Evergreen by Naomi Hirahara (Soho)

When Aki Nakasone and her parents return to Los Angeles after years in an internment camp and an involuntary relocation to Chicago, their hometown feels unwelcoming and unfamiliar. “Ban the Jap” committees prevent them from moving into many areas in the city, Little Tokyo is filled with Black transplants from the South, and Aki feels lucky to find a house in the Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Many others who have returned from the camps can only find temporary housing in trailers and old army barracks.

She’s also fortunate to land a job in the Japanese Hospital as a nurse’s aid, because California is mulling over propositions that will limit the livelihoods open to Japanese Americans. There are rumors that the state intends to confiscate property owned by Japanese Americans under an act of escheat, and the Ku Klux Klan is a legal entity under California law. 

When one of Aki’s elderly patients turns out to be covered with bruises, she’s surprised to find that the old man is the father of one of her husband’s best friends, who was best man at her wedding. His dismissive reaction to his father’s injuries shocks Aki and when the old man later dies in the hospital from a gunshot wound, her suspicions flare into life when the son is nowhere to be found.

As Aki searches for the missing son, she becomes drawn into the scattered community of  internment camp returnees and the underworld that flourishes in post-war Los Angeles. Police corruption and rampant prejudice impede her efforts to find the dead man’s only relative, plunging her into a perilous and frightening mission. To complicate matters, the man Aki married in a whirlwind wartime romance has come home from the battlefield with memories that trouble his sleep and have turned him into a stranger.

In this sequel to Clark and Division (Asia by the Book, July 2022), Naomi Hirahara once again uses a compelling mystery to bring past history to light. Aki’s husband is one of the “Go for Broke Boys,” a member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, part of the 100th Infantry Battalion that fought in Europe while their own families were interned in U.S. camps. In less than two years these two units earned over 4000 Purple Hearts and 4000 Bronze Star medals, only to face discrimination when they returned to the United States. In a heartbreaking portion of Evergreen, a member of the 442nd is unable to marry the woman he loves unless the couple elopes to another state--California’s anti-miscegenation law isn’t repealed until 1948, three years after the war ended.

Hirahara’s deep dive into history and her skill in creating intricate mystery plots are brightened by bursts of descriptions that are original and lovely. “Palm trees swaying against a bleed of pink,” and “windows spilled sun on tile floors” make readers understand why Aki and her family, along with so many other, returned to Los Angeles and fought against steep and daunting odds to make it their home once again. ~Janet Brown

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (Penguin)

I often enjoy revisiting modern classics as well as reading classics I’ve never got around to reading. E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India falls into the latter category for me. I already knew that some of the content would irritate me as the story is set in British India and the Brits were not kind to the native people. 

The book was originally published in 1924 and was adapted into a movie in 1984. I had neither read the book nor watched the film, so the story was very fresh to me. It is set around the 1920s and is based on the experiences of the author. The title is taken from a Walt Whitman poem, A Passage to India, which can be found in his book of poetry, Leaves of Grass.

The story revolves around four main characters —Dr. Aziz, his friend, Mr. Cyril Fielding, an elderly woman named Mrs. Moore and a young and soon to be engaged British woman named Miss Adela Quest. 

Dr. Aziz is a young muslim physician who works at the British Hospital in the fictional city of Chandrapore. His boss and head doctor at the hospital is Major Callendar, a bigoted Brit who is unlikable from the very beginning of the story. 

Dr. Aziz first meets Mrs. Moore at a local mosque. He yells at her, telling her she does not belong here, but after exchanging a few words and clearing up their misunderstanding, this becomes the start of a new friendship. 

Miss Adela Quested is a British school mistress who has come to Chandrapore to meet and talk with Ronnie Heaslop, the British Magistrate in Chandrapore, to see if she really wants to marry him. She is accompanied by Mrs. Moore, Ronnie Heaslop’s mother. The two women say they would like to meet some “real” Indians so Mr. Turton, the city tax collector, arranges a party and invites several Indians. 

However, the party turn outs to be a bit awkward, not only because of the Indians’ lack of self-assurance and their fear of offending the host and other British citizens but is also due to the Brits’ bigotry. It is here that Dr. Aziz meets Mr. Fielding, a middle-aged British man who is the principal of a small government-run college for Indians. 

At the party hosted by Mr. Fielding, Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested say they would like to see more of the “real” India and Dr. Aziz says he would arrange an outing to the nearby Marabar Caves, another ficitional area that was modeled after Barabar Caves in Bihar. He also invites Mr. Fielding and his Hindu friend Nawab Bahadur. 

However, Mr. Fielding and Mr. Bahadur misses the train to the caves, leaving Dr. Aziz in charge with no British officials present to watch over the women. At the caves Mrs. Moore decides to take a rest while Dr. Aziz and Miss Quest continue through some of the other caves. The two become separated and the next time Dr. Aziz sees Miss Quested, she’s climbing down the mountain to meet Miss Derek, who frequently makes use of a car owned by the Hindu Royal Family she works for. 

When Dr. Aziz returns, he is immediately arrested and charged with sexually assaulting Miss Quested in one of the caves. The British police, the Magistrate, all believe that Dr. Aziz is guilty because no Englishwoman would lie or make up a story.

Dr. Aziz’s trial then becomes the focal point of the story. The Brits have already condemned him and for them, the trial is but a farce to prove that the government is also fair to the natives. The verdict all lies with Miss Quested’s testimony. As to the outcome, I would not spoil it for any other readers who may be interested in this novel.

I think many reader would find this story reminiscent of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which also focuses on the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. The attitudes of white Americans are similar to those of Forster’s British colonizers. The underlying theme is the fragile balance of race relations. One word from a white person is all that’s needed to condemn someone who is not of the same race.

Although the British Empire isn’t as strong as it was and the U.S. did abolish slavery, it hasn’t stopped prejudice against people who are perceived to be different. As cynical as it sounds, until a time when people are really treated equally, prejudice and injustice will continue. ~Ernie Hoyt

Written on Water by Eileen Chang (New York Review of Books)

There are some books that wait for the right moment to be opened, bought with good intentions but sit on a shelf, unread, for months. Last winter I brought home a collection of essays, realized I wasn’t in the mood for any of them, and almost forgot about this purchase. When I picked it up recently, I fell into a conversation with a twenty-something who was born over a hundred years ago, a writer whose fiction had always intimidated me but whose essays were pure enjoyment.

Author of Love in a Fallen City and Lust, Caution, Eileen Chang admits that her novels are “rather diverting but also more unsettling than they should be…I like tragedy and, even better, desolation.” She approaches her characters with an analytical distance that’s scaldingly honest and devoid of tenderness. Although I’ve always been stunned by her talent, I’ve never read her work with pleasure--until I opened Written on Water and was immersed in delight, envy, and agreement. 

Chang had me hooked with her essay,  Peking Opera through Foreign Eyes, where she asserts that ignorance of its subtleties only increases the enjoyment. If the audience isn’t aware of how it should be performed, then it has no niggling criticisms and can simply be delighted by the pageantry and spectacle. As an ignorant and passionate devotee of Chinese opera who has sat on a sidewalk for hours to enjoy outdoor performances of this art-form, thrilling to the “sharp, anxious tattoo of percussion” that punctuate the “kicks and jousts and feints,” I began to love the mind of Eileen Chang. When she went on to say “Chinese people like the law, and they like breaking the law too…by way of trivial violations of the rules,” I remembered the times I saw this happen in Beijing and embarked upon a silent conversation with Chang as I read. And when she discusses “the chamber pot strategem,” when the soul of a dead man is imprisoned in a chamber pot, I knew this was a plot device that could only be created by people who had intimate knowledge of an outdoor privy (or as we called this in Alaska, an outhouse).

At this point I was ensnared by Chang’s wit, frankness, and her unflinching curiosity. She wrote these pieces before she turned 25, after the publication of her first novel, and they’re filled with the viewpoint of someone who’s still in love with discovery. She describes street scenes with the same relish that she does women’s fashions and confesses that her love of city sounds means “I can’t fall asleep until I hear the sound of trams.” She gives a vivid character sketch of her best friend with an intimacy that she denies her fictional subjects and she brings a poignant dimension to the fall of Hong Kong with the memory of “how we scoured the streets in search of ice cream and lip balm” in the midst of “chaos and destruction.”

The bleakness and distance of Chang’s fiction becomes understandable when she writes about her father, a man surrounded by “clouds of opium smoke.” “When he was lonely,” she says, “he liked me.” In a luxurious setting, Chang’s childhood is Dickensian in its privations, which she recounts in the spirit of “There’s very little to remember so nothing is forgotten.” She’s far too ironic--and much too cerebral-- to lapse into drama.

Chang skillfully reveals her love of China, as she writes about its daily life, its art, its music. “I am Chinese,” she says, “so I know how to appreciate noise and clatter…If I were to choose, I could not bear to leave China: I’m “homesick even before I leave home.”…” Ten years after these words were published, she left. In 1955, Chang moved to the U.S. and five years later she took U.S. citizenship. She died alone, in Los Angeles, a death that makes Written on Water all the more precious and deeply sad.~Janet Brown

The Ainu and the Bear : The Gift of the Cycle of Life by Ryo Michico, illustrated by Kobayashi Toshiya, translated by Deborah Davidson and Owaki Noriyoshi (R.I.C. Publications)

The R.I.C. Story Chest series is published by R.I.C. Publications, a press that focuses on releasing Japanese picture books in English. The Ainu and the Bear is one of those books. It introduces young people to a story by northern Japan’s indigenous people—the Ainu. 

The Ainu and the Bear was originally published in the Japanese language as Iomante in 2005 by Parol-sha. The English version became available in 2010 and includes a CD which narrates the story. Also on the CD is a song titled Iomante Upopo by Umeko Ando, an Ainu of the Tokashi region in Hokkaido. 

The original title of the book, Iomante, is the name of the “sending” ceremony performed by the Ainu. The sub-title [The Gift of the Cycle of Life] will give the reader an idea of what the story is about. The Ainu believe that “every grain of millet, and every piece of meat and fish, contains the life of another”. As narrated in the story, “We feed on the life of others. We are a part of a cycle of fleshly and spiritual life. We all partake in the blessing of the cycle of life. We all partake in the blessing of the cycle of life”. 

The Ainu believe that the animals they kill and eat are all provided by the Kimun kamuy, mountain gods who take the form of bears when in the human world. They believe that kamuy are gods who live in both the human and non-human things in the human world but their true home is the land of the gods.  This story is told from two perspectives, a newborn bear and an Ainu boy. The climax of the story is the Iomante. 

The Iomante or “bear sending” ceremony is an Ainu tradition in which a bear cub is raised by the village and then killed in a ceremony “to relieve it of its flesh so that it may return to the land of the kamuy”. 

The story opens with the killing of a mother bear and how a newborn bear smells humans for the first time. We then listen to an Ainu boy talking about his father going on a hunt. When the boy’s father returns, he says to his son, “Look what Kimun kamuy has given us” and shows the boy a small bear cub. The boy is a little scared as it’s his first time smelling the scent of a bear. The father tells his son, “But as tiny as she is, she’s still a true Kimun kamuy. She’s an honored guiest who comes to us from the land of the gods”. 

The village celebrates by eating ohaw, a type of stew filled with meat and vegetables. The boy and the people of his village raise the bear cub as if it is a child of their own. The bear grows and becomes quite strong. It can no longer stay in the house and must be raised in a cage. 

The bear becomes increasingly wild and makes the boy scared to get close to her. The father tells him, “She’s starting to get homesick for the land of the kamuy, that’s all”. The boy still doesn’t understand until his father says, “Where her mother is.” The boy realizes the bear is lonely for her mother which is why she is howling. 

The father then reminds the son of when he first brought the bear cub home and how the village feasted on ohaw. The boy thinks back to the huge chunk of meat, the beautiful bear fur. Only now does the boy understand that the meat of the ohaw was the meat of the mother bear. Then the father tells his son that they must send the grown bear back to the land of the kamuy. 

The story is a fascinating look into the rituals and traditions of the Ainu people. The Japanese government abolished the Iomante in 1955. However, the law was rescinded in 2007, “because the Ministry of Environment of Japan announced that animal ceremonies were generally regarded as an exception to the animal rights of Japan in October 2006”. I’m sure the decision was a blow to animal rights activists, but in my opinion, I don’t see the difference between raising a bear cub for food as being any different from raising cattle for beef or raising pigs for pork. 

The moral of the story is about having respect for the animals whose lives are taken, so that we can eat and be nourished by them. It is my belief that governments should respect indigenous people as the indigenous people respect animals and life. ~Ernie Hoyt

Coming Home Crazy by Bill Holm (Milkweed Editions)

With ten rooms of books and over 3,500 sections, Powell’s City of Books has filled a city block in Portland, Oregon for the past fifty-three years, and  claims to be the largest new-and-used bookstore in the world. It certainly is one of the most enticing, with its shelves filled with surprises and its cavernous rooms somehow managing to feel cozy. A trip to Powell’s is always a treasure hunt and it’s impossible to stick to a book budget when browsing in that place. 

On a recent expedition, I made it to only two sections--Travel Literature and Asian History--and left with a book bag that strained at its seams. Among my purchases was a book whose title had always intrigued me but that I’d never read, Coming Home Crazy by Bill Holm. 

Anyone who has lived anywhere in Asia, with the possible exception of Singapore, is going to come back to the West feeling a wild disorientation that verges on insanity. Holm cites The Crackup, where Scott Fitzgerald said he knew he was crazy when he couldn’t look at two opposing ideas at the same time. China, Holm says, has the opposite effect, as a place that makes it impossible to ever “see again singly.” People who return from the Middle Kingdom come home with a “bifurcated consciousness.” The antithesis to “every idea in your life and culture looks as sane and reasonable as the idea itself--” and sometimes even more so.

Although this beginning hints at a work of comparisons and contrasts, what follows is a collection of essays that follow a strange sort of alphabetical order, with a scrambled sense of time. After living with a language that can’t be alphabetized, Holm is delighted to point out the random nature of the A to Z classification. By beginning with an essay on AIDS and ending with a piece that explains the Chinese custom of zou houmen, (“going through the back door” to get a desired result), he creates a crazy quilt of unrelated patchwork pieces.

The only way to read this book is to ignore the alphabet. Holm offers suggestions that might give his readers a narrative thread but his choices are as idiosyncratic as his structure. After floundering in attempts to find a beginning, middle, and end, readers may find themselves wishing that Holms had simply published the journals that these pieces seemed to have emerged from.

Nevertheless, within the chaotic tumble of anecdotes and impressions there’s some very good writing and a Picassoesque portrait of what one city in China, Xi’an, felt like to a displaced Midwesterner from 1986-1987. 

As a “waiguoren,” a Western foreigner, Holm was an object of curiosity, one that was inexplicable and fascinating. Reluctant to learn Chinese because it would strip him of his adult authority and take him back into childhood, he salutes his Chinese students in their study of English because they “exhibit a kind of courage” that he lacks himself. Swiftly he falls in love with the idea of teaching people who value books and are delighted to encounter English literature--”Whitman, Thoreau, Yeats…It was all candy, all delight.”

Holm is less than delighted with the frugal and Spartan comforts of his life in China but  he finds an essential dimension in how the people find “celebration in their daily lives.” The ritual of making dumplings is one he explains step-by-step, from buying pork and vegetables in the market, to chopping, stuffing, and shaping in the company of friends in a home kitchen. Eating them is “a mountain, a dinner party, close to gluttony” and a sacrament of pure pleasure.

Pleasure is the hallmark of Holm’s essays. According to him, Nixon wasn’t the one who opened China to the West. Walt Disney did. Sunday evening was when people clustered around TV sets to watch Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and the gang cavort in an hour of cartoons.

And under a government of rigid control with a bloody history that would re-erupt on June 4 in 1989, Chinese people, Holm claims, are “anarchically free” so long as they avoid actions that are overt. The small regulations of daily living are freely and happily ignored in a society that he sees as operatic, “the Asian Italy.”

It would be interesting to go to Xi’an in 2024, decades after Holm spent his year there, to see how many of his observations still ring true. Carried as an anti-guidebook, his collection of impressions and opinions could launch explorations that may prompt surprise, delight, and a whole new attack of “coming home crazy.”~Janet Brown

Knife by Salman Rushdie (Random House)

In 1988, Salman Rushdie became a symbol. His fifth novel, The Satanic Verses, enraged the Muslim world and led the Ayatolla Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, to call for his assassination. 

A fatwah was issued, a legal decree that is irrevocable. It guarantees that as long as Rushdie draws breath, he can be murdered with impunity, under Shia Islamic law.  It also guaranteed that to millions of people, Rushdie was a target while to millions more he was an icon of free speech. 

A target? An icon? When Rushdie decided to live without fear and with pleasure, then he was derided as a “party animal.” It took him almost thirty years to find a place where he could be happy and escape the different narratives that tried to put him in an assortment of pigeonholes. He was, he said, “famous not so much for my books as for the mishaps of my life.”

Then, six years later,  soon before his twenty-first novel was released, he went to speak at the Chautauqua Institution. An idyllic spot in rural New York, this is a place that, for 150 years, has dedicated itself to ideas, thoughts, and discussion that would foster the growth of a civil society. It’s a sanctuary that has never seen violence. So when a man burst out of the audience as Rushdie began to speak, nobody moved in the minute or two that it took the assailant to reach the stage. Until he pulled out a knife and began to stab, 27 seconds passed before someone realized this was not performance art.

In under half a minute, Rushdie is almost mortally wounded in an attack that would change his life once again, trying to pin him to a fate that was prompted by somebody else’s actions. He’s 75 years old. It will  take him six weeks to leave his hospital bed and far longer than that to undergo agonizing therapy. “You’re lucky,” a doctor told him, “that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.”

But the flawed attack puts Rushdie in “a one-eyed, one-handed world.” The simple act of tooth-brushing becomes an ordeal and before his left hand is mobile again, a therapist has to chip away at a thick layer of dried blood. His right eye is gone forever. The knife had reached the optic nerve.

But even when he was comatose, Rushdie’s creativity was brilliantly alive. Unconscious, he envisioned palaces whose building blocks were the alphabet and when he finally opened his surviving eye, he saw golden letters floating between his bed and the people who stood beside it. From the very beginning of this, he knew that although “the knife had severed me…language was my knife.” 

Unable to return home for security reasons once he’s released from the hospital, he still has his “home in literature and the imagination.” He claims his story and reclaims his life. He writes Knife.

Reading this book is a humbling and inspiring experience. Rushdie’s language is playful and discursive, thoughtful and creative. Being given an entrance to his mind and trying to keep up with him is dizzying and sometimes vexing, and his story, told without a softening filter, is often harrowing. But it never lapses into self-pity. A man who was brutally forced out of the life he had created takes full possession of where he has been put by someone who attacked him as a symbol that was “disingenuous.” In his mid-seventies, Rushdie seizes his “second chance” at being alive without clinging to “ an irretrievably lost past.” In his old age, this ageless artist continues to “sing the truth and name the liars.” ~Janet Brown