Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (Ballantine Books)

We all need a dash of romance in our reading lives, no matter how cynical we believe ourselves to be. History buffs can read volume after volume of past events but are rarely moved to tears as they turn the pages. Is it important to cry? Yes. Tears are a sign that we’ve moved beyond empathy into sympathy--feeling the same pain. Without that, our understanding is still removed, dispassionate, and easy to forget. 

History and romance are a hard combination to unite in literature, since one frequently threatens to submerge the other, but Jamie Ford did it in his debut novel, published thirteen years ago and still in demand. Cleverly juxtaposing past and present, Ford makes the days that began World War II in the US as real as anything we experience today, and he does this through the story of a childhood friendship that becomes a doomed love story--or is it?

Henry Lee and Keiko Okabe are both scholarship students at an exclusive white school, working together in the school lunchroom. Henry lives in Chinatown, Keiko in Japantown, Nihonmachi. Their two neighborhoods are adjoined but are divided by nationalism, prejudice, and privilege. The Japanese feel superior to the Chinese and the Chinese, like Henry’s father, hate the Japanese for atrocities Japan is committing in Nanjing and other Chinese cities. Even before Pearl Harbor brings the US into war with Japan, Henry leaves his house every day with a badge his father has pinned to his shirt. that says “I am Chinese.”

Born in the same city hospital, Henry is the child of Chinese-born parents while Keiko’s parents were bon in the US. Even so, when headlines are filled with Japan’s act of war, Keiko is the one at risk. In Nihonamchi bonfires in the streets consume anything that will link its residents with Japan. Family treasures are tossed from apartment windows and find their way to the flames. Signs for Mikado Street are replaced with ones with its new name, Dearborn. Japanese-owned businesses that have given economic life to the area are closed or are taken over by new owners. Japanese residents from all over the region are rounded up under Executive Order 9066 and are shipped off to internment camps, with almost 10,000 removed from Henry and Keiko’s city alone. When the Okabe family is put on a train and sent to improvised shelters built from cattle stalls in the county fairground, Henry discovers a way to visit Keiko. When her family is transported to Camp Minidoka in another state, Henry finds her. But Henry is only thirteen. His parents bitterly oppose his friendship with a Japanese girl and the two of them lose touch.

Decades later, when Henry is in his fifties, a discovery at the Panama Hotel that was once the pride of Nihonmachi makes headlines. In the basement of this neighborhood landmark are trunks and boxes that had been left in safekeeping when their owners were interned with only the possessions they could carry. As these artifacts are unearthed so are Henry’s memories and as he remembers, a vibrant community that has vanished comes vividly into light.

Ford has based his novel on solid facts. The Panama Hotel that was the sanctuary for jettisoned treasures stands in Seattle’s International District/Chinatown with belongings that were never reclaimed still in its basement. Along with a scant number of businesses and restaurants, this is all that remains of the prosperous community of Nihonmachi that once spread over almost the entire district. Until very recently its history had been forgotten and was given an impetus for revival by the meticulous renovation of the Panama and, in no small part, by Ford’s depiction of the past. 

The area has never recovered from the expulsion of its Japanese American residents. After reading Ford’s descriptions of the jazz clubs, the Japanese-owned barber shops, photography studio, the Nippon Kan Theatre, the Nichibei Publishing Company, all gone, a walk through the area is tinged with its ghostly past. Passing the historic King Street Station where Amtrak trains whisk passengers across the country, its carefully preserved architecture makes it easy to see the thousands of families being herded onto trains under the guns of soldiers. The cattle stalls of “Camp Harmony” haunt the shadows of the Puyallup Fairgrounds. The sadness of the past is palpable in the present, reawakened by Ford’s story of an interrupted friendship and a shattered community.~Janet Brown

Three Paper Charms by Shosuke Kita and Seion Yamaguchi translated by M. Owaki and S. Ballard (Shinseken)

Shosuke Kita was born in Aomori Prefecture, the northernmost prefecture of Honshu, the largest of Japan’s four main islands. He is a professor at a local university and researches folk tales of the Tohoku Region. Seion Yamaguchi is also an Aomori native whose occupation is an illustrator. Yamaguchi provides beautiful pictures to accompany the text.

Three Paper Charms is the English translation of Sanmai no Fuda. The tale is believed to have originated in either Aomori Prefecture or Saitama Prefecture in the Kanto area. Other scholars argue that the original telling of the story can be traced back to Niigata Prefecture. Although there are many variations, the core of the story remains the same. 

In the Tohoku region, the title is Kozokko ga Madadaga and was published in English in 2001. The story is about a mischievous little boy who is also an apprentice monk. As he was always causing trouble, the head monk decides to send the boy on a journey to learn self-discipline. 

The monk gave the boy three paper charms and said to use them only when he finds himself in trouble. As the boy walked and walked and walked, it became dark and he needed to find a place to stay for the night. 

He was fortunate enough to spot a light in the house and went to ask if he could have a bed for the night. A young and beautiful girl greeted him at the door and said he was more than welcome to stay. The woman fed him and he fell asleep shortly thereafter. 

The boy woke up in the middle of the night after hearing a strange sound coming from another room. As he took a peak, what he saw wasn’t the beautiful girl who greeted him at the door. He saw an old hag sharpening a knife and heard say, “How delicious the boy must be! He is young, plump and healthy!” The boy also heard her saying, “Let’s sharpen the knife, make it as sharp as possible, and then I can chop him up!”

The boy then tries to run away but the hag hears him and even though he says that he is just going to the bathroom, the hag ties a rope around him so he won’t be able to escape. This is when he remembers the three paper charms the head monk had given him. 

His first wish is for when the hag asks him if he’s done, to have it answer “Not yet”. He ties the rope to a pillar in the bathroom then runs away from the house. After a while, the hag realizes she’s been fooled and chases after him. As she almost catches up to the boy, he uses the second paper charm and asks it, “Please turn into a big sand mountain”

The sand mountain had slowed down the hag but she eventually made it over and soon caught up with the boy again. The boy then used his last wish and asked it to turn into a big river. Once again the hag slowed down and the boy ran as fast as he could back to the temple. The hag entered the temple as well and told the monk to give her the boy. 

The head monk was a wise man as well and praised the hag for her magic. He said he would hand over the boy if she could prove how great her magic was. First, the monk asked her to become as tall as the ceiling. She once again demanded the priest to hand over the boy. 

The priest was undeterred and asked if the hag could become as small as a pea and stand on the palm of his hand. She proved that she could do this as well and shouted, “Now, admit your defeat, priest! Give me the boy!”

But as she was just a little pea-sized hag, the priest picked her up with his fingers and threw her into a burning candle. Even the hag couldn’t stop the heat of the candle and that put an end to her life. 

Old folktales are timeless. It doesn’t matter if you're a child or an adult, they never go out of style. You can also enjoy them in all their variations. Reading old folktales and picture books can remind you of the child that still lives within you. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Many Daughters of Afong Moy by Jamie Ford (Atria Books)

I may be the only bookworm in the Pacific Northwest who has never read Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet and it’s all his great-grandfather’s fault. If Min Chung hadn’t changed his surname to Ford when he arrived in San Francisco from Hoiping, China back in 1865, I would never have unfairly categorized Jamie Ford as just another white guy following in the pathway of Snow Falling on Cedars. Since both David Guterson and Ford focused on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, with Ford speaking through the viewpoint of a first-generation Chinese boy, that wasn’t an unfair assessment on my part--except Jamie Ford isn’t just another white guy. He contains the genetic legacy that makes Chinese American history his own.

In The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, Ford blends history with genetics--and the result is fascinating. What threatens to become an ordinary family saga of fiction based on fact is given an intriguing depth with its interweaving of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, a theory that borders on science fiction but is based on reputable scientific research. Memories rooted in emotion and stored in the brain are capable of causing changes in DNA and can be passed on to future generations. Descendants of Holocaust survivors can inherit depression and anxiety spawned by memories of trauma that they have never experienced themselves. As Dorothy Moy, a descendant of Ahfong Moy, is told by a scientist, “We’re not individual flowers…we’re perennial. A part of us comes back each season, carrying a bit of the genus of the previous floret.”

Seven generations spin through this novel, appearing, fading, and reappearing like the bits of memory that tease and puzzle the descendants of Afong Moy. Based upon historical fact, Afong arrives in America at a time when Chinese women are banned from entering the U.S. Afong is allowed entry because she falls under the category of exotic curiosity, to be displayed in theaters in front of a crowd that has paid to see her. Her story ends in an alley where she dies in childbirth, a woman whose life is as stunted and tragic as her broken bound feet. 

Ahfong’s unhappiness and blighted love life are replicated over and over in her female descendants. None of them find love. Each of them bears a daughter whose father was a matter of random choice; all are driven by the “broken compass of her heart.”

In 2045, the city of Seattle is bludgeoned by ARk-Storms, vicious typhoons that sweep in from the Pacific at 110 miles per hour, flooding the streets and shaking skyscrapers. In the middle of environmental turmoil, Dorothy Moy is racked by her own mental storms that she can’t understand. When she sees her little daughter drawing the same strange images that she drew as a child, Dorothy follows her therapist’s advice and explores a controversial new form of treatment, one that believes present-day difficulties may have been spawned by inherited memories. If the past memories can be changed, so can the behavior that is troublesome now.

From the plague-ridden city of San Francisco in the 1890s to England’s experimental and bohemian school of Summerhill in the 1920s, from a nursing hospital in the middle of World War II to a booming tech business in the beginning of the 21st century, Afong’s “daughters” meet and lose the men who bring them happiness. Their tragedies echo and repeat themselves in kaleidoscopic glimpses that become almost unbearable to read. Although the ending is one that’s rooted entirely in speculative fiction, it’s so welcome that nobody could ever criticize it.

Jamie Ford has written a novel that all but demands more than one reading, if only to see how he manages to fit those puzzle pieces together. He provides a bounty of research titles for anyone who wants more information about epigenetics, ARk-Storms, and the history that each “daughter” lives through, making this novel a portal into other times and an introduction to other ways of looking at memory.~Janet Brown

The Curse of Kim's Daughters by Park Kyong-ni, translated by Choonwan Knag, Myung-hee Lee, Kay Ho Lee, and S. Keyron McDermott (Homa & Sekey Books)

Park Kyong-ni is one of South Korea’s most prominent writers. Her best known work is her ten-volume epic Land which started as a serial publication in a literary magazine called Modern Literature. The story debuted in the September 1969 issue. It took her twenty-five years to complete. The theme focuses on ordinary Korean people’s lives spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth-century, through Japan’s occupation and up until the division of the country into North and South Korea. It has been made into a television series, a movie, an opera, and has been translated into several different languages, including English. 

The Curse of Kim’s Daughters was first published in 1962 in the Korean language as Kim Yakkuke Ttadeul. The book was translated into English by a four member team of translators including three Koreans and one American and published in 2004 by Homa & Sekey Books, an American publisher that specializes in fine books on Asia, focusing mainly on China and Korea.  The translation was made possible by a grant from the Korean Literature Translation Institute (LTI Korea). 

The Curse of Kim’s Daughters is set in the town of Tongyong, a small fishing village near Tadohae Seashore National Park. It sits halfway between Pusan and Yosu. It is the story of one family’s struggle to live and survive in a rapidly-changing world. The Kim family’s patriarch is Songsu Kim. A man who was orphaned after his mother committed suicide and his father ran away from home after killing a man.

Songsu Kim was raised by his uncle and grew up to inherit the family pharmacy. He later sells the company and invests in a small fishing fleet. He marries a woman named Punshi who was chosen to be his bride by his uncle. Although Punshi gives birth to a son, the boy dies at an early age. Punshi then gives birth to five daughters - Yongsook, Yongbin, Yongnan, Yongok, and Yonghay.

We follow the lives of Songsu Kim, his wife and his daughters as they all deal with their own troubles. There does seem to be a curse set upon the Kim family’s daughter. The eldest became a widow, got pregnant and was accused of killing her own baby after giving birth to it, the second daughter despairs in not being able to find a suitable husband, the third has a mental breakdown and goes insane, while the youngest meets with misfortune while at sea. 

I’m sure there are some aspects of Korean culture that I just cannot understand which may have biased my opinion on praising this novel. I can understand arranged marriages, respecting your parents and your elders, and not shaming one's family but the abuse and neglect fostered upon the daughters of Songsu Kim by their various spouses can only be described as abuse and domestic violence. 

The most heart-wrenching incident involves the third daughter. She fell in love with one of the family’s servants. They eloped but were caught. The servant was made to leave town and because their daughter was no longer a virgin, the parents forced her to marry a rich man’s daughter who was not only abusive but was an opium-addict as well. Whenever she tried to come back home, her mother would force her own daughter to go back to her abusive husband because that is her duty as a woman. 

Although well-written, the story is sad and depressing and doesn’t seem to leave any room for hope. The parents attitude towards their own children borders on child abuse. If you want to be depressed and believe that living life is a curse, then perhaps you will be able to enjoy this story. As for me, I believe in the pursuit of happiness and that all relationships should be based on love and trust. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Map for the Missing by Belinda Huijuan Tang (Penguin Press)

In this new century fiction has changed. Autofiction blends truth with stories, teasing readers with what’s been made up and what is fact. Unreliable narrators are normal and plots often need an electronic microscope to plumb their enigmatic depths. Chapters not infrequently are no longer than a single paragraph and sometimes are never there at all. A book waiting on my shelf right now is a novel told in a monologue of thoughts silently voiced in the matter of  an hour or two.

These are all interesting journeys into new forms of story-telling but once in a while all I want to read is a straightforward, chewy, smart novel, one written in a 20th century mode, with a beginning that links coherently to its end and with characters whom I care about. 

These aren’t easy to come by in the realm of what’s now called literary fiction so when I picked up Belinda Huijuan Tang’s A Map for the Missing, I had no idea that my wish was was going to be granted.

The book begins with a language that I can’t read, translated into the words “Your father’s gone missing.” A swift phone call from his mother sends Tang Yitian from his life at a California university back to the rural Chinese village that he left fifteen years ago. He returns with the last words his father ever said to him echoing in his mind: “You owe us a son.”

It’s Yitian’s brain that took him from the family farm to Beijing’s top university, that sent him to America and made a home for him as a professor in Palo Alto. It also led to the death of his older brother and made his father cast him out forever. He returns to China eight years after his departure, promising his mother that he will find her husband. 

Rapidly he realizes his promise is an empty one. He’s never learned how to negotiate the intricacies of a Chinese bureaucracy, even on its lowest levels. He knows only one person who might help him, a girl from his past whose letters he has ignored, whom he hasn’t seen since they both were struggling with China’s recently revived national examination, the gaokao.

Once a “sent-down girl,” one of the urban teenagers whom Mao’s regime whisked off to the countryside as laborers, Hanwen is now the wife of a city official, living in an affluent gated community of a provincial city,. A woman who has bumped up against corruption, she has just begun to question the limits of her life when Yitian appears with his plea for help.

Skillfully taking her story through China’s transformation from the 1970s into the 1990s, Tang has based her novel upon the life of her own father, who left his ancestral village to live in the US and who spent a summer when he was seventeen searching for the man who had guided him through childhood. Her research has been both personal and scholarly, returning to her father’s village home as a stranger who’s welcomed by relatives she had never met, as well as unnearthing primary sources written in Chinese to discover how it was to live through the dizzying periods ot the Cultural Revolution, Reform, and Reopening. 

In her search for her own family’s history. Tang endows her characters with vivid and poignant life.  “Home,” she says in an interview, “is a place in your memory, more than a physical location.” Exploring what happens when memories are lost, she confronts the idea that places are defined as much by what is missing as by what now exists. The result is a deeply satisfying story of  journeys back and journeys forward, an odyssey everyone can recognize and understand.~Janet Brown

Beaufort by Ron Leshem, translated by Evan Fallenberg (Vintage)

Ron Leshem is an Israeli-American television producer and writer. Beaufort is his first novel and was first published in Hebrew in 2005 with a title that translates to If There’s a Heaven. It was the winner of the Sapir Prize in 2006, Israel’s most prestigious literary award. The English edition translated by Evan Fallanberg was published in 2007. 

Beaufort or Belfort Castle was the site of a fort that was captured by Fulk, King of Jerusalem in 1139. Fulk was also a Crusader and it is believed that the construction began on the castle shortly after the fort’s capture. It is located in a remote area of Southern Lebanon. 

In 1982, the Battle of Beaufort was fought between the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). It was dubbed by the Israeli government as Operation Peace for Galilee and later came to be known as the Lebanon War or First Lebanon War. However, in Lebanon, it is only known as “the invasion”. 

Israeli Defense Forces attacked the fortress and captured it and for the next eighteen years, the IDF occupied the fort in Southern Lebanon to prevent attacks from Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and militant group whose pimary goal was ending Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. 

Beaufort focuses on the final years of the IDF occupation of the fortress. It centers around the young soldiers who were all taught at a young age that the enemy are terrorists and the need to protect Israel from the “terrorists” is their duty to their country. 

The story is narrated by the unit’s commander, Liraz Librati. He has all his soldiers call him Erez and people think Liraz is a girl’s name and too feminine for an officer. The novel opens with the soldiers playing a game called What He Can’t Do Anymore. 

“Yonatan can’t see us growing ugly any more. ‘We’ll never be as handsome as we are today’ he’d say, and I’d ask if that was meant to make us feel better, because it didn’t.” Erez explains that this is a game everyone plays when a friend is killed. “You toss his name into the air and whoever’s there at the time has to come up with something he can’t do any more.”

Beaufort is an isolated area. The young Israeli soldiers defending the place have created their own world. They have their own games, they make their own rules, and at times clash with each other. But the infighting takes a backseat to the comradery when it comes to protecting each other against the unseen terrorists.

Erez and his men believe what they are doing is for the good of the country. But rumors have been flying that Israel is in negotiations to pull out of Lebanon. The soldiers are ready to fight, they are always ready to fight but lately, the soldiers feel that the Israeli government has long abandoned them. They are beginning to question why they are still in Lebanon, in enemy land without any support from their own government. 

When the order to withdraw comes, the team is given one last mission to accomplish. Will it be a sweet victory for Israel or will they be viewed as running back home with their heads between their tails?

Ever since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the Middle East has been a hotspot for the Arab-Israeli conflict and continues to be so today. Leshem being an Israeli, it’s only natural that the protagonists of the story would be the Israeli soldiers. They were taught at a young age that the Lebanese Hezbollah are nothing more than terrorists whose main goal is to destroy the country of Israel. 

There are no easy answers to solve the problem and the continued hostilities between Israel and Arab nations is not going to go away anytime soon. What a world it would be if as John Lennon said, “Give peace a chance”. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead Books)

When Anders awakens one morning to find that his body has turned “deep and undeniably brown,” he rushes to a mirror and sees an unrecognizable face staring back at him. The selfie he snaps and posts to a digital album goes unnamed by the algorithm that always knows who he is.. Anders has become a victim of the most severe identity theft. With a change in skin color, he has become a different person.

Anders is a man whose body is his livelihood. His job is at a gym, where he works with other men who want his level of fitness. After days at home, he finally realizes whatever has taken place isn’t going away, that his persistent “looking for whiteness” in his face only proves that he no longer is white and never will be again. When he comes back to work, his boss tells him “I would have killed myself. If it was me.”

Slowly rumors surface that other people are turning dark. At first the reports are rejected but then news from reliable sources confirms their truth. One man does indeed kill himself after he turns brown, the first case of a white man killing a dark man when both are trapped within the same body.

As more people transform, panic sets in. Those who remain white are convinced there will be a brown take-over. They empty the shelves of stores in a sudden burst of hoarding. A white militia appears on the streets, armed and looking for people they perceive as threats, giving other white people a sense of optimism that whatever this calamity might be, it can be righted with enough extermination.

The night Anders goes for a walk with his girlfriend, they both realize the inherent peril of a brown man with a white girl when they come across a group of boys skipping rocks against a stream. The thrown rocks suddenly come closer to Anders and Oona, evoking fears of a public stoning. When Anders drives through town, he finds himself cautiously peering for danger at intersections, “like an herbivore.” Then the riots begin and everyone, white and dark, stays home, hiding from a force that can’t be stopped, lying “outside the control of human beings.” They lock themselves away from “ancient horrors awakening,” their lives now limited to their online presences and their conversations on phones. When they sleep, their dreams hold normalcy while life awake is the stuff nightmares are made of. Anders realizes he’s “doubly, triply imprisoned, in his skin, in this house, in his town.”

Subtly Mohsin Hamid takes his narrative away from the echoes of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the hints of the savage stoning in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. His novel that begins as a fantasy turns into an allegory that everyone will recognize. As life grows tighter and more confined, as trust in other people becomes a luxury and hoarding a fact of life, as hysteria takes shape in “the sound of anarchy or revolution,” and the “final chaos” described in Revelations seems to be at hand, the death and terror of the past Covid years closes in once again. We remember altering our lives to escape the infection and hoping for “progress in discovering ways to undo the horror.”

Like Anders, many of us asked ourselves the same question of how much did we want to live, slowly learning to “abandon confinement and grow.” Venturing out of our protective spaces, “pale people who wandered like ghosts” we took our places in “a country in mourning, that had taken a battering,” “trying to find …footing in a situation so familiar yet so strange.”

The Last White Man is our century’s version of Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider. It’s a fable that mocks racism and an allegory of the world’s impotence against the threats posed by viruses. Hamid’s happy ending does nothing to dispel the claustrophobic memories this book evokes--or the fear of “another tidal wave” that can once again stop life as we prefer to live it, with the speed and force of a sneeze.~Janet Brown

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai translated by Donald Keene (Tuttle)

Osamu Dazai is a Japanese author and is also the pen name of Shuji Tsushima who was born and raised in the small town of Kanagi, located in Aomori Prefecture. He would gain recognition among the literati after the publication of his 1947 novel The Setting Sun. The book was translated into English by Donald Keene, an American scholar and Japanologist who moved to Japan after the 2011 earthquake and became a Japanese citizen. 

Keene is also the translator for No Longer Human, Dazai’s semi-autobiographical novel which was first published in Japanese with the title Ningen Shikaku in 1948. The book was translated into English in 1958. Keene writes in his introduction that the literal translation of Ningen Shikkaku is “disqualified as a human being”. 

The story is about a young man named Yozo Oba. He is a man who has trouble expressing himself to others. He had “a mortal dread of human beings” but was “unable to renounce their society”. In order to deal with his fears and insecurities, he refined the art of being a clown and making people laugh. 

In high school Yozo befriends a classmate named Takeichi who saw through his antics. This created a fear in Yozo’s mind so he deemed that the best way to deal with potential problems was to make Takeichi his friend so he wouldn’t be able to tell the other classmates that Yozo's hilarious antics were nothing more than a farce. 

Although Yozo wanted to go to art school, his father sent him to a regular university. More often than not, Yozo would skip his classes. He did go to one art class where he would meet Masao Horiki. 

Horiki would be a major influence on Yozo’s life, introducing him to alcohol, women, and general debauchery. Yozo gets involved with a married woman who also has a bleak outlook on life. They decide to commit a double suicide by drowning themselves in the sea. The woman dies but Yozo survives. 

Yozo is then expelled from the university and finds himself living with a family friend. Still, Yozo doesn’t see the errors of this way and runs away from the house and finds refuge with a single mother. He continues to drink and falls into a deeper hole as he still fears society as a whole. He runs away from them as well and ends up living with an older woman who works at a bar. His fear of humanity continues to haunt him and he becomes an excessive drinker. 

He gets involved with a young woman named Yoshiko who asks him to stop drinking. They get married and true to his word, Yozo stops drinking and even starts making money by drawing pictures for various magazines. Just when things were looking for the better, Horiki comes to visit him and Yozo relapses into his old ways. 

Yozo becomes an alcoholic, then gets addicted to morphine, and finally is committed to an asylum. He spends three months there before he is released by his older brother and family friend with the promise of him leaving Tokyo immediately and living in the country in a house provided by his older brother. He is now twenty-seven but says “people will take me for over forty”. 

Dazai’s Yozo Obo is the epitome of someone who fears society and yet cannot free himself from it. Everyday is a struggle just to live and survive. The story is written in the first person and separated into three different notebooks, covering Yozo’s life from his childhood until his mid-twenties. 

Yozo’s overwhelming inferiority complex and lack of self-esteem leads him on a downward spiral into hanging out with prostitutes and drowning himself in alcohol. But, does this really disqualify him from being human? ~Ernie Hoyt