One Last Look by Susanna Moore (Knopf)

“No matter how loud I scream, no one can hear me,” Lady Eleanor Oliphant writes in her journal. Wracked with seasickness in a cramped and dirty ship’s cabin, she’s two months away from England and faces another month at sea before her journey ends at Calcutta. A half-century after England lost its American colonies, it’s turned its attention to India, where Eleanor’s brother Henry has been named Governor-General.

Accompanied by his sisters Eleanor and Harriet, Henry travels in squalor that’s just marginally different from what his company of soldiers and 84 hunting hounds experience below deck. He weathers it with stolid aplomb, Eleanor is almost incapacitated with misery and disgust, and Harriet is “having a lovely time.”

All three are greeted with a heady mixture of luxury and the unknown, which they face in the same way they endured their 100-day voyage. In “rooms as spare as a gibbet...a trifle less fiery than a kiln,” even their lapdog has its own servant and five men are employed in the simple task of Eleanor washing her hands. Their meals are heavy and British, and the sisters’ daily schedules are dominated by periods of rest. “There are no locks on the doors,” Eleanor observes, “indeed there are seldom doors,” and the floors outside of the bedrooms are covered with servants, sleeping.

Eleanor becomes lethargic and relies upon a sedan chair; her chief activity is observing what surrounds her and writing about it all in her journal. Harriet hurls herself into her new life with enthusiasm, collecting a lemur and a gazelle as pets, and “making a life for herself,” always in the company of her jemadur who serves as a butler and interpreter. Both sisters learn to deny themselves nothing,as they take on the privilege and richness of the lives led by Indian royalty. 

Henry discovers that the commercial ventures of the East Indian Company are possibly more important than political concerns. His colonial government rests upon financial success. When he discovers that the government in Kabul threatens the four million pounds a year that flows to England from the subcontinent, he decides to overthrow the current leader and replace him with someone more acquiescent, someone “Indian in skin, but English in thought, English in morals.”

Meanwhile Harriet returns from a tiger hunt with the habit of smoking a hookah filled with sweet grass, tobacco, and cardamom. Eleanor, plagued with savage headaches, is introduced to opium by the mother of a raja. For Christmas that year, Harriet gives her an ivory opium pipe. Eleanof’s gift to her sister is a bejeweled lotus-shaped mouthpiece for her hookah.

When Russia threatens England’s presence in Afghanistan and the Crown’s hold upon India, Henry makes a disastrous move. British women and other civilians are captured and imprisoned, while 700 soldiers are slaughtered in a surprise attack. The Great Game is imperiled and Henry is recalled from his post.

He returns to England as a marquis, his sisters come back indelibly transformed. While Henry was absorbed in matters of strategy and empire, Eleanor and Harriet discovered India’s secrets as best they could and are now “most unprepared for London,” where there are “no pearls, no monkeys, no betel...no color...no smell.” Neither of them is able to escape the changes that India has cast upon them.

Susanna Moore has mined the letters and diaries of Englishwomen living in India during the Raj. Her research is staggering and her details of daily life in 19th century India, along with the debacle of British foreign policy in that country, is told with the assured voice of someone who experienced this time and place herself. Through the words of Lady Eleanor, Moore takes the convention of the historical novel, twists it viciously and veils it with enormous subtlety. The result is a book that is decadent but never sensational, a story that’s sensuous, languid, and illuminating.~Janet Brown

Eternal Harvest : The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos by Karen J. Coates (ThingsAsian Press)

Many people do not know where Laos is located nor do they know its official name. It is the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia bordered by Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, and Myanmar. It’s a beautiful and serene country. The people are very friendly and open but Laos is also a very dangerous country due to the amount of unexploded ordnance (UXO) that remain in the ground, left over from the Vietnam War.

“The U.S. military and its allies dumped more than six billion pounds of bombs across the land - more than one ton for every man, woman, and child in Laos at the time. American forces flew more than 580,000 bombing missions across the land, the equivalent of one raid every eight minutes for nine years.” “To this day, Laos remains, per capita, the most heavily bombed country on earth.” 

Eternal Harvest brings to light a problem still facing Laotians today. One of the most common types of munitions used were tiny bombs, called “bombies” which were designed to open in midair releasing smaller explosives over a large area to cause a maximum amount of damage. 

No one knows the exact numbers but even forty years after the end of the Vietnam War, many of these “bombies” didn’t explode on impact. “Millions of these submunitions fell into forests, where many lodged into treetops and scrub brush.” These bombies are the most common form of unexploded ordnance (UXO) and are very dangerous as well. Every year, around 100 to 150 people are injured or killed by UXO. 

Coates travels throughout Laos interviewing people who live with this constant everyday threat. She talks to farmers who have to work in their fields to grow food for their family. She meets people who search for UXO to make money from the scrap metal business and she interviews members of various bomb-disposal teams. 

Coates introduces us to Noi who was working in a field when a bomb exploded sending shrapnel into her face. She meets Lee Moua who makes utensils out of old bomb casings. She talks to Joy, a young boy with a metal detector he uses to look for scrap metal which could kill him. Coates also meets Jim Harris, a former elementary school principal from Wisconsin who gave up his job and now blows up bombs in Laos. 

This is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read about Laos, a country I had the opportunity to visit a couple of times. Coates makes me care about the people and the country. This would make a great compliment to people interested in learning more about America’s secret war in Laos and the effects it still has on the country today. It also makes you question why the United States government refuses to sign and ratify the Convention on Cluster Munitions which puts an international ban on the use of these weapons. As the country becomes more accessible to tourists, this book will make visitors more aware of the dangers of traveling off the beaten path. ~Ernie Hoyt

Available at ThingsAsian Books

A Dangerous Friend by Ward Just (Houghton Mifflin)

Sydney Parade comes to Saigon in 1965 as a civilian, believing that foreign aid is a form of nation building, and holding a devout faith in the domino theory. He’s employed by the Llewellyn Group, an organization formed by and connected to the U.S.government, existing outside of any chain of command. The Group is in Vietnam to facilitate the distribution of rice, the providing of vaccinations, the repairing of dikes, the building of roads and bridges and schools. Parade is told their victories will be reflected in the hearts and minds that their work will win, not in body counts, and he believes that. The man who tells him that does not.

Dicky Rostok is an ambitious cynic. His invisible agenda is based upon the principle that knowledge will give him mastery and power. His instrument in gaining this is Parade, whose family is loosely connected to Claude Armand, an owner of a rubber tree rubber plantation that’s close to enemy territory. 

“We’ve got to know things that the rest of them don’t know from a source of information they can’t figure out,” Rostock tells Parade, “And then Llewellyn Group will count for something. Not before.” Armand and his American wife are the ones whom Rostok is certain will give him the information that nobody else will have and it’s Parade’s job to get it.

The Armands live “between the lines.” To them the war is a nuisance that they would be able to ignore, if the American forces would only stop bombing their rubber trees. But the lines blur for them when an American plane is shot down near their home and a young American with political connections is captured. To deflect the glare of attention that this brings them, they give Parade information that will provide Rostok with his power while destroying lives, including their own.

“I will insist at the beginning that this is not a war story,” is the opening sentence of A Dangerous Friend, and the war remains peripheral throughout the novel. Instead it’s the story of people who give their hearts and lives to places they don’t understand, expatriates who believe that “when you have lived in a place and loved it that you belong to it.” But as Parade says to Madame Armand, “I’m thinking we live in different countries. I’ve invented one and you’ve invented another, and somewhere there’s a third that’s undiscovered.” Neither of them yet know what Parade’s father told him years earlier, “Thing about a foreign country, you never know what you don’t know.” They haven’t learned that acquiring this knowledge can be dangerous.

“There were many things that could be taken from you that were more precious than life.”  Rostok gets what he wants while other people lose their innocence, their homes, their faith.

Ward Just has written a companion novel to Graham Greene’s classic, The Quiet American. While both books show the destruction caused by ignorance mingled with power, Just’s novel is suffused with a love for Vietnam and for the people who believe it’s their home. It too deserves to be a classic.~Janet Brown

Shadow Family by Miyuki Miyabe (Kodansha)

Shadow Family is a murder mystery incorporating the world of Internet chat rooms where people gather and pretend to be whoever they want to be. The story starts off with the investigation into two murders in two different locations but evidence suggests that they were killed by the same person. 

Shadow Family was originally published in the Japanese language in 2001 with the title R.P.G. At the beginning of this book we are given a short definition of the term role-playing: “A method of learning in which real life situations are acted out; by playing various imaginary roles, participants master techniques of problem-solving.” 

The victims are a middle-aged businessman named Ryosukie Tokoroda and a young woman  named Naoko Imai who was found strangled to death near her place of work. As the deaths took place far apart from each other, the police at first do not think they are related. However, the police do think there may be a serial killer on the loose picking victims at random. 

During the investigation, The police discover that Tokoroda’s family dynamics were less than ideal. The father had numerous affairs which the wife knew about and he was estranged from his teenage daughter. The police find that “Ryosuke Tokoroda had created an “alternate” family on the Internet.” Tokoroda has taken the role of “Dad”. The family also consists of “Mom”, a daughter named “Kasumi”, the same name as his daughter, and a son named “Minoru”. 

Tokoroda had more interaction with his Internet family than he did with his own. He is able to give comfort and be supportive of them than his own family. Around the time of Tokoroda’s murder, his  real-life daughter had been given police protection after telling her family that someone has been stalking her.

The police do find a connection between Imai and Tokoroda. Three years prior, when Naoko Imai was still a junior in high school, she worked part-time for a company called Orion Foods. The same company that Ryosuke Tokoroda worked for. The police have also found a trail of emails which they use to reconstruct this online family life. 

The cops have their number one suspect - Miss A, who was acquainted with both Tokoroda and Imai and has the motive to kill them. However, the evidence against her is circumstantial at best and she is released from police custody. The police then change the direction of the investigation. They decide to bring in the “shadow family” for questioning as they have determined that the family has met offline. The police also bring in Tokoroda’s wife and daughter to the precinct and have the daughter watch the proceedings from behind a one-way mirror. 

Miyabe creates a story that’s compelling as it is complicated. As the investigation nears its end, it may take you by surprise. I was hooked from the opening pages until the end where the truth finally comes to light. It’s a psychological thriller where reality and fantasy are intertwined. A story to keep you guessing “whodunnit?”. ~Ernie Hoyt

White Ghost Girls by Alice Greenway (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic)

Hong Kong in the summer of 1967: Across the border, above the line where the New Territories meet mainland China, Red Guards rampage in their goal to purify Mao’s revolution. Hungry mainlanders plunge into the sea, hoping to swim to Hong Kong.  And only a short plane ride away from the peace and prosperity of England’s prize colony, a war rages in Vietnam.

Kate and her older sister Frankie are Americans in Hong Kong, endowed with a wild freedom that’s bred by their home country and fostered by benign neglect. Their father is a photographer for Time/Life, his lens and his attention claimed by Vietnam. Their mother is a beautiful practitioner of selective blindness, an artist whose paintings are “light, pretty, airy,” drenched in “the charm and comforts of the colonial era.” Ah Bing, the girls’ amah, is the only one to provide attempts at discipline, buttressed with Cantonese curses and epithets, but she’s old and too slow to keep up with her gwaimui, her white ghost girls.

Frankie and Kate escape to the beach, building shelters from whatever is washed up by the sea, playing Castaway, calling themselves secret sisters, Viet Cong sisters. They know they’re too old for the games they play; Kate is thirteen, Frankie is nubile--or as a friend of her father’s remarks, voluptuous. Both girls are feral and neither wants to grow up.

Then comes the day that they find a woman’s body floating in the sea, “swollen and bloated like a buoy,” a peasant who tried to swim to freedom and failed. They see students march in protest through the city streets, holding up pictures of Mao. When they accompany Ah Bing to a Kwan Yin temple on a nearby island, they run away, bump into a Red Guard demonstration in a market, and leave when they see the police are on their way. As they begin their return to the temple, the girls are accosted by two men who grab Frankie and  give Kate a bag, Lychees, she’s told, a gift for the captain of the police boat. “You no come back, you no big sister.”

Terrified, Kate ends up throwing the bag into a garbage can near the market and hears it explode as she rushes back to Frankie. Neither girl has been hurt. Both of them are changed. Kate, feeling responsible for the death and injuries incurred by the explosion, becomes secretive. Frankie, molested by her captors, has discovered her sexual power. The summer darkens and takes on a dreadful momentum that their parents fail to recognize nor even notice.

White Ghost Girls is a story of loss and grief, a love letter to a vanished home written by an exile, a eulogy for a girl who would never leave Hong Kong. Alice Greenway, who also grew up in Hong Kong during the 60s, illuminates the city with a sense of place that’s meticulous, visceral, and wistful.

“Can you give me hot rain, mould-streaked walls, a sharpness that creeps into my clothes...The smells of dried oyster, clove hair oil, tiger balm...The feverish shriek of cicadas, the cry of black-eared kites?” Kate begins her story with these questions and ends with this answer. 

…”this is all I want: a wooden stool, a bowl of rice, an army canteen, a secret comrade, the whooping cry of wild gibbons,” the summer when her Viet Cong sister left her forever.~Janet Brown

Voices from the Snow by Hideo Osabe and Kyozo Takagi (Hirosaki University Press)

Voices from the Snow : Tsugaru in Legend, Literature and Fact is “an attempt to present a picture of life in Tsugaru as it once was and to some extent still is, by means of literary documents and traditional materials alternated with scholarly essays.” The book was translated and edited by James N. Westerhoven who is a Professor of American Literature at Hirosaki University and has also translated the works of Osamu Dazai and Nitta Jiro into English and has also translated the works of Haruki Murakami and Yukio Mishima in his native tongue of Dutch. Tsugaru is located at the northern end of Honshu island of Japan. During the Edo Period, it was part of the Tsugaru Domain whose capital was Hirosaki and was ruled by the Tsugaru clan. It is often considered the backside of Japan. “Because of its distance from Tokyo, its long history of isolation, and its impenetrable dialect, Tsugaru even nowadays has a backward image.”  Although Tsugaru still has a backwater image, it is home to two of Japan’s cultural assets - writer Osamu Dazai, who was born here, and the Tsugaru shamisen, a three-stringed instrument that originated in China.

Three of the most well known stories of Tsugaru were written by Hideo Osabe - Tsugaru Jonkarabushi, Yosarebushi, and A Voice in the Snow. Jonkarabushi and Yosarebushi are both stories about the songs that are played on the Tsuguru shamisen which also has a long history of its own. A Voice in the Snow is a short murder mystery in which a suspect commits a crime because of her belief in an itako.

The stories by Kyozo Takagi include Grannies’ Lodge and Yosaburo’s House. Both stories are about ordinary life in Tsugaru and appear here for the first time in English. In order to truly appreciate the stories, it helps to have a little background about the people and practices that are native to the region such as the gomiso and itako. 

Takefusa Takamori, a Professor of Ethnomusicology at Hirosaki Gakuin University, whose research focuses on folk performing arts and the music of Tsugaru gives us insight into the practices of the itako and gomiso who are considered to have shaman-like ability. The itako are blind or nearly blind mediums who are all women and must be trained by older itako. They are believed to be able to communicate with the dead. The gomiso have their regular eyesight and do not require any training but also act as a medium and also interpret people’s dreams. 

Although Voices from the Snow is a University publication, it is written for the layperson in easy to understand prose. Many of the stories can be enjoyed in English for the first time and will give the reader a better understanding of what life was like on the outer fringe of Japan up north. I find that the longer I live in Aomori City, located in Tsugaru, the more curious I am about its literature and history. The book is absorbing and informative and the stories and essays have made me an even bigger fan of my adopted hometown! ~Ernie Hoyt

Leaving Thailand: A Memoir by Steve Rosse

Back in the early ‘90s. Steve Rosse had it all. He lived in an island paradise in the south of Thailand, he had his choice of women who were attractive and acquiescent. His job as a public relations manager for an upscale resort ensured that he would eat well, drink well, and meet everyone in the world, from royalty to scalawags. As a columnist for one of Thailand’s two leading English-language newspapers, his name was widely known and his face appeared on Bangkok billboards. He had conquered the hurdles that cause most foreigners to lose sleep and gain ulcers—an extendable visa and a work permit.  With a life so idyllic, what could go wrong?

The answer to this question, Rosse tells readers in his honest, funny, and self-deprecating memoir, is summed up in one word. Everything.

In a gradual descent, he loses the woman who could have been the love of his life, marries another who becomes the scourge of it, and takes an ill-advised publicity photo that shows the Crown Prince of Denmark in close proximity to a pack of Marlboros. The fact that the Marlboros belong to Rosse’s boss and not the prince means nothing. Suddenly Rosse has no job, two children, and a wife who may be loathsome but is certainly pragmatic. Her suggestion that they move to the States removes Rosse from a place he loves to an existence in Iowa and puts him into a permanent state of culture shock and longing that he’s never recovered from.

Fortunately he has never lost his skill with words or his sense of humor. “Listen,” he says, in his opening sentence. “Let me tell you a story.” While in real life, those words would make most people run for the nearest exit, here they’re an irresistible invitation to another world. Rosse is a natural-born storyteller and Leaving Thailand is a remarkable collection of stories, some of them heartbreaking, some of them bawdy, all of them captivating.

From his welcome to Thailand, which involves an act of petty larceny after a night of serious drinking, an act of carnal knowledge with someone of dubious gender, and an act of extended bliss that leaves Rosse with a somewhat humiliating virus, right up to a poignant essay on his retirement plans that feature a house on a bluff near a temple and a massage parlor, he doesn’t miss a beat. There’s no self-pity here and no disrespect for anyone he meets, including his former wife. He tells about bar girls he has known in the Biblical sense while honoring them in some whole other sense and writes tender essays about his son that are sweet but never mawkish. He puts himself in the heart and mind of a Thai-born cafeteria lady who’s made a home in a cold country and breaks the heart of anyone who reads about his Burmese maid whose life he may have ruined with a few careless words. 

There are many books written by white men about their lives in Thailand. Leaving Thailand roams through much of their territory, expands it, and claims it. And as for its author, as he reveals himself? Let’s give him the last word on who he is--”Not bad. Not good. Just...thus.”~Janet Brown

Kim by Rudyard Kipling (Everyman's Library)

Kim is one of Rudyard Kipling’s best known characters in one of his best known novels. It was first published as a serial in McClure’s Magazine and in Cassell’s Magazine. It was published in book form for the first time by McMillan & Co. in 1901. It is the story of a young boy’s coming of age and his recruitment into the Indian secret service to take part in the Great Game in British India during the late 19th century.

“Though he was burned black as any native, though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white.”  Kim is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier and a poor Irish mother and was raised by a half-caste Indian woman. He wanders the streets of Lahore and treats everybody equally and has garnered the nickname “Friend of All the World”. 

Kim befriends a Tibetan lama and becomes the man’s chela or disciple. They travel together, each having their own quest. Before Kim sets off on the pilgrimage, he visits Mahbub Ali, an Aghan horse-trader, who he has done odd jobs for in the past.

In exchange for a bit of money, Ali gives Kim the task of carrying a mysterious message to an officer named Colonel Creighton in Umballa, a town located between Lahore and Benares. Kim is to say to the Englishman, “The pedigree of the white stallion is fully established” and to pass on a folded piece of paper with a coded message. Kim deduces that there is more to Ali than just being a horse-trader and is determined to solve the mystery. 

On their journey, Kim and the lama come across a British regiment. Their flag depicts a red bull on a green field, an image Kim was told about in his childhood. His father said to him if he ever sees this image, the people it represents would help him. The chaplain of the regiment discovers that Kim is the son of one of the regiment’s former soldiers and takes Kim away from the lama and sends him to an English school to be properly educated. 

Kim spends three years other than tutelage of the British but yearns to return to the lama and help him complete his quest. However, the British have other plans for him. Kim is appointed to a government job and is trained to join the Great Game. A term given to the political game played out by the British Empire against the Russian Empire in seizing control of Afghanistan and other surrounding Central Asia countries. It is the 19th century version of the Cold War.

Kipling brings to life the intrigue of international espionage in the Raj’s however, the most compelling thing about Kim is India itself - the people, the customs, the interactions among races and religions, all under the rule of a foreign power. The story is written in prose that can be described as poetry in motion. Kim may not be James Bond and Kipling certainly isn’t an Ian Fleming, but the spy story that emerges will make you want to read the book over and over again. ~Ernie Hoyt