Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri (Vintage Books)

“I don’t share my life with anyone,” Jhumpa Lahiri’s unnamed narrator says at the beginning of Whereabouts. Although this refers to her lack of a domestic partner, the statement is true of her entire existence. She moves through the Italian city that she’s lived in all of her life as if she were a stranger, cherishing her solitude. “It’s become my trade,” she explains, blaming it on her mother, who had never left her alone, shrouding her in an “unhealthy amalgam” as she was growing up. Now as an adult, she approaches her mother as she would any aging stranger, twice a month, with respect and a box of cookies.

She has her familiar haunts in her city but she frequents them in the same way a tourist might, observing, eating, and making purchases without offering her presence to the people she sees there every day. This is a woman for whom intimacy is something to guard against. The men with whom she has had physical relationships are married; “We had a fling,” she says dismissively.

In her solitary life, she becomes painstakingly observant, like a camera, recording images without judgment, watching the people around her as though she’s conducting an anthropological study. Her distance is both fascinating and appalling. The city that has always been her home isn’t a place where she finds the comfort that usually comes to those who live in one spot forever.

And yet, when she accepts the offer of a fellowship that will put her in another country, “surrounded by another impenetrable tongue, she finds that the city she has never before left “doesn’t beckon or lend me a shoulder”  anymore. “I’m scared,” she admits, but realizes she knows “the guts and soul of this place a little too well.” 

Jhumpa Lahiri is a writer who has often given her characters that feeling of separation. She explains this within In Other Words, (Asia by the Book, July 2022), when she says that her parents’ language, Bengali, failed to connect her to a place she’d never known and English failed to give her a place of belonging in England or the U.S. When she found Italian, she found the “freedom to be imperfect,” and when she moved to Rome, she began to write only in Italian.

In Whereabouts, by giving voice to a woman who insists on maintaining her distance, Lahiri constructs a fine description of what it is to be an expatriate, living as a stranger, equipped with a language that is imperfectly acquired. Anyone who has gone to another country, living alone, existing as a “word hunter” and a careful observer of the world around them will fully understand the existence of the woman whose solitude is chosen but utterly complete.

Lahiri has written four books in Italian. Whereabouts is the third while Roman Stories, published in the U.S this month, is the fourth. By using Italian to write her books, she’s constructed even greater levels of distance. Conceived in English, written in Italian, and then translated back into English constructs a process that sets up a series of barriers between reader and writer, writer and character. It will be interesting to see how Lahiri’s style changes as her Italian becomes more of a creative language and less of a learning exercise. Will her trademark distance become warmed by a language that’s heated with emotion?~Janet Brown

Romaji Diary and Sad Toys by Takuboku Ichikawa, translated by Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda (Tuttle)

Takuboku Ichikawa was a Japanese poet born in 1886 in  Iwate Prefecture, near what is now called Morioka City, at Joko Temple where his father was the head monk. He moved to Shibutami, also in Iwate Prefecture, a year later. He died at the young age of twenty-six from tuberculosis. 

He is mostly known for writing tanka, a genre of Japanese classical poetry. Unlike haiku which follows an on of 5-7-5, on being a phonetic unit, tanka follows a 5-7-5-7-7 on pattern. However, Ichikawa became famous for breaking with tradition as many of his tanka does not follow the standard pattern, nor does it deal with classical subjects. Ichikawa wrote his tanka to describe the mundane, the ordinary, he wrote them as a diary in poetry form.

Romaji Diary and Sad Toys is actually a collection of two books in one volume. The first half of the book, Romaji Diary, was originally published as マジ日記 (Romanji Nikki), a diary the Ichikawa wrote between the months April and June in 1909 before his death. 

The latter half of the the book, Sad Toys, which was originally published in the Japanese language as 悲しき玩具 (Kanashiki Gangu), is a collection of 194 of Ichikawa’s tanka translated into English by Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda. 

Ichikawa had been living in Tokyo for a year when he started writing his diary. He had yet to send for his family because he didn’t feel he would be able to support them. It appears Ichikawa wrote his diary as a means to leave the stress he felt from what he thought were his own shortcomings. 

In one of his earliest entries, he writes, “Why have I decided to write this diary in Roman letters? What’s the reason? I love my wife, and for the very reason I love her, I don’t want her to read it.” Many of his entries are full of contradictions. He goes on to write, “I love her is the truth, and that I don’t want her to read it is equally true, but these two statements aren’t necessarily connected. 

Ichikawa continued to write his diary until his wife and daughter came to Tokyo to live with him. Reading his diary, you can feel his frustration at not being able to achieve what he set out to do. He is often cynical and self-loathing. He often praises his wife but then in another entry, wonders why he even got married. 

The latter half of the book, Sad Toys, is a collection of Ichikawa’s tanka. In this edition, the publisher includes the Japanese original which were all written in three lines. The translators not only provide the English equivalent of each tanka but have also included their own interpretations and explanations of each to make it easier for the reader to understand them.

As with his Romaji Diary, his tanka are also little stories about himself, how he felt at a certain time, what his exact thoughts were. Some of the tanka are about his friends, others are about his family, and there are a few about a woman he became very infatuated with, although their friendship remained platonic. 

As a recent resident of the Tohoku area of Japan, I have become quite interested in regional authors. Not many of their works have been translated into English, with the exception of Osamu Dazai. If you want to expand your knowledge of Japanese literature and want to read more than just Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, or Soseki Natsumi, you may find the works of Takuboku Ichikawa to be an interesting alternative. You might even think of it as a breath of fresh air. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Girl with the White Flag by Tomiko Higa, translated by Dorothy Britton (Kodansha International)

The Girl with the White Flag was originally published as 白旗の少女 (Shirohata no Shojo) in 1989 by Kodansha. It is a memoir of Tomiko Higa’s experiences she had during the last days of World War 2. She was only seven years old when war came to her town. It is the story of how she and her siblings became refugees in their own country and how she became the focus of international attention when a photographer named John Hendrikson took her picture as she came out of a cave carrying a white flag. 

Tomiko Higa was born and raised in Shuri, Okinawa which is now part of Naha City, the capital city of Okinawa Prefecture. She was born in 1938, the youngest of nine children. Her mother died three weeks after she turned six years old. Her two eldest sisters were already married and had moved out of the house. Her two older brothers were serving in the Imperial Army, one in China, the other working on the mainland. That left Tomiko, her two older sisters Yoshiko and Hatsuko, and her older brother Chukuyo at the family home.

American soldiers landed on Okinawa on April 1, 1945. A month later, bombs and shells began to fall near Tomiko’s house. Their father gathered his children together and told them, “If by any chance there is an enemy attack in this immediate area while I am away and I can’t get back, you will each have to decide for yourself what to do”. He left it up to his oldest daughter to look after her younger brother and sisters. It would be the last time they would see their father. 

Yoshiko, the eldest of the five, said that they should follow their father’s instructions and head south. They managed to scrape by with a little food and spent their nights in caves which are abundant in Okinawa. Some of the places they stayed were already full of refugees and in some caves there were the remains of human bones.

As the children continued to walk south, they made a stop to rest. They dug holes in the ground to sleep in. Tomiko and her brother made more of a hollow, just big enough to hold their bottoms. They were awakened just a few hours later by soldiers who told them there would soon be fighting in the area. As Tomiko tried to wake up her brother, she noticed that he was sleeping with his eyes wide open. 

Yoshiko, the oldest sister, took the cloth that was wrapped around his head and “saw that his head had a hole in it and there was blood all over the back of his head and on his shoulders and down his back”. It was explained later to Tomiko that her brother was hit by a stray bullet and probably died instantly. 

As they fled Komesu, Tomiko, who had always held Chukuyo’s hand, clutched her sister’s dress as they continued to flee to the south. However, when she looked up, she was staring into a stranger’s face. She looked for her sister Yoshiko and Hatsuko but could not find either one of them. Now she really was all alone. 

As Tomiko continued to head south, going from cave to cave, calling out for her sisters, people would either tell her to be quiet or leave. Some even threatened her with death. One of the final caves she came to was occupied by an elderly man and a blind woman. Tomiko also noticed something strange about the man. “Both his arms had been amputated at the elbows and both his legs at the knees”. 

It was these two invalids who probably saved Tomiko’s life. It was these two who made the white flag for Tomiko to hold high when coming out of the cave. She was led to a beach where there were other women and children and she was reunited with her sisters.

This is one of the saddest but most inspiring stories you will read about children surviving the horrors of war. Thanks to her father’s strict upbringing, her brother’s knowledge of edible plants, and the kindness of strangers, Tomiko was alive and well. She would also meet John Hendrickson, the man who took the picture forty-three years ago. If only all wars could end with such a happy ending. ~Ernie Hoyt

Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang (Riverhead Books)

A cook, an exile, and “a hungry ghost, adrift,” a young Chinese American woman working in a London restaurant reads an advertisement for a “private chef in an elite research community.” Tempted by the thought of “one last taste of green” in a world that’s been overrun by grey—the pervasive smog that has killed crops all over the world and the grey mung bean flour that has become a nutritional staple—she lies about her work experience and enters what’s known to its envious neighbors as the land of milk and honey.

Set on an Italian mountaintop that defies the smog with bright bursts of sunlight, this is a place where food crops are bioengineered. When the young cook enters her workplace for the first time, she walks into a kitchen that is a “vessel of light” and the first food she tastes are strawberries that turn her mouth into “an orchard in the sun.”

She finds a bounty of ingredients to work with, food that’s vanished from every other part of the world, “a passage back through time.” With it she cooks elaborate menus that are only for practice, with nobody but herself to eat them. Her body rejects the richness of the meals she makes and, in a world that’s besieged by famine, every night she throws away all of the luscious food.

“I’d read the fairy tales,” she says, which means she recognizes the Bluebeard quality of her employer, a man who forbids her to leave the grounds of her workplace while promising her, “You may cook protected from the world’s distractions.” However a distraction finds her in her isolated state. Her employer’s daughter, Aida, brilliant, beautiful, and cynical, becomes her companion, friend, and lover.

Presented with a role to play at banquets where her employer feeds potential investors, the cook takes on an eerie persona, a silent woman dressed in white, who pretends to understand no spoken language and prays without words at the end of every meal. She’s a necessary component to her employer’s plans. He tells her, “They dislike me. Nor do they like Aida.” Posing as the employer’s former wife, the cook takes the vanished woman’s name, Eun-Young, and provides “an unimpeachable public image.” In return, her employer pays her a sum that will clear all of her considerable debt, so, she says, “I signed myself away.”

C. Pam Zhang has followed up her stunning debut novel, How Much of these Hills is Gold (Asia by the Book, March 2021) with an equally breathtaking work of imagination. Blending an apocalyptic future with a fantastic culinary world that’s rich with poetry, Zhang’s sentences sing with unexpected lyricism, burnishing the world that we live in today with a glow of miraculous good fortune. 

Her unnamed central character tells her story with wit and bitter truth. “It’s always been easy to disappear as an Asian woman…The woman I was to become was…a hollow, a receptacle, a mirror held at a flattering angle.” She views her employer with an unsparing eye, describing him as a vulgarian who disguises himself with orange self-tanning cream, “a man who studied pleasure” but derives no enjoyment from anything but humiliating others with his wealth and power. On a dying planet, he milks other wealthy men for the money he needs to safeguard those who are on his list and the money’s forked over by those who want to be on it.

A love story, a dystopian nightmare, a celebration of the bounty we take for granted everyday along with a tribute to life in all its messy and chaotic creativity, Land of Milk and Honey pierces the present to unveil a dubious future, while never releasing its grip on hope. “In certain lights,” Zhang tells readers, “ the past and present are indistinguishable.” Perhaps the future is as well.~Janet Brown

Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore (UBS Publishers)

Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet, writer, and composer. He was born in Calcutta to a very prominent family and was the youngest of thirteen children. The Tagores were known for their contributions to the Bengali Renaissance, a movement that took place in the Bengal region of the British Raj. 

Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European and the first Indian national to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his English translation of his book Gitanjali which translates to Song Offerings. He’s also known for writing books, short stories, and essays, writing his first poem when he was only eight years old.

Gitanjali was first published in his native language of Bengali in 1910 and contained one hundred and fifty-seven poems. Tagore translated his own poems into English and they were subsequently published by the India Society in England in 1912. The English collection only includes one hundred and three of the original poems. The “songs” are based on the themes of love, devotion, and the quest to find spiritual enlightenment. 

The book has been translated into almost all the languages spoken in India and many other languages around the world. There is even an edition available in Braille.

USB Publishers in association with Visva Bharati University decided to create a special edition of the book, including facsimiles of the original lyrics in Bengali, and published the book in 2003. The book includes one hundred and three of his poems, plus a message from the Prime Minister of India, and introductions to the book by W.B. Yeats and excerpts from Andre Gide for the French translation, Ivo Stornilol’s prologue to his Portuguese translation, and an excerpt from Suko Watanabe’s prologue to his Japanese translation of the book. 

Also included at the end of the book is Tagore’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech he gave on May 26, 1921 in Stockholm, Sweden. The gist of his speech is that not only literature, but education in general, should be shared throughout the entire world. The East and West should continue to exchange ideas and learn from each other and should continue to do so in the future.

Even if one is not religious, it is easy to understand Tagore's devotion to a supreme being. The first poem begins: 

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.

This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again.

and fillest it ever with fresh life.

The poems ends with: 

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.

Ages pass, and still thou poorest, and still there is room to fill. 

The only thing a reader may have difficulty with is the English that Tagore uses. The poems are filled with words which sound obsolete today and are often associated with the Bible. Almost all the poems include the words thee, thou, thy, etc, but one has to take into consideration when the poems were written.

The book is also a great introduction to Indian literature. Aside from the biblical-like words, the language is easy to understand and it makes for a pleasurable reading experience. ~Ernie Hoyt

Elephant Company by Vicki Constantine Croke (Random House)

Teak logging was a big business for Great Britain at the start of the 20th Century, with Burma producing 75% of the teak that was used by the world’s ship builders. It was a prime location for the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation, who sent  young British men, “nomads of the forest,” into the jungles to manage logging camps. 

This was a hazardous position. In 1920, 41 Englishmen were hired to work in “Upper Burma.” By 1927, only 16 of them were still alive. One of the original 41 (and the most notable of the 16 survivors) was Billy Williams, a young veteran, fresh from the trenches of World War I. He came because he was intrigued by the idea of working with elephants, an interest that would dominate his life for the next 25 years, giving him the nickname “Elephant Bill.”

Williams loved animals and had an understanding rapport with them that served him well in his new career. He soon became fascinated by the elephants that were an essential part of the logging business, particularly one named Bandoola who had a preternatural understanding of human language. If asked to hand a worker a particular tool, this elephant unerringly selected what was needed and handed it over without hesitation.

There was a peculiarly strong bond between Williams and Bandoola, perhaps because they had been born in the same month of the same year, and that bond led to an improved relationship with the other elephants that Williams worked with. Unique among his cohort, Bandoola was unscarred. When Williams discovered that this phenomenon had lived all his life in the camp, not captured in the wilderness and cruelly trained as the other elephants in the camp had been, he decided it was kinder, cheaper, and more efficient to raise baby elephants in the camp, training them with rewards and bringing them up with young boys who would later become their handlers. This humane standard of care became the norm in logging camps, along with elephant hospitals to cure the wounds incurred in this hazardous line of work.

When World War II began, the jungles of Burma became battlegrounds and elephants were a highly prized labor resource for both the Japanese and the Allies. Suddenly Williams was on equal terms with generals and guerrilla fighters, as the elephant advisor for the Allied forces. The Japanese put a price upon his head because he spirited away the pachyderms that they wanted for themselves.

At the height of his wartime career, Williams had 1652 elephants under his command, with Bandoola as their leader. In spite of his expertise and efforts, Burma’s elephants were sacrifices to warfare. Many of the British soldiers mistreated them, they were wounded in bombing raids and by landmines, and those that were under Japanese control were burned terribly by the acid from batteries that they were forced to carry.

“The more I see of man, the more I love my elephants,” Williams paraphrased and his love becomes contagious. Vicki Constantine Croke has done an immense amount of research and her lively writing style makes her facts irresistible. Elephants take center stage in this history, most particularly the one that was Elephant Bill’s pachyderm twin. Both Elephant Bill and Bandoola become unforgettable heroes in a biography that they companionably and equitably share.~Janet Brown

The Dark Side : Infamous Japanese Crimes and Criminals by Mark Schreiber (Kodansha International)

Japan has an image of being a very safe country. People say you can leave your bag or wallet on the train and nobody will steal it. The image most people have of Japanese people is that they are very polite. Then along comes Mark Schreiber to dispel many of those myths. 

Schreiber is a long-time resident of Japan and has worked as a freelance journalist and translator. His first book was Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan which was first published in 1996 by Tuttle Publishing. 

The Dark Side : Infamous Japanese Crimes and Criminals makes a nice companion piece to his first book. It is based on his series titled Crime and Punishment in Old Japan which he wrote for the Mainichi Daily News, publisher of one of Japan’s English language newspapers. 

In this book, Schreiber goes back in time. He starts with the crimes and criminals from the Edo Era (1603-1868) and explains the roots of Japan’s legal system and judiciary process starting with the age of the Shogun, the Tokugawa reign. He takes us through the Meiji Era (1868-1912), the Taisho Era (1912-1226), and ends the book with crime stories from the Showa (1926-1989) and Heisei (1989-2019) Eras. As the book was published in 2001, stories from the Reiwa Era (2019-present) are not included. 

According to Schreiber’s research, the roots of Japanese law date back to the Tokugawa era. In 1635, The Shogunate created the Roju, a group of five senior councilors from large fiefdoms, who served the Tokugawa shoguns. Below them was the Hyojosho, a judicial council that included three main departments, the JIsha bugyo which oversaw the Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. The Kanjo bugyo which was the treasury department, and the Machi bugyo, an office similar to that of the mayor or governor. It was the Machi bugyo that was responsible for ordinary civil and criminal cases.

One of the first criminals in seventeenth century Japan was a man known as Hirai (or Shirai) Gonpachi. He was a member of a low-ranking samurai family but had a very quick temper. A fight broke out between a couple of dogs owned by Gonpachi’s father and another samurai named Honjo Suketaro. The samurai said something offensive to Gonpachi’s father and when Gonpachi learned of that, he became very angry. He forced his way into Suketaro’s home and killed the man with a sword. He then became a fugitive and an outlaw but eventually turned himself in. Of course he was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was only twenty-five. 

As with any society, it isn’t only men who are criminals. Feudal Japan had their fair share of women who committed crimes. However, as women were considered second-class citizens, the courts were more lenient with them. They didn’t suffer from branding or flogging. They were usually let off with a kitto shikari, a severe scolding—like a big slap on the hand. 

The Meiji Era opened the country to foreigners so it goes without saying that more crimes were committed against the unwanted visitors by nationalistic samurais. However, the Western world was better armed and the Shogunate Era came to an end. The introduction of Western ideas was soon adopted as well. The West helped to change Japan’s feudal legal system. No longer was beheading a punishment for the convicted, nor was the severed head publicly displayed.

The Taisho Era lasted only fifteen years but another problem sprouted for the country during this time. It saw an increase in juvenile crime. However, instead of condemning these youths to death, a man named Kosuke Tomeoka set up a training school and farm in Hokkaido to reform them. His work is similar to Father Edward Flanagan’s creation of Boys Town, official known as Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home, with its belief that “children had a right to be valued, to have basic necessities of life and to be protected”.

Going into the Showa and Heisei Eras, Schreiber introduces the reader to a few notorious criminals. One of the most famous was Tsutomu Miyazaki. a serial killer who preyed on young girls. Between August 1988 and June 1989, he killed four girls, ages four to seven. After he killed them, he molested their corpses, then dismembered them, and also consumed some of their flesh. He was caught, convicted, and then executed on June 17, 2008.

In the Heisei Era, one of the most abhorrent crimes took place on Tokyo’s busy subway system. Members of the Doomsday Cult, AUM Shinrikyo, led by Shoko Asahara, released sarin gas on three different lines of the Tokyo Metro causing thirteen fatalities and injuring thousands of others. Fortunately, Asahara and most of those responsible for the sarin attacks were caught, tried, and convicted. Asahara was executed by hanging on July 8, 2018. 

Japan is currently in the Reiwa Era and one of the most shocking crimes was commited during this period., the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was shot and killed on July 8, 2022 in Nara Prefecture during a political event. How could this have happened? Where did the perpetrator get a gun? Why were the secret service so slow to respond? Although the suspect was apprehended, it reinforces the dangers of crime and criminals and the need for precautions against such people.

It doesn’t matter what era, what country or even what religion is invovled. As long as there are people with differing views, conflicts and wars will continue. The wish for World Peace may be an idealistic fantasy but it is something worth striving for. ~Ernie Hoyt

Totto-chan's Children : A Goodwill Journey to the Children of the World by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, translated by Dorothy Britton (Kodansha International)

Tetsuko Kuroyanagi is a Japanese actress, a popular television talk-show host, and is the author of the acclaimed book Totto-chan : The Little Girl at the Window (Asia by the Book, December 2019). In February of 1984, she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund), currently known as United Nations Children’s Fund, whose main purpose is to provide humanitarian and developmental aid to children all over the world. She held this position until 1996. 

Totto-chan’s Children is the story of her travels to countries in Africa, Asia, and other nations to visit the people who are most at risk from malnutrition, disease, and conflicts - the children. Originally published in 1997 by Kodansha as トットちゃんとトットちゃんたち (Totto-chan to Totto-chan Tachi). The title is a play on words. Totto-chan was what Kuroyanagi called herself when she was a child. Totto is also the word for “child” in Swahili, one of the official languages of Tanzania which was the first country Kuroyanagi would visit as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. 

Kuroyanagi visited Tanzania in 1984. The country was suffering from a severe drought. It hadn’t rained since 1981 and because there was no rain, no crops could be grown. “Everyday, nearly six hundred children under the age of five were dying of starvation and disease”. 

Kuroyanagi thought she knew a lot about starving children, being a child who grew up in wartime Japan. Her visit to Tanzania opened her eyes to what real starvation is. She met children who could neither stand, nor walk nor talk. However, none of the children she met shed any tears or said anything. Later in the evening she was told by a village chief who told her, “Adults die groaning, complaining of their pain, but children say nothing. They simply die silently, under the banana leaves, trusting us adults”. 

Her travels to Asia would take her to Cambodia and Vietnam in 1988 where she would see the children who suffered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and the Pol Pot regime, children whose parents were killed, children who were malnourished because there was no powdered milk or anything nourishing for the kids to eat. Many of the nurses themselves were orphans and did not know how to take care of babies.

In Vietnam, she visited a night elementary school. She was told there about a million school-age children in Ho Chi Minh City. Of these, “about sixty thousand either bravely went to work each day to contribute to the household economy, looked after their younger siblings or helped with the housework and, therefore, could not attend elementary school in the daytime. The night elementary schools were for their benefit”. 

An elementary night school for children—Americans would be hard-pressed to understand a need for such a facility. It may not seem as strange to the Japanese, where many elementary school students attend night classes at cram schools after their regular school. 

In 1990, Kuroyanagi visited Bangladesh, known at the time of this writing to be one of the poorest nations in the world. In this country about nine hundred thousand children under the age of five die each year. She visited the country after it suffered a severe flood wiping out nearly one-third of the nation. Many of the children were afflicted with diarrhea or diarrhea-related diseases. However, what really surprised Kuroyanagi were the children. She says, “There was not a child who had become lethargic and spiritless. They bubbled with the will to live”. 

Kuroyanagi also visited Iraq in 1991 shortly after the end of the Persian Gulf War. Most of us have seen footage of this conflict on television, but we have not seen the real tragedy of war. The ones most affected are the innocent children and news programs usually don’t focus on that aspect of military conflicts.

Every country Kuroyanagi visits is inundated with children in need. Fortunately, UNICEF continues to do what it was intended to do, that is to help children in need all around the world. It’s a sad state of affairs that throughout the world, war, conflict, disease, famine, and starvation continues. We are often left to think, “How can I be of more help?”, “Is there more I can do?”

The book provides a reference for those wishing to contribute to UNICEF through Tetsuko Kurayanagi’s goodwill ambassador account in Tokyo. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo (Henry Holt and Company)

“I exist as either a small canid…or a young woman. Neither are safe forms in a world run by men.” Snow, however, is well equipped to defend herself, no matter if she takes the form of a beautiful woman or a fox. Unfortunately her daughter is not. When the fox cub is captured by a photographer to sell on the open market, the baby is easily broken. By the time Snow finds her, the child is ready to die.

Now Snow is out for revenge, taking her human form to find the man who is responsible for her baby’s death. Her quest takes her to the home of an old woman whose son is a photographer and who knows the murderer. This old woman is attracted to something within Snow, an indefinable quality that reminds her of a fox she encountered long ago in the northern grasslands. She hires this enigmatic beauty to be her maid servant and companion.

Bao is an elderly man who long ago was taken to a fox shrine to save his life. From that time on, he is a lie detector in human form who can immediately distinguish truth from lies the minute the words are spoken. “Truth is a green garden hedged thickly with bamboo that he can’t escape.” He uses this blessing and curse in his work as a detective, a job that puts him on the path of a beautiful young woman who might be a fox. While on his hunt, he always keeps an eye out for the woman he loved when he was young, a girl who claimed she had once been rescued by a fox.

The Fox Wife suddenly becomes a mystery based upon myth, where three foxes find each other, all of them linked through time, history, love, and tragedy. Yangsze Choo makes them not only plausible, but absolutely possible and completely desirable. “We make our living beguiling people,” Snow says and anyone who picks up this book is certain to be beguiled.

Ancient Chinese stories, Choo explains in notes at the end of her book, were augmented by footnotes and in this book, she had wanted to include footnotes written by Snow. Instead she gives tidbits of information sprinkled throughout her novel and within her closing notes. Foxes are recognized as magical shape-shifters in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, beings that are capable of pursuing a thousand-year journey toward becoming celestial foxes. While on that journey they are known to humans as spirits, demons, and gods. 

First mentioned in the Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), a work of Chinese literature that dates back to the 4th Century B.C., foxes were believed to have the power to become a woman at fifty, a beautiful woman or an adult male at one hundred, with the ability “to know things more than at a thousand miles distance.” They could use sorcery to kill or to “possess and bewilder,” and often were the presiding spirit of villages.

Even without these historical facts, Snow’s story is skillfully interlaced with Bao’s in a novel that’s poetic, romantic, and steeped in adventure. Trapped in neither mystery nor fantasy, The Fox Wife brings a new depth to fiction, along with a yearning for a sequel—with footnotes.~Janet Brown

Kwaidan : Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn (ICG Muse)

Lafcadio Hearn was born in Greece on the Ionian island of Lefkada. His mother was a native of Greece and his father was a British Army medical officer. It was as an adult that Hearn moved to Japan to work as a newspaper correspondent. He fell in love with the country and managed to get a teaching position in Shimane Prefecture where he would meet and marry his wife, Setsuko Koizumi. He then became a Japanese citizen and took on the name Yakumo Koizumi. 

He is mostly known as the first foreigner to introduce Japanese literature to the rest of the world. His book Kwaidan is a collection of Japanese ghost stories, some of which have a Chinese origin. It was originally published in 1904 as 怪談 (Kaidan) in the Japanese language. 怪談meaning Ghost Stories. He appears to have made a play on words with the English title as kowai means “scary” and dan meaning “story”, “conversation”, or “talk”.

In the introduction of the book which Hearn wrote in 1904, he says most of the stories were taken from old Japanese books. He mentions that some of them have their origins in China but “the Japanese storyteller, in every case, has so recolored and re-shaped his borrowing as to naturalize it”. 

The lead story, Mimi Nashi Hoichi is a very popular story. Almost every Japanese person knows it. It is about a blind minstrel named Hoichi who could play the biwa, a Japanese lute, and was really good at telling The Tale of Heike. He was especially noted for his rendition of the Battle of Dan-no-Ura.

He made his home at a temple with a friendly priest. His skill was so great that he was called to perform in front of a noble samurai when the main priest was absent. The nobleman was so pleased with his performance that he sent his servant to call upon Hoichi again.

The priest thought there was something strange about Hoichi’s behavior and had some of his servants follow him the next day. They discovered Hoichi playing his biwa in a cemetery in front of the tomb of Antoku Tenno, Japan’s 81st Emperor whose grandfather drowned him when he was only seven during the Battle of Dan-no-Ura. He did this so that the enemy wouldn’t capture the child emperor.

The priest told him he was bewitched by ghosts but he would protect him by writing sutras over Hoichi’s entire body. He was to remain silent and motionless when called upon again. The servant of the nobleman, who we now realize is also a spirit, called upon Hoichi but was angered because Hoichi did not answer him. The sutras the priest wrote rendered his body invisible. The only part of Hoichi’s body the servant could see were Hoichi’s ears. He ripped them off to show his master that the ears were the only part of Hoichi that he could find. 

When the priest returned to see a bloody and injured Hoichi, he admonished himself and apologized to Hoichi telling that he neglected to write any sutras over his ears. However, the priest nursed Hoichi back to health and Hoichi became a famous musician. 

Other stories include Yukki-Onna which is about a woman who is dressed in white and breathes cold air onto sleeping men and takes their lives. Riki Baka is about a simple boy whose mother wished and prayed that he would be reborn into a happier life. 

It’s a great introduction into Japanese folklore. Not all the stories are ghost stories but they are strange. Aside from the bizarre stories, Hearn has included three essays on insects, butterflies, mosquitoes, and ants, telling how they relate to Japanese and Chinese beliefs.

The ghost stories are fun and might seem a little quirky to the Western reader. While I enjoyed the insect essays, I thought it was an interesting concept but a bit hard to absorb. ~Ernie Hoyt

Falling Leaves : The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah (Broadway Books)

Adeline Yen Mah’s book Falling Leaves is the story of her life. It is the true story of growing up in a family where she tries her best to please her father and step-mother but nothing she does changes their apathy towards her. It is a heart-breaking story of family bonds and how those ties are often broken. 

Adeline Yen Mah was born into a very wealthy family in a city just north of Shanghai, China. Her mother died at thirty, a couple of weeks after Adeline was born. Her dying words were to Adeline’s Aunt Baba, “I’ve run out of time. After I’m gone, please look after our little friend here who will never know her mother”. Adeline has no idea what her mother looked like, she has never seen a photograph of her. 

In 1930’s China, men were expected to have a wife while women were “expected to sublimate their own desires to the common good of the family”. In the past there was a double standard between men and women. Single girls who were not married by the time they were thirty often remained single for the rest of their lives. A man, on the other hand, was expected to take at least one wife, regardless of his age. 

Adeline’s father was thirty years old. He was the president of his own company. He had properties, investments and other successful businesses. He decided he would now do something to please himself. While driving around with his sons, he spotted a woman whom he became totally infatuated with. Her name was Jeanne Virginie Prosperi, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a French father and Chinese mother. 

He eventually married Jeanne and had the family call her 娘 (Niang), another term for mother, as the children often talked about their deceased mother and called her 媽媽 (Mama). As Niang became a part of life, great changes would come, and nothing would be the same again. 

It is now 1988 in Hong Kong. Adeline Yen Mah’s family have all gathered together for the first time in almost forty years. The only person who is absent is Adeline’s youngest sister, Susan. The occasion is for her father’s funeral and reading of his last will and testament. 

At the end of the will, the solicitor says, “It is my duty to inform you that I have been instructed by your mother, Mrs. Jeanne Yen, to tell you that there is no money in your father’s estate”. 

It is this reading of her father’s will which is the catalyst for Adeline to tell her story. She and her siblings could not believe that their father died penniless. Adeline Yen Mah says she had to go back to her grand- aunt and grandfather’s time to explain why this came to be.

Adeline Yen Mah’s bittersweet memoir of a happy childhood turned nightmare is heartbreaking as it is inspiring. It’s a story of finding one’s identity and the search for the most important things in life—acceptance, love and understanding. I believe it’s a goal we all strive for and those of us who have it should count our blessings. ~Ernie Hoyt