Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goosen (Knopf)

It could be easy for readers of Novelist as a Vocation, all of them presumably writers or people who want to write, to hate Haruki Murakami. He’s a man who decided, while he was at a baseball game, that he could write a novel and then immediately proceeded to do that, again and again over the next thirty-five years.  He has never suffered through a case of writer’s block because “I don’t make promises, so I have no deadlines,” and claims “I never write unless I really want to.” (When he doesn’t want to, he translates English writers into Japanese. Raymond Carver is a particular favorite.)

Obviously he’s wanted to do this every day of his life since that fateful baseball game because he’s published twenty-two books with America’s most prestigious imprint, Alfred A. Knopf.  The bulk of them are novels, with five short story collections, and four works of nonfiction: Underground, a collection of interviews with survivors of the Aum Shinrikyo bombing in Tokyo’s subway system; What I Talk About When I Talk about Running (reviewed on Asia By the Book, June 2023); Absolutely on Music, his conversations with the famed symphony conductor Seiji Ozawa; and Murakami T, a slender volume that’s an annotated catalog of his impressive t-shirt collection, with photographs of each shirt.

“The thing that makes novels different is practically anybody can write one if they put their mind to it,” Murakami says generously. He then proceeds to explain why many writers produce only a few, warning that writing a novel is “time-consuming and tedious work,” an “inefficient undertaking.” 

It’s also a demanding job that requires a high degree of physical fitness. “Once a writer puts on fat, it’s all over,” Murakami once proclaimed in an interview and although he admits that was a trifle harsh, he believes it’s true. Aerobic physical activity leads to an increase of neurons firing in the brain, which is why he himself has taken a run every day for the past thirty years.

A believer in schedules, his own is strict and modeled after the sort followed by an assembly-line worker. “I punch in, write my ten pages, and then punch out.” Those ten pages are written in Japanese and amount to the “equivalent of sixteen hundred English words,” every day. If he finds himself wanting to write more, he makes himself stop;  when he doesn’t feel like writing, he still produces his ten pages. Although he’s been told that’s not how artists work, he counters with “Why must a novelist be an artist?” 

A passionate reader, Murakami began to read novels written in English when he was in high school and when he began writing his first novel, he wrote it in English. When he translated it back into Japanese, he found he had hit upon a new style of writing, not conventionally literary but completely his own. He’s coupled this with his decision to “omit all explanations,” and to ignore “conventional logic and literary cliches,” using these principles to create novels that are unlike any others.

“Read,” he tells prospective writers, “Observe. Remember.” Quoting James Joyce, Murakami says “Imagination is memory…fragments of memory that lack any clear connection with one another.”

More than once, Murakami insists that he is a very ordinary person, “the type who’s always shown to the worst table in restaurants.” He may have that facade. In fact, as a man who treasures his privacy, he probably works hard to maintain it. But his extraordinary writing has taken him far beyond the ordinary—his agent, his editor, the men who have been his publishers, both at Knopf and the New Yorker, have all been glittering literary stars among whom Murakami does more than hold his own. Choosing to move from Japan to the East Coast, insisting on choosing his own translators and working with them to create a manuscript in English that he then presents to his agent, regarding literary prizes with an aristocratic disdain, the man may be ordinary. The writer is not.

Although he may never write his autobiography, Murakami has given abundant glimpses of himself and his opinions in this collection of essays. He reveals a man who rebelled against Japan’s educational system and chose his own way of learning, who turns his back on Japan’s aversion to those who “go against the flow” and praises originality instead, who submits his writing first of all to his wife for her opinion and then chafes against her constructive criticism. Anyone who reads this book is going to come away with a yearning to have a beer and listen to jazz with Haruki Murakami, that “ordinary guy” with a far from ordinary mind.~Janet Brown

The River by Rumer Godden (out of print)

In a family of four children that will soon expand to five, Harriet is alone. Her father is consumed with managing a jute mill, her mother is in the final stages of pregnancy. Bea, the eldest, is lost in a haze of beauty and the admiration that this gift has bestowed upon her. The only son, Bogie, is immersed in the natural world and the youngest daughter, Victoria, is reveling in her final moments as the baby of the family. 

Harriet has learned to find companionship within her thoughts and the words that emerge from them. An ardent observer of the life that swirls about her, she does her best to understand what she sees by chronicling it all in her journal and in her poetry.

What she sees is the extraordinary beauty of India, which is the only home she’s ever known. Growing up on the banks of Bengal’s Lakya river, behind the walls encircling a house that’s fashioned after an English manor and is surrounded by an English garden, Harriet goes beyond that sheltering enclosure to watch the river. 

The river contains “ life in and over its flowing,” crocodiles, porpoises, steamships, barges, fishing boats, under “a blue weight of sky.” In its depths are sunset river pearls, brought up by divers and wafting over it are the smells of incense, ghee, and honey. With the changes that are washing over her family, the river’s constancy comforts Harriet and gives substance to her racing thoughts. As she watches the moving water, ideas take shape and emerge in coherency as poems and stories.

Harriet is enraged at the thought of giving up her childhood and it puzzles her that Bea has relinquished it so thoroughly. At the same time, she feels pangs of jealousy that a young soldier, crippled by the war, ignores her in favor of Bea and she finds she’s unable to quell these feelings by playing with Bogie. In fact, she has unfamiliar feelings of responsibility toward the brother who has been her playmate. When he tells her he’s discovered a snake deep within the garden and is obsessed with watching it, Harriet is torn between telling her parents and keeping Bogie’s secret. Her decision will change her life forever.

A slender novella of less than 200 pages, The River is an extraordinary love letter to India during the final days of the Raj, as seen through the eyes of a thoughtful child. Harriet’s world is “not entirely European…not entirely Indian,” but “a mixture of both.” She lives in a conventionally English house but when Christmas comes, it arrives with the weather of “a cool fresh summer day.” Equally special to the family is Diwali when the river comes alive with thousands of floating lamps and the sky blazes with fireworks.

And yet when Harriet goes beyond the walls of the house, what she sees is a postcard. Walking through neighboring villages after dark, she passes through “a still life of figures and things, lit and quiet.” In love with what surrounds her, Harriet is a tourist, here for a while, then moving on.

Her life is patterned after Rumer Godden’s own Indian childhood. Forced to leave the country where she had lived since she was six months old, Godden returned when she was eighteen after going to school for five years in England. She remained in India until she was forty and her best novels are ones that reflect her life in that country: The River, Kingfishers Catch Fire, Black Narcissus. 

The most poignant of these is The River, steeped in the fresh and untarnished viewpoint of a child. Beauty and tragedy, perception and naivete, all combine to give a picture of the vanished lives of the English, yet Indian, children, like Godden and Kipling before her, who will always be torn between two cultures, two worlds.~Janet Brown

Salamander and Other Stories by Masuji Ibuse, translated by John Bester (Kodansha International)

Salamander and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by the author of the acclaimed novel Black Rain which was about the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Asia by the Book, March 2020). Salamander and Other Stories was first published as 山椒魚 (Sanshouuo) in the Japanese language in 1948 by Shinchosha. The first English publication became available in 1971 and was released with the title Lieutenant Lookeast and Other Stories, also published by Kodansha International in hardcover. The paperback edition was published in 1981 with a change in the title. Both versions were translated by John Bester. 

This book includes nine stories that were written between the years of 1923-1955. Ibuse uses a wide range of themes. Some are semi-autobiographical while others can be considered satire. The setting usually takes place in rural Japan where Ibuse writes about ordinary, everyday life which is often filled with subtle humor. 

Plum Blossom by Night is about a man who decides to go out drinking one night. It is February 20 around two in the morning. The man is looking for an oden restaurant or some other cheap eating joint when he is accosted by a man who shouts, “Is there blood on my face?” After ascertaining that he is indeed hurt, the man helps the drunkard concoct a story to tell his boss the following day. The drunk is so grateful that he presses a five-yen note into the other man’s cloak. The five-yen note begins to bother the recipient. He decides he will return the note to the drunkard the following day, but days, then months, then years pass before he calls the drunk man’s home only to find that the man had disappeared ages ago. 

Lieutenant Lookeast is a satire on Japan’s militarism era. The story takes place after the end of World War 2. Lieutenant Yuichi Okazaki (Lieutenant Lookeast) suffers from the delusion that the war is still going on and will often shout out military orders to people who pass by his house. We later find out from a local how Lietenant Okazaki got his name and why he behaves the way he does. It was when Lieutenant Lookeast was in Malaysia and overheard one of his soldiers saying something about war. The soldier said, “the enemy was dropping bombs as though they’dgot them to spare. So I said war was an extravagant business”. The lieutenant slapped the soldier but at the same time, the truck hit a bump, the tailgate flipped open and both Lieutenant Lookeast and the soldier fell out and rolled down into the river. The soldier fell on his head and rolled off in the river. The lieutenant hit his head and hasn’t been the same since. 

The title story, Salamander, is about a small amphibian that lives in a cave. But as its body grows, so does its head and whenever it tries to leave, the salamander’s head gets stuck, giving it only enough room to move its feet to and fro and from side to side. 

Old Ushitora focuses on a man’s grandchild who doesn’t approve of his grandfather’s job. Carp is about a man who is given a gift of a carp but has a hard time taking care of it. Savan on the Roof is about a man who finds a wounded goose on the roof, nurses it back to health, but then finds that he doesn’t want to set it free. There are three other stories that are just as enjoyable as the ones already mentioned—Pilgrim’s Inn, Life at Mr. Tange’s, and Yosaku the Settler.

Ibuse’s stories are fun to read and give light as to what life might have been like in a small town in old Japan. It is a great introduction to one of the lesser-known Japanese writers and the stories give you a feeling of nostalgia when you read them. ~Ernie Hoyt

Banyan Moon by Thao Thai (Mariner Books, HarperCollins)

Although Tolstoy may have been wrong when he said “Happy families are all alike,” he was definitely amiss when he decided unhappy families were all different. Unhappy families are the same in one crucial way—they all conceal secrets.

Secrets fill every corner of the Banyan House, a crumbling mansion in Florida that Minh purchased long ago as a family home. There her daughter Huong takes refuge from a dangerous husband, raising her daughter Ann in tandem with Minh, who quickly supplants Huong in Ann’s affections. From her earliest childhood, Ann has an adversarial relationship with her mother, much as Huong does with Minh. Only when Huong tells her daughter that her grandmother has died, does Ann leave her established adult life and return to the Banyan House, a place that no longer holds the woman whom she has always loved and trusted above anyone else.

She returns carrying a secret, one that she has yet to tell the man she thought she would marry, the one who has recently confessed to an act of infidelity. As her mother once did, Ann looks for a sanctuary in the Banyan House, but the child she brings with her is months away from being born. 

This secret is swiftly uncovered by Huong, who’s determined to repair the prickly, damaged relationship that she has with her daughter. United in the task of cleaning the Banyan House that Minh has filled with unused and unnecessary objects, the two women work under the oversight of an invisible observer, the restless spirit of the family matriarch. Slowly Minh discloses her secret, one that her family has never known. Huong and Ann are not descendants of the man they were taught to revere as their father and grandfather.

As a flood of secrets gradually comes to light, what begins as a run-of-the-mill beach book takes on a depth that’s surprising and puzzling. Although the subjects of greed, sibling rivalry, domestic violence, and the return to a hometown that no longer seems to fit have all been covered again and again in a multitude of novels, Banyan Moon carries an eerie magic that makes this all seem fresh, new, and riveting. 

How does Thao Thai manage to pull this off? From the very beginning, with its cliched friction between the privileged wasp background of Ann’s fiance clashing against her own artistic and “exotic” life, this story carries a luster that pushes readers into its many different layers of story. Although Thai is a writer who doesn’t shy from well-worn descriptions that are perilously close to being threadbare, she has the gift of creating irresistible characters—and it’s Minh, Huong, and Ann who carry this novel. Each of their voices is distinctly different and they coexist without the slightest trace of unease. Their stories flow and interweave, never feeling intrusive or inauthentic. Their lives flare into being, making the supporting characters seem almost nonessential and certainly pallid. The strength and complexity of their different personalities gives an edge to the end of this novel. Will these women be able to move beyond their history and their secrets, taking secure possession of what seems to be a happy ending?~Janet Brown

A Walk in the Darkness by Jon Land (Tor)

Jon Land is an American thriller writer. He has written two detective series—the Caitlin Strong novels about a fifth generation Texas ranger and the Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea series featuring a Palestinian Detective and an Inspector of Israel’s National Police. 

A Walk in the Darkness is the third book in the Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea series. The story opens with an incident that took place in Jerusalem in around 33 A.D. This relates to another incident which took place in Ephesus, Turkey almost 2000 years later.

“1948:  An archaeological team in Turkey is slaughtered after making an earth-shattering discovery. More than fifty years later, a group of American archaeologists is murdered in the Judean desert”. 

Inspector Barnea is investigating a crime scene in the desert. A member of the Israeli Defense Force says he wasn’t expecting someone from the National Police Force as the Judean desert falls under military jurisdiction. The Inspector informs the sergeant that would be true if there it were a security issue but the murder of foreign nationals is a civilian issue, unless terrorism is involved. However, the victims were part of an American archeological team who were invited at the request by the government of Israel. 

Fourteen people had been killed, shot at point blank range, in the back of the head, twelve Americans and two others. Barnea is given a list of the victims and is shocked to see the name at the bottom. It’s a name she recognized, the nephew of Palestinian detective Ben Kamal. 

Detective Kamal heads out to the Judean desert but is told by an Israeli army sergeant that he has entered a restricted area. He shows his ID and informed the Israeli army sergeant that he’s there at the request of Pakad Barnea of the Israeli National Police Force. The sergeant refuses to budge, insisting that his orders were to deny access to the area to all but those who have the proper authorization. Inspector Barnea intervenes and Ben is allowed to pass.

Although Inspector Barnea tells Ben that he’s not there in an investigatory capacity, the death of Kama’s nephew sparks in him a need to find out more. There is one witness but nobody can understand what he is saying as he speaks in a dialect the Israelis are unfamiliar with. However it’s a dialect that Ben’s father taught him when he was young. 

From what Ben can gather, the archaeologists had found something of great historic value. Barnea reluctantly recruits Kamal’s help in the investigation in which they find more than just the discovery of an item that could change the world as we know it. They uncover a conspiracy that is an even greater threat to the Palestinian people and the entire West Bank. 

The Middle East remains one of the most volatile regions in the world. The Arab-Israeli issue remains at the heart of the conflict. Land’s depiction of both the Israelis and Palestinians puts you in the heart of the region. His latest story blends a bit of Dan Brown-like history (as in The Da Vinci Code) with current day politics in the Middle East. It’s a fascinating blend of fact and fiction which will keep you on the edge of your seat. We can only hope that one day peace will come to the Middle East. ~Ernie Hoyt

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City by Jane Wong (Tin House)

Jane Wong is in college when she learns about the Great Famine, also known as the Great Leap Forward. When she looks at the dates of this tragic era in Chinese history, she realizes that when her grandfather told her his family had “disappeared,” and he was adopted by a man whose family had also “disappeared,” that in truth the “disappeared” had starved to death. Wong, who has never gone hungry, races from the classroom in the grip of a panic attack, “heaving tears as thick as wheat.” 

Too respectful to breach her grandparents’ “chosen silence,” Wong pieces together bits of information as it falls in conversational crumbs. “What happens,” she asks, “when your archive is a ghost?” Her reply to herself is “I have no choice but to let food haunt me.”

During the pandemic, she learns to make jook, that supreme comfort food, and dreams of the day when she’ll be able to make it for her grandmother. Later she learns that on the day she made jook for the first time, her brother did the same thing. This dish that “at its simplest core” is only rice and water holds the secret and power of a sacrament, comforting and connecting the two siblings.

Wong needs that comfort and connection. Although her mother and her grandparents feed, nurture, and love her, her father truly has “disappeared.” A man who gambles away the restaurant he owned and leaves his wife to support two children, the father gives his children only a collection of memories—the trips to the casinos of Atlantic City. There he parks his family in a squalid hotel room for days while he plays all night “in that red-velvet world of his.” After he loses everything he has, he buys a ping-pong table that’s meant to keep him at home but he and his friends eventually begin betting extravagantly on the matches. And then he vanishes.

Wong’s mother was the “village beauty,” who came to America for an arranged marriage with the wrong man. When she gave birth to her daughter a year after the wedding, she looked at the baby and said “She knows too much.” But even as she works two jobs in the wake of her husband’s abandonment, she fosters her daughter’s intelligence and takes pride in her beauty. 

Although this book has A Memoir emblazoned on its cover, it’s a collection of essays, deeply personal and fluid, not linear. Wong is a poet  and her poetic art burnishes the language of her narrative. She discloses the rage that filled her childhood home and that still burns within her when she thinks about her father. Her stories of the other men who have left her are told with agonizing honesty and she illuminates her mother with a love that’s almost blinding in its clarity, empathy, and truth.

She tells how it was to leave Hong Kong after living there for a year as a Fulbright Scholar, flying to Iowa, where she’s accepted in the legendary Writer’s Workshop. Trading the smells of soy sauce eggs and sweet egg waffles for the odors wafting toward her in a Midwestern airport that reeks of “old carpet and recycled air,” Wong realizes that she’s no longer surrounded by Asian people. In fact she is “the only Asian person” to be seen and she “immediately felt unmoored.”

Now the author of two volumes of poetry and a university associate professor, she asks “How did I get here, glistening with all this nourishment?” These brilliant, shining essays show every step of Jane Wong’s emotional odyssey, and “memoir” will never be the same.~Janet Brown

Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga (Knopf)

Aravind Adiga, author of the Booker Prize winning novel, White Tiger (Asia by the Book, October 2008), had his third book, Last Man in Tower, published in 2011. It tells the story of a real estate developer who has his eyes on buying out Vishram Society, an apartment complex which consists of Tower A and Tower B. The buildings are located in the city of Mumbai, in India. 

If you were to ask about Vishram Society, “you will be told it is pucca—absolutely, unimpeachably pucca. It is important for the reader to know because “something is not quite pucca about the neighborhood—the toenail of Santa Cruz called Vakola”. You will infer from the context of the passage that pucca means something solid or permanent. 

Tower B is the newer and younger of the two buildings. It is a seven-story building that was built in the seventies. It houses many young executives who work in the financial district which is located nearby. It is the more desirable building of the two to buy or rent. 

Tower A is what most people think when people talk about Vishram Society. It is a six-story building which was founded in 1959. Many of the residents of Tower A have been living in the same building for thirty years or more. 

Real estate developer Dharmen Shah has made a very generous offer to the residents of Vishram Society, both Tower A and Tower B. Most of the people living there had never seen or held the amount that the wealthy builder is offering. He believes that all the residents will agree to the offer and will move out as soon as possible so he can build his latest and best luxury apartment complex which he has already named Shanghai. 

Shah had the Secretary of Vishram Society post his offer on the complex’s notice board. There was only one stipulation written at the very bottom—“The last date for the acceptance of the offer is the day after Gandhi Jayanti: 3 October. (Non-negotiable.) The offer will not be extended one minute beyond this date”. All residents must agree to the offer. If only one person refuses, then the offer will be withdrawn.

It is a dream-come true for most of the residents, but one man, Yogesh A. Murthy, a 61-year-old retired teacher, known to all as Masterji, is not interested in moving. The apartment is a reminder of the life he shared with his recently deceased wife. The rooms are also full of memories of his only daughter, who met a tragic end when she was pushed out of the train when she was on her way to school. 

As the deadline approaches, the residents' true colors begin to show. Friends become enemies, rumors are spread, and threats are made. However, Masteri does not budge from his refusal to accept the offer. 

In short, Adiga’s story is how greed and yearning can corrupt even the best of people. When the builder’s left-hand man, the person that does the dirty jobs fails to change Masterji’s mind, the builder relies on the residents’ greed to do what must be done. If you lived in a similar complex, how far would you be willing to go in order to get what you want? ~Ernie Hoyt