Walking to Samarkand: The Great Silk Road from Persia to Central Asia by Bernard Ollivier, translated by Dab Golembski (Skyhorse Publishing)

The Turkish bus driver thought he had a madman on his hands when the French passenger of mature years asked to be let off on a deserted stretch of highway, fifteen minutes from any town. But Bernard Ollivier isn’t your typical lunatic; he’s touched by divine madness. Ten months earlier,  he had succumbed to a violent case of dysentery that stopped him from traveling to Tehran on foot. Now he’s back to health and back on his journey, but this time around he’s going to walk to Samarkand.

When Ollivier became a widower, he submerged his grief in a grand plan. After completing a hike down the Santiago Trail, he decided he would walk the length of the Silk Road, from Istanbul to Xi’an. Now at the age of 62, he’s prepared to complete the second leg of this project and nobody’s going to stop him--not police, immigration officials, nor a dumbfounded bus driver. “I refuse to skip even one inch of this road,” he says, and except for one four-mile jaunt in a friendly Iranian’s jeep, Ollivier keeps his word.

With a portion of the first stage still to complete, he faces an additional 560 miles on top of the 1300 miles of his second trek. Afflicted with what he calls “reckless optimism” and what others might say is pure lunacy, Ollivier, aided with a generous supply of anti-diarrheal medication. is taking this stroll in the summer on a route that will lead him into three ferociously hot deserts. At this time of year, he discovers, the desert is even too hot for camels.

The amount of water Ollivier will need is far too much for him to carry but this man is ingenious. Cobbling together a basic cart from bits and pieces that he finds in local markets, off he goes, managing as much as thirty miles a day, under an “inexplicably blue sky.”

He rapidly falls in love with Iran, a country where people turn radiant with “the sheer joy of meeting a passing stranger.” This possibly saves his life, or at least his journey, because there are a scanty number of places where he can sleep or eat along the Silk Road route. Instead he’s met with hospitality that is culturally engrained and generously practiced. In addition to food and resting places, Ollivier is offered clandestine vodka, served warm, and puffs of opium. In Iran, smoking taryak is commonplace among laborers and is offered as a matter of course, and although he risks a flogging by accepting the vodka, he turns down the opium.

Instead water becomes his primary addiction; he drinks 12 liters in a matter of hours while making his way through the “fire pit” of the deserts. Facing temperatures that soar as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit, he goes through a “baptism of solar fire,” learning to walk in the early and the evening hours, with a break between 1 and 4 in the afternoon. His skin is rubbed raw by his sweat-soaked clothing as he walks through sand “as soft as skin,” in “waves of shifting gold.” 

“I’m getting high on walking,” he confesses and has to force himself to stop for the day. He finds that 6:00 pm is the hour of conversation in desert villages and the men who gather to chat at day’s end bring him into their circle, offering hospitality that is often wordless. When a translator is part of the scene, the questions can become unexpected. “Are your teeth your own,” Ollivier is asked by one elderly gentleman.

Ollivier loves Iran, “a welcome interlude of relative cleanliness” between the “pervasive filth” of Turkmenistan and Turkey. But. as a true Frenchman, he’s enchanted by one of his first sights in Turkmenistan, a girl with long blonde hair, wearing a miniskirt. “After three months of chadors, it’s a magical sight,” he admits. And he’s astounded when he reaches the Amu Darya, “not a river, it’s a sea…rushing between two barren banks.”

To cross it, there’s no bridge, only a string of linked barges with a narrow passageway for pedestrians, “more like a horizontal stairway than a bridge.” But soon after he reaches its end, Ollivier is at the Uzbekistan border where the officer in charge allows him entry with a jovial “OK. Go, boy!”

His goal is announced rather prosaically with “a concrete mushroom the size of a water tower,” a far cry from the turquoise-domed roofs Ollivier has dreamed of, but after four months and 1706 miles of walking, he’s not complaining. Samarkand ensnares him. He sleeps for two days, moving only from bed to table and back again, looking back on his “marvelous, extraordinary harvest of encounters.” He spends hours in the bazaars where sensory overload  leaves him “wearier than if I had spent the entire day on the road.” “I could never,” he concludes, “have dreamt of a more exciting, exalting destination than this.”

Still the road beckons. In ten more months, Ollivier will set off on a 1600 mile journey that will take him to China, the Turfan Oasis in Xinjiang Province, the Taklamkan Desert, and into Kashgar. What if, he wonders, instead of educating, “travel actually ‘de-educated you,” by having you think and do things you never thought possible? It’s a de-education that Ollivier, with his humor and his stunning descriptive powers, makes unbelievably enticing. After he completes his four-volume account of his long walk, of which this book is the third, armchair travel will never be the same again.~Janet Brown

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga (Free Press)

Between the Assassinations is Aravind Adiga’s second published novel, although he wrote it before the acclaimed book, The White Tiger. The title of the book refers to the time between the assassination of India’s then-Prime Minister, Indira Ghandi in 1984 and the assassination of her son Rajiv Ghandi who became India’s Prime Minister that same year. It is a collection of short stories set in the fictional city of Kittur which is modeled on Adiga’s hometown of Mangalore which is located in the state of Karnataka.

Kittur is located on the southwestern coast of India, between Goa and Calicut. It is bordered by the Arabian Sea on the west, and by the Kaliamma River to the south and east. The monsoon season starts in June and lasts until September. After that, the weather becomes dry and cool and is suggested as the best time to visit. 

Before each story, we are given a little history of the city and how the town is laid out. In the middle of the town is a pornographic theater called the Angel Talkies. Unfortunately for the town, people give directions by using Angel Talkies as a reference point. We learn that the official language of the city is Kannada, but many of the residents also speak Tulu which no longer has a written script, and Konkani which is used by the upper-caste Brahmins. The city has a population of 193, 432 and “only 89 declare themselves to be without caste or religion”. 

The story takes place over a week in the city starting with a visitor’s arrival at the train station. We are first introduced to a twelve-year-old Muslim boy named Ziauddin. He is hired by a man named Ramanna Shetty who runs a tea and samosa place near the railway station. The man tells Ziauddin “it was okay for him to stay. Provided he promised to work hard. And keep away from all hanky-panky”. However, Ziauddin begins to work for a Muslim man who pays him for counting trains and the number of Indian soldiers in them. It isn’t until Ziauddin asks why the man has him counting trains that he understands that the man is not as kind as he thought.

We meet a man named Abassi who has a case of conscience. He is a shirt factory owner whose employees are going blind by the poor working conditions. He must decide if he should close the factory to save his workers from doing further damage to their eyes while having to deal with corrupt government officials. 

Ramakrishna, known to the locals as Xerox, sells counterfeit copies of books. He has been arrested a number of times and has been told to stop what he’s doing but he lives to make books and sell them. His latest goal after getting out of jail is to only sell copies of The Satanic Verses by Salmon Rushdie. 

Adiga’s stories are full of characters who deal with an array of problems still affecting India today. Class struggles and religious persecution, poverty, the caste system, and political corruption are just some of the topics covered. The story reads as a satire on Indian life and is filled with humor and angst. Although, his description of Kittur makes it seem like a dirty, crowded and dangerous city, you can’t help but want to go and visit it to see it for yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt

Another Bangkok: Reflections on the City by Alex Kerr (Penguin Random House UK)

Alex Kerr made a name for himself as a leading foreign expert on Japan when he won the Shincho Gakugei Literary Prize in 1994 for the best work of nonfiction published that year in Japan. Kerr was the first foreigner to have won this prize with Lost Japan, a book he wrote in Japanese. By that time, Kerr had lived in Japan for seventeen years, the country he had chosen as a home when he was still in his twenties. 

Three years later, Kerr established a second home in Bangkok, dividing his time between Thailand and Japan.  Within five years of that decision, he published Bangkok Found, a book of essays about his new life and what he discovered there. Twelve years later, he expanded upon that theme with new discoveries and a different focus, one that echoes the theme of Lost Japan, “the past and what it has to teach us.”

Another Bangkok is Kerr’s search for the “wellsprings” of culture that underpin the “chaos and ugliness” of Thailand’s primate city. He finds a wealth of “kaleidoscopically complex cultural traditions” that were originally adopted from India, Cambodia, and China and were transformed into an amalgamation that is completely Thai. Sri Lankan stupas and Angkor’s towers have become slender and elongated in their Thai incarnations. The Buddha rose from his seated position and began to walk gracefully under the hands of Sukkothai sculptors. The ceramics of China were translated into vessels of riotous color when Thai craftsmen began to use Benjarong’s five colors, bright, controlled, and dazzlingly ornate. Even Western skyscrapers have taken on surprising shapes as they dominate the Bangkok skyline, using the traditional Thai features of teak pillars and delicately curved roofs. 

Bangkok, Kerr says, was rooted in this sort of adaptivity. The enshrined city pillars are based on the lingam of Angkor. “They’re really Khmer,” a Thai aristocrat told him. The Grand Palace, Thailand’s primary national symbol, is a “treasure house” of elements from different cultures, combined into a glorious extravaganza of “exotic fantasy.”

Kerr finds quite a bit of exotic fantasy in his examination of Thai traditional culture and he writes about it beautifully. His essay on the Grand Palace alone is stunning, giving a whole new view to what has become a visual cliche. But in his following essays, his focus becomes diluted. Traffic jams and tangles of electrical wires invade his examination of Thai floral art and a discursion into sex tourism interrupts his look at classical Thai dance. His own experiences in Bangkok are mentioned in passing, along with some of his memories from Japan, in a way that’s frequently more annoying than it is illuminating. Why, for example, are expats even discussed in a book that purports to be about traditional Thai culture? Not even Kerr seems to know, torn as he is between regarding his own kind as a form of beneficial and creative “yeast” in the city or “a hair in the soup.”

Kerr seems to find comfort in the creation of “a beautiful surface” that’s more important than substantial content, a practice that he finds in Thailand as much as he has in Japan. Another Bangkok slides gracefully over its own beautiful surface, a fusion of memoir and research that’s essentially “charming but trivial,” much more like a series of articles written for a variety of magazines than a thoughtful and coherent book. ~Janet Brown

A Bridge Between Us by Julie Shigekuni (Anchor Books)

Julie Shigekuni is a fifth-generation Japanese-American and her first novel, A Bridge Between Us is the story of a Japanese immigrant family. It isn’t about the struggle of being Japanese in America, it is the story of one family. Four generations of an immigrant family all living under the same roof. 

The story focuses on four generations of women who  live together in a house in San Francisco. Reiko, the matriarch, whose father traveled from Japan with his wife to the U.S. in 1898.  Rio, her daughter who is always at odds with her mother. Tomoe, the wife of Goro, Rio’s son. Tomoe is the mother of two daughters - Nomi and Melodie. 

Each chapter is told through the eyes of one of the main characters. It opens with Reiko talking about the death of her father and how he told her, “Never forget who you are.” “You are the daughter of a princess.” Reiko has never met her mother. She only knows her through the stories as told by her father. She knows that her mother’s name was Misao and whenever Reiko would ask her father, “Where’s Misao now?” Her father would always respond, “She’s visiting her Mother in Japan” or “She is in a boat on her way home”. 

Rio starts to tell her story from the bed of her hospital room after an attempted suicide. She starts to reminisce about her relationship with her mother. Tomoe, her daughter-in-law visits her in the hospital and tells her that Granny (Reiko) has been causing trouble again. Nobody in the family understands why she tried to kill herself. It’s Tomoe who says to her, “I know that you must want to live or you would have let go long ago.”

Nomi was only seven years old when her grandmother Rio tried to kill herself. This is her earliest memory. We follow Nomi as she deals with growing pains trying to please her mother by helping her take care of Grandma Rio and Granny Reiko. However, she sometimes feels trapped and finds solace in the arms of different boys. She has dreams of going to Japan but doesn’t speak a word of Japanese. At times, she seems to suffer from an identity crisis. 

Tomoe is the pillar of strength among the four women. She is the second oldest of her eight sisters. Her father was a fisherman who one day went out to sea and never came back. She remembers her older sister Miwa taking care of her, while she watched over her six younger sisters. She is the woman who takes care of Reiko and Rio. She also does her best to raise her two daughters as best as she can. 

A Bridge Between Us is a story about secrets and betrayals, hopes and dreams. It is not about the difficulties of being Japanese in America or being an American with a Japanese face. It is a story about family and the bonds that bind them. Four strong women with four strong personalities covering a span of more than fifty years. 

The story can be dark and depressing at times as Shigekuni takes you on a roller-coaster ride of emotional highs and lows. As with any family, there will always be love and conflict. It is only a matter of how you react to any family situation where you find out what kind of person you really are. ~Ernie Hoyt

Clara’s Diary: An American Girl in Meiji Japan by Clara A. N. Whitney (Kodansha)

Two decades after Commodore Perry’s “Black Ships” came to Tokyo, William Whitney arrived in that city to establish its first national business college in 1875. His wife Anna saw this as an opportunity to advance Christianity in Japan and insisted on coming with her husband, along with their three children. Her daughter Clara was fourteen when she came to the country that would be her home and from the first day of her arrival she recorded the details of her new life with enthusiasm, humor, and careful observation.

It’s easy to be ensnared by Clara’s charm and her honesty that verges on the indiscreet. Within minutes of clearing Customs, she embarks on her first jinriksha ride which she finds “absolutely too ridiculous for anything,” particularly when her father, slower than the rest, is forced to race behind his wife’s conveyance, yelling “Stop!” After two weeks, she’s entrusted with the “keys and apron” of housekeeping, adapting to cooking stoves that are roughly the same size as a flowerpot, noticing the number of handsome Japanese men on the street, and struggling to describe beauty of the purple and gold sunsets that illuminate Fujiyama. Clara is obviously made for living in Japan, and she does that, eventually marrying the son of a highly placed Japanese statesman with whom she had five children, according to the lengthy introduction to this book.  (The Library of Congress brief biography says she had six.)

Her diary is as lively and fascinating as a good romance novel but Clara is too observant to lapse into that category. On her fifteenth birthday she’s taken to the Akusa Kannon Temple,  where she’s fascinated by a statue of the god of health whose face has been so smoothed by the hands of worshippers that it has “neither eyes, nor nose or mouth.” Her Christian viewpoint emerges in a ridicule that fades rapidly as her diary progresses--although Clara’s faith is palpable, her interest in rituals and ceremony becomes almost anthropological, without condescension or censure. An earthquake that lasts a full minute and a fire that consumes twenty thousand houses within a six-mile space does nothing to quench her enthusiasm for a place that, within two months, she knows she’ll be sad to leave. 

Political and economic matters are largely ignored by Clara, although a Christmas visit from a young prince of the powerful Tokugawa clan leads to her assessment of his appearance, “very dignified.” Months later she and her mother are invited to the prince’s mansion, where the prince, his attendants, and all of his servants are assembled to greet them. The unexpected reception throws Clara into an unusual speechlessness until everyone takes refuge in the informality of croquet. “Mr. Tokugawa won, of course. (I wonder why he always won?)”

The Whitneys fall under the protection of the Katsu family, whom Clara will later became part of by marriage. Her friendship with the family provides insights into the domestic lives of the Japanese nobility, as well as a bloodcurdling eyewitness account of the earthquake of 1855 that killed 10,000, told to Clara by a survivor. Clara herself is an eyewitness to the funeral procession of the Emperor’s aunt, a parade of foot-soldiers, cavalry, infantry, professional mourners, priests, maids-of-honor, and the nobility taking part in “perhaps the last funeral pageant which shall ever pass through the streets.” 

After three years in Tokyo, Clara is rather harsh in her assessments of the foreign visitors that she meets. Isabella Bird she characterizes as “a very disagreeable old maid,” and when former president U. S. Grant comes to town, she hopes “he will give up drinking so hard.” It’s thanks to the hard-drinking president that she’s witness to a jousting tournament : fencing, archery by mounted horsemen, and equestrian feats, concluded with daytime fireworks in the shape of “ladies, fans, umbrellas, fish, gourds and other amusing things.” A visit to Mrs. Grant takes Clara into the Summer Palace, a place that has the president’s wife in awe. Even Clara is impressed with the “doors and woodwork lacquered with gold molding” and “the walls covered with elegant Japanese screen paper.” She’s less impressed with Mrs. Grant, who “has very few ladylike traits,” when regarded by a young woman schooled in Japanese etiquette.

Although Clara describes several Japanese weddings, she fails to give a picture of her own, or of her life as a wife and mother. When she’s forty, Clara returns to the States with her children and without her husband. She begins to write articles about Japan to supplement the money her husband sends to her from Tokyo.

After almost twenty-five years in Japan, this must have been a difficult, painful transition for Clara and her children that deserves a whole other volume of its own. Her published diary is only ¼ of its original length, part of a “lifetime record” written in English and Japanese that one of her daughters has given to the Library of Congress. Her papers, 75 items in four containers taking up 1.6 linear feet, including speeches, short stories and an unpublished novel, are open to researchers.

However Clara at forty had learned the discretion that Clara at fourteen had yet to acquire. Her journals--at least the ones that have been passed down--end in 1887. Clara left Japan twelve years later, wrapped in the self-containment that she had learned in her adopted country.~Janet Brown

The Complete Story of Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Sue DiCicco and Masahiro Sasaki (Tuttle)

There are many books about the story of the thousand paper cranes which was first created to commemorate the children who lost their lives during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan and for those who suffered afterwards, even many years later, from their exposure to radiation. It has become an international symbol of peace. 

Sadako Sasaki was a twelve-year-old girl whose story has often been repeated in a number of publications. However, author Sue DiCicco says in the preface of this 2020 publication, “So much of what I’ve read about Sadako was contradictory and felt incomplete.” The author wanted more details about her life story, what she went through, and how her family remembers her. 

DiCicco’s curiosity led her to contact Sadako’s brother Maashiro Sasaki. Together, they collaborated on bringing new light to Sadako’s story as seen through the eyes of someone who was also there with his little sister when the bomb dropped. Now, Tuttle has published The Complete Story of Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Paper Cranes. 

Sadako Sasaki was born on January 7, 1943. Her father Shigeo owned and ran a barbershop. Her mother Fujiko, gave birth to her in a neighbor’s rickshaw who was doing his best to take her to the hospital. It was four in the morning. They named her Sadako whose kanji character, 禎 means “happiness”. 

On the morning of August 6, 1945 an air raid alarm sounded and all the citizens of the city hurried to go to one of the shelters and would wait to listen for the “all clear” signal. The plane had only passed over the city and the “all clear” was sounded. 

As the family was about to eat breakfast, they heard people yelling outside. They also went to investigate. The grandmother was not interested in the airplane and called them back to the table. Just as they sat down at the table, “the city lit up with what seemed like the brightness of a thousand suns, followed immediately by an enormous explosion”. 

The unthinkable had happened. For the first time in history, an atomic bomb was dropped on a populated area of a city killing an estimated 80,000 people instantly. Sadako Sasaki was only two years old. 

It would be almost ten years later when the affects of the atomic bomb manifested in Sadako. Although her parents did not want to believe it, Sadako was diagnosed with leukemia. It was 1955 and back then leukemia was incurable. 

One day Sadako received a long string of colorful cranes folded for the patients by the Red Cross Youth Club at Aichi Shukutoku High School. Sadako didn’t yet know the significance of its meaning. Her father explained that “giving paper cranes to someone in the hospital means that you hope they’ll get well soon”.

He also told her the legend of the crane. It is said that it can live for one thousand years. “An ancient Japanese legend promises that anyone who folds one thousand cranes, one for each year of a crane’s life, will be granted a wish. This story made cranes a favorite gift for anyone experiencing a life event, especially someone getting married or suffering from an illness.” 

The story inspires Sadako to reach the goal of folding one thousand paper cranes herself. She wanted her wish to come true. She “wanted to be well, to return to school, and to live with her family again”. 

Sadako accomplished her goal but she didn’t get any better. Instead of feeling bitter or sorry for herself, she thought she would just fold another one thousand. Sadako Sasaki died on October 25, 1955 at the tender age of twelve. 

Her death inspired her friends and schoolmates to build a monument in memory of her and of all the children who died from the effects of the atomic bomb. They raised enough money and on May 5, 1958 it was unveiled. It is located in the Memorial Peace Park in Hiroshima, Japan. It has the title of 原爆の子の像 (Genbaku no Ko no Zo) which directly translates to “Atomic Bomb Children Statue”. The title of the monument in English is the “Children’s Peace Monument”. 

Sadako’s story is a story of inspiration and courage. It is also a testament to the horrors of war. The story of her life carries an important message. One that we should take heed of, to strive for peace and to work together to accomplish that goal. ~Ernie Hoyt

Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie (Knopf)

Chinese-French writer, Dai Sijie, author of the highly acclaimed book Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is back with another morsel of literary delight - Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch. It is his second novel which was originally published in French in 2003 with the title Le complexe de Di. 

It is the story of Mr. Muo, a psychoanalyst who had studied Freud in Paris for a number of years. He has returned to China to ply his trade as an interpreter of dreams. However, Mr. Muo has an ulterior motive for going back to his homeland. He wants to save his unrequited love whom he calls Volcano of the Old Moon, from his university days who is currently being held as a political prisoner. 

It was a few months prior that Mr. Muo pleaded his case for his university crush to a man known as Judge Di. His argument “rested mainly on ten thousand dollars in cash”. The judge, whose full name is Di Jiangui, was known to be a former member of an elite firing squad during Chairman Mao’s China during the Cultural Revolution. Judge Di had “been the first to establish a fee of one-thousand dollars for his pardon of a criminal offence”. 

Unfortunately for Mr. Muo, keeping in step with the rising cost of living, Judge Di had increased his fee tenfold by the time his university crush was arrested. As luck would have it, the lawyer appointed to Volcano of the Moon’s case informed Mr. Muo of an alternative. He tells Mr. Muo,  Judge Di has a weakness for young virgins. If he can find a suitable candidate, he might be able to free his love. 

Mr. Muo convinces his neighbor, a forty-year old embalmer, to help him in his quest to save the love of his life. The embalmer is a widow whose husband jumped out of the window to his death on the same day as their wedding before consummating the marriage. It turns out he was a closet homosexual. The embalmer agrees and a date is set but things go awry.

Judge Di has one other passion besides virgins. He is fond of playing the game mahjong and will often go without eating or sleeping for twenty-four hours. At a recent mahjong game, he had been playing for three days straight, again without eating or sleeping, which caused him to keel over. The Embalmer was given the task of conducting his autopsy. 

The autopsy is a disaster as Judge Di was prematurely declared dead. He woke up believing that the woman in front of him is his virgin to deflower. The Embalmer screams and is later arrested. Mr. Muo believes the authorities will come for him and charge him with being an accomplice to commit murder. And yet, now that Mr. Muo realizes Judge Di is still alive, he feels he might once again be able to help Volcano of the Old Moon. 

And thus begins Mr. Muo’s real journey. His search for a virgin will lead him to a wildlife preserve which is home to one wandering panda. He will visit an insane asylum in the countryside. He will manage to set up shop in the Domestic Workers Market, a place Mr. Muo “never imagined such a dreamscape existed - a realm of only girls”.  In his quest, he will also face a hostile tribe of men called the Lolo. 

Dai Sijie’s Mr. Muo can be aggravating at times. He is a brilliant intellectual but is lacking in social skills, especially when it comes to women. We learn that he is also a forty-year old virgin who can discuss sex but has never had sex himself.

Will Mr. Muo be successful in his search? Will he be able to free his university sweetheart? Will communist China welcome the Western study of psychoanalysis? The only way to find out is to follow Mr. Muo in his extraordinary adventure. ~Ernie Hoyt

Take No Names by Daniel Nieh (HarperCollins, release date July 5, 2022)

Fasten those seatbelts and hold on tight. From the first page to the last of this puzzling thriller, Daniel Nieh keeps readers guessing with unanticipated twists and hairpin curves taken at breakneck speed. 

Dennis Lao is almost an invisible man in Seattle’s Chinatown, one in a crowd of waiters and dishwashers who are paid under the table, rent rooms filled with bunkbeds, and sleep in shifts. Lao has lived this way for sixteen months. Before that he was Victor Li, an affluent guy who “grew up with a white mom, a free-spirited sister, a golden retriever, and a Playstation 3.” That came to an end when his father was brutally murdered and Li learns where the money came from. Sun Jianshui, a “mild-mannered assassin,” arrives from China, introduces himself as an enforcer employed by Li’s father, and takes Li on a quest for revenge that ends in another death. Now Victor Li is Dennis Lao, on the run with a warrant out for his arrest.

But the guy is a self-confessed adrenaline junkie. With a friend he’s met at a martial arts gym, he ends up rummaging through storage units run by Homeland Security, scavenging the confiscated belongings of deportees. That’s how he ends up on the run once again, in possession of a sizable gemstone, painite, the rarest in the world, worth $65,000 a carat. His friend drives the getaway car and Li has the address of a potential buyer. They’re headed for  Mexico City.

Once they cross the border, they’re plunged into a morass of pulque bars, political dissidents, a controversial Chinese construction project, American goons named after cheap beers, and head-spinning deceit. These boys simply cannot catch a break or make a good decision. Lucky for them that Li’s sister manages to track them down, accompanied by the assassin who killed her father. Jules and Sun have formed an unlikely alliance--and with her brains and his array of talents, (not all of them homicidal), the Hard Luck Twins just might come out of this alive.

Sprinkled generously through this noir adventure are looks at geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China, the economic hegemony that China is weaving across the globe in competition with the U.S., the political power of drug cartels, and some fascinating glimpses of DF, Distrito Federal, the 573-square-mile capital that’s known as Mexico City.

Nieh is quite obviously enthralled by this metropolis and was fortunate in having the thirty-two--year DF resident and author, David Lida, as his friend while he was there. Under Lida’s guidance, Nieh was given the background that he uses to depict dive bars, street markets, and religious shrines in enticing and sometimes harrowing detail. He has the observation skills of a good journalist, deftly describing the Seattle sky, “always near at hand, bearing down, making problems bigger,” the carnivalesque vibrancy of Mexico City streets, and the presiding saint of the city, Santa Muerte, “a black-robed skeleton with rhinestone eyes and a Mona Lisa smile.” 

Even more frightening than the Saint of Death are the economic strangleholds that threaten Mexico, exerted by mammoth corporations owned by Chinese and American magnates. When Nieh takes readers inside the Baoli Tower, home of a global construction empire with Chinese ownership, this is a place even more chilling than the palatial compound of the foremost cartel leader. Deftly he turns real-life threats into fiction, believe them or not. 

With equal skill, Daniel Nieh has perfected the art of the cliffhanger ending and the ability to transform a sequel that’s possibly part of a series into a free-standing adventure. Although it’s a fine idea to read Beijing Payback, the novel that introduced Victor Li, that’s only because it’s such a good book. Take No Names stands on its own without a required preamble, one of the books most likely to be tucked in a suitcase after its publication in July--especially if vacation plans include a trip to Mexico City. ~Janet Brown

The Prince, the Demon King, and the Monkey Warrior retold by Janet Brown (ThingsAsian Press)

The Prince, the Demon King, and the Monkey Warrior is the retelling of a Hindu epic called Ramanaya which is attributed to a fifth century B.C.E. poet named Valmiki. It tells the story of the life of Prince Rama, the first-born son of King Dasarat in the country of Ayodhya. The story opens with King Dasarat speaking to one of his advisors. 

King Dasarat is a wealthy man without any enemies and has four wives and yet says to his advisor, “I am sadder than the poorest peasant in my country”. He believes the peasants are richer than he is. They may be poor and have no possessions of their own and they live grueling lives but they have one thing that King Dasarat doesn’t have - a son. 

The wise man helped the king and his four queens each had a son within a year. The oldest was Rama, who “from the day he was born, made everyone feel happy.” Barat was the second son, a righteous individual who supported those around him. The third son was Satrugan and the youngest was Lakshaman who was always very loyal to his eldest brother Rama. 

The King informed his sons that the land was being torn apart by two demons and that the wise men of the forest had told him that only his oldest son would be able to defeat them, yet he did not want to burden his child with this news. 

Rama was a dutiful son and did not hesitate to take up the challenge. His youngest brother said he would join Rama on his quest. The two sons traveled far and wide and defeated the demons without any problems. On their way home, they set foot in another kingdom whose king was said to be as wise as their father. 

Rama meets his soon to be wife, Sita in the kingdom. The two marry and live a happy, peaceful life for many years. Rama’s aging father tells his son that he is going to abdicate and Rama will be King the following day. However, the mother of Barat, Kaikeyi, was fooled by her evil maidservant Mantara. The distressed Kaikeyi went to her husband and pleaded with him to fulfill one of her wishes that he had yet to grant her. 

So it comes to pass that Rama is exiled from his home for four fourteen years while Barat is crowned King. Lakshaman follows his brother and his wife into exile. They settle in a land surrounded by evil demons. A She-Demon that has the power to transform herself into anybody she wishes tries to trick Rama into making him believe she is his wife, he tells her he already has a wife. She then shows her true form but is disfigured by Lakshaman and runs back to her home. 

One of the She-Demons brothers is Ravan, the Demon King. He sends an army of demons to kill Rama but they all end up dead except for one. It is this demon that convinces King Ravan that the best way to defeat Rama is to kidnap his wife and make her his own. 

The King of the Demons manages to kidnap Sita and now Rama finds himself on a quest to save his wife. With the help of Hanuman, the Monkey Warrior, Rama defies all odds to save the love of his life. 

This modern retelling will appeal to everyone, young and old alike. The full color illustrations by Vladimir Verano bring life to the story. It is a beautiful introduction to the culture of India as seen through one of its most popular stories. ~Ernie Hoyt