Reading the Room by Paul Yamazaki (Ode Books)

There are only a few legendary bookstores in the world--Foyles of London, Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and San Francisco’s City Lights, Booksellers and Publishers. Foyles is famous for having thirty miles of books, Shakespeare and Company for being a magnet for 20th Century literary giants--Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein. City Lights was co-founded by one of the most famous Beat poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and then became well-known for publishing Allan Ginsberg’s Howl, when nobody else dared to put it into print.

Its luster has been quietly enhanced over the past fifty years by a man who is famous only to writers, publishers, and other booksellers. Paul Yamazaki has shaped and sharpened the collection of books that fill the shelves at City Light since 1970, only now being revealed in a book of his own. Appropriately, this is a series of conversations with other booksellers, in a book that has been published by another bookstore, Chicago’s Seminary Co-op.

Yamazaki came to San Francisco in 1967, walking the streets of Haight-Ashbury in a pair of wing-tip shoes, dressed in a London Fog jacket and brown slacks. He arrived to go to college at his parents’ insistence and the college he chose was a hotbed of dissent, San Francisco State. Not an academically-minded student and admittedly “more conservative than my parents,” this former high school football player immersed himself in the politics of the time, becoming a member of the Asian American Political Alliance. Thrown in jail for “inciting a riot,” a young poet who worked at City Lights convinced Ferlinghetti to get Yamazaki an early prison release by hiring him to work at the bookstore. He’s been there ever since.

“Yamazaki, you work in a bookstore--this bookstore?” his high school English teacher demanded when he encountered his former “memorably bad” student in the aisles of City Lights. Yamazaki doesn’t say what his job was by that time but he went from packing boxes of books to selecting the 30,000 titles that are placed on the bookstore’s shelves. He was instrumental in the decision to go from a store that sold only paperbacks to one that included new release hardcovers, a decision that saved the store from closing its doors forever. It’s now celebrating its 70th anniversary.

“We average 1.3 copies per title,” Yamazaki says, on shelves so tightly packed that booksellers have to move a small library in order to make room for a new volume. And shelving is not a casual activity--Yamazaki wants the shelves to create “a shimmering conversation between the books. When they’re placed side by side, they talk to one another.” 

His goal is to fill the store with books that offer “possibility and resistance,” and the joy that comes with “happiness through knowledge.” “We’ve never been looking for comfort,” he says, “Curiosity is a fundamental tool of a bookseller.” 

“At a great store, you can look through twelve well-selected serendipitous linear inches to find a universe.” In City Lights, a bookstore that’s on the site of a former church and a topless barber shop, Paul Yamazaki has shaped a multitude of challenging, joyful universes. ~Janet Brown

Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide by Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt, illustrated by Tatsuya Morino (Kodansha)

Ghost stories have been around for a long time. They are told around campfires or at slumber parties. A number of movies have featured a wide array of ghosts as well. Ghost stories are not always horror stories as some may believe. In Japan, ghost stories and other stories of the supernatural are called kaidan. They became popular with the 1904 publication of Lafcadio Hearn’s book Kwaidan which is a play on the words “kowai” (which means scary )and “dan” (which means “stories”).. 

Many books in English have translated the term “yokai” from demon to ghost to specter. However, none of these translations are true to the meaning of the Japanese term. For Japanese, “yokai” are “yokai”. The kanji is written as 妖怪 which more closely translates to “other worldly”. 

In this book, the term yokai refers to “mythical, supernatural creatures that have populated generations of Japanese fairy tales and folk stories”. They are the things that “go bump in the night, the faces behind inexplicable phenomena, the personalities that fate often deals us”.

The authors have done extensive research into the history of yokai. One of their references they often use and has the most comprehensive illustrations of yokai are from Sekien Toriyama’s Gazu Hyakki Yakko, translated into English as The Illustrated Demons’ Night Parade which he drew in 1776. 

Another major reference the authors used was Tono Monogatari (Tales of Tono) which was written by Kunio Yanagita. It is a collection of folktales and yokai stories from the Tohoku region of Japan that was originally published in 1912 and remains in print today. 

In the 1960s, it was the comic series Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro by Shigeru Mizuki that sparked another fad in all things yokai. The manga would be adapted into a popular and successful anime series as well. 

In Yokai Attack! the reader is not only introduced to a number of different types of yokai but also is given information on what to do in case you encounter one. The Japanese yokai have been around for centuries. They can be seen “in museums worldwide on scrolls, screens, woodblock prints, and other traditional forms of Japanese art”. 

The authors remind readers that this book is not a comprehensive encyclopedia of yokai and is not a scholarly work. It is a collection of conventional wisdom concerning the yokai. It is about what the average Japanese already knows about them. it’s more of an introduction to yokai culture for the novice. 

The authors group the yokai into five specific categories—Ferocious Fiends, “the sorts of creatures you wouldn’t want to encounter in a dark alley (or a bright one, for that matter). Gruesome Gourmets feature yokai with “peculiar eating habits. Annoying Neightbors are the types of yokai you hope never move in next door. The Sexy and Slimy are yokai that enchant their prey. Finally there are The Wimps which are rather self-explanatory, the kind of yokai who are more afraid of you than you are of them. 

The book includes full color illustrations of all the yokai featured. The authors also provide the names of yokai in English, their gender, height, weight, and distinctive personalities. And as the authors state at the beginning of the book, “So forget Godzilla. Forge the giant beasties karate-chopped into oblivion by endless incarnations of Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and the Power Rangers. Forget the Pocket Monsters. Forget Sadako from The Ring and that creepy all-white kid from The Grudge. Forget everything you know about Japanese tales of terror”. 

“If you want to survive an encounter with a member of Japan’s most fearsome and fascinating bunch of monsters, you’ve got some reading to do”. ~Ernie Hoyt

Foreigners Who Loved Japan by Makoto Naito and Ken Naito (Kodansha)

I am a foreigner who loves Japan. I’ve made it my adopted home for the last thirty years and plan to live here until my days are over. So when I came across a book titled Foreigners Who Loved Japan, I knew I had to read it. I was under the assumption that I would be familiar with all the individuals whose stories are told. Imagine my surprise when I knew less than half of the twenty foreign nationals featured. 

The twenty individuals featured in this book not only loved Japan but they also contributed to the country in some way. Japan has a long history of being a “closed” country and every Japanese student learns about the first foreigner who was granted access to the country and given permission to spread his message of Christianity.

The first person to be featured is the Portuguese Jesuit priest Francisco Xavier. He reached the shores of Kagoshima in present day Kyushu in 1549. He was taken to see Shimazu Takahisa, lord of Kagoshima. When Xavier showed Takahisa a picture of Mary holding the baby Jesus, “Takahisa was struck by its holy aura and fell to his knee in a display of reverence”. Takahisa would give Xavier permission to build a church and spread the Gospel of God. Xavier is still honored as the man who brought the Christian God to the country. 

Luis Frois was another Christian missionary and was also one of the first of the Portuguese Jesuit priests to come to Japan. He is known for writing reports about Japan and penned the book The History of Japan in 1585. He would gain the trust of one of Japan’s most famous bushi (samurai warriors), Oda Nobunaga, a man known for being one of the unifiers of Japan at the end of the Sengoku or Warring States era.

It wasn’t just Portuguese Jesuit priests who fell in love with what was still a mysterious country. Englishman William Adams joined a Dutch trading fleet traveling to the Far East but there was trouble at sea and after drifting in the ocean, they reached the shores at Usuki in Bungo which is now present-day Oita Prefecture. Adams would become an advisor to Japan’s first Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. Novelist James Clavell’s main protagonist in Shogun, William Blackthorne, is based on William Adams who would later marry a Japanese wife and take the name Miura Anjin. He would also teach the Japanese to be better shipbuilders.

One of the most popular foreigners who really loved Japan and that almost every Japanese citizen knows is Lafcadio Hearn who is also known as Koizumi Yakumo. He wrote a number of books and essays on Japan. He is mostly responsible for introducing Japanese horror to English-speaking readers with his book Kaidan, also known as Kwaidan. 

Other prominent foreigners who loved Japan who are featured in this book are Phiipp Franz von Siebold who taught the latest medical techniques to the Japanese, American James Curtis Hepburn who created the Hepburn system that romanized the Japanese language, and Henry James Black, Japan’s first foreign performer who took the stage name Kairakutei. 

Not all of the featured foreigners remained in Japan but their contributions to Japanese society remains. Their stories and why they came to Japan and fell in love with it will also make you want to visit this country and see firsthand what they experienced. 

I’m making a minor contribution to the Japanese by teaching Japanese students English at an English Conversation School. Perhaps one day I will also be featured in a book such as this. One can only hope. ~Ernie Hoyt

Strange Foods: Bush Meat, Bats, and Butterflies by Jerry Hopkins, photographs by Michael Freeman (Tuttle)

What we think is delicious and what we recoil from as disgusting is determined by our geography, history, and sheer good luck. Nothing points that out like one of the first photographs in the opening pages of Strange Foods. If you think the image of a baby calf on a plate, still in fetal form, is revolting, ask yourself how is that more quelling than a dish made with veal? Would you rather eat a calf that isn’t yet alive or one that’s knocked on the head when it’s a living, breathing, cute little baby? What’s the difference?

That question is posed again and again throughout this provocative book and Jerry Hopkins is the right man to pose it. When his youngest child was born at home, Hopkins refrigerated the expelled placenta, later turning it into a paté for guests at the christening party. Nobody died.

“No one is sure what the first humans ate,” Hopkins says, but it’s a sure thing that they wouldn’t have turned down the dish made of little pink baby mole rats that’s eaten in modern India. Probably the French during the Franco-Prussian War’s Siege of Paris wouldn’t have spurned that either back in 1871, when people flocked to stalls that sold dog and cat meat. Starvation breeds exotic tastes.

Horse meat has been a staple throughout human history, with U.S entrepreneurs in our present day buying wild horses to slaughter and sending their meat to Europe and Japan. Thirty years ago, Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market had a stall selling steaks, roasts, and ground meat that came from mustangs in Montana.

Cows or horses? Both are livestock but only one is commonly raised for food. However in Mexico, when Columbus first showed up, the only domestic livestock raised for human consumption were turkeys and dogs. In the northeast of Thailand, in a distant province where life is rough, dog meat is a staple and, Hopkins reports, in the civilized modern city of Guangzhou dogs and cats wait to be bought, killed, and butchered on the spot—along with deer, pigeons, rabbits, and guinea pigs—”a take-away zoo.”

When mad cow disease emerged in Europe, suddenly kangaroo, ostrich, and zebra appeared on supermarket meat counters as “exotic meat.” Beefalo was a popular meat during a period of soaring U.S beef prices and in Alaska, consumers happily chow down on reindeer sausage, swallowing Rudolph and his colleagues without a qualm. Still, the thought of elephant meat on the menus of African restaurants makes many a Westerner turn pallid.

In the 1970s, muktuk was sold as a snack at an Alaskan state fair. Bits of the skin and blubber from a beluga whale, it was chewy and flavorless, clearly an acquired taste and to the Inuit of Alaska, almost sacramental.

The Arctic offers little in the way of food and whale hunting is still one of the chief means of subsistence. This isn’t necessarily true of Japan, a highly developed country that consumes large amounts of whale meat. It’s indubitably more healthy than more conventional options. “Richer in protein, whale meat has fewer calories than beef or pork, and it is substantially lower in cholesterol.” Whales are rapidly increasing in number around the world, Hopkins reports, and opposition to whaling is decreasing. Who knows? If we can order shark steak in fine dining establishments, will whale be on the menu soon?

Hopkins made his home in Thailand where he lived until his death in 2018. Michael Freeman has spent most of his career in Southeast Asia. The two of them have encountered—and eaten— insects, silk worm larvae, bats, scorpions, and partially-formed chicken embryos still in the shell. They are proponents of a truth that prevails in their book: Anything can be delicious if it meets a kitchen with a clever cook. To back this up, recipes appear in almost every chapter to challenge the squeamish and entice gastronomic adventurers. Rootworm Beetle Dip, anyone? (I don’t know about you, but I’d rather eat that than the classic Scottish meal made from sheep’s stomach and lungs—haggis? No, thanks!)—Janet Brown

Osamu Dazai's The Setting Sun : The Manga Edition by Osamu Dazai, translated by Makiko Itoh (Tuttle)

Osamu Dazai whose real name is Shuji Tsushima is a Japanese writer who was born in Kanagi in Aomori Prefecture. His most well known work is 人間失格 (Ningen Shikaku) which was later translated into English with the title No Longer Human. 

His novel, The Setting Sun, was first serialized in a literary magazine titled Shincho between July and October of 1947. The original title was 斜陽 (Shayo) and was published in book form in later that year. 

Now in 2024 Tuttle has published Osamu Dazai’s The Setting Sun : The Manga Edition, retold and illustrated by Cocco Kashiwaya, a manga artist who debuted in 1990 in Booquet Comics, a sister comic to the Shojo Manga (Girls Comic) Margaret. It was translated into English by Makiko Itoh. 

The story begins at the end of World War 2. An aristocratic family now find themselves impoverished and are forced to sell their home in order to survive.  Kazuko, a young divorced woman who lives with her mother is told by her uncle that since Japan has surrendered, their life of luxury is no longer possible. 

Kazuko’s father died ten years earlier and it was her Uncle Wada who has been supporting them since the war ended. He tells the two women that they have no choice but to sell the house and move to the countryside. Kazuko’s younger brother, who was an aspiring writer, was sent off to war and has not been heard from since. 

The night before the two are going to move to Izu, Kazuko’s mother is trying to sleep but keeps murmuring, “Because Kazuko is here. I’m going to Izu. Because of Kazuko… Because Kazuko…Because Kazuko is here with me”. 

But then Kazuko hears her mother say, “And what if…Kazuko wasn’t here. I’d prefer to die!”. Her mother is having a complete mental meltdown, shouting, “I WISH I COULD DIE!”. Kazuko’s mother has always been a pillar of strength so Kazuko is shocked to see her mother in this state of hysteria. 

Even when Kazuko’s father died, when Kazuko got married and then divorced, when Kazuko came home with a baby in her belly, when the baby was stillborn, when Kazuko was taken ill, and when her younger brother did bad things, during the ten years after her husband’s, Kazuko’s mother has stayed the same as she has always been—easy-going and gentle. 

That night Kazuko thinks how, as children, she and her brother were spoiled. She had not realized what a great life she had. She thinks, “Oh, to have no money! What a horrible, irredeemable hell this is”. 

The next day, her mother acts if nothing happened and they move to Izu without incident. However, due to Kazuko’s carelessness, she almost burns down the house. After that, she is determined to become a rugged country woman.

Then one day, her younger brother appears. He goes back to his old ways, drinking and hanging out with his mentor, Uehara, a writer he admires who also has love for the bottle and women. Kazuko had met him before while she was still married.

After her mother dies, Kazuko finds herself thinking more and more about Uehara and how much she loves him and how she wants to have his baby even though she knows he’s an alcoholic. She is determined to live her life for love even if it means breaking with traditional conventions. She thinks of herself as a revolutionary—a revolutionary for love. But…will she find true happiness?

Most of Osamu Dazai’s novels are semi-autobiographical and they can be very bleak and depressing. In this story, Kazuko’s character was based on a woman named after the writer and poet Shizuka Ota whom Dazai had an affair with while he was still married. Kazuko’s actions may seem mild by today’s standards but if you keep in mind the time-frame of when the story took place, Kazuko may be considered a true revolutionary. ~Ernie Hoyt

Getting Closer to Japan : Getting Along with the Japanese by Kate Elwood (ASK Co., Ltd.)

As of January 13 next year (2025), I will have been living in Japan for thirty years. Although my mother is Japanese and I lived in Tokyo during my elementary school years (although that was at a family annex for military families called Grant Heights), I might have found Kate Elwood’s Getting Along with the Japanese an excellent reference for living and working in Japan before my move. 

According to the publisher, the Getting Closer to Japan series is a series of books for those who:

• would like to get accustomed to the life in Japan quickly

• feel communicating with the Japanese is difficult

• want to learn the Japanese way of thinking

• want to enjoy life in Japan

There are five books in the series. In addition to Getting Along with the Japanese, other titles in the series include Living in Japan by Andy D. Para, Working in Japan by Bruce Rutledge, Japanese Industry by William Carter, and Japanese Culture by Naoki Takei.

All the books give useful information one needs to know if they plan to have an extended stay in Japan. The books are written by business people sharing their own experiences of the trouble that may come with living, working, and understanding Japanese people and Japanese culture. At the end of each chapter are useful words and phrases related to the subject being discussed. 

Getting Along with the Japanese is broken down into three sections. The first section is Twelve Key Words Useful in Understanding the Japanese. It focuses on words such as gaijin (outsider / foreigner), wa (group harmony), tatemae and honne (surface feelings vs real feelings), gaman (endurance) and tells how these words are related to business culture. 

The first chapter is an example of what it’s like to be a gaijin in a Japanese company. Steve Wilson started working in Japan three years ago. He enjoys his job and has a good relationship with his co-workers. However, it’s been three years and Steve wonders why his colleagues seem to keep him at a distance. He notices that Japanese employees who joined the company after him seem to blend in quickly and become more relaxed in a short span of time. 

Even non-business people may find this a little hard to understand. Even if they were born and raised in Japan but have foreign parents, they will always be treated like gaijin. It doesn’t matter how long you have been living in Japan. If you are a foreigner, or like me, have one foreign parent, you will still be treated like a gaijin. 

The second section focuses on direct contact with Japanese people. Nancy Evans met a Japanese client who said to her in English, “My name is Hori”. So, throughout the evening, she called the man Hori, only to find out that Hori was the man’s family name. It is rare and may even be considered rude to call someone by their first name. It would be more proper to add the honorific suffix -san after the family name. So Ms Evans should have called Hori, Hori-san. 

The final section deals with life events such as weddings and funerals. If you’ve never been to a Japanese wedding or a Japanese funeral, there are many things you need to know before you attend such an event. Getting Along with the Japanese will help you answer questions you may have without having to rely on anyone else. 

As a longtime resident of Japan, I always enjoy reading other people’s experiences of living and working in Japan and what kinds of situations they find confusing, amusing, or even irritating. It’s also interesting to read about the types of culture shock they may have had as well. 

If you plan on working and living in Japan, or if you are just interested in Japanese culture, the Getting Closer to Japan series may be the series for you. ~Ernie Hoyt

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (Knopf)

When two little girls disappear after playing on a deserted stretch of beach one summer’s day, the small city of Zavoyko on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula is besieged with tinges of fear. Children are confined to their homes while young women are flooded with memories of an older girl who vanished years before and was never seen again. A woman who claims she saw the two children entering a black car driven by a man on the afternoon of their disappearance has no details that could help the local police in the search for the girls and her story is disregarded. Eleven months later the mother of the two missing children meets the mother of the lost teenager and is given a clue that might let her know what became of all three girls.

A novel with the basic plot of a conventional mystery becomes far more than that. Zavoyko is a divided community, with white residents, the “real Russians,” on one side and indigenous people, grouped together as “natives,” on the other. And yet the city is small enough that the lives within it intertwine and intermingle when they are brought together by tragedies. When Marina, the mother of the little girls, finally meets Alla, the mother of the teenager, their racial differences are transcended by their shared pain.

In chapters that function almost as linked short stories, Julia Phillips gives voice to eleven different women, white and native, who live in Zavoyko. All of them are displaced.

The indigenous women have lost their identities, with five separate tribes stripped of their cultures by the former Soviet Union who homogenized then as a monolithic group. Living far from the communities that had nurtured them, they’ve come to Zavoyko for an education and for jobs. When the little girls go missing, they watch the search that takes place, angered that the vanished teenager was ignored and quickly forgotten. The little girls are Russian, the teenager is indigenous, and the different reactions to the two disappearances point out the supremacy of one group over the other. This is “a deep common knowledge, an ache that was native.”

The Russians came to Zavoya when the Kamchatka Peninsula was an integral part of the Soviet Union’s military system, “so tightly defended that even other Russians needed government permission to enter.” Military funding made this outpost a comfortable place to live but when the Soviet rule disintegrated, “Kamchatka went down with it.” Now they live in a region surrounded on three sides by water, linked to the mainland only by roads made from dirt and ice, a spot where 32 degrees is considered warm.

The division is sharply revealed when Alla, one of the Even tribe, confronts the Russian, Marina, about the police search for the two little girls while her daughter was given scant attention. “You must have paid them, I think…They didn’t listen to me.” Yet when Marina is given a shred of information that may conclude her search, it’s given to her by a man who is Even.

There are no easy answers to the questions that pervade Disappearing Earth. There is no conclusively happy ending. But Phillips, in her debut novel, has depicted a haunting and compelling narrative of bleakness, beauty, and the powerful strength that comes from telling a story.~Janet Brown

Ocean’s Godori by Elaine U. Cho (Hillman Grad Books)

Ocean Yoon ought to be on the fast track to stardom. She can outrun any other space pilot in the solar system, she’s a graduate of the world’s best flight program, and she’s Korean. 

Korea rules the solar system with its space agency, the Alliance, and Seoul is a glittering metropolis filled with galactic hotshots. Ocean would be one of them except for two fatal obstacles. She was sent to a boarding school on Neptune where she grew up without the cultural influences that would make her truly Korean and she’s developed a mind of her own that doesn’t submit well to authority. Early in her space career she made a decision that’s branded her as a liability on any spaceship. Nobody wants the woman with the grisly nickname, Headshot, who never misses her target—except for a captain with a shaky code of ethics and a ship that needs Ocean’s unmatched speed and skill.

Captain Song pretends that she “could put this ship on auto-pilot and it would do the job,” but when things get rough, she turns to the woman whom she tries to ignore. She has to rely on Ocean, who has gained the respect of the crew in a way that Song has not. Even the newest recruit, a man from a planet where the inhabitants learn to become Masters of the Death Arts, is fascinated by Ocean from the moment he joins the crew. 

When Ocean’s best friend Teo, the son of a man who has made his fortune by devastating the environments of other planets, shows up in an escape pod, wounded and unconscious, mutiny begins to simmer beneath the surface of Song’s crew. It bubbles over when the most notorious raider in space comes aboard and places a wedge between Song and her crew. Phoenix wants Teo’s money and Ocean’s skills and he’s smart enough to exploit the situation to get what he wants.

Elaine U. Cho is adept at creating a multifaceted plot that takes a new twist on every page but her ability to bring life to her characters through smart and snappy dialogue is what powers this novel into new territory. Ocean’s Godori soars far beyond conventional science fiction. Its roots are in the Saturday morning serials that once made radio stations popular, when dialogue and cliffhangers ruled the airwaves. Cho has resurrected that form and made it her own, ending her debut novel with a teasing conversation that sets the stage for the next episode.

“A thief, a hacker, an accountant, and now a pilot. My ultimate party is almost complete.” Because Cho has provided a multitude of characters who almost threaten to topple Ocean’s Godori, Phoenix has quite a few candidates who might complete his party. The question is will Cho be able to sustain this wild pace and devious plot in a follow-up novel? What she’s done in this one sets a high bar. She’s written a space fantasy that will ensnare even those readers who despise science fiction.~Janet Brown