Five Point Someone: What Not To Do at ITT by Chetan Bhagat (Rupa Books)

Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone is his first novel, which was published in 2004. It follows the life of three university students studying at IIT, the India Institute of Technology, the author’s alma mater. The book was also adapted into a major motion picture and released as Three Idiots in 2009. 

The story is mostly narrated by Hari Kumar. He tells the reader from the beginning “what this book is not”. He says with a little mirth that “it is probably an example of how screwed up your college years can get if you don’t think straight”. He also reinforces the fact that “the book will not help you get into IIT”. 

On his first day at IIT, Hari meets his housemates from Kumaon hostel, Alok Gupta and Ryan Oberoi. Alok had dreams of becoming an artist to follow in his father’s footsteps, but his father had an accident when painting a ceiling mural, became half-paralyzed, and could no longer work. Alok also has an older sister that the family must marry off eventually, so they need money for her dowry. As Alok is the male of the family, he gives up his dream and decides to become an engineer so he can support his family. 

Ryan on the other hand has rich parents. They have their own business but Ryan is not close to them. Although they send him letters weekly, he has not answered any one of them. He also despises the university’s rules and thinks of many different ways to beat the system. 

The three first meet on the roof of the hostel. As freshmen, they are being hazed by a couple of seniors. and are made to take off all their clothes. Hari and Alok are told to get on all fours, while Ryan is forced to flex his muscles and make warrior poses. When a senior brings back a couple of empty coke bottles for nefarious purposes, Ryan takes quick action against his upper-level classmen, saves Hari and Alok from total embarrassment, and the three become fast friends. 

The three students are overloaded with work and need to be prepared for pop quizzes but Ryan talks his friends into seeing a movie instead of studying. The following day, their fears are realized as one of their teachers give a pop quiz. All three score below average, Ryan having the lowest score. To get themselves motivated again, Ryan suggests they go jogging. Hari and Alok are not in the best of conditions to go running but Ryan has a way of getting them to agree to whatever he thinks up.

While they’re out jogging, a young girl learning how to drive actually hits Hari. Instead of reprimanding her, Hari instantly falls in love with the woman. It is only later that he finds out she is the daughter of the head of the engineering program. 

If you’ve been a college student, you can guess where this is going. Yes, Hari can’t get her out of his mind and Ryan helps think of ways to not only beat the system but tries to help Hari win the girl of his dreams. 

And then it’s time to check their grades. From the results, students could determine their grade point average, or GPA, on a 10 point scale, 10 being the highest with the average hovering around 6.5. Hari scores 5.46, Ryan is at 5.01, and Alok at 5.88. These less than average GPAs can affect their future and the grades are posted for all the students to see.

Five-pointers are not only looked down upon by other students but by the professors as well. Will these three underperformers be able to graduate? And what will become of Hari’s relationship with the daughter of the head of the Mechanical Engineering Department?

The book is sad and funny at the same time. The attitudes of people in regards to degrees from prestigious universities compared with no name or not so famous colleges and universities persist to this day. It’s still prevalent in Japan where I currently live, a country where many women’s eligibility as marriage partners consists of the three 高 (ko) - 高学歴・高身長・高収入 kogakureki (graduating from prestigious university), koshincho (height), and koshunyu (high salary). 

Higher education isn’t for everyone and if you are able to get into a name-brand university, then the student should be proud of that accomplishment and not worry about their GPAs so much. Unlike IIT, graduating from a prestigious university in this day and age doesn’t guarantee a good-paying job either.

That’s just my opinion although I barely made it through my university years and ended up working in a bookstore for twenty-five years! ~Ernie Hoyt

Mistapim in Cambodia by Christopher Pym (Hodder & Stoughton)

Not many people traveled to Angkor Wat in 1954. The French War in Vietnam, which had spilled into Cambodia, had just ended. Although it remained a French colony until the end of the year, Cambodia was too absorbed with preparing itself as a newly independent nation to concern itself with tourism.

It was a Thai prince who organized a sightseeing expedition to Angkor and a member of this group was a young Englishman who was working in what was at that time called Malaya. At 25, Christopher Pym was still young enough to swerve from secure employment into charting his own adventure and when he fell in love with the glories of the ancient Khmer empire, this is what he did.

He began an intensive study of Cambodian history and the Khmer language, moving to Phnom Penh in 1956 without a safety net, determined to “carve one’s own set of circumstances,”

In Malaya, his life had been comfortable. The business firm Pym had worked for in that country had provided everything--”car, house,cook, gardener, cocktails, and so on.” This isn’t the way he wants to live in Cambodia; he finds a wooden house on stilts on the outskirts of Phnom Penh and almost immediately comes down with dengue fever. Moving back to the city, he rents a small room that is next to a shrine for a Chinese deity. His domestic comforts are limited to a bed, a table, and a wooden crate, but unlike his first home, this place has electricity and a rudimentary bathroom.

Learning Khmer and teaching English gives Pym the life he wants, with freedom to travel in search of “the heart of the Khmer people.” After an evening of opium-smoking at the home of a French acquaintance, he decides he isn’t going to find the heart of Cambodia in the company of Europeans in Phnom Penh and he begins to explore village life.

While urban Cambodians are jaded when it comes to foreigners, Pym is a delightful novelty to rural communities who are more than willing to let him witness and chronicle their ways of life. Although he has fleeting contacts with Cambodia’s royal family, Pym becomes close to people of less exalted lineage and he much prefers to spend his time with them.

Perhaps his favorite brush with royalty is when he’s a spectator at the funeral of one of the princes of the realm. The royal tomb has gone unused for many years and “a combined attack of blunt pickaxes and old crowbars” fail to open the entrance--until a member of the King’s family grabs a pickaxe, throws his jacket aside and leads “a continuing onslaught,” royal privilege be damned.

But any prince of the realm pales beside Pym’s friendship with Om, “a kind of Khmer teddy-boy.” Westernized but “not a delinquent,” Om opens village life and its daily life in a way no prince could ever have done. Because of him, Pym is given free access to Buddhist ordinations, engagement ceremonies, and “ a positively Aristophanic marriage-feast.”. He describes all of these events in photographic detail and with deep respect, without a trace of condescension or British snark.

Even in Phnom Penh, which clearly isn’t his favorite place in Cambodia, he only allows himself a tiny tinge of bitterness when he comes across “a milkbar neon-lit,” and thinks, “Well done, Cambodia, the same as everywhere else at last.”

Pym was lucky--he took up residence in Cambodia when ceremonies and rituals and village life still mirrored what was carved in bas-relief on the walls of the Bayon and Angkor Wat. He journeyed to the distant reaches of the kingdom by oxcart during the rainy season to view the citadel of Bantei Chmar, before looters dismantled it “stone by stone.” And he was invited to see a performance of the Royal Khmer Ballet within the royal palace, watching “the eloquent hands of the Khmer dancers” as they performed The Abduction of Sita from the Ream Ker, the Khmer Ramayana.

There are hints of change in Pym’s accounts--electric lights replacing the gigantic candle that illuminates the months when monks retreat to their temples, an American “education center” being built in the countryside, and rebel insurgents preventing a journey to a village near the Thai border. As the “temptation to go to Samrong just for fun increased in proportion as the police insisted upon my not going there,” Pym, respectful as always, doesn’t break his word.

The only facetious part of this book is its title, which Pym at the outset assures readers “was chosen by the publishers.” Although he can’t resist flashes of humor, he writes with a scrupulous lack of judgment that an anthropologist would envy and gives meticulous glimpses of Cambodian life that are worthy of Zhao Daguan, back in the days of the Angkor Empire. Thank you, Mistapim.~Janet Brown

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei by Sachaverell Sitwell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

Take one well-born aging Englishman, with a classical education that has centered around Europe, throw him into Asia, and watch him flounder when he’s not in places that were once part of the British Empire. The intellectual consternation that engulfs this sort of gentleman should be amusing but his excellent education keeps that from happening. Instead pomposity takes over, with rare moments of enchantment that veer on the naive. 

For a prime example of this, try to read Sachaverell Sitwell’s The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei.  A member of England’s hereditary peerage and the grandson of an Earl, Sitwell went to Eton and Oxford and was first published when he was twenty-five. This volume of poetry launched a career of writing over fifty books, almost all of them devoted to European art, music, and architecture. When he began to age, he turned his attention to other continents, venturing to Japan and Peru, but never deviating from his Eurocentric point of view.

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei is a misleading title which desperately needs a follow-up subtitle along the lines of And Other Travels in Asia, since only one brief chapter is devoted to what is now spelled “Banteay Srei.” This is probably a mercy because Sitwell is ill at ease in that lovely place or anywhere else in the Angkor complex. That he devotes only five chapters to Cambodia is a relief but that’s almost enough to sink this book.

Sitwell starts off in a sprightly fashion by falling in love with Bangkok. His time there is brief and comfortable, with a room in the Oriental Hotel and trips to places that aren’t yet tourist cliches--The Temple of the Emerald Buddha, floating markets which are still plentiful and utilitarian in the early 1960s, a night at a Thai boxing match. There he concludes that muay thai is “more serious and less amusing than the Sumo wrestling in Japan” and worries that an injured boxer may never be able to fight again. He’s delighted by the broken crockery that ornaments temple chedis and is impressed by the air-con in a Chinese restaurant that has his wife begging for a towel to use as a shawl during dinner. It’s sweet to see him fall in love with Thailand’s capital, which he explores without comparisons or judgments. Those he saves for Cambodia, where he seems determined to denigrate the glories of Angkor.

Although Sitwell confesses he came to Angkor “after half a lifetime of anticipation,” the heat, “of a kind and degree never experienced before,” and the humidity which “was something excessive,” appears to have flattened his enthusiasm. Although he immediately claims “the approach to Angkor Wat is on a grander scale than anything in the living world” and is later awed by the Bayon’s face-towers, he swiftly begins to describe the “sham buildings” constructed by people whom, he claims, had no conception of how to build a spacious room. He lapses into memories of blitzed London during World War I and begins to long for the “cooing of doves” and a “wood of bluebells.” If it weren’t for his frequent quotes of Zhou Daguan’s eyewitness accounts of Angkor, there would be no substance to his observations, which conclude with “this is a whole dead city…too big even for poetry.”

Things don’t improve in Nepal, where Sitwell becomes obsessed with the sexual nature of temple paintings. He tears himself away from erotic art long enough to write a detailed description of “a living goddess in Katmandu,” a heavily made-up child of twelve, the sight of whom made him decide she was “wonderfully, and a little pruriently exciting.” Once again he wallows in comparisons to Greece, Italy, and Spain and it’s impossible not to wish for the ability to slap him.

India, since the Empire had left it twenty years before, is a sad disappointment to Sitwell, who mourns that hotel dining rooms no longer serve proper English meals and that Delhi’s “houses with pillared porticos and nice gardens” are no longer inhabited by British families. Except for the brilliant colors of women’s clothing, Delhi is a disappointment but he consoles himself with a visit to the Taj Mahal and the Pearl Mosque, which he manages to view without his customary litany of European comparisons. Jaipur’s gardens, however, “did credit to English seedsmen,” and the Italian lakes immediately come into play when he goes to Udaipur. At Bombay he’s thrilled to find streets with English names and statues of British luminaries which might prove to console him when he discovers the Caves of Ajanta “are now too far gone with age to give pleasure.”

At this point anyone who’s persisted in reading Sitwell’s observations would be justified in saying the same of him. It’s a vast relief when he goes to Ceylon and becomes enthralled with its beauty. Perhaps his lack of jaundiced criticisms is because in Columbo he’s able to have a cocktail. “After a sojourn in India the inventor of Singapore Slings deserves commendation.”

Sitwell, sadly, does not--in fact the only way that his book should be read is in the company of several Singapore Slings as anesthesia against his pomposity. The reader is warned, as Sitwell’s Victorian forbears used to say--stock up on gin and limes before entering his realm of boring ethnocentricism.~Janet Brown

Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung (Riverhead Books)

Forgotten Country is Catherine Chung’s debut novel. It is a story about family bonds, secrets and betrayals. It is about a family that drifts apart and comes together. It is a highly emotional roller-coaster that will take you on the ups and downs of life. The book received an Honorable Mention for the 2013 PEN/Hemingway Award.

The story centers around a South Korean family who emigrated to the United States and made a life for themselves in a city in Michigan. The father was fleeing political persecution and brought with him, his wife and two young daughters, Jeehyun and Haejin. The girls were given American names at their school to blend in more with American culture and they became Janie and Hannah. 

Before the family moved and the night before Hannah was born, while Janie’s mother was in the hospital, along with her father, Janie was left alone with her grandmother. It was the first time she was away from her own home without her mother. The room her grandmother put her in was large and scared her. When her grandmother checked in on her, Janie was crying. She cried so hard, she had a fever. Janie still wouldn’t stop crying until her grandmother shook her and said, “Jungshin chalyuh” which meant pull yourself together.

Her grandmother said she was too old to be crying. “You’re an elder sister now, and you have new responsibilities”. The grandmother then tells her about how she also became an elder sister. The day Hannah was born, her grandmother also told her, “In our family, a sister always dies.”.

Now, years later, in the U.S., Hannah has disappeared without a trace. She cut all ties to her family. Her father has told Hannah that he and her mother are planning to move back to South Korea and that Janie needs to find Hannah before they leave.

Janie’s father told her that he has cancer and that a doctor recommended a specialist in his home country who handles his type of cancer. The doctor said there was nothing more he could do. The father and mother plead with Janie to find Hannah before they leave. Thus starts Janie’s journey in which she will learn more about her family and herself. 

Janie does track down Hannah in California. They have an awkward reunion but Janie did her duty and informed her sister that their father was dying of cancer and that their parents sold the house in Michigan and would be landing in Korea right about the time they were having this discussion. 

Their argument and Hannah’s attitude brings out the worst in Janie, who tells her, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to come.” Hannah of course doesn’t believe her but Janie can’t stop herself from saying, “Seriously. They just wanted me to tell you they sold the house and they’re gone. They’re done with you.”. 

Forgotten Country is definitely an emotional roller-coaster, not only for the characters in the book, but for the reader as well. It makes you question what is love and what is loyalty? It makes you think about what you would do if confronted with family secrets and how you would deal with it in this poignant and very strong story about family ties. ~Ernie Hoyt

Feasting, Fasting by Anita Desai (Vintage)

Feasting, Fasting is a novel by Indian writer Anita Desai. It is the story of complex family relations. The story is told in two parts. The first part deals with the family living in a rural town in India. The second part of the book is about the son of the family trying to make his way through life as a university student in Boston, Massachusetts. 

The first part focuses on the eldest daughter, referred to as Uma throughout the book. Her father has sent her to a convent school and although she tries as hard as she can, she has been held back for two years already. Uma also has a younger sister named Aruna. Then, the mother gives birth to a son.

Suddenly, the family’s focus is on the first son. Uma’s mother tells her there is no need for her to go to school anymore. She needs to stay home and help care for her younger brother, Arun. 

Arun is treated like a king. He gets the best meals, the largest portion, the best cuts of meat which he would rather not eat. He gets the attention of his parents wno continue to treat their eldest daughter more as a servant than a family member. The father is determined to have his son study at a university in the United States. However, it wasn’t the parents who did all the things for Arun, they made all their demands on the eldest daughter. 

After the father retires from work, Uma’s parents are very demanding of her. Uma thinks of them as MamandPapa, MamaPapa, PapaMama. For her, “it was hard to believe they had ever had separate existences”. Before she could finish one chore, she was always asked to do another. 

The parents try to marry off Uma on three different occasions. The first man told the family he was more interested in Uma’s younger sister. The second time, the father accepts a proposal from a family for Uma only to learn that the family has spent the dowry given to them but canceled the engagement. The third time, Uma is married. Then her father finds out that the man was already married and had a family in another town and used the dowry to help his ailing business. 

It may be a big cultural difference but Uma’s family and those who live in her village have old-fashioned ideas and believe in tradition. Girls are raised to be married off and boys are to be given the best education possible. 

Instead of blaming themselves for their shortsightedness, the parents believe everything seems to be Uma’s fault. They become even more demanding of her. As it often occurs in families with Western ideals, the parent’s treatment of their eldest daughter borders on child abuse or negligence. Uma comes off very timid and doesn’t seem to have a mind of her own. We know she does but she is not assertive enough to defy her parents. 

IN the latter half of the book, we travel to the U.S. Arun is studying in Massachusetts but he is having as much difficulty as Uma had at home. He wants to spend his time in the U.S. in anonymity. Coming to the U.S., he “at last experienced total freedom of anonymity, the total absence of relations, of demands, of requests, ties, responsibilities, committments”. He was just Arun, “he had no past, no family, no country”. And he prefers to keep it that way. 

Desai’s prose does make for easy reading and the book is beautifully written. However, there really seems to be no coherent plot. The story consists of a series of events depicting ordinary life in a fictional Indian family.  Nonetheless I found the family to be the epitome of a stereotypical Indian family that seems to verge on the comical. It would be laughable if the parents weren’t so despicable to their eldest daughter. To be honest, I was exhausted after reading this novel. I wanted to smack Uma’s parents into the twenty-first century, but that just may be my American upbringing. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Road to Angkor by Christopher Pym (John Beaufoy Publishing)

There’s a certain kind of British male who confirms Noel Coward’s assertion that mad dogs and Englishmen are attracted to the midday sun and Christopher Pym is a fine example of this. Like many travelers, he was enchanted by Angkor Wat in 1954. However he, in his early twenties, acted upon that enchantment by spending the next three years studying Cambodian history and learning the Khmer language, in London, Paris, and Cambodia. In 1957, armed with a knowledge of that country’s culture, past and present, and with French and Khmer language fluency, the 27-year-old academic sets off on an adventure that verges on insanity. He intends to walk from the part of South Vietnam that had once been the empire of Champa to Angkor Wat, looking for evidence of the ancient road that had supposedly once connected these two strongholds, with 57 resthouses sprinkled along the way. If Pym could find evidence of these resthouses close to his starting point, he’d know the road had actually existed. As it was, at the time he begins this trek, traces of the road had only been found between Angkor and the citadel of Prah Khan in northern Cambodia, with nothing proving a route between Prah Khan and what was once Champa. Ten weeks, he decides, will be enough time for this walk, one that he’s making on foot because he can’t afford horses or elephants as transportation.

But this isn’t complicated enough for Pym. Neolithic tools had been found in the Vietnamese city of Pleiku and he hopes to find more along his route, confirming that a Neolithic culture had spread across the region. He also has a whimsical goal in mind. He’d read about a tribal hillside chieftain, described by an early French explorer as being “young, handsome, brave, quick, eloquent and confident in the future.” This paragon of manly virtues was named Pim and this is enough to prompt his English namesake to look for him, as “an entertaining sidetrack.”

Pym discovers the most arduous part of this enterprise is getting the necessary permits from bureaucrats, which is a prevailing hardship throughout the book. But in the freewheeling spirit that never leaves him, he uses that hurdle to observe the differences between Vietnamese in Saigon, Cambodian monks in a temple near his starting point, and the Chinese in Cholon--”the way they talked, the way they washed, the way they spat.” Pym, unlike many of his countrymen, makes no value judgments nor shows traces of racism, but it becomes clear that he prefers the company of Cambodians, probably because he’s able to speak their language. One of his few moments of petulance surfaces when a Khmer official insists on conversing with him exclusively in French.

Carrying a rucksack that weighs over thirty pounds that he’s filled with 1000 cigarettes and four pounds of candy to give as gifts along the way, as well as a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and wearing “car-tyre sandals,” Pym travels less than 14 miles on his first day and fails to reach his initial goal, Pim’s village. On the following day he meets a man who claims he’s related to Pim, “the son of his brother.”

“It was a recognition worthy of a Greek play.” Although Pim died years earlier, his relatives are delighted that a foreigner has come in search of him and the next few days are spent drinking rice wine and existing in an “alcoholic stupor.” 

Drunk or sober, Pym never loses his talent of observation that he cloaks in understatement, delighted by the sight of a Vietnamese woman garbed in a heavy Norwegian sweater, taken aback by nights when the air becomes “quite nippy,” and politely eating “several kinds of unsavory vegetable soup.” When he’s presented with a grilled tiger steak, he overcomes his initial qualms and finds that it’s “most delicious.”

Having found traces of Pim, his next goal is discovering Neolithic tools. Given an axehead that falls into that category, Pym is satisfied, although his prized possession is a much more modern one--a sabre that he’s seen tribesmen carry and has longed to own. “There were none on sale at the market” but when he meets a man who owns two, he’s able to purchase the extra one. Now armed against tigers, Pym is able to disregard his bleeding feet and makes his way through “the sugar palm curtain” that marks the Cambodian border. 

Here he finds a flourishing industry of zirconia pit-mining as well as a Khmer Gold Rush near an “unsavory village.” Peasant life, he decides, is “like an antique pitcher with myriad cracks” that’s held together by Buddhism.

Pym turns out to be one of those delightful explorers for whom the journey is more important than the goal and this makes him a fantastic armchair travel companion. His inability to find traces of the road that led from Prah Khan to Champa is thoroughly eclipsed by the stories he gathers on his 450-mile, 7-week odyssey. These make The Road to Angkor a diverting travel narrative--and make me eager to find the book that followed this one, Mistapim in Cambodia.  Christopher Pym, where have you been all my life?~Janet Brown 

Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami, translated by Stephen Snyder (Kodansha)

Trying to categorize Ryu Murakami’s novel Coin Locker Babies is an exercise in futility. it doesn’t follow any known patterns. Is it science-fiction, is it horror, is it a love story? It’s actually all those things and more. 

This book was originally published in the Japanese language in 1980 by Kodansha. It won the Noma Literary New Face Prize in 1981, a prize established by Seiji Noma, the first president and founder of Kodansha Publishing. 

The book centers on two main characters—Kikuyuki Sekiguchi and Hashio Mizouchi. The only thing these two boys have in common is that they were abandoned by their mothers and left in coin lockers in an unnamed station in Tokyo during the summer of 1972. They were the only two babies to survive the ordeal. They were usually called by their nicknames—Kiku and Hashi.

The two boys, wards of an orphanage in Yokohama, became friends as Kiku always came to the aid of Hashi, who was often bullied. Most of the other kids avoided both boys who behaved in unusual ways so the nuns finally took them to see a psychiatrist. Their treatment consisted of having the boys listen to an in utero heartbeat without their knowledge. The therapy was supposed to help calm them down. 

The boys are eventually adopted by a couple named the Kuwayamas before they begin to go to school. They grow up on a small island off of Kyushu. On the island they discover an abandoned mining town. Their foster parents have always told them to avoid that place but they are young and full of mischief. There, they meet a man they called Gazelle. One of the last words Gazelle says to Kiku is DATURA. He tells him not to forget it. That it will come in handy one day. 

In junior high, Kiku finds that he is adept at pole-vaulting and soon that becomes the focus of his life. Hashi is proud of him and tells others that Kiku is his big brother. In high school, Kiku becomes even more serious about pole-vaulting but on the day of an important competition Hashi is nowhere to be seen. Kiku’s foster mother shows him a note that Hashi left. Hashi went to Tokyo.

As the story progresses, Kiku and his foster mother go to Tokyo to look for Hashi but do not succeed at first. During their search, they are accosted by some unruly characters. One knocks his mother over who falls and hits her head. She later dies in the hotel they’re staying at. 

Kiku finds Hashi in a fictional area of Tokyo called Toxitown. This is an area surrounded by barbed wire. The outskirts are patrolled by some military types who are ordered to shoot anything that moves if they try to get in. 

Kiku finds Hashi in Toxitown. He also meets a woman named Anemone who becomes his girlfriend. Hashi is now a bisexual singer discovered by a man named D who decides to become Hashi’s manager. He markets Hashi by making public that Hashi’s origins was being an abandoned baby in a coin locker.

As Hashi’s music begins to sell, Mr D has a promotional stunt set up where Hashi will meet his mother who abandoned him on live television. When Kiku sees Hashi break down on TV, he goes to Hashi’s rescue and ends up shooting the woman who turns out to be his own mother. 

Kiku is sent to a Juvenile Detention Center for five years and during that time, Hashi’s music becomes even more popular. However, Hashi is slowly losing his mind while Kiku thinks of escaping and finding DATURA, a lethal substance he plans to use on the city of Tokyo to get his revenge against everybody. 

This book certainly isn’t for the weak of heart. It’s also very difficult to be sympathetic to either Kiku or Hashi even if the reader is aware of their unfortunate beginnings. If you’re in the mood for a dystopian vision of Tokyo, then Coin Locker Babies might be the right book for you. ~Ernie Hoyt

Lords of the Rim by Sterling Seagrave (Corgi Books, out of print)

If you want to grasp the vertiginous changes that have swirled into being since the final decade of  the last century, Lords of the Rim could have been a fine place to start. A political analysis of the power and influence of the Overseas Chinese, heavily balanced upon the past history of China with fleeting glimpses of the present, author and historian Sterling Seagrave launches this with statistics that were doubtless cutting-edge in the early 1990s but are threadbare now. An empire of 55 million Chinese who live and work in the countries of the Pacific Rim with a GNP of $450 billion and liquid assets “as much as $2 trillion” are an economic force in the development of China. This is the underpinning of this book but readers are tossed into a dubious frame of mind when confronted with these statistics thirty years after Seagrave put them on his pages. How can these still be valid after the Asian financial meltdown of 1997, the handover of Hong Kong and its subsequent political upheavals, the booming world of high tech that has made smartphones a necessity all over the world, and the effects of SARS and Covid-19? 

Because his thesis is a shaky one at this point  in time, Lords of the Rim is only worth reading now if it’s approached as a work of history. Since Asian history is Seagrave’s area of expertise, and his bibliography at the back of this book shows a vast amount of research, this might be enough to justify reading a book in 2024 that was published in 1995. Unfortunately, it’s not.

Beginning his narrative long before the birth of Christ, Seagrave swiftly moves through Chinese dynasties to show why the North and the South of China have traditionally been in opposition, with the North holding the rulers and the South being a hotbed of entrepreneurs. With merchants being on a low rung of the Confucian hierarchy, it was an easy matter to expel them from the reaches of power, banishing them to live below the Yangtze. Southern China became a sort of prison colony, far from official regulations and near the sea. Maritime trade was a logical step for the exiled merchants.  They found routes to Southeast Asia that became lucrative and later brought them to Arabia and parts of Africa. Long before the advent of the Silk Road, southerners had become wealthy from spices and silks and as dynastic upheavals racked the North, the South became a refuge and an opportunity for the merchant class of China, not a punishment.

Although they weren’t scholars, these businessmen were far from illiterate--and their choice of reading material wasn’t the Analects of Confucius. It was Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Learning that “business is warfare,” they adapted Sun Tzu’ s classic instruction manual to serve as “The Art of Wealth,” with gratifying results.

As their voyages became an integral part of the Southern Chinese economy, they established trading centers in the countries with which they did business, and since these new expatriates had no interest in local politics and no desire to colonize, they met little opposition from their host countries. But through business, the Chinese residents gained secure toeholds as pawnbrokers, making loans to the locals with property as the collateral. As dynasties rose and fell, with accompanying turmoil, the overseas outposts became attractive places to live; by the 17th Century, there were sizable communities of Chinese living in Japan, the islands of Indonesia, the Malay peninsula, and Siam. When the merchant pirate Coxinga, half Chinese, half Japanese, chased the Dutch from Taiwan, that island became another alluring alternative to dynastic uproar and gradually the Overseas Chinese became an “invisible empire.”

Seagrave is masterful in recreating the history of China but that only takes up one-third of his book. He then plunges into the 20th Century history of the Chinese in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Thailand in a kind of intellectual Cliff Notes. Overstuffed with too many names, too many cataclysms, and too many business enterprises, his book becomes a tiresome slog and sinks under an excess of information. Ending with the death of Deng Xiaoping, he hints at a backlash against “commercial corruption” and a threat of “economic collapse.” “Where it will stop, nobody knows,” he concludes.

Sterling Seagrave knew. He lived until 2017. It’s a pity--and quite annoying-- that he didn’t care enough to publish an updated version of Lords of the Rim, with fresh insights provided by a new century.~Janet Brown

Honeybees and Distant Thunder by Riku Onda, translated by Philip Gabriel (Doubleday)

Riku Onda is the pen name of Nanae Kumagai who was born in Aomori Prefecture in 1964. She came to prominence as a writer when she wrote 六番目の小夜子 (Rokubanme no Sayoko), The Sixth Sayoko which was published in 1992 and was adapted into an NHK drama in 2000. Her first novel to be translated into English was ユージニア (Eugenia). The international English title is The Aosawa Murders (Asia by the Book, January 2023). 

Riku Onda’s latest novel to be translated into English is Honeybees and Distant Thunder.  It was originally published in the Japanese language as 蜜蜂と遠雷 (Mitsubachi to Enrai) and published by Gentosha in 2016. It won the Naoki Prize in 2016 and the Japan Booksellers Award in 2017. The book was also adapted into the full length feature film Listen to the Universe in 2019. 

The book centers around a prestigious and highly classical piano competition being held in a small town located just outside of Tokyo. Auditions for the fictional Yoshigae International Piano Competition were being held in five cities around the world—Moscow, Paris, Milan, New York, and the town of Yoshigae. The competition is held every three years and this year marks the sixth time it would be taking place. 

There is Jin Kazama, a sixteen-year-old prodigy who isn’t enrolled in any music school, doesn’t have a piano of his own, and travels with his father who is an itinerant beekeeper. He is also the protege and student of a renowned figure in the classical world, the recently deceased Yuji Von Hoffmann. 

Aya Eiden was also once considered a piano genius but fled the stage during a competition and seemed to have vanished without a trace after her mother’s death. She is now trying to make a comeback but still lacks the confidence needed to participate in an international competition.

Another participant is Masaru Carlos Levi Anatole, also known as “The Prince of Julliard”. He was befriended by Aya when they were still high school students. He is favored to take the top prize at this year’s competition. 

Finally, there is Akashi Takashima. He is the oldest entrant. He is married and has a steady job. However, he wants to make one last attempt to have a career in music. If he is able to win this competition, the dream he gave up may be rekindled. 

Onda’s book is a story of love and courage, friendship and rivalry, and what it means to be a genius. The four main protagonists' interactions with other minor characters such as a piano tuner, a documentary filmmaker, and a stage manager show the human side of each individual. Onda leaves it up to the reader to determine what makes a person a genius. If you’ve never been a fan of classical music, reading this book might spark your interest. 

The Japanese edition of the book included a CD of different selections mentioned in the story. Although the English edition doesn’t include a CD, readers can check Spotify or other streaming services to hear the actual works of Chopin, Mozart, Bach, and others. You may even become a fan of classical music while doing so. ~Ernie Hoyt