The Woman Back from Moscow by Ha Jin (Other Press)

Yan’an, 1938: Two young women study dramatic arts in the place where Mao Zedong brews the ideas that will lead to China’s liberation in ten more years. Both women have recently appeared on stage, with Yomei in the starring role and Jiang Ching taking a secondary part. The older of the two by seven years, Jiang Ching, is ambitious and competitive. Yomei at seventeen is an incandescent beauty, glowing with life and in love with the theater.

The older woman’s jealousy is apparent but Yomei is under Zhou Enlai’s guardianship and knows she has nothing to fear. The daughter of a dead revolutionary, Yomei became Zhou’s adopted daughter when she and her mother moved to Yan’an. Already powerful, Zhou’s cloak of invulnerability shelters the girl he has taken into his family, leading people to call Yomei The Red Princess.

The community of rebels in Yan’an is small and closely knit. While Mao is a man whom Yomei is familiar with, Jiang Chang has to work to gain his attention. Yomei receives Mao’s permission to study drama in Moscow for seven years while Jiang Chang uses every advantage she possesses to become Mao’s indispensable helper and eventually his wife. 

When Yomei returns to Yan’an after struggling to survive in Russia during World War II, she has turned from acting to become a director. Steeped in seven years of theater arts training in Russia, where Stanislavsky has transformed the way plays are interpreted, Yomei has soaked up everything that her teachers could give her. Her intelligence allows her to enter into the heart of every play she directs and her enthusiasm and generous way of teaching others makes her a charismatic figure. Combining that with her fluency in Russian, her sophistication from her years in another country, her relationship with Zhao Enlai and his wife, and her glowing beauty, she is irresistible.

Jiang Chang, on the other hand, has become Madame Mao, China’s First Lady. She’s eager to use Yomei to her own advantage but Yomei has learned to be wary of politics. Seeing that Jiang Chang plans to use culture and the arts to increase her own power, Yomei keeps her distance.

Ha Jin has taken the life of Sun Weishi while giving her the name she called herself when she wrote letters to close friends and family, Yomei. “Reality,” he says, “is often more fantastic than fiction.” His research to uncover the truth in Yomei’s story carried him only so far, There were gaps in her life that he was forced to create, rather than recreate, so he calls this work a novel instead of a biography. 

As he carries Yomei through seven hundred pages, he brings her to life as an artist who had the power to enchant everyone she met, except for the woman whose goal was to “crush her spirit and destroy her beauty.” Slowly Ha Jin uncovers the politics that led to the horror of the Cultural Revolution and the insane power of the woman who brought it into being. What was at first the story of art and beauty becomes an inexorable tragedy of power and twisted political decisions that darkens the second half of this novel, as it does Yomei’s life.

Born In China in 1956, Ha Jin was a child during the Cultural Revolution and its tragic consequences. He came to the U.S. as a student of American literature in 1985 and made his decision to stay after the Tiananmen Massacre. A poet and a novelist, he writes his poems in Chinese and his novels in English.

In a book as lengthy as The Woman Back from Moscow, this is both an advantage and a handicap, especially when he writes dialogue, where his language becomes stilted. However, this slight lapse in facility simply accentuates the Chinese reality of the thoughts and words and actions that spawned terrible forces and engulfed the life of a brilliant and beautiful artist.~Janet Brown

Monkey Brain Sushi : New Tastes in Japanese Fiction edited by Alfred Birbaum (Kodansha International)

Monkey Brain Sushi is a collection of short stories by Japan’s up-and-coming talented writers. It was first published in 1991 and is a great introduction to contemporary Japanese fiction. Some of the writers have gone on to become successful worldwide, the most notable being Haruki Murakami.

American translator Alfred Birnbaum had this to say about the new crop of writers, “Starting from the early ‘80s, a new generation of Japanese writers has emerged to capture the electric, electric spirit of contemporary life in Japan’s mega-cities. Choosing to speak through the medium of popular magazines—rather than literary journals”. 

He further states that the new writers are more influenced by Western culture than their native land. The writers featured in this collection were all “born and raised in an Americanized postwar Japan. Their Japanese lifestyle they know has as much to do with jeans and hamburgers as tatami mats and miso soup.”

Monkey Brain Sushi includes eleven stories in all that are as diverse as they are entertaining. A wide range of genres are featured in this collection. Some have an element of fantasy while others may be hard to stomach for the weak of heart. There are stories that are mundane and ordinary and stories that may have you tilting your head as you wonder what the writer was trying to convey.

The book leads off with a story by Haruki Murakami titled TV People. This story is rather surreal as three TV People arrive unannounced at a man’s house on a Sunday evening. The narrator says the TV People are slightly smaller than normal, about twenty to thirty percent smaller. The TV People never knock or ring the doorbell. They don’t say hello. They just walk right in. One opens the door and the other two bring in an ordinary size TV. They leave as quietly as they came.

Sproing by Eri Makino is written as one long monologue with a woman talking to one of her friends who drops by her house. Not once does the woman give her friend a chance to speak. It’s one long story of her talking about different episodes in her life. It sounded as if she just needed someone to complain to about her less than extraordinary life. 

In Mazelife, Kyoji Kobayashi writes a story about a man named K creating his own God. In order to create his God, he comes up with six requirements. A God needs devotees who will worship it with their entire being. The God needs a priest to conduct its ceremonies, a God needs a place where it can be worshiped, a God needs commandments for its devotees to follow, a God needs a myth to give it divine authority and finally a God needs enough power to satisfy its devotees. Can K really create a God?

One of the most disturbing stories included in this book is Amy Yamada’s excerpt from her novel Kneel Down and Lick My Feet which was based on her two-month experience of working at an S&M club in Tokyo. Shinobu, who works at an S&M club called the Queen’s Palace, is teaching her younger sister, Chika, the ins and outs of working in such a place. She tells her sister, “it behooves us to use words that elevate our actions”, spouting off a phrase like, “Beseech the queen that you might grovel before her honorable legs and receive the venerated punishment”. 

Michio Hisauchi’s The Junglest Day is written in manga form and the main characters, Lieutenant Onada and Sergeant Yokoi are based on real Japanese soldiers who were discovered on a remote island in the seventies, almost thirty years after the war ended. 

Back in the early nineties, it was hard to find hard-edged fiction by Japanese writers. Most of the books available in English were Japanese literary giants such as Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe and Yukinari Kawabata. There were a few others but they pretty much followed in the same vein as Mishima and company. 

Now, there are many young Japanese writers for the Western world to explore. Murakami has written quite a few novels. The mysteries of Keigo Higashino and Miyuki Miyabe are also now available in English. If you thought Japanese fiction was dry and serious, it’s time for you to pick up a book by any one of these new generations of writers. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Apology by Jimin Han (Little, Brown and Company)

Jeonga Cha is an unlikely heroine.  Not only is she a sprightly 105, within the first few pages of The Apology she’s dead. But neither of those factors get in her way. Immediately she launches into the story of her life, one that’s both charming and duplicitous.

Jeonga has secrets, ones that she’s never disclosed to her sisters, Mina,the oldest at 110, and Aera who’s 108 but boasts the most beautiful hair in the family. These women have learned to coexist through their “territorial intuition and quest for harmony.” These traits show up primarily in the colors they choose for their clothes, which never clash. Otherwise the sisters often do, with Jeonga usually being the one who prevails.

“An epilogue is what I wanted in my own life,” she tells herself but when one turns up, it isn’t particularly welcome. A letter arrives from the U.S., addressed to Mina. Since Jeonga is the only sister who’s fluent in English, the language used by the letter’s writer, she’s the one who’s given the task of reading it and then translating its contents to her sisters.

As she makes her way through the English words, she uncovers a bombshell, the kind that works well in a Shakespearean comedy but much less so in ordinary life. Two separate branches of the Cha family had emigrated to America several generations ago, branches so separate that they were unaware of each other’s existences. Now through an annoying twist of fate, the great-grandniece of Jeonga’s vanished sister, who had long ago defected from the family home in Seoul to North Korea, and Jeonga’s own great-grandnephew both have chosen to attend Oberlin where they meet, fall in love, and are happily planning their wedding. This, Jeonga decides, is a scandal and she must prevent these cousins from marrying.

The backstory of this problem is rooted in Jeonga’s secrets and she’s damned if she’s going to let her sisters in on any of those hidden details. Still Mina and Aera are as determined as their baby sister. Even with the falsified details of why Jeonga is taking an unexpected flight to the United States., the other two insist on going with her.

The comedy becomes convoluted but quite delicious as the old women bicker their way across the Pacific and into a luxurious hotel in San Francisco. Jeonga’s hidden past unfolds as she casts her memory back upon it and the suspense of how she will solve the family dilemma without involving her sisters heightens and then swiftly dissolves when she has a fatal encounter with a moving bus. 

Now what? 

At this point, the author switches gears so thoroughly that The Apology becomes two separate narratives. Jeonga in a murky version of the bardo state roams through the afterlife, unsure that she will ever be able to forestall the catastrophe that continues to simmer in the world of the living. Unfortunately anyone who’s still reading this novel begins to feel unsure as well and gradually begins not to give a hoot.

A delightful beginning turns into a mass of tangled storylines and none of them lead to a satisfying conclusion. “All’s well that ends well,” Shakespeare insisted but a felicitous ending needs a better underpinning than what’s served up in The Apology. 

With luck, Jimin Han’s next novel will concentrate on these three centenarian sisters because they steal the story when they stand together. They’re far too marvelous to leave stranded as they have been in what becomes an annoying and unsatisfying attempt at fiction.~Janet Brown

In Search of Amrit Kaur by Livia Manera Sambuy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

When Livia Manera Sambuy wanders into a Mumbai museum, she has no idea that this random excursion will lead to an obsession that will dominate her life for years. Among the photographs of India’s past royalty is a portrait of a stunningly beautiful young woman, Amrit Kaur. Information posted nearby identifies her as the Rani of Mandi, born a Punjabi princess, who lived in Paris during World War II. She sold her jewelry to help Jews escape from the Nazis, was arrested by the Nazis, and, the placard claimed, died in a German prison camp.

Stunned by this brief biography, Sambuy wonders why she had never heard this story before. She remains haunted by it and by the strong and beautiful face that had lived this life--or had she?

When a friend puts Sambuy in touch with Amrit’s daughter, who’s now an old woman of 78, a portion of what would prove to be an elusive truth is revealed. Amrit didn’t die in prison. She was freed within a few months, but her health was weakened, and she died seven years later in London.

“Come and see me,” the daughter says and when Sambuy makes the visit, she’s shocked to discover that “Bubbles,” as the old woman called herself, knows nothing more about her mother. Amrit had abandoned her children when Bubbles was only four years old, and never returned. The Raja of Mandi’s second wife became the woman the little girl thought of as her mother.

Even more intrigued by a woman who left her children and never looked back as well as by the rewritten history provided by the museum placard, Sambuy begins to delve into Amrit’s life. The daughter of a maharajah who ruled the Princely State of Kapurthala, Amrit was born into a world of luxury and hedonism. When the British stripped all responsibilities from the Indian princes, they allowed them to keep their wealth and titles, thereby creating what Gandhi termed “a gigantic autocracy” and the Viceroy Lord Curzon reviled as “frivolous and sometimes vicious spendthrifts and idlers.”

Amrit’s father spoke six different languages, including French, and developed a strong affinity for Paris, where he maintained a residence. Bringing elements of French architecture back to his Indian domain, he dazzled the more than 100 Europeans whom he invited to his oldest son’s wedding. Placing 240 tents in the palace gardens, he created a luxurious community for his guests, complete with a post office and a bank created for the occasion, and hosted a lunch for 800 in the midst of “bejeweled splendor.” When his only daughter was married, Amrit’s wedding was equally drenched in lavish excess.

But the maharajah had made a mistake. He had given Amrit an English education at a British boarding school and she had returned to India with revolutionary thoughts. When she was twenty-three, the beautiful and articulate rani was interviewed by the New York Herald Tribune where she championed the right for women to be educated and advocated changing the minimum marriageable age for Indian girls. (Her own daughter would enter an arranged marriage at the age of seventeen, without complaint. But then Bubble’s father had refused to make his father-in-law’s mistake. Amrit’s daughter received her education in India, not in the West.)

A year after the interview, Amrit led a delegation of women to demand that the Indian Viceroy abolish child marriage altogether. Three years later her husband married his second wife and Amrit left him soon afterward.

The Raja class was reluctant to give up any of their power. Bubbles, herself the wife of the Raja of Bilkha, told Sambuy, “We printed our own money…We could hang anyone.” And their wealth was devoted to pleasure, in the same manner that once allowed the emperor who had erected the Taj Mahal to order the making of two pairs of eyeglasses, one with diamond lenses and the other with emerald.

Bubbles was the last of her kind to experience this extravagant life. When Indira Gandhi imposed taxes upon India’s royalty, they melted down their gold and silver furniture to meet the government’s demands. One of Amrit’s grandsons is now an auto mechanic who lives happily in Chicago.

When Sambuy tries to follow Amrit’s life in Paris, she finds it stunningly undocumented, until one day she receives a letter from a burlesque entertainer in the U.S. The woman has come into possession of a monogrammed briefcase filled with letters that were written by an Indian princess. With this discovery, some of the questions are answered—and rather shockingly—but not all. The follow-the-dots puzzle of Amrit’s enigmatic life will never be fully connected.

This book is a history, not a biography, and its details are revealed in piecemeal fashion, in the same way that the author discovered them. This adds to the quality of mystery that pervaded the life of Amrit Kaur but it creates a muddled narrative. Blithely skipping from Jacques Cartier learning Hindi so he could sell jewels to Indian potentates to the grisly details of life in a German concentration camp, Sambuy could have used a much more rigorous editor. 

Even so her book is a treasure trove of colorful details that will enchant future historians and enthrall anyone who has a penchant for the days of the Raj. As for Amrit, she undoubtedly rests easy, knowing that many of her secrets remain completely her own.~Janet Brown

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Bloomsbury Publishing)

W. Somerset Maugham was a writer with a talent that verged on the vampiric. Taking advantage of the human “urge to confess,” he kept a travel notebook filled with “anecdotes and character sketches [that can be] smelted and hammered into stories.” In the early part of the 20th century, he journeyed through the Straits Settlements of Malaya and Singapore, having adventures, sucking up stories, and feasting upon secrets. The book that resulted from this journey, The Casuarina Tree, made him a pariah among the British community of the Straits but Maugham was unlikely to care. He was obsessed with keeping his own secret, hiding behind an unhappy marriage to conceal his homosexuality. 

The House of Doors fictionalizes his time on the island of Penang, placing him as a houseguest in the home of a friend from his youth. Cassowary House is named after a casuarina tree in the garden, a corruption of the Malay word, kasuari. The tree, Maugham’s hostess, Lesley,  tells him, is believed to be a “whispering tree” that can tell the future if it’s approached in respectful silence. Maugham can relate to that, although the whispers he yearns to hear are ones that tell stories from the past or, even better, the present.

He’s not the first famous visitor to Penang. Herman Hesse beat him to it by thirteen years and more recently the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, came to garner financial support from the local Hokkein Chinese. Dr. Sun spent a great deal of time at Cassowary House and when Lesley speaks of him, she does this with a mixture of reserve and suppressed emotion that intrigues Maugham. Convinced that she betrayed her husband with the charismatic doctor, Maugham divulges a secret of his own and embarks on a series of late night conversations with his hostess, after her husband has gone to bed. What he is told provides a generous portion of his next book, with one startling omission—startling only because he chooses to maintain silence, out of respect for his old friend and the woman with whom he’s developed a deeper friendship.

In The House of Doors, Tan Twan Eng matches the master of literary larceny. Within the framework of a doomed clandestine love affair, Eng inserts some of the tales told in The Casuarina Tree into his own novel. Some are fragments of the stories Maugham purloined: the wife who runs away from her wealthy husband without leaving an explanatory note, the uncovered affair that demolishes a marriage, and the tidal bore that sweeps its way up a river and sends the occupants of a boat into deadly water. But the story that carries a substantial part of Eng’s novel is one of Maugham’s most famous, The Letter, that later became a movie of the same name. It recounts the true-life tale of  a notorious Singapore scandal in which an English wife killed a man whom she said had tried to attack her in a nocturnal encounter. She was put on trial, was found guilty., and served time in a Singapore prison.

Eng takes that piece of history and embroiders upon it. He turns it into a surprising subplot to the stories Maugham discovers about his hosts in Penang, upon whom Eng has bestowed the first names of the ill-fated husband and wife in The Letter. As Lesley divulges the intricate details of the victimized woman who once was her friend, her own revelations receive a kind of dispensation from a man who finds no shame in his violation of other confidences. 

Although Eng takes Maugham’s stories and folds them into his own, there’s nothing predatory about his hijacking. It’s done with the spirit of homage, while Maugham is given a full measure of respect and tenderness, with at least one unforgettable moment of humanity and communion in a sea gleaming with phosphorescence. 

But it’s Lesley who dominates this novel, a woman who has known no other home but the island on which she was born. Through her eyes, we see Penang in its full beauty, its “trees gauzed in mist,” a seaport where “seabirds dipped and wheeled above the swamp of riggings and swaying masts,” where “labrynthine streets sold a bewildering variety of goods”and where at sundown “the world faded to monochrome.” 

As he did in his debut of The Gift of Rain ( Asia by the Book, April, 2008), Eng makes Penang and its colorful, tumultuous history irresistible. He overlaps his first novel with this most recent one, with the father of Philip Hutton, the boy whose story is told in the first, making memorable cameo appearances in The House of Doors. Both of these novels have been longlisted for the Booker Prize, an honor that Eng would well deserve--and I’m certain that Somerset Maugham would agree with me.~Janet Brown

The Beast Warrior by Nahoko Uehashi, translated by Cathy Hirano (Pushkin)

The Beast Warrior is the sequel and conclusion to Nahoko Uehashi’s The Beast Player (Asia by the Book, May 2023). The story centers around the main character of Elin. As with the previous book, this was originally released in Japan in 2012 with the title 獣の奏者 III 探求編 (Kemono no Souja III Tankyu-hen) and 獣の奏者 IV 完結編 (Kemono no Souja IV Kanketsu-hen) by Kodansha. The English translation became available in 2020 from Pushkin and was translated by Cathy Hirano who also translated the previous volume. 

The story picks up ten years after the end of The Beast Player. Elin is now married to Ialu and they have a son named Jesse. They are living a quiet and peaceful life until Elin is called away to investigate the sudden deaths of the kiba, the most fearsome todas which are dragon-like beasts that the Aluhan have trained. Elin also has a special relationship with Royal Beasts which are the natural enemy of the toda.

Elin had become a beast doctor but it’s her wish that the wild animals, both toda and Royal Beasts alike, would not be used to fight for humans. She is constantly struggling with her conscience as the toda continues to be used as a defense against enemy forces. 

In the previous volume, Elin’s mother, Sohyon, was accused of dereliction of duty, and was sentenced to death after the todas she was entrusted with all died at the same time. Now, a similar incident has occurred in another toda village.

Elin was also shown documents that showed there were other mass kiba deaths in the past and they occurred in several villages at once. It proved that her mother was not at fault for the death of the todas she was in charge of. Now it is Elin’s task was to find out the cause of the mass kiba deaths.

To make matters worse, a foreign country that raised a toda army of its own is now invading Elin’s homeland. Semiya, the Yojeh, a title given to the Ruler of the Kingdom of Lyoza, is commanding Elin to raise an army of Royal Beasts to counter the attack. Yet it is still Elin’s wish to let the animals live in peace in the wild.

Elin had also found out that her mother and her people, the Ahlyo, kept many secrets concerning the toda and Royal Beasts to avoid a calamity that could affect the entire world. Elin questions the wisdom of the Ahlyo in suppressing the truth about the tragedy that happened many, many years ago.

She is determined to find out for herself why it is that the Ahlyo refused to divulge information concerning the animals, even if it means repeating a catastrophe from the past. Can Elin stop that tragedy from happening?

Although Uehashi’s Beast series is considered a children’s book, it can be enjoyed by both kids and adults alike. The Beast Player is more of a coming of age story, whereas the sequel, The Beast Warrior is more of a cautionary tale about the horrors of war and how people are forced to do things against their better judgement. In the end, it is up to us, the people, to strive for world peace and end all wars. Unfortunately, that day seems to be a long way from ever happening. ~Ernie Hoyt