionary tale about conceit and narcissism. 

What makes Once and Forever most entertaining is that no two stories are alike and can be enjoyed by children and adults. Some of the tales are plotless while others seem to convey a type of moral message, although that message may be ambiguous. You may gain a better understanding of Miyazawa’s stories with repeated readings and with each subsequent reading, you will be sure to discover something new. ~Ernie Hoyt

Stranger in the Shogun's City by Amy Stanley (Scribner)

“I wanted to go to Edo, but you wouldn’t let me go.” These words echo from the early 1800s, written by a woman who became the scandal of her rural, religious family. 

Tsuneno was born in snow country, where ten-foot measuring poles were buried by blizzards, temperatures remained at freezing “from equinox to equinox,” and gigantic icicles grew inside people’s homes.  The daughter of a village priest, she was taught to read and write, with the understanding that she would become a wife who could write letters, read poetry, and keep household accounts. The interminable winters sent her to read manuals of good conduct for women but what Tsuneno gleaned from them was the knowledge of another life in the metropolis of Edo, a two-week journey from her home.

Married when she was twelve, Tsuneno was divorced by the time she was twenty-eight. Her family rushed her into another marriage which lasted only four years. A third marriage was over in three months, due to “her selfish behavior,” her older brother wrote. Tsuneno was now a thirty-eight-year-old triple-divorcee, and although divorce carried no stigma in 19th-century Japan, she was apparently barren and definitely shopworn. Her prospects were dismal and she made up her mind. She would break tradition by running  off to Edo and making a life for herself far from home.

A neighbor promised to guide her over the mountains to her destination and to finance her journey, Tsuneno sold clothes from her many trousseaus and pawned more utilitarian garments. These were garments that she had made herself, carefully, from fabric that only the more fortunate were able to procure. Good clothing was a mark of social status and she was selling hers. She would be haunted by that decision for much of her life.

Tsuneno was forced into a pragmatic liaison with her guide, a man with relatives in Edo who would give them a place to live and help them find their footing in the capital. This lasted about as long as the money she had brought with her and soon Tsuneno was on her own, with only the clothes she had worn during her escape. But she was a survivor, with little regard for social class. Taking a job as a maid in a samurai’s household, she began the life she’d always wanted in a city filled with vitality and culture. 

She arrived during a time of turbulence and hunger. Edo was flooded with refugees from the countryside, fleeing starvation, looking for work. That Tsuneno survived on her own is an amazing feat, one that she chronicled in letters to her family, long streams of letters to people who had all but disowned her.

Family records in Japan at that time were preserved for future generations. Tsuneno’s father had over a hundred years worth of paper, documents that detailed every minute transaction of his ancestors, every letter that had ever been sent. His son carried on this tradition, keeping even the letters of the sister who had brought shame to her family. She wrote to him up until the year of her death at the age of forty-nine, the year that Commodore Perry arrived in Edo and the city became Tokyo.

Historian Nancy Stanley was online reading the public archives from a city near the place where Tsuneno’s family had lived for centuries. One of the archivists had discovered the letters of a woman who had written an epistolary history of herself and the city she had made her own and Stanley was hooked as she read Tsuneno’s words to her mother. “I went to...Edo--quite unexpectedly--and I ended up in so much trouble!” But even while enduring this “trouble,” Tsuneno left a legacy, a picture of Edo just before the arrival of Commodore Perry changed it forever. 

If there’s one cavil to be had with Stranger in the Shogun’s City, it’s the regret that Tsuneno’s own words don’t tell her story. Even so, her vibrant, adventurous spirit pervades this history, while Stanley gives a detailed, lively view both of Tsuneno’s unchronicled early life and of the city this headstrong woman loved.~Janet Brown 

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (Canongate)

A Tale for the Time Being is the story of two people who live oceans and years apart and yet are indelibly linked together. Nao is Naoko Yasutani. She is a sixteen year old Japanese girl who lives in Japan. She calls herself a “time being” and explains that a “time being” is “someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or will ever be.” 

Ruth is a married woman living in a small town on Vancouver Island in the province of British Columbia, Canada who will discover something that belongs to Nao and it will forever change her life. Ruth was beachcombing when she discovered a barnacle encrusted freezer bag. Believing it to be garbage, she takes it home to throw it out with the trash later. Having forgotten that she left the bag out on the porch of the front steps to the house, her husband, Oliver, picks it up and asks what it is. Ruth says it’s just garbage but before she can tell her husband not to bring it in the house, it was too late. He not only brings it into the house but opens the bag to discover a Hello Kitty lunchbox. In the box were more plastic bags and inside the bags they found a stack of letters, a book with a French title, and a wristwatch.

Ruth and Oliver are book lovers. Ruth is a novelist and Oliver believes that all novelists should have cats and books. The title on the book from the Hello Kitty box said “A la recherche du temps perdu par Marcel Proust”. “In Search of Lost Time”. However, when Ruth opens the book, what greets her eyes are handwritten pages in purple ink and by the looks of the writing, she surmises that it was written by a young girl. 

Ruth and Oliver also discover that the stack of letters were written in Japanese and they imagine that the items were thrown overboard from a cruise ship. A friend of theirs says it may have drifted from one of the Pacific Ocean’s gyres, a collection of ocean currents that circulates around Japan and the West Coast. Their friend said that experts had predicted debris from the 2011 tsunami in Japan would eventually wash up on the shores of Vancouver Island. 

The book with the Proust cover turned out to be a diary written by Nao. Ruth wasn’t sure if she should read it or not but curiosity gets the best of her and what she reads disturbs her. On the first page after Nao introduces herself and wonders who will read this book, but then writes  “Actually, it doesn’t matter very much, because by the time you read this, everything will be different.” Nao continues to tell the reader that this is her diary of her last days on earth, implying that she intends to commit suicide after completing it. 

As Ruth continues reading the diary, she becomes obsessed with finding out more about Nao. After reading the first few pages, Ruth feels an urgency to either help the girl or save her, even though she realizes both actions are not logical. The more she learns about Nao’s life, the deeper she tries to find out exactly who Naoko Yasutani is. Nao’s diary is full of reasons why she wants to say good-bye to the world - being bullied at school, her father getting fired from his job in the U.S., her mother who she believes is more concerned about appearances than about her own daughter. 

There is still the mystery of the letters written in Japanese that appear to be older than the Proust diary book and there is also the question of the antique watch. Does Ruth believe she can help Nao in any way? Does Nao carry out her plan to end her life? Finally, do they ever meet or are they just two “time beings” that have yet to cross paths? ~Ernie Hoyt

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li (Picador)

Yiyun Li is a Chinese-American writer. She was born and raised in Beijing, China. She was born in 1972 when Mao Zedong was still the Chairman of the Communist Party of China. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a nuclear physicist. As a Freshman at Peking University, Li was required to spend one year in the military or as Li says in her own words, “to immunize students to the disease that was called freedom, all freshman were sent to the military for a year of brain-washing, or political re-education, as it was called.”

In the same year Li graduated from Peking University, she went to the United States and studied for four years at the University of Iowa receiving a Masters of Science degree in immunology in 2000. She continued to study at the same university and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative nonfiction. 

Having grown up in Communist China inspired Li to write the short stories collected in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Some of the stories were previously published in magazines such as the New Yorker and the Paris Review.  All the stories in the collection are set in contemporary China. The stories are heartbreaking and humorous, describing the lives of ordinary people in modern China. Two of the stories have been adapted into feature films, both directed by Wayne Wang. The films were based on “The Princess of Nebraska” and the title story of the collection, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers”, both films being released in 2007. 

In “The Princess of Nebraska”, a young woman named Sasha is traveling by bus to Chicago to get an abortion. She is accompanied by an older Chinese gentleman named Boshen, who came to the U.S. by way of a false marriage. Boshen is a gay man and was put under house arrest in China when it was discovered that he had been exchanging mail with a Western reporter telling the reporter that there was a high risk of an AIDS epidemic in one of China’s rural province. A lesbian friend who had recently immigrated to the U.S. and had become a citizen offered to marry him. The man who got Sasha pregnant was a Chinese man named Yang. Yang was a Nam Dan, “a male actor who plays female roles on stage in the Peking Opera”. Yang was ousted from the opera after being discovered that he had a male lover and became a money boy, a male prostitute. Boshen was in love with Yang.

“A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” was made as a companion piece to “The Princess of Nebraska”. In this story, a retired Chinese man visits his recently divorced daughter, Yilan, who lives in Spokane, Washington. He wants to help his daughter in her time of need, but his daughter is totally uninterested in his assistance.  The father-daughter relationship is strained due to their different ideas of duty and honor. 

What really makes these stories special is the fact that Li only started to write in English six years prior to the publication of this book. She refuses to have her work translated into Chinese for fear that the Chinese authorities might consider her work “counter-revolutionary” or “would read like an indictment of the regime” and she knows what could happen if the government were to make that distinction and knowing Li feels that way makes you feel as if you’re reading illicit literature yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Plotters by Un-Su Kim (4th Estate)

When his job gets him down, Reseng knows it’s time for Beer Week. He orders ten boxes of beer, clears out his refrigerator,  and replaces the food with beer cans. He takes peanuts and dried anchovies out of his freezer for nourishment and opens his first beer. By the time he crushes the last can, he’s ready to get back to work.

Found in a garbage can when he was a baby, Reseng is adopted when he turns four by a man called Old Raccoon and grows up in a place called the Doghouse Library. Surrounded by books, he teaches himself to read, a skill that will do nothing to enhance the career path Old Raccoon has waiting for him. Reseng is fated to become an assassin, one of many who are directed by plotters and owned by contractors. Reseng is owned by Old Raccoon.

After his first kill, Reseng asks “Am I going to end up killing more and more people?” “No,” Old Raccoon tells him, “You’ll kill fewer and fewer. But you’ll make more and more money.”

And as Reseng’s targets become increasingly valuable, the money increases too. He’s good at his job. But the morning that he finds a small ceramic bomb in his toilet, a delicate but deadly item, sends him off into Beer Week. 

In Reseng’s line of work, a man doesn’t have friends; he has associates and one of his associates is a tracker. Jeongan is a man who cultivates the art of being so ordinary that nobody will ever notice him or remember him. He can find anyone and he finds the person who put the bomb in Reseng’s toilet. 

Mito works in a convenience store, a puzzling occupation considering that she studied medicine and is fully qualified to be a doctor. Too small to be an assassin, too young to be a plotter, she is, Jeongan says, “one disturbingly complex woman,” who is obsessed with Reseng. But why?

The Plotters is no ordinary thriller. Each one of its characters is unique and none of them are who they seem. The cross-eyed librarian who works for Old Raccoon; the “grumbling orangutan-size man” who “looked like Winnie the Pooh” and runs a pet crematorium that also burns the corpses brought to him by assassins; the polished, Stanford-educated contractor who also grew up in Old Raccoon’s Doghouse Library; the old man with a mastiff who cultivates his garden far out in the woods and is one of Reseng’s targets--all of them are walking riddles, and all of them are intertwined in a morass that includes government officials.

Un-Su Kim has constructed an eerie, dreamlike world for his characters, one that’s revealed in chapters that appear to be stand-alone short stories. Then their common thread begins to surface: in the library with 200,000 books that nobody ever borrows, the knitting shop run by Mito’s crippled sister where the attic is filled with photos of Reseng, the high-rise insurance building that holds “the luxurious digs of an assassination provider bang in the heart of the Republic of Korea.” 

The biggest puzzle of all is Reseng, a man moving down a dead-end street who never went to school but who grasps the essence of the world he was brought up to inhabit. “There was no better business model than owning both the virus and the vaccine. With one hand you parceled out fear and instability, and with the other you guaranteed safety and peace.” These words resonate with a horrible meaning ten years after they were written. They give The Plotters a dimension that seems to have been written for the time we face in 2020. ~Janet Brown

Dragon Dance by Peter Tasker (Kodansha)

If there are three countries vying for the dominant position in East Asia, I think it’s China, Japan, and the United States. Fortunately, the region is currently stable right now and all three countries are working together in the best interests of their citizens (or so I would like to believe). Imagine if things were different. Imagine if the story you’re about to read came to fruition. A very scary thought indeed. 

The time is 2006. The world is suffering from a great recession and Japan is falling by the wayside. Their economy is down and the people are looking for someone to blame. At the same time, China is becoming a power that can no longer be ignored. As Japan weakens, China gets even stronger and a leader in a secret group in China is making use of a Japanese terrorist named Reiko Matsubara to further destabilize the relationship between Japan and the United States, leaving the gap opened to be filled by China.

Tasker sets up a great story filled with political intrigue, manipulation, conspiracy, espionage and the search for truth. He has lived in Japan for over twenty years and his knowledge of the nuances of Japanese places and culture makes you feel as if you are there in the middle of this power struggle.

Dragon Dance is a delicate balance of power between three of the world’s largest economies - Japan, China, and the United States. Japan, once having the image of being one of the world’s safest places now has a rising crime rate, regular security alerts and an increase in homelessness and poverty. In these trying times, one politician has come to the fore, Tsuyoshi Nozawa, a former musician with a very right wing agenda is riding on the wave of his popularity. He is an ultra-nationalist who is campaigning to have Japan sever it’s military ties with the U.S. and for Japan to become a nuclear power.

Following another storyline, a long time Japan resident and female reporter, Martine Meyer has been following the progress of Nozawa’s rise to power. Around the time of a new election, Meyer has been receiving e-mails from an unknown source warning of impending “accidents” at various places. The more she looks into the matter, the more complicated the news story gets. She senses a conspiracy about Nozawa’s rise to power and how Nozawa is being manipulated by more sinister forces. 

As a longtime resident of Japan myself, I can attest to the authenticity of Tasker’s Japan. He makes you feel as if you are there yourself. Tasker manages to create a mystery that is compelling enough to keep you interested in the outcome, however, the plot does tend to veer off in some directions which at times takes the story away from the main action. The subplot of the female reporter and the relationship with her Japanese microbrewery owner boyfriend is a bit lacking in detail and doesn’t really add anything to the story, but don’t let that keep you away from a good yarn. 

Even today, many countries are still trying to be the dominant force in all of Asia - especially China. The U.S. does not want to remove its military bases from Japan, and some sections of Japan’s current government would love to repeal Japan’s constitution to perhaps allow for a military build-up. I sure hope those right wing advocates remain in the shadows! ~Ernie Hoyt

The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Oe (Kodansha)

Kenzaburo Oe is Japan’s second recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first being Yasunari Kawabata. Oe was awarded the honor in 1994. The Nobel Prize in Literature committee called The Silent Cry “Oe’s major mature work,” praising it for dealing “with people’s relationships...in a confusing world.” 

The story is set in the sixties and centers around the Nedokoro brothers, Mitsusaburo and Takashi. They had left their hometown, a small rural village on the island of Shikoku. Mitsusaburo moved to Tokyo where he taught English at a university and also worked as a translator. Takashi had set out for the United States after the suppression of the student protests in his home country.

Mitsusaburo is twenty-seven years old. In the opening chapter, he wakes up in the predawn and seems to walk in a daze. He spots a square hole in the ground which was dug to set up a septic tank for the house. Mitsusaburo climbs down the hole and sits in the hole and ponders life. He thinks about his friend who committed suicide at the end of summer “who daubed his head all over with crimson paint, stripped, thrust a cucumber up his anus, and hanged himself.”

Mitsusaburo and his wife also have a child. Unfortunately, their son was born with a congenital birth defect and the doctors have told them that the chance of their son leading a normal life is unlikely and they have recently committed him to an institution. This leads Mitsusaburo’s wife to drink, affecting their relationship. 

The following day, Mistsusaboro hears from his brother’s friends that Takashi would be coming back to Japan. Takashi meets Mitsusaburo and suggests that he and his wife should join him and move back to their hometown in Shikoku and start a new life. Around the same time, an owner of a supermarket chain has made an offer to the Nedokoro’s for their kura, a traditional “store house” that is still in their possession in their hometown. Mitsusaburo lets his younger brother Takashi take care of all the details, not giving much thought to its sale or about starting a new life again.

As the story progresses, we discover that Takashi has an ulterior motive. Takashi not only sells the kura but the land as well. Mitsusaburo realizes he’s been duped into coming back to Shikoku for Takashi’s nefarious purpose. It appears that Takashi idolizes their grandfather’s younger brother who was a leader of a rebellion against the “establishment”. Now, Takashi wants to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather’s younger brother and to start a rebellion of his own. 

When the Nedokoro brothers were younger there was a small community of Koreans who were brought there to work as forced laborers during World War II. The owner of the large supermarket in town is Korean by origin. After the opening of the supermarket, many of the local shops were forced to sell or close as they were no longer making any profits. Takashi has recruited a lot of young people from the town and has been teaching them how to play football which is only a ploy to teach his recruits to use violence to help him in his rebellion.

A complex story about family ties and relationships - love, marriage, children, adultery, incest, violence, and suicide. The intricate web of the Nedokoro brothers' volatile relationship and their family history can be painful at times and draws a dark web that will haunt you long after you have finished reading the book. ~Ernie Hoyt