The Refugee Ocean by Pauls Toutonghi (Simon & Schuster, release date October 2023)

Marguerite has a passion for music and a gift for composing it. She is immersed in creating a sonata, one that she hopes may fulfill her deepest desire, a life that allows her to “live in music.” But instead she lives in the patriarchal culture of 1940’s Beirut and her father has charted her future. He’s decided she will marry a man who will rescue and buttress her family’s dwindling fortune. One tiny fragment of possibility exists that might rescue her from this plan, along with a different avenue provided by a man she barely knows but who understands her better than anyone else in her life.

As a strictly monitored young Lebanese woman, Marguerite is smothered in a claustrophobic life. Her beauty is a prison and her talent is ignored. She rebels in small ways: making her way alone in an opera house to meet a female singer whose freedom she longs to have for herself; accepting a cigarette from a woman who tells her to find a way to be herself; escaping the family house to go to her father’s place of business where she finally sees him as the flawed man he truly is. 

Naim is a child whose world is shattered to pieces when a bomb hits his home in Aleppo and sends him “twisting and spinning like a dead, dry falling leaf.” When he regains consciousness, he learns only he and his mother have survived the blast. Finding their way to a refugee camp, they are given asylum in the United States. But Naim has lost his greatest form of comfort. A musical prodigy in Syria, he can no longer find solace at a piano. His left hand was torn in half when he was caught in the maelstrom of the bombing. Now he feels useless, a drain upon his mother’s energy, a boy who can’t even keep a grip on the debit card that would buy groceries for the coming week.

Annabel Crandall is an elderly woman confined to a wheelchair in her large and comfortable home. With more space than she needs, she offers an apartment in her basement to a Syrian woman and her young son. When Annabel sees the child staring at her grand piano with a look of sorrow on his face, she becomes intrigued and when she finds him rifling through her kitchen pantry in search of food, she lures his story from him with a carton full of chocolate bars.

Naim isn’t the first Middle Easterner Annabel has met. When she was young and pretty, a contest took her to a tobacco plantation in Cuba, at a time when nobody realized the strength of the brewing revolution. Annabel was caught in the erupting violence, racing through the night to escape Castro’s guerrillas with a woman named Marguerite.

Each of these separate threads has the strength of a novel and when they intertwine, coincidences that border on the improbable have the power to overcome the bounds of strained credulity. Pauls Toutonghi has drawn upon the details of his own family’s history that make every setting, whether it’s in the opulence of a Beirut opera house or in a refugee camp so huge that it contains four hundred stores, vividly alive. Toutonghi’s parents had lived in a refugee camp before arriving in the United States and he has dedicated this book to his cousin who has the same name as his character Marguerite Toutoungi. 

Two people who were forced to leave places they loved; two stories, one that ends happily; two unforgettable characters who provide an essential window on the never-ending history of those who seek asylum--The Refugee Ocean is a book that anybody with a conscience should read and take to heart.~Janet Brown

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka (Picador)

Lois-Ann Yamanaka was born on the island of Moloka’i. She and her four sisters were raised on a sugar plantation by her parents. Based on her own experiences, she has managed to create stories featuring the local dialect of Hawaiian Pidgin. 

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers is her second book and her first full-length novel. It is narrated by a Japanese American girl named Lovey Nariyoshi. Her family is not rich and is not even considered middle class. They live on the edge of poverty on the Big Island of Hawai’i. 

Lovey has a younger sister named Calhoon. Her father’s name is Hubert and her mother’s name is Verva. She has two uncles, her father’s older brothers Tora and Uri. Lovey also has a best friend, an effeminate boy named Jerome whom everybody calls Jerry. 

The story is set sometime in the seventies. There are references to hit songs of the era such as Seasons in the Sun, I Shot the Sheriff and  Kung Fu Fighting. Lovey and Jerry talk about TV shows like Charlie’s Angels and The Dukes of Hazzard. At times it’s hard to determine if they are in junior high or in high school. 

Lovey doesn’t tell anybody but she is ashamed of her pidgin English. Her teacher tells the class for the umpteenth time, “No one will want to give you a job. You sound uneducated. You will be looked down upon. You’re speaking a low-class form of Standard English. Continue, and you’ll go nowhere in life”. 

Lovey cannot help the way she speaks. Her parents speak pidgin, her uncles and aunts speak pidgin, her grandmother speaks pidgin, All her cousins speak pidgin as well and “nobody looks or talks like a haole,”a term used by native Hawaiians to describe mostly white people. It is very similar to the use of the Japanese word gaijin which is the vernacular for “foreigners”. 

Her haole classmates often make fun of her and her friend Jerry. They are considered outcasts, or nerds if you prefer. Lovey is also not very good at math. When one of her classmates sees that she can not reduce the fraction 8/14, her classmate says, “You real stoopid for one fricken Jap”. And when one student starts, others join in—“Yeah, I thought all Japs suppose for be smut. But you cannot even reduce one stupid fraction, eh, you, Jap-Crap, Stupid, thass why, you Rice Eye, good-for-nuttin’ Pearl Harba bomba”. 

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers is a series of vignettes by Lovey Nariyoshi describing her life on the Big Island. It’s a coming-of-age story as Lovey deals with bullies, mean teachers and just trying to fit in to find an identity of her own. 

Sometimes the story is hard to follow as Yamanaka makes Lovey jump from one subject to the next. She may be talking about wanting to be a haole in one chapter, then she’ll be talking about hunting goats with her father or talking about going to a school dance and being one of the wallflowers as she waits for some boy to ask her to dance. 

As entertaining as the stories are, if you are not familiar with pidgin English it could be very difficult to read. Although I am not a full Japanese American, I am a half-Japanese, half-American person who grew up in Japan on an American army base. 

My mother is Japanese and often speaks English with a lot of grammatical errors. Her English wasn’t as difficult to understand as Lovey’s pidgin but a lot of times it did remind me of my mother’s speech. Perhaps if more haole were to read Yamanaka’s novel, they would be more understanding of people like Lovey Nariyoshi. One can only hope. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Future by Naomi Alderman (Simon & Schuster]

The Fall of Hong Kong sends young Lai Zhen to a refugee camp and on to the U.S. where she grows up to become an internet influencer whose specialty is survivalism. Martha Einkorn is a refugee from a religious cult who now works closely with an internet mogul whose mission is world domination. Lenk Sketlish is one of the three most powerful people on the planet, all of whom are determined to destroy what exists and start over from scratch.

Welcome to a world of hidden bunkers, womb-like suits constructed to provide every human need, and a special surveillance program that guarantees personal safety, even during an apocalypse. Religion, myth, and the ultimate in human greed all unite in a novel whose threads are intricate and nearly impossible to untangle. What begins as a satire with easily recognizable key characters swiftly becomes an end-of-the-world scenario. But wait! That’s only the beginning. Suddenly the book becomes a thriller, with Lai Zhen fleeing from a mysterious killer in the world’s largest shopping mall. This fades into a love story between Lai Zhen and Martha Einkorn that dissolves into a devious plan of revenge. It seems to culminate in an episode of Survivor, with four people on a deserted island where there’s no means of communication with whatever is left of the world. 

Naomi Alderman has an imagination that can only be described as diabolical. Drawing upon current events—the climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the overwhelming amount of wealth and power controlled by a very few people—she throws her readers into a morass of fiction that borders perilously upon fact. Not since H.G. Wells created The War of the Worlds has any writer so skillfully manipulated nightmares into what seems to be a prophesy—or reality.

“You think you can change something big about the world and it ends with destruction. Every single time….What do you call it when you can’t do anything, but you can’t do nothing?” This simple observation and desperate question are both resonant and provocative. Although even the smartest of readers may find themselves floundering in the nooks and crannies of The Future, Martha Einkorn’s words will keep them enmeshed in spite of their confusion.

This novel goes through dizzying transformations in a way that’s reminiscent of the Aurora Borealis. It shifts its enticing patterns as quickly as it abandons one character for another or jumps from narration to baffling conversations on a survivalist forum. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah comes into play as God is asked “Will you spare the city if ten good men can be found within it?” The Future inverts this question by asking “Can the world be saved if four people are sacrificed?”

It’s a well-worn cliche to say that a book is mystifying right up to its last page. The Future continues to tease and baffle its readers beyond the last sentence of its last chapter. Placed in a portion of a book that is rarely looked at are two sentences that upend whatever one might believe the ending is. Alderman goes beyond a cliffhanger into what amounts to literary sadism and makes a sequel inevitable. It looks as though she’s taken notes from Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past. If so, she owes us all two more novels, sooner rather than later.~Janet Brown

The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan (Simon & Schuster)

Cecily Alcantara knows precisely what the blessings of colonization are. In British-ruled Malaya she chafes under them every day. She’s Eurasian, “nearly  white, like them,” her mother often told Cecily when she was growing up. Cecily knows better. She comes in contact with “them” frequently and none of “them” see her as nearly white. 

Married to Gordon Alcantara, a Malay bureaucrat who has a low-ranking position with the local British administrator, Cecily frequently and reluctantly accompanies her husband to government social functions where she’s snubbed by Englishwomen. She’s an easy target for a Japanese spy who has come to their town under the guise of a Hong Kong businessman.

Bingley Tan is actually Shigeru Fujiwara, a man who will eventually become a general in the Japanese Army,  the Tiger of Malaya. He insinuates himself into Cecily’s household by befriending Gordon, visiting his house, plying him with whisky, and helping Cecily put her husband to bed after Gordon passes out. 

Quickly discovering Cecily’s resentment of the British overlords, Fujiwara lures her with thoughts of Malaya governed by Malays after the colonial powers are vanquished by the Japanese Imperial Army. Japan, he tells her, will bring this about but for this to happen he needs the help of patriots like herself. 

And help is what Cecily provides. Her life shimmers with new excitement as she purloins official papers from her husband’s study, eavesdrops on conversations he has with his superiors, has clandestine meetings with Fujiwara, and tucks information in secret hiding places for her spymaster to recover later. 

When the Japanese Army invades Malaya and routs the British troops who had expected them to launch a naval attack, not a march overland from Thailand, Cecily is overjoyed. But then matters go badly awry. The occupying Japanese aren’t eager to relinquish Malaya to the Malays. Instead they exert a brutal form of control that becomes terrorism.

Families hide their young daughters when Japanese soldiers enter their homes. Then the young boys begin to disappear. One of them is Cecily’s son. What she first thought was an act of heroism performed for the good of her country Cecily now realizes was a betrayal that demands her children as sacrifices.

Little is known in the West about the effects of the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia and much of the known history focuses on the plight of British prisoners of war. Vanessa Chan turns a bright lens upon the Asian prisoners who were slave laborers, forced to build the Burma Railway that was immortalized by the movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai. She vividly and terribly reveals the conditions of the “comfort stations,” put into place so Japanese soldiers wouldn’t reenact the rapes that took place in Nanjing, a collection of shacks where the “comforters” were barely out of childhood. She reveals what it was like to live under a military occupation, in a state of constant fear and hunger.

Chan grew up in Malaysia with grandparents who had lived through the years between 1941-1945. “In Malaysia,” she says, “our grandparents love us by not speaking,” specifically not speaking about life under the Japanese Imperial Army. When Chan asked her grandmother, who had been a teenager in those days, what her life was like at that time, she received the reply “Normal. Same as anyone.”

Slowly Chan’s questions received answers, fragmented details of her grandmother’s life during World War II. From these fragments, Chan began to construct her novel, one that is emotionally difficult to read but is so skillfully told that it’s impossible to set aside. The Storm We Made is her first novel. Let’s hope that it won’t be her last.~Janet Brown

Two Blankets, Three Sheets by Rodaan Al Galidi (World Editions)

According to the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees), at the end of 2022, there were currently over 108.4 forcibly displaced people worldwide. 62.5 million were internally displaced, 35.3 million were refugees, 5.4 million were asylum seekers, and another 5.2 million people were in need of international protection. (www.unhc.org)

Rodaan Al Galidi was an asylum seeker. He left his family, his job, his native homeland of Iraq to escape joining Saddam Hussein’s army. He is currently a Dutch national. Two Blankets, Three Sheets is his fictional account of a man named Samir Karim whose story is based on Galadi’s life. Galadi states in his introduction that “the narrator is not me”. In this way, he says he “can still be the writer and not the main character”. 

Galadi introduces us to a world that most of us have probably never heard of or experienced. He spent nine years in an ASC (Asylum Seeker’s Center) and before he made the decision to apply for asylum in a European country, he had spent seven years wandering the world. Before buying his way to Amsterdam, he spent three years in Southeast Asia just scraping by. His alter-ego, Samir Karim then takes up the story. 

Samir says his three years of living in Southeast Asia “was like searching through the wall of your cell only to find another cell on the other side, and then scratching through the next wall and ending up in yet another cell”. He would save up enough money to buy nearly expired passports of various different nationalities. At different times he was Dutch, German, Czech, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, British, French, and Swedish. 

He was on his second Dutch passport and wanted to end his odyssey without official documents. He was living in Thailand at that time. He bought a fake driver’s license with the same name as the passport for fifty dollars on Khao San Road, and then bought a Dutch student I.D. for another fifty dollars. He decided to request asylum once he reached Amsterdam. 

I think it would be hard for any one of us to imagine what it must have been like to cross borders using a forged passport. Samir Karim’s biggest fear (and Galidi’s as well) was being deported back to his home country of Iraq. With Saddam Hussein as president, he would surely be punished severely or worse yet, put to death, for not joining Saddam’s army. 

Once Samir reached Amsterdam, the first thing he did was tear up his fake passport and anything that would leave a trail to show where he came from. He still did not know how he was going to get out of the airport. He looked so anxious that when a policeman approached him and asked if he needed any assistance, to which he replied, “I am Iraqi”.

Thus starts his nine-year odyssey of living in the ASC. His story is not only Galidi’s story, it is also the story of the hundreds, if not thousands, of people seeking asylum away from their home country. In Samir Karim’s words, Galidi is able to convey how the asylum-seeker system works and how long the process can take. For some people, it may take a few weeks or months, for others, it may take years. 

It is much to the reader’s relief when Samir Karim receives his residence permit to live in the Netherlands. We can only imagine what went through Galidi’s mind while he was living in the asylum center. Galidi writes with humor and passion as he explains his plight and of those others he came in contact with during his confinement. 

I think it would be difficult for anyone to imagine what Galidi or the hundreds of thousands of other asylum seekers go through. All they want is to live a normal life, one that’s safe from persecution and war. This book sheds light on an ongoing problem that most of the world may not even be aware of. 

Galidi also states in his introduction, “This book is fiction for the reader who cannot believe it. But for anyone open to it, it is nonfiction. Or no: let this book be nonfiction, so that the world I had to inhabit for all those years will be transformed from fiction into fact”. ~Ernie Hoyt

Beijing Sprawl by Xie Zechen, translated by Jeremy Tiang and Eric Abrahamsen (Two Lines Press)

To country boys in China’s distant provinces, the ones who drop out of school and have no skills, Beijing is where the money is.  Opportunities in the capital are “like bird shit—it would spatter on your head while you weren’t looking and make you rich.”

Four boys have come from the same village to Beijing, where they live together in a room that holds only four bunk beds and a desk.  The rooftop is their living room, where they meet at the end of their work day. Sitting on stools, they drink beer, eat donkey burgers, and play cards, surrounded by a city that “spreads quick, like a tropical jungle.”

They all have the same job, pasting ads on empty walls night after night, making just enough to pay the rent for their room and to buy food for their rooftop meals. They’re young enough that this seems like fun--the oldest is twenty and the youngest only seventeen. But they know that life in Beijing for people like them is a “young person’s game.” While they can still be romantic, falling in love with girls whom they see at a distance and dreaming of forming a rock band, they’re well aware that their city life has an expiration date. They see it as it claims older people who came from their village to find wealth but watched their dreams die instead. 

One of these men works on construction sites, “wiping out everything that isn’t a skyscraper,” while back in his village his little son calls every man “father,” since he has never known the man who deserves that name. Another patches a car together, building it from scrap that is discarded in the garage where he works. It looks ridiculous but it runs and when he drives it to work, it draws customers to the shop and eventually leads to vehicular homicide. 

Occasionally Beijing succumbs to an attack of “urban psoriasis” when street vendors and the boys who paste ads become the itch that the cops are told to scratch. The cleanup brings an enforced leisure that turns into gang fights where different factions arm themselves with whatever they can find. “Sticks, iron coal shovels, furnace tongs,” all become weapons and one boy dies from tripping over the sharpened blade of a hoe, cutting his own throat. 

Boredom is a dangerous occupation. From their rooftop, the boys become enraged by the barking of a neighbor’s dog that is chained up nearby. First they tease it and then become more purposeful. What begins as a game turns into cruelty and then death. 

Even good intentions turn into tragedies. A young man who lets himself worry about a little girl who begs on the street is lost forever in his attempts to take her to safety. Another who falls in love with a girl whom he only sees when he peers through the window of a tavern ends up back in his village, a drooling idiot. 

“I’d sell blood twice for that,” one boy says after treating his friends to a restaurant meal. But in fact, all of these lost boys sell their blood every day in a different form, as they scrabble to keep their expiration dates at bay. They know that, for lives like theirs, there are no happy endings. Their stories are bleak and beautiful, stark and laced with humor, interlocking to form a novella that just might break your heart.~Janet Brown

Shutting Out the Sun : How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger (Vintage)

Michael Zielenziger is an American journalist who spent seven years as the Tokyo Bureau Chief for Knight Ridder media company. Before he moved to Tokyo, he worked as the Pacific Rim correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News. As Zielenziger moved to Japan in 1995, a few short years after the bubble economy burst, he was witness to disturbing social trends that may affect the future of Japan. 

Shutting Out the Sun is the story of the social trends and how Japan got to be the way it is. He argues that “Japan’s tradition-steeped society, its aversion to change, and its distrust of individuality are stifling economic revival, political reform, and social evolution”. Some of the trends he focuses on are the “hikikomori” and the “parasite singles”. 

Zielenziger says the purpose of this book is not to focus on politics or economics but “to unravel the unusual social, cultural, and psychological constraints that have stifled the people of this proud, primordial nation and prevented change from bubbling up from within”. 

He first focuses on the hikikomori, “young men who lock themselves in their rooms and find little solace in the larger society”. The other social trend he explores are the parasite singles, women who continue to live with their parents, refuse to get married, and choose not to have any children. 

Zielenziger starts off his book on Japan’s lost generation by sharing the story of Princess Masako who in 2004, eleven years after her marriage, disappeared from public view. The Imperial Household Agency acknowledged that the Crown Princess was currently suffering from an “adjustment disorder” whose symptoms are described as sleeplessness and anxiety. Although she is a woman, you could argue that she was the first person to become a hikikomori.

The hikikomori, mostly males who have chosen to withdraw from society, lock themselves in their rooms,  sometimes for months or years, and never come out. Zielenziger says they cannot be diagnosed as schizophrenics or mental defectives. “They are not depressives or psychotics; nor are they classic agoraphobics, who fear public spaces but welcome friends into their own home”. 

What leads these men to become recluses who seem to be afraid of their own shadows? The majority of the hikikomori whom Zeilenziger was able to interview all mentioned feeling alienated or different. Many of them were bullied in school or at work because they did not conform to the majority’s way of thinking. As Japan stifles individuality and creative thinking, those who do are usually ostracized, ignored or bullied. 

The other social disorder which became prominent after the bubble economy burst are the parasite singles. A term coined by a sociologist named Masahiro Yamada which he used in 1999 to describe “women who shop avidly, travel abroad on fancy vacations, and prefer to ‘live for the moment’ rather than marry or start a family. 

The reasons the women gave Zielenziger for their adamant refusals to marry and have children is the fact that the “Japanese system is not fully prepared for both men and women to work while having children. It’s the woman who raises the child”. One of them tells Zeilenziger she would have to choose between her baby and her job and she is not ready to give up her career. 

Another reason why many women refuse to marry and have children is because of the “feudal attitudes that still govern marriage and family life, the crippling economic costs of child-rearing, and a pervasive pessimism endemic to the nation ''. 

This attitude still holds true today. Japanese men want their wives to quit their jobs so they can keep house and raise children. It’s the same attitude of American males in the fifties when men believed that women should be “barefoot and pregnant.”

Until the nation as a whole changes its way of thinking, the social disorders of hikikomori and parasite singles are not likely to fade away. It’s currently 2023 and Japan doesn’t seem to have made any progress to keep up with the trend of globalization.

I’ve been living in this nation for almost thirty years but even I know I will always remain an “outsider” in this “closed society,” no matter how well I can speak the language and understand the country’s customs. 

As sad as it may be, I tend to agree with the author who concludes that “a nation unwilling to acknowledge—or adapt to—its internal dislocations ends up closing like a clam shell to preserve what it has”. ~Ernie Hoyt