The Foreign Student by Susan Choi (HarperCollins)

It begins like a fairy tale. The lonely traveler walks through the night to a place he’s never been before, where a kind old woman gives him a place to sleep. In the morning a beautiful young woman takes the foreign stranger to his new home and tells him about an older man who will help him as he learns to live and study in a rural paradise.

But, as it is in fairy tales, nothing is as perfect as it first appears to be. Chang has survived years of war, sickness, and starvation that his Southern counterparts have never even thought of. On a Tennessee campus, he’s called Chuck by classmates who regard him with “a subtly unremitting scrutiny, disguised as politeness” and who mistake his “limited English for a limited knowledge of things.” Chang likes that; it gives him “a hidden advantage,” which he uses to his benefit, along with his “infinite patience for listening.” Seen as an object of charity, he hides secrets which emerge only in his half-remembered nightmares.

The young woman who first helped him has secrets of her own. From the time she was fourteen, she has had a sexual relationship with the older professor whom she advises Chang to take as a mentor. She has inherited her childhood home and is still enmeshed in her childhood liaison with the man who has known her since she was a little girl. Although rumors swirl around her, Katherine has set herself apart in a cocoon of loneliness. 

“You’re the first new thing here in a while,” she tells Chang. As she slowly begins to form a friendship with this stranger, both of them peer at each other through their veils of secrets, each beginning to feel trust without knowing why.

Although a love story teases at the edges of this novel, the story belongs to Chang. Gradually bits of his history are revealed: his early friendship with a rebellious boy who joins the guerrilla movement against the government of South Korea, his English proficiency that gives him a job as a translator for the American presence in his country, his abandonment, survival, and betrayal. Scenes of torture lie in counterpoint to the tentative peace that he and Katherine find together, darkening Chang’s dreams and tarnishing the possibility of his finding happiness.

Susan Choi brilliantly unfolds Chang’s world as he leaves the safety of the Southern campus and goes to Chicago, a metropolis where he’s “surrounded and invisible,” where there are “so many ways he could slip into life.” After a summer of living in the city’s Japantown, Chang can “no longer imagine the lack of imagination he’d arrived with.” As he encounters new dreams, he begins to face his nightmares and dares to believe he might deserve a life, one filled with love and without charitable condescension

As he and Katherine slowly release “the wariness they both turned toward the world,” they find new ways of living within it, bringing hope and joy to a novel that has been shrouded in the immobility of pain. Choi’s recreation of history, her skillful creation of characters who may never have appeared in fiction before, and her ability to paint unforgettable landscapes with precise and evocative words make her debut novel stunning and unforgettable.~Janet Brown

Mio The Beautiful by Kinota Braithwaite, translated by Setsuko Miura (Self-Published)

Kinota Braithwaite is a Canadian-African children’s book author and elementary school teacher. He is married to a Japanese citizen and they have a young daughter. Braithwaite wrote Mio The Beautiful for his child who experienced being bullied at school due to the color of her skin. He also illustrated the book. 

The book includes English and the original Japanese which was translated by Setsuko Miruo who is also a childhood educator and Montessori Teacher Trainer. She dreams of a world “where all children can find happiness, love, and acceptance”. 

It is Mio’s first day of school. She is starting the first grade but is feeling nervous. She’s wondering what her new school would be like, with questions all new students have when they’re starting a new school or going to elementary school for the first time. Will she be able to make friends? Who is going to be her teacher?

Mio enjoys her first day of school. She likes her teacher, Momo-sensei. Momo-sensei makes learning fun and all the students enjoy her lessons. Mio really likes school. She enjoys the school lunches, called kyushoku, which is common to all Japanese schools. Students help serve the food as well. 

Mio also likes learning new things about Japanese culture such as flower-arranging and wearing a kimono. But then one day everything changes. Some of the other students start making fun of her because of the color of her skin. Once she gets home, she tells her parents she doesn’t want to go to school anymore. 

Prejudice against foreigners is nothing new to Japan. Even for those foreigners who were born and raised in Japan and even if they can speak the language, often they are not accepted as Japanese. Mio’s father being African-Canadian means her skin color is different and being different in Japan makes you stand out. And if you stand out, you are almost sure to become a target of ridicule. 

In the book, Mio’s parents call Momo-sensei and express their concern. Momo-sensei says she will talk to all of the students about the power of words and how they can hurt people. In class the next day, Momo-sensei asks the other students if they have ever had their feelings hurt because someone called them a name they didn’t like. Many of the students raised their hands. 

Momo-sensei explains to her students that Japan would be a boring place if everyone was the same. She goes on to tell them, “Mio has a different color than many of you but that does not mean she is not beautiful”. She continues by telling her students, “Mio was born in Japan, like us, and speaks Japanese, like us, and she loves Japan like we do”. 

If all teachers in Japan were like Momo-sensei, there wouldn’t be bullying of any sort in any of the schools. It would be an ideal world but bullying continues to be a problem, not only for biracial children but for Japanese kids as well. 

The story is very reminiscent of the children’s book Yoko by Rosemary Wells. In a plot similar to Mio The Beautiful, Yoko’s mother prepares her favorite dishes for lunch. At lunch time when everyone takes out their lunch box or brown paper bags, Yoko takes out her bento box. The kids then see that she’s eating sushi for lunch…and the teasing begins which leaves Yoko in tears. 

Finding acceptance in a foreign country can be a difficult thing, especially for kids, and Mio the Beautiful is a reminder to parents, teachers, and others how everyone should be treated with respect. As my father used to say to me, “Treat people the way you want people to treat you.” I’ve always taken that advice to heart. ~Ernie Hoyt

Recitation by Bae Suah, translated by Deborah Smith (Deep Vellum)

There are some books you read and can’t put down. Once you come to the last page, you’re saddened by the fact that the story has ended because you want more. Then there are books you read, reread, and try to read but the more you read, the angrier you get as there’s no plot or point to the story. 

Bae Suah’s Recitation falls in the latter category. Perhaps there is something lost in translation from the original Korean. Suah is a South Korean writer and translator who made her literary debut in 1993 with A Dark Room in 1988. Bae had no formal training in writing nor did she have a literary mentor to help her and it shows. She started writing as a hobby but left her full-time job after getting her first story published. 

Recitation starts off with a woman named Kyung-hee talking to some people she met at a train station. We never know who she is talking to or why but she tells them she had the idea of visiting the houses she’s left behind. We do learn that the people listening to her were from the same city as Kyung-hee. She tells them in her hometown she was a theater actor specializing in recitation. 

The people who first talk to Kyung-hee meet her at the train station. They offer to accompany her to her hotel or wherever she was staying, but she tells them she doesn’t have a reservation anywhere, that she is waiting for a man who is going to let her use his living room for a few days. 

She explains to the people who talk to her that she is a “part of a community of wanderers who let out their homes free of charge”. She continues by saying, “If someone comes to visit whichever city I’m living in, I give them somewhere to stay, and then when I go traveling, other people in other cities will let me use their living rooms, veranda, guest room, attic, or even in the off chance that they have one, a barn”. 

The people become intrigued with Kyung-hee’s story. They listen to her as she tells why she started traveling, the people she’s met, the experiences she had. This may sound like the beginning of an interesting tale but it becomes one long boring monologue. You discover that Kyung-hee doesn’t really have anything to say, or rather she speaks a lot but doesn’t say anything that makes any sense. 

Anyone who is not familiar with Bae’s writing may become frustrated as they try to decide who is actually speaking. Bae switches from Kyung-hee to other characters, to the unnamed people who first started listening to her, and then to a daughter Kyung-hee doesn’t claim to know. Not only is the writing confusing, but I found it pretentious as well. In the end, I wonder why I even bothered to read this book at all. If you’re a glutton for literary punishment, you could challenge yourself to read this. As for me, I was just glad that I was able to finish it. ~Ernie Hoyt

Off the Books by Soma Mei Sheng Frazier (Henry Holt)

Every girl should have a grandfather like Mei’s. When she graduates from Dartmouth and faces a tight job market, it’s Laoye who buys her a sedan and persuades her to forgo the easy money of working for a rideshare company. He’s the one who taught her to drive as soon as she was old enough to sit behind the wheel of a go-kart and he’s the one who sets her up with a woman who always needs a ride. So do her customer’s many female relatives, all of them with peculiar schedules and all of them turning out to be sex workers.

But then Laoye is no ordinary grandfather. He’s a devoted pothead with unconventional acquaintances who patronize his granddaughter’s ride service. Mei’s latest client is different--a conventional-looking handsome young Chinese guy with a Bulgari watch and the elegance of a GQ model. 

Henry Lee hires Mei to drive him from San Francisco to Syracuse, all expenses paid. It would be the ideal gig except for one glitch. Her passenger carries a giant suitcase that he takes out of her field of vision at every rest stop and that he allows nobody else to touch. 

Mei stifles her curiosity and respects her customer’s privacy until the day he steps away from his burden to take a phone call, leaving his baggage halfway out of the car. When Mei pushes it securely onto the back seat, she feels something move inside it.

Is her passenger transporting smuggled wildlife? Is this something that could put an end to her livelihood and maybe even land her in jail as an accessory? Mei keeps her questions to herself until that night, when she hears voices coming from the hotel room next door--Henry and another person, both speaking Chinese.

At this point what seems to be turning into a standard romantic comedy takes a sharp twist into global politics and stays there. The person in the suitcase is a terrified child who was taken out of China after her mother was imprisoned by the government. Her father is a professor who teaches at a university in upstate New York. His little daughter, traumatized, has begged for the safety of traveling in a gigantic suitcase. She and both of her parents are Uyghur, the oppressed minority of Northern China. 

If Laoye trusts Henry Lee, then Mei has no choice but to do the same. On the drive across the country, she, her customer, and Anna, the child who has chosen the safety of a suitcase, form a kind of family, with just enough potential danger and sexual tension to keep things interesting--but not interesting enough. 

Since many of the readers who pick up Off the Books may have no knowledge of what’s going on in Xinjiang, an autonomous territory of Northwest China where the Muslim Uyghurs are being forced to assimilate into mainstream Chinese culture, they have a lot of catching up to do. Soma Mei Sheng Frazier has done her homework but the information she ties into her novel eventually takes over and sinks the whole thing.

If you disdain the Crazy Rich Asians series for its frivolity and wish that romance novels would dabble in geo-political issues, this is the book you should take with you when you go to the beach. Otherwise pick up Tahir Hamut’s Waiting to be Arrested at Night (Asia by the Book, August 2024) along with the smart romance novel, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Asia by the Book, November 2023) and save yourself a bad case of literary indigestion.~Janet Brown

Shanghailanders by Juli Min (Spiegel and Grau)

Happy families are all alike, according to Tolstoy, but unhappy families are the ones who get all the attention. Starting with Cain and Abel and moving through millennia to the British Royal Family as portrayed by Netflix in The Crown, dysfunctional parents and their children feed the imaginations of novelists and fill the shelves of libraries. 

But not every unhappy family is captured in fiction with the skill that Juli Min gives to the Yang family in her debut novel. Shanghailanders. Taking the threadbare formula of successful husband, unhappy wife, and three beautiful daughters, Min reveals these cliched figures cleverly, in a series of interlinked short stories that move backward in time, from 2040 to 2014. 

While giving scant descriptions of Shanghai, Min provides a startling view of that city’s wealth, along with a capsule history of how swiftly this came into being. A man who was orphaned before he was in his teens and who grew up in a small, crowded room sees an opportunity when he’s still at a university. He borrows money from friends and buys several apartments. By the time he graduates, Shanghai’s rapid change has made real estate the arena where fortunes are made and Leo is a wealthy man.

His three daughters are in good schools, with the two oldest in the U.S. His wife is an artist, Japanese by birth but with most of her life shaped by living in Paris. In addition to the home in Shanghai, the family has a country place, a house in Vancouver, a village house in Zhejiang, an apartment in Paris, and an estate in Bordeaux. 

And yet as the years fly backwards, unhappiness settles in like a rot. Leo’s wife plans to leave him but her plans are set aside when she learns one of her daughters needs an abortion. His oldest daughter is a kleptomaniac who has made cruelty her second-favorite hobby. His youngest, at sixteen, has discovered a flair for sex work. His mother-on-law, teetering on the edge of dementia and living in a palatial assisted-living facility in France, has recently been diagnosed with an STD. Leo “loved them, all of them,” but he has lost interest. Slipping into another life is a thought he occasionally entertains, but—”how tiring.”

Wrapping her novel in snatches of time, Min mercilessly dissects this family, through the eyes of people who work for them and through the moments that bring yet another crack in their perfection. When she finally takes her readers to where this family began, at Leo’s wedding, where he sees his bride as “the loveliest, most reckless person he knew,” what pervades this event is “Spirit, grief, memory, and that, too, edited and faded over time.” 

Min has created a joyless world, with characters who spend their  lives “dancing around the truth.” The elegance of her sentences, the precision of her descriptions, the way she gives life to even those characters who exist in passing moments, all make Shanghailanders soar far above its soap opera possibilities, giving it the glitter and intricacy of a masterfully cut diamond set in bright platinum.~Janet Brown

Houses with a Story by Seiji Yoshida, translated by Jan Mitsuko Cash (Amulet Books)

Seiji Yoshida is a former employee of a PC game manufacturer who became a freelance Japanese illustrator and background graphic artist in 2003. He has worked on a number of video games and recently has designed the cover of books. He is also a lecturer at the Kyoto Univeristy of Arts and Kyoto Seika University. 

Houses with a Story is the English translation of his second book which was originally published in the Japanese language with the title ものがたりの家 吉田誠治美術設定集] (Monogatari no Ie : Yoshida Seiji Bijutsu Settei-shu) by PIE Books in 2020. It is a collection of his illustrations of imaginary houses.

Yoshida mentions in the Foreword that he has always been impressed by the buildings in the books and stories he’s read. He mentions “the hideout in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the hut in the Alps from Heidi, the Nowhere Hose Of Master Hora in Momo, and so many others”. He would read the stories and look at the illustrations over and over and would imagine the details of those various worlds. 

In Houses with a Story, he says, “To re-create my childhood self’s delight, I introduce unique homes within this book, all of which could easily turn up in stories of their own”. He has drawn more than thirty houses and the people that live in them. He also gives a lot of thought as to the location and time period for each building. 

Some of the houses featured in the book include the Kaidan-do Bookstore, a World Weary Astronomer’s Residence, the Meticulous Clockmaker, the Reserved Mechanic’s Cottage, the Post Office of the Dragon Tamer, and The Library of Lost Books, to name just a few. Many of the designs of the houses were meticulously researched while others were purely drawn from inspiration. 

One page is a full color illustration of the house from the outside. The other page shows a cut-away so you can look into the interior as well. He has imagined the type of person who lives in the house and gives a little background of the person and the story. 

The bookstore owner is a young man who “quit his steady job in the city and moved to this town, following his dream of owning a used bookstore”. The house is located on a hilly road that leads to the ocean. As the house is built on a slope, “its defining feature is the multiple levels that make up the interior”. 

Yoshida has also included a panel story about the Reserved Mechanic’s Cottage titled The End of the Day. There is absolutely no dialogue so he leaves it up to the reader’s imagination of what might be going on in the mechanic’s mind as he makes dinner and feeds his dog. 

Yoshida includes an illustration of his work studio and explains in detail where he makes his drawings. It is easy to visualize him at work as he includes the top of his work desk and the equipment he uses and also shows a top view of the layout of the room which he shares with his wife. 

Towards the end of the book, Yoshida provides concepts and commentary about each house included in this collection. For example, we learn that the house of the Meticulous Clockmaker is located in Japan and was built sometime around the nineteenth century. The interior of this house is based on a stationary store called Takei Sanshodo which can be seen at the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum in Koganei, Tokyo Prefecture.. Although it is an old building, he believes it’s appropriate for the present. Even today many old homes are renovated and given new life. 

The final section of the book is a full chapter on how one of his illustrations comes into being. It is titled Making of a Minor’s Engine House. He writes in step-by-step detail of how a drawing comes into being starting with “Creating the Rough Drafts and Sketches”, followed by “Color the Model Sheet”, and ending with “Color the Illustration”. 

Houses with a Story is more than just an art book. It is more than just a collection of unique houses. It is a book that will help you expand your imagination. Yoshida says, “The tale you weave for each house is entirely up to you, and nothing would give me greater pleasure than you finding yourself immersed in a wonderful story”. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)

Michael Ondaatje is almost legendary, a prolific writer with such creative energy and abundant talent that it’s hard to believe he’s reached the age of 83. Over the past fifty-nine years, he’s written twenty-two books: a book about film-making, a family memoir, seven novels, and thirteen books of poetry, including the recently published The Last Year.

Although this title sounds elegiac, these poems are not. They draw upon a life that Ondaatje has steeped in literature and enriched by living on several different continents. They celebrate the precise beauty of words and use imagery from Ondaatje’s first home, Sri Lanka. They are tender and sensuous, capturing moments with lovers and friends. And yes, there are eulogies that honor the memories of household animals who died old.

Above all, they are fragments of autobiography, told at a slant, never confessional, always alluring.

In his evocation of his Sri Lankan roots, Running in the Family (Asia by the Book, October 2007), Ondaatje mentions the kabaragoya, a monitor lizard the size of a crocodile, which an early explorer described as having “a blew forked tongue, which he puts forth.” A smaller relative of this lizard is prized because eating its tongue gives eloquence.” Both of these creatures are blended into one and become part of Dante in the poem Last Things. In an Italian piazza, a statue of Dante falls and the shape of a lizard “crawls out of shattered plaster, a blue rough tongue slithering…a finished book in his mouth.”

A similar echo is found in the poem Dark Garden, where a woman Ondaatje has not yet met but will someday love steps on a nail at the time he imagines one of his characters having a splinter pulled from her foot, “That faraway echo and coincidence” mirrors the final chapter of The English Patient when Kirpal and Hannah, separated by time and space, each see a household object fall at the same moment.

A man enthralled by language, Ondaatje, in his poem Definition, says “All afternoon I stroll the plotless thirteen hundred pages of a Sanskrit dictionary,” where he finds the word ansa, and gives it to the woman he loves, for “the warmth of that word for your shoulder blade.” The English patient springs into life in that poem, searching for the word that will name “that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck.”

In a mixture of poems and small essays, lives unfold. “The dyers who steal color out of the bark of trees to paint temples,” unnamed lovers who exist in a realm that’s “still all coal and smoke,” the dog whose death is “courteous and beautiful,” They all evoke memories of other stories, while breathing on their own and lingering in a new corner of the mind. “Nothing remains still in a story,” Ondaatje says to those readers who recognize shadows from his previous work. 

A Year of Last Things begins and ends with rivers, “the wet dark rectangle,” “all those echoing rivers.” And suddenly Lalla comes to mind, the glamorous, eccentric grandmother who often stopped her car to swim in a river, who stepped off her front porch one night and was swept into a flood that “was her last perfect journey.”

This is the gift that Michael Ondaatje always offers: each of his books brings new portions of beauty while taking us back into other wonders that he’s placed in our minds and hearts, sweeping us into an unending “perfect journey.”~Janet Brown

海峡の記憶：青函連絡船 (Kaikyo no Kioku : Seikan Rensakusen) by Asako Shirai (Kajisha) Japanese text only

Asako Shirai is a Japanese photographer. She was born in Hakodate, Hokkaido in 1951. Before the advent of the Seikan Tunnel that connects the islands of Honshu with Hokkaido, from Aomori City to Hakodate, the only way to travel to and from Aomori to Hakodate or Hakodate to Aomori was to take the Seikan ferry. 海峡の記憶：青函連絡船 (Kaikyo no Kiouku : Seikan Rensakusen) translates to Memories of the Strait : Seikan Ferry. The strait refers to the Kaikyu Strait that separates Honshu from Hokkaido. 

March 1988 marks the last day of the Seikan ferry service between Aomori and Hakodate. There were still seven ships in service at the time - the Hakkoda Maru, Mashu Maru, Yotei Maru, Towada Maru, Sorachi Maru, Hiyama Maru, and the Ishikari Maru. 

The Sorachi Maru was only a freight service ferry. The Hiyama Maru and Ishikari Maru were freight-only ferries but were converted into freight-passenger service. The other four ships were freight-passenger ferries from the beginning. 

A little history of the Seikan ferry service from 1960 onward is provided by Takashi Ishiguro. From 1946 to 1953, Ishiguro worked at the Ministry of Transport, General Bureau of Trade, Marine Division. From 1953, he was the Hakodate Railway Management Bureau Marine Affairs Division Manager. It was his job to design and oversee the safety aspects of the Seikan ferries. 

To understand the need for the safety of the ferries, Ishiguro says one must revisit the Toya Maru Disaster. On September 26, 1954, The Toya Maru sank during Typhoon No.15, also known as Typhoon Marie. Aside from the Toya Maru, four other ferries sank during the typhoon—the Dai Juichi Seikan Maru, the Kitami Maru, the Hidaka Maru, and the Tokachi Maru. 

From a total of 1,632 passenger and crew members, 1,430 people lost their lives, 112 people could not be found. Only 202 people survived. Out of the 1,089 passengers, 981 were lost, 108 survived. Of the 57 American servicemen, 50 died, 6 were unaccounted for, and only 1 survived. 

It was one of the worst ferry disasters in history. Ishiguro was assigned to design the new ferries and to make them safer so a similar accident would never happen again. Learning a bit of the history of how and why the new ferries were designed adds to the enjoyment of viewing the photographs taken by Shirai. 

As someone who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, one of the small pleasures of life was taking the ferry from Seattle to Bremerton. I had never given any thought to the people who work and run the ferries. However, with any form of public transportation, safety must always remain the top priority. 

Since 1990, the Seikan Ferry Memorial Ship [Hakkoda Maru] has sat in Aomori Bay as a Maritime Museum. My mother-in-law worked there as a receptionist for about ten years so I have taken the tour on many occasions. You would be surprised that the freight was carried directly by trains—some of the trains are displayed inside the ferry.

There are displays on the ship portraying life in Aomori during the Showa era. It startles some people because as you pass by some of the displays, the life-like figures start talking to you in the Tsugaru dialect. Even if you understand Japanese but haven’t lived or worked in Aomori, it is very difficult to understand what is being said. You can also take a tour of the Mashu Maru which sits at the harbor in Hakodate. 

There is still a ferry service between Aomori and Hakodate and it is much more economical than traveling by shinkansen, also known as the bullet train. After reading and looking through this photography book, you will have a new appreciation for how the ferries run. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Distant Heart by Sonali Devi (Kensington)

Sonali Devi’s novel A Distant Heart is the fourth in her series of Bollywood stories. It is set in the bustling city of Mumbai. The main characters are a young girl named Kimaya and a boy named Rahul Savant. 

Kimaya Kirit Patil is the daughter of a wealthy politician and his wife. Everybody calls her Kimi. Her name means “miracle” in Sanskrit and to her parents that’s exactly what she is. Her father has told her that her mother had given birth to seven other babies before she was born but only she, Kimi, survived. 

Rahul Surajrao is the son of a policeman. He is the oldest of three. His younger brother’s name is Mohit and his sister's name is Mona. Along with his Aie, which means “mother” in the Marathi language, they live in a chawl, a residential building similar to a tenement. 

The story is mostly told in the first person by the two main characters. However, Devi has the novel jumping from the present and past. Once you understand the development of the story, it gets easier to follow. 

Rahul’s father died in the line of duty. He was shot while protecting a high level politician. Rahul was only fourteen years old when his father died in his lap. The other officers around him told him, “He will be okay. Keep courage”. However, Rahul knew only terror. How could he “keep courage” knowing his father was not coming back after being shot a couple of times in the chest. At fourteen, it was now up to Rahul to take care of his family.

When Kimaya was eleven, it was discovered that she had a rare disease. Her body lacked the immunity to protect her from various pathogens and she was confined to living in a sterile room with a view of the ocean. She spends most of her days alone…until one day she spots a boy cleaning the windows on the outside. That boy would be Rahul and they would become good friends. In fact, for each of them, the other was their only friend.

Switching back to the present, Kimi was the recipient of a heart transplant two years ago. She becomes interested in knowing who her donor was. Her father explains to her a number of times that the donor wished to remain anonymous. The day Kimi receives her heart is the same day that Rahul lost one of his closest friends, a woman named Jen Joshi who worked in a clinic in one of the slums. 

Joshi had noticed that the names of organ donors on her list had been disappearing and it was Rahul who was helping her investigate it when she was killed by the leader of an organized crime boss, Asif Khan. This is the same man who had accosted Kimi earlier to show him her scar, asking, “Do you know where your heart came from?”. Rahul managed to shoot Asif who survived but is currently in a coma. 

Now, Asif has come out of his coma and has escaped the hospital. He has also threatened Kimi’s father because Kimi’s father was unable to stop the police from investigating the illicit organ-trading business. Ironically, Kimi’s father tried but the man heading the investigation was Rahul who refused to back down.

Devi’s story has an exciting blend of action coupled with romance. The story asks the ultimate question of its readers—a question of ethics. How far would you go to protect the one you love? Would you be willing to sacrifice others just to save your own flesh and blood? ~Ernie Hoyt

The Mantis by Kotaro Isaka, translated by Sam Malissa (Vintage)

Kotaro Isaka is one of Japan’s foremost mystery writers, along with Keigo Higashino and Miyuki Miyabe. A number of their books have been adapted into feature length movies and many of their titles have been translated into English. 

The Mantis became available in English in paperback for the first time in 2024. It was published by Vintage Books and translated by Sam Malissa, a Yale scholar who holds a PhD in Japanese Literature. He has also translated Kotaro Isaka’s books 3 Assassins, Bullet Train, and most recently Hotel Lucky Seven. 

The Mantis was originally published in the Japanese language as AX in 2017 by Kadokawa. It was nominated for the Bookstore Award in 2018 which was won by Mizuki Tsujimura’s Lonely Castle in the Sky (Asia by the Book, April 2023). The Mantis is the third book in Isaka’s Hitman series. 

The main character is Kabuto. An ordinary family man with a wife and a high-school aged son, Katsumi, he works at an office supply company. He started the job in his mid-twenties when his son was born and has continued to work there—but Kabuto has another job, a job he hasn’t mentioned to his wife or son. 

Kabuto is a contract killer. However, he has a strong desire to leave that particular profession behind. When he was talking to his son one evening, he says, “Do you know what the one thing I want to do most is?” Of course his son doesn’t know but Kabuto answers, “I want to worry about my son’s future. Whether it’s school, or anything. I want to rack my brains thinking about what path you should and shouldn’t take”. 

On his latest assignment, Kabuto teams up with a couple of other contractors who were given the same target. After the job is done, the assassins joke around with each other. The other two admire Kabuto for being a married man who continues to do this job. Kabuto shares a story about his wife that the other two find quite amusing. They tell him “The whole industry respects you” but add, “There are a lot of people who would be disappointed if they knew you were this frightened of your wife”. 

Kabuto often goes to a hospital in another part of town away from his own house and his son’s school. The clinic may seem like an ordinary clinic on the outside but the doctor who runs the place is also Kabuto’s handler. He advises Kabuto “to undertake this surgery”. In their line of business, they use codes and phrases that may sound normal in a hospital setting but have totally different meanings. “Surgery” means “target”. “Emergency operation” means the deed has to be done as soon as possible. 

Kabuto had promised his wife that he would go with her to their son’s parent-teacher conference but the “emergency operation” is to be held on the same day. Kabuto wants to refuse the “operation” and tells the doctor, “No more risky procedures”. He tells the doctor he wants to get out of the game. The doctor answers “Retirement requires capital” which Kabuto knows to mean the doctor will never let him retire. 

He reluctantly takes the assignment but consistently refuses other “risky procedures”. He also learns that the Doctor has taken out a contract on him. Now Kabuto must do everything he can to save himself and his family. 

Kotaro Isaka’s Assassins series never disappoints. There is a lot of action, there are many plot twists and you never know what will happen next. If you’re unfamiliar with Japanese mysteries, Kotaro Isaka’s books would be a good place to start. ~Ernie Hoyt

Kiki's Delivery Service (Volumes 1-4) by Hayao Miyazaki (Viz Media)

Studio Ghibli animation films have become popular worldwide, loved by many people around the world. Although the films are usually original stories, there are a few that are based on other works. 

Kiki’s Delivery Service is a film that was based on a novel written by Japanese children’s book author and essayist Eiko Kadono. The original title is 魔女の宅急便 (Majo no Takkyubin) which translates to The Witch’s Delivery Service. it was originally published in 1985 by Fukuinkan Shoten. This four -volume graphic novel adaptation of the book was written and drawn by Hayao Miyazaki. 

We are introduced to Kiki, a thirteen-year-old witch who is about to embark on a journey to become an independent witch. She is the daughter of the witch Kokiri and a mortal man, Okino, an anthropologist who studies witches and fairies. 

Kiki speaks in the first-person and tells us “I’m the witch Kiki. When a witch turns thirteen she has to take a journey to hone her craft!”. She has made her own broom and plans to leave on an evening when the skies are clear and the moon is full. Joining Kiki on her journey will be her pet and companion, Jiji, a black cat that can speak. 

Kiki’s mother offers Kiki her old and reliable broom but Kiki wants to use the one she made herself. Jiji also says that she should take her mother’s broom. An elderly woman says that Kiki can make a new broom once she gets settled into her new town. Then her adventure begins. 

Kiki heads towards the ocean and finds a bustling coastal city. it’s the kind of place she’s always imagined. The first person she meets and talks to in the city is the town’s clock-tower keeper who informs Kiki that nobody has seen a real witch in a long time. 

However, her first encounter with citizens of the city is the local police who reprimands her for nearly causing an accident. She is saved from the police when someone shouts “Thief!!”. It is a young boy who loves flying. He tells Kiki it was him who helped save her and would she mind teaching him how to fly. Although she is thankful for being saved, she finds the boy's demeanor to be rude and walks away. 

Kiki tries to find a place to stay for the night but wherever she goes, she’s asked about her parents or if she has any identification on her. She begins to have doubts about living in this big city and her cat Jiji suggests they look for a friendlier place. Then they meet Osono, the proprietress of a local bakery who offers Kiki a room in return for helping out in the bakery. 

As a new witch in a new town, Kiki must now find a way to make a living. After helping Osono by delivering an item a customer forgot, she returns with a message telling Osono her new delivery girl is quite special. Kiki knows the one talent she has that others don’t is the ability to fly. So she asks Osono if she could start a delivery service at Osono’s Bakery. 

The story is about the trials and tribulations of fitting into a new environment, making friends and becoming a responsible witch after a year of training. However, even with humans, witches have their ups and downs. The most serious possibility is losing their magical abilities. 

Kiki makes friends with a boy about the same age as Kiki named Tombo who has a love of flying. He is a member of the Aviation Club at his school. Although she feels comfortable talking to Tombo, she feels his friends look at her differently. She can sense that they see she is different. It’s after this encounter that Kiki discovers her magic is weakening. 

Will Kiki’s magical powers return? Will she be able to talk to her cat Jiji? When danger threatens and Tombo’s life is hanging by a thread, it takes all of Kiki’s power to conjure up the courage to face her fears and help her new-found friend. 

At its most basic, Kiki’s Delivery Service is a coming-of-age story. It is the story of becoming independent and finding the courage to face up to one’s fears in the face of danger. The story can be enjoyed by adults and children alike and perhaps will be able to teach the reader a lesson as well. ~Ernie Hoyt