The Honorable Visitors by Donald Richie (ICG Muse)

Japan - the Land of the Rising Sun. A country that remained closed and isolated for over two-hundred years. It was a policy mandated by the bakufu under the Tokugawa Shogunate and was termed sakoku which literally translates to “closed country”. The only people allowed in were some Portuguese Jesuit missionaries and Dutch traders at designated ports. One of the main reasons for this extreme policy was “an effort by the Japanese government, the Tokugawa shogunate, to legitimize and strengthen its authority.” 

It wasn’t until Commodore Perry with his Black Ships forced the government to open their borders that slowly Japan would see an increase in foreign visitors. In Honorable Visitors, Donald Richie has compiled a book of Japan’s earliest and most prominent visitors including such luminaries as Isabella Bird, Ulysses S. Grant, Rudyard Kipling, Aldous Huxley, Charlie Chaplin, and Truman Capote to name a few. 

Richie’s criteria for inclusion in this book was “determined by the fact of the writing.” He chose people in which “some image of Japan emerged (whether the writer liked the place or not), one that reflected thought and consideration, one that defined not only the country, but also the writer.”

Isabella Bird visited Japan in 1878 when she was forty-seven years old. She was already an acclaimed travel writer having written books about her travels through the Sandwich Islands and living as a woman in the Rocky Mountains. In the early days after Japan opened its borders, visitors were recommended to see popular tourist sites such as Nikko, Hakone, Kyoto, and Kamakura where a fair amount of English was spoken. Bird was not interested in just seeing the famous sites, she was looking for “authenticity”. She was one of the first people to travel to the far north and to Hokkaido where she met the Ainu people. The notes from her journey became her masterpiece of travel writing - Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. 

In contrast to Bird, Pierre Loti, a French native who became popular for his books upon finding love exotic places, could be described as the “bad tourist”. From his writings, it doesn’t appear that he came to Japan to experience it or learn about it. His main goal was to find another woman to add to his list of conquests and to buy as many trinkets as he could for a cheap price. It’s unfortunate that there are still “bad tourists” in this day and age who only come to Japan to look for a playmate they think is demure and subservient to them. 

Each story is unique in the way each writer views Japan. I believe everybody has their own ideas of what they expect when visiting a foreign country. Sometimes those expectations are met, sometimes what’s expected and what you experience can change your way of thinking. Richie’s choice of writers gives the reader an impression of what Japan was like, either good or bad, from the eyes of its earliest visitors. I believe we can learn from the early adventurers in how one should conduct themselves abroad and to be open to all kinds of new experiences. This book certainly makes me want to explore my adopted home country of Japan even more. ~Ernie Hoyt

The World Eats Here by John Wang and Storm Garner (The Experiment)

John Wang grew up in Texas but his culinary horizons extended far beyond Tex-Mex cuisine. His childhood summers were spent in Taiwan where he learned to love that country’s night markets, where people of all economic backgrounds came to eat in an atmosphere of “ineffable electricity.”

When he moved to New York as a high-powered attorney, he was shocked at how few people could afford to eat the city’s legendary food. “Affordabilty,’ he decided, “was the single greatest equalizer,” and his dream was to recreate the night markets he loved as a child, with their diversity of meals and their reasonable prices. 

In 2015 he created the Queens Night Market, where the average dish was no more than five dollars, with a few soaring as high as six. “The target demographic was literally everyone.”

Located in a park that once held the 1939 World’s Fair, near the home of the New York Mets and the site of tennis’s U.S. Open, the location was close to perfect. Open every Saturday night in the summer, Wang’s dream drew an average of 15,000 visitors per day until Covid-19 regulations closed it for the summer in 2020.

Writer and filmmaker Storm Garner fell in love with the Night Market in 2014 when it was still in its planning stages and offered her talents from the start. In 2019 she and Wang were married. By then Garner had interviewed many of the vendors on camera for an oral history project, which formed the nucleus for The World Eats Here.

New York City has more than 150 nationalities and over 120 of these live in Queens. More than 90 of these countries found a home in the Queens Night Market with its 300 vendors. The World Eats Here features 52 of them, telling their stories and sharing 88 recipes, with almost half of both the vendors and the recipes coming from countries in Asia. 

“What are you doing with your expensive degrees?” the Singaporean parents of a Columbia Business graduate asked their daughter when she began selling noodles at the Night Market. “Sharing...a passion for food... the beauty of food and culture,” a Malaysian vendor with an MS in nutrition says.  Indian food “can be amazing with just a few ingredients instead of twenty-five spices” says a banker who spends her Saturday nights proving this is true.  A former chef at Cafe Boulud with a degree in French culinary arts dreams of having “Korean fried chicken at baseball games instead of hot dogs” and a university professor raises money for his Bengali community by manning a food stall on Saturday night.

From Tibet to the Philippines, mouthwatering and uncomplicated recipes beckon to even the most apathetic cook. Son-in-law eggs, (a naughty pun in its native country of Thailand), Burmese tea leaf salad with careful instructions on how to ferment the tea leaves, a hearty breakfast sandwich from Singapore called roti john, and pandan key limeade from Malaysia or avocado smoothies from Vietnam to wash down Hong Kong’s curry fish balls, these and so many other dishes come tantalizingly within reach.  Even though the Queens Night Market may be closed, this book brings it to home kitchens, along with the philosophy of the “floating plate” imparted by the mother of a Pakistani cook who’s a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America that forbids returning an empty plate to anyone who has given you food. Dinners at home will never be the same again after The World Eats Here is in the house. ~Janet Brown

Original Letters from India by Eliza Fay (New York Review of Books)

Eliza Fay was twenty-three years old and a newlywed woman when she and her feckless husband set off to improve their fortunes in India. In 1779, England was still embroiled in the Revolutionary War, in which France had joined forces with the American colonists. None of this turmoil enters Mrs. Fay’s sprightly piece of early travel literature. Instead she concentrates upon seeing Marie Antoinette at the theater, deciding that the ill-fated queen had “the sweetest blue eyes that ever were seen,” the joy of drinking a pint of Burgundy at every meal, remarking “I always preferred wine to beer,” and the disgusting spectacle of asparagus in Lyon “covered with a thick sauce of eggs, butter, oil and vinegar.” 

Having nearly reduced a French cook to tears by demanding her asparagus be “simply boiled with melted butter,” Mrs. Fay crosses the Alps, which she’s surprised to learn consists of more than one mountain, and is delighted to discover the inhabitants make “excellent butter and cheese.” Clearly this is a lady who travels on her stomach.

Once aboard the ship that’s bound for Calcutta, Mrs. Fay turns her attention from the pleasures of the table to the dissection of her fellow passengers. The only other Englishwoman on the voyage is “one of the very lowest taken off the streets of London” and another passenger “has the most odious pair of little white eyes mine have ever beheld.” Bereft of decent food and company, she retreats to her cabin where she makes a dozen shirts for her husband and persuades him to teach her shorthand. 

Her ship reaches the Indian port of Calicut (called Calcutta by the British) at a time when the city was under the rule of a Muslim rebel with no love for the English. Mrs. Fay, her husband, and other passengers are placed in captivity for fifteen weeks but this grisly interlude does nothing to quench her spirits. When released at last and safely in Madras, she’s enchanted by its “Asiatic splendor combined with European taste,” its buildings painted with chunam, a powder made from crushed shells that’s applied like whitewash and glows like marble. She finally arrives in Calcutta after a journey of twelve months and eighteen days and immediately approves of its colonial elegance and beauty. Although it is here that her husband’s “imprudent behaviour,” which results in his fathering a “natural child,” puts an end to her marriage, Mrs. Fay finds that India “interests me exceedingly.” She left only to return three more times over the course of her life, dying penniless in Calcutta at the age of sixty.

Her observations are piercing and evocative, with an amazing adaptability for a woman of her time and place. She resigns herself to living in “a house of thieves” with servants who skim a profit from every domestic transaction in exchange for living in a “land of luxury.” She casts a scathing eye upon her fellow expatriates “languishing under various complaints” which they blame on the climate while their lifestyle would “produce the same effects even in the hardy regions of the North.” She winces at the “luxurious indulgence” of the lengthy dinners which begin at two in the afternoon and end with a repose between four and five. She finds something about the “Hindoos that interests me exceedingly” while writing graphic descriptions of local customs that she calls abhorrent. She travels about the countryside in a silk net hammock carried by two men or on a donkey while seated on “a sort of armchair with cushions and a footstool.” 

Mrs. Fay claimed to be happiest when she had a pen in her hand and it’s quite possible that these letters were written with a goal of future publication. She was far from the first Englishwoman to embark upon epistolary travel literature; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters from Turkey had become a publishing sensation sixteen years before Eliza Fay set off for India. But it’s Mrs. Fay’s letters, with their indiscretions and vitality, unpolished and irresistible, that are still read for pleasure centuries after they were written, setting a standard for modern-day travel writers who would find her travels difficult to emulate, assuming that any of us could survive them.~Janet Brown

Tone Deaf in Bangkok and Other Places by Janet Brown (ThingsAsian Press)

Can you imagine leaving everything you know behind? Your job? Your friends? Your family? That’s exactly what author Janet Brown does as she leaves her long time job of selling books in one of Seattle’s most popular bookstores and says goodbye to her two adult sons and moves to a country she is not overly familiar with and where she cannot speak a word of the language. 

In 1995, when the opportunity arose, Janet moved to Bangkok, Thailand in Southeast Asia to teach English. Every two years, she would go back to Seattle and spend some time with the people she loves. On her last trip, she makes a major life decision and says, “I’m carefully planning my final journey to Bangkok, where I plan to remain until the day I die.” 

Tone Deaf in Bangkok is a collection of her experiences of living abroad and traveling to other nearby destinations and is filled with beautiful, full-color pictures taken by freelance writer and photographer Nana Chen. She shares with us her difficulties in learning the Thai language, navigating the city by using local transport, finding a place to live, and falling in love with a man two years younger than her oldest son. 

Expats living in foreign countries are often asked the question “Why do you like living in your adopted home?”. Janet responds to this question by saying, “I babble something vague and incoherent about the light, the food, the people, the climate, and the lack of earthquakes.” If people ask her to go a little deeper than that, she responds with a variety of answers - “the beauty and ugliness that co-exist side by side, the warmth and humor behind the omnipresent masks of smiles, the irrepressibly free spirit of the city that is often regulated, but never with any lasting success.” 

There are many things Janet learns from experience. At a noodle shop as she reaches for the salt on the table, her friend and Thai mentor says, “Careful. That’s not what you think it is.” He hands her some fish sauce and takes away the bottle of sugar she was about to use on her noodles. She learns that black is the color of death and that she will soon need to replace her wardrobe. 

She discovers that women are expected to dress conservatively and do not smoke in public, an idea she finds ridiculous as an American. She was once asked if she was a “tomboy” and answers “I guess so” only to discover later that “tomboy” is a Thai euphemism for lesbian and that smoking in public is what prostitutes do. 

There is no mistaking the love-hate relationship Janet has with Bangkok. It entices her as much as it infuriates her. She takes us on a journey where we can smell the life of the city. Every one of her adventures will make you cringe or bend over with laughter. Janet will make you want to visit Bangkok and other parts of Southeast Asia. You will want to see for yourself what constantly draws her back and what makes her want to stay. Perhaps she will inspire you to become an expat. ~Ernie Hoyt

Available from ThingsAsian Books

Kingfishers Catch Fire by Rumer Godden (Viking, out of print)

“When Sophie had an idea, her child Teresa trembled.”

Sophie is a young British widow in India, with a very small pension and two equally small children. She is adventurous, sentimental, and in love with the Vale of Kashmir. Brought up as a sheltered English girl of good breeding, she is insouciant, viewing the world around her with “superficial eyes.” To Sophie the place she chooses to make her home is a haven surrounded by mountains, perched above a lake, picturesque as are the peasants who live nearby. 

“We shall live a poor and simple life. We shall toil...we shall grow our own vegetables and keep hens and bees, “ she tells Teresa, who has unfortunately been born with common sense and the gift of realism. Teresa observes and puts puzzle pieces together while Sophie is in love with beauty and crippled by her idea of what is necessary to live a basic life.

Her passion for lovely objects leads her to Profit David, a man who deals in beautiful expensive things and Sophie soon goes into debt buying a lamp with a shade that blazes painted kingfishers into light, a gleaming carpet, a Kashmir shawl. The villagers take note of her extravagance and deem her rich. Even the furnishings that Sophie’s upbringing leads her to regard as essentials are thoroughly luxurious to her neighbors: “A bed each. Even for  the children...Aie! She is rich!”

And she is inexplicable. Sophie and her children wear shoes in the house--”dirty!” and she has no husband. In India ladies do not live alone, unless they are “saints or sinners.” Sophie, living with only two servants and her little children, is neither and to her neighbors she seems mad.

Every community has its own politics and in the village near Sophie’s house the two leading families are wrapped in bitter competition. The village children are almost feral, spending their waking hours in the mountain fields, herding cattle. Sophie urges Teresa to make friends with them but Teresa knows better. For her and her little brother Moo, the herd children are dangerous.

Sophie moves in a graceful world of her own, unsettled only by the shape of a compass carved into the floor of her new house. While she works at settling in, blindly and blithely, the compass calls to her with its promise of places still to be seen. Her ignorance of the world around her is a path to disaster and when it hits, it focuses upon Teresa--and, less violently but with equal danger, upon Sophie.

British author Rumer Godden was taken to India when she was an infant, grew up there, and returned to it after completing her education in England. She embarked upon an unsuccessful marriage and when it disintegrated she moved with her two children to the Dal Lake in Kashmir at the start of World War Two. She stayed there for three years, starting an herb farm and “living, thinking and perhaps dreaming.” She left, as Sophie did, because of a disaster that was directed at her and her daughters. But before that occurred, she “wrote endlessly,” and like Sophie, she was obsessed with the beauty that surrounded her.

Godden’s love for India and her knowledge of it lifts Kingfishers Catch Fire well above the customary expat fiction, while gently excoriating the point of view of the customary expat. She presents a classic dissection of the dangers of romanticism and selective blindness, wrapping it in a mixture of the passion and unvarnished realism with which she saw the country she loved and eventually had to leave.~Janet Brown

Quest for Kim : In Search of Kipling's Great Game by Peter Hopkirk (John Murray)

Quest for Kim is author Peter Hopkirk’s attempt to follow in the footsteps of Kim from Rudyard Kipling’s novel of the same name. However, it is not a travelogue but more of a literary detective novel. The days of the Raj’s India are long past so Hopkirk’s journey takes him through the countries of Pakistan and India. He couldn’t have chosen a worse time to partake in this endeavor as the two countries were on the brink of war. 

Hopkirk does his best to leave the politics aside and focuses on his own journey. He wants to see how much of Kim’s India still remains. The trail has him starting from Lahore, Pakistan. He will continue on to Simla, Umballa, Delhi, and travel along the Grand Trunk Road. Hopkirk also sets out to show that the characters in Kim were based on or inspired by real people. 

You do not have to read Kim in order to enjoy this book as Hopkirk provides the necessary passages related to his quest. He admits that there are parts of the story that he would not be able to do justice to and advises the reader that it would be best to read the actions in Kipling’s own words. 

Hopkirk’s first order of business is to determine and argue if Kim was based on a true person and who that might have been. Hopkirk suggests that Kipling would also have been familiar with the story of two likely candidates. The first being a man named Durie who was the son of a British soldier and an Indian woman who traveled through Afghanistan “dressed as a Muslim”. 

The other likely person is a man named Tom Doolan, the son of an Irish sergeant and a Tibetan woman. The story goes that the Irishman deserted his post and ran away with the woman to Tibet, never to be heard from again. Then, years later, a young boy is seen in a market in Darjeeling with “fair hair and blue eyes, but who spoke no English”. “Around his neck, however, was hung an amulet-case containing papers which showed him to be the son of the missing soldier.”  This is the exact same way the chaplain of Kim’s father’s regiment discovers the identity of Kim.

Quest for Kim is a fascinating journey as we follow Hopkirk trace Kim’s journey and gives us the truth behind the real people the characters in the novel are based on. In his research, Hopkirk finds there really was an Afghan horse dealer who he surmises was the model for Mahbug Ali. Hopkirk makes a convincing argument that Colonel Craighton was based on the actions of Thomas Montgomerie who trained locals to “gather topographical and other intelligence in areas where it was far too dangerous for Europeans to travel.” 

This book is definitely not your ordinary travel journal. It is a tribute to Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim, whom Hopkirk says first introduced him to the “Great Game” and became obsessed with the story. Once you read this, you may be inclined to read Kipling’s masterpiece or return to it if you have read it before. Perhaps it will inspire you to make your own literary journey of one of your favorite novels. ~Ernie Hoyt

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama (Riverrun)

This is Hideo Yokoyama’s first book to be published in English. Fourteen years ago in the first week of the sixty-fourth year of the Showa Era or 1989, Prefecture D was in the midst of an investigation involving a large number of police officers. A seven year old girl named Shoko Amamiya was kidnapped and held for a twenty-million yen ransom. The case ended on a sour note as the police found the girl’s dead body five days after the perpetrator escaped with the money. He remains at large and his identity remains unknown. The unsolved case has been given the name Six Four. 

Yoshinobu Mikami has recently been assigned the position of Press Director in Media Relations, a branch of Administrative Affairs, after having served in the Criminal Investigation’s First Division in Nonviolent Crime. He also worked on the kidnapping investigation fourteen years ago. He was a member of the Close Pursuit Unit and had followed the victim’s father, Yoshio Amimiya, to the ransom exchange point. He has been summoned by Akama, the Director of Administrative Affairs and Ishii, the Secretariat Chief to their office. They inform him that the Commissioner General is going to pay them a visit the following week. 

The Commissioner General is the head of the National Police Agency (NPA) which is based in Tokyo. He is responsible for some 260,000 police officers. “To the regional police, he is like the emperor.” The plan is for the Commissioner General to visit the site where the body was found. He will make an offering of incense and flowers, then visit the father at his home to pay his respects. “To make an appeal inside and outside the force, and to give a boost to the officers still investigating the case. To reinforce our intention never to let violent crime go unpunished.” The timing is well-planned as the statute of limitations will go into effect in just a little over a year. Mikami realizes there is more to the Commissioner General’s visit when Akama says, “I do believe his appeal is intended more to reach an internal audience than the general public.” 

Mikami is assigned the task of getting permission from Amamiya for the Commissioner General’s visit. The first time Mikami goes to see Amamiya, his request is flatly refused but persuades Amamiya to change his mind on a subsequent visit. However, on the eve of the Commissioner’s visit, another kidnapping has taken place. The victim is a young girl and the kidnapper has demanded a twenty-million yen ransom. He has also given the victim’s father the same instructions as those given in the Six Four case. It becomes a race against time as the police have to determine if this is a copycat case or if it is the same person who committed the crime fourteen years ago. 

This is an exciting look into the inner workings of the Japanese police investigating process and the relationship between separate divisions within the force. It also sheds light on the politics and bureaucracy of the National Police Agency. It is also a high-paced mystery with an unpredictable outcome and will appeal to fans of Miyuki Miyabe and Keigo Higashino. Once I started reading, I could not put it down. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat (Candlewick Press)

Three children roam the city streets of Chattana, on their own but linked together in a way none of them completely understand. Pong and Somkit were born to prisoners which has left both boys marked for life. Nok, the daughter of the prison warden who lost his position after Pong escaped for freedom, is intent upon capturing the fugitive and restoring her father’s lost honor. 

Chattana is a city of brilliant light, surrounded by absolute darkness. Years ago a fire destroyed the city and now all flame is forbidden. The city’s blazing light comes from the power of one man, the Governor, who carries illumination in his fingertips. Under his touch, bulbs flare into globes of colored brightness and only he can decide what areas will receive this gift. 

However he, Pong, and Ampai, a mysterious woman activist who is “a stirrer of hearts,” have one thing in common. All three wear identical bracelets given to them by the abbot of a monastery, who himself carried the gift of light. Their vastly different lives intersect when Ampai plans a protest march against the Governor’s absolute and crushing power with Somkit and Pong promising to help her. The two of them scavenge for the material needed for the protest and as they wander the city, Nok hunts relentlessly for the boy who destroyed her father’s career.

Where did the Governor obtain his ability to brighten the world?  What is the secret behind the scars on Nok’s arm, ones that could only have been inflicted by a forbidden fire?  What is the secret behind Pong’s talent for hearing sounds that nobody else can hear? These questions give this story mysteries that will entice even the most reluctant reader and will make it a splendid read-aloud choice for teachers and parents.

A Wish in the Dark is an intricate and resonant story with plot twists and political parallels that take it beyond the realm of the 8-12 age range that its publisher has assigned to it. While young readers will fall captive to the book’s fantasy and adventure, their parents will recognize the Governor who has turned the City of Wonders to the City of Rules, the City of Order, and who wants to raise taxes to build a “youth reform center.” As Chattana is thronged with people from the farthest corners of the countryside to march peacefully across the city’s bridge, memories of Selma, Hong Kong, and Bangkok come to mind and this story takes on a deeper dimension.

Thai-American Christina Soontornvat has drawn upon Thai culture and history, mixing them with the classic theme of Les Miserables. Within that framework she has placed unforgettable characters who battle against injustice in a novel that will speak to everyone from the age of eight up to eighty. No matter how old or how young its readers may be, they will all be heartened by its message of hope and persistence as they too find themselves wishing in the dark.~Janet Brown

Red Candles and the Mermaid and Other Tales by Mimei Ogawa (Nihon Tosho Kan Kokai)

Mimei Ogawa was born in Joetsu in Niigata Prefecture in 1882. He went to Waseda University and studied Russian and English literature. After graduating, he focused on writing children’s literature and is often cited as the Hans Christian Andersen of Japan. Red Candles and the Mermaid is a collection of some of his most popular stories. 

“Red Candles and the Mermaid” is a story of human greed and revenge It is about a mermaid whose only wish is for her daughter to live a happy life. She decides to let her baby be brought up by humans because she heard “towns where human beings live are beautiful. People are kinder and more gentle than fish and beasts.” The daughter is brought up by an old couple who makes and sells candles in a small coastal town.

The daughter pays back their kindness by painting pictures on the candles. They sell really well and the shop becomes very prosperous. Rumors spread that if the candle is offered to the local shrine, ships would be protected at sea. However, the now rich couple are persuaded by a man to sell the girl knowing she is not human. The daughter begs her parents not to sell her but her pleas fall on deaf ears. Still, the girl kept drawing and colored some of the last candles all in red.

Around midnight, a woman comes to the house wanting to buy a candle and is sold a red one. That night a huge storm came and a rumor soon spread that whenever there is a red candle burning at the shrine, a violent storm would come no matter how nice the weather. The candles became associated with bad luck. The old couple stopped selling candles and the town perished as well.

“The Cow Woman” is a story that incorporates Buddhist beliefs concerning the afterlife. The tale centers around a very tall and strong but gentle deaf woman. She has a son that she loves very much. She is very protective of him and she fears people making fun of him because of her disability and because the boy has no father. Even after her death, the mother continues to look after her only son. 

“The Lord’s Bowl” is a story about beauty and practicality. A famous potter is requested to make a bowl for the Lord of the land. The official tells the potter the bowl must be light and thin. The potter makes the bowl as light and thin as possible. When the official presents the bowl to the Lord, he asks, “How do you decide whether the bowl is good or not?” The official responds by saying, “The more light and thin, the better. A heavy and thick bowl is vulgar.” Unfortunately, the Lord isn’t pleased with the bowl. The potter is brought to the castle and instead of the praise he thought he would receive, is reprimanded for not being considerate or practical when making the bowl. 

This collection of twenty-five short stories will appeal to children and adults alike. Ogawa believed that his stories were written for people who never forgot the innocence of their youth. The stories will take you back to a world you may have forgotten and will once again stir your imagination. ~Ernie Hoyt