Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien (W.W. Norton & Company)

Within the devastation that swept over Cambodia during the Pol Pot years, names become irrelevant, hazardous, and disposable. Who cares what name was given at birth when nobody is left alive to remember what it once was? “Names were empty syllables, lost as easily as an entire world.” 

A Red Cross physician becomes Kwan instead of James when that name gives him the only chance to stay alive and find his child. A young boy whose brothers are blown apart by landmines as they approach a border of safety only knows his nickname, Nuong, which he will keep for the rest of his life. Another little boy tells his captors he is Rithy, not Sopham, and survives to learn which parts of the human body will yield a confession under interrogation, becoming a killer by the time he’s nine. His sister never tells what her name used to be; she becomes Mei in one of Angkar’s labor camps and then Janie when she’s sent by a refugee organization to the safety of a home in Canada. 

“If you want to be strong,” a boy says in the labor camp, “you have to become someone else. You have to take a new name.” 

“Inside us,” Janie’s mother tells her back in the days when the family lived in peace, “from the beginning, we were entrusted with many lives…we try to carry them until the end.” But thirty years later, Janie discovers she “knows too much” and has “too many selves.” Laden with memories that shadow her present life, she’s haunted by her little brother, Sopham. Unable to maintain her grip on him in the middle of an empty sea, she watched as “the ocean breathed him in.” 

Now her memories endanger her son. She no longer can trust herself to live with her husband and child because the minute that remembered violence engulfs her, she strikes out. When her colleague and mentor disappears in search of his brother, James, who vanished in the horror of Cambodia in 1975, Janie seizes a chance that will let her find the man who has become the only parent left to her. She returns to the country where she was born, where people who once were told to rid themselves of “memory sickness” and to forget their past history, live with ghosts who will “never be put to rest.”

“The soul is a slippery thing,” Janie’s mother told her, “but in darkness it can be returned to you.” In the darkness of what remains in Cambodia, Janie’s soul remembers the love and the beauty she once knew, in a time when that was as profuse and ordinary as air or water. She learns the necessity of guarding what’s precious and vital by placing dogs at the perimeter to safeguard those essential things. When she makes a phone call to her Canadian family, her son begs her, “Promise me. Don’t disappear,” and Janie makes that promise.

“The Khmer Rouge had taught us how to survive, walking alone, carrying nothing in our hands.” Piece by piece, Madeleine Thien shows how the Khmer people lost their names, lost their families, but survived to learn other names, other lives, other ways to love. Her novel recreates terrible damage and the agonizing process of recovery, with images that are unforgettable: ”tiny sequins of snow,” “light [that] spins over us like quiet laughter,” two children adrift at sea who are “caught on broken glass,” a prisoner feeling “his heart solidify in mute fear.” Normalcy and madness, the destruction of war and the confusion of peace, people who are privileged in their longing to keep their memories and those who wish they could lose their own--in an astounding act of literary alchemy, Thien makes these juxtapositions alive and agonizing and ultimately steeped in hope.~Janet Brown

Cannibals by Shinya Tanaka, translated by Kalau Almony (Honford Star)

Shinya Tanaka is a Japanese writer who won Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Award for his novel 共食い (Tomogui), which has been translated into English as Cannibals. The story is set in 1989 and the main character, Toma Shinogaki, just turned seventeen. 

He lives with his father Madoka and his father’s partner Kotoko-san. His father is a philanderer, an alcoholic, and often beats the women he has sex with. Toma’s birth mother, Jinko-san, lives close by and runs a fish shop. 

They all live in a community called the Riverside, a place where not much happens and where people down on their luck seemed to have converged. The place also smells of raw sewage as the sewer system has not yet been completed. 

Jinko-san, the fishmonger is almost sixty and her right arm from the wrist down is gone. It was during the war when she lost it. She got pinned under her burning and collapsed house during an air raid. The riverside was an ocean of fire. “I traded one hand to keep my life,” she once told Toma.

The riverside was one of the places that didn’t get developed after the war “and the people who gathered there, intending only to temporarily avoid dire poverty, ended up stuck”. Toma’s father, Madoka, was one of those people.

His father met Kotoko-san at a bar where she worked and she came to live with the Shinogaki’s about a year earlier. It wasn’t until Kotoko-san started living with them that Madoka would start to hit her. 

Toma once asked, “Why don’t you break up with him? You scared of him?”. He was shocked and surprised at her response. She said to him, “He tells me I got a great body, and when he hits me he says it gets even more better. To Toma, she looked like “an incredibly stupid woman”. 

Toma has a girlfriend named Chigusa. At this point in the story, it’s actually hard to tell if Chigusa is really his girlfriend or just some girl that he has sex with. They have known each other since childhood as Chigusa also grew up in the Riverside. 

Lately, Toma has been thinking how much he is like his Dad. She tells him he’s not like his Dad, that he doesn’t hit her. However, Toma responds by saying, “It’s too late if I realize I’m like him after I hit you”. 

Recently, Toma’s father has been searching for a young man as he believes Kotoko-san is being unfaithful to him. The double standard of if’s okay for men to play around but a woman must stand by his man is alive and well in Japan in 1989. 

One day, Kotoko-san tells Toma that she’s pregnant with his father’s baby. This gets Toma thinking about his future. Will his father kick him out so Madoka can live with Kotoko-san and their baby? But Kotoko-san tells Toma that she plans to leave the Riverside. Toma has never thought about leaving and wonders if his father will try to find Kotoko-san if she really does leave. He also wonders if his father will come back. 

Chigusa and Toma also have a falling out after a sex bout where Toma starts choking her before he climaxes. He really believes he’s becoming like his father. Then one day, something happens that changes everything on the Riverside. 

Kotoko-san is gone. Chigusa has been waiting for Toma at the local shrine. And the children run to tell Toma that he must go see her. His father comes home and tells Toma that he’s sorry, that he couldn’t help himself, that he couldn’t find Kotoko-san and Chigusa just happen to be close by and he couldn’t control his urges…

Tanaka brings to life the gritty reality of living in near-poverty. His characters are far from likable, especially the father and son. The women are all treated as objects to have sex with and hurt. It’s a very disturbing reality but one that’s hard to ignore.

Thank God that this story is fiction. People like Madoka and Toma are the worst breed of humans. How some women can stay with abusive men is still a problem that plagues society today. In the end, Madoka gets what he deserves and Toma…well, that would be up to the reader to decide. ~Ernie Hoyt

Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum, translated by Shanna Tan (Bloomsbury)

South Korean writer Hwang Bo-Reum’s Welcome to the Hynam-dong Bookshop is  a book for booklovers and for anybody who has ever had a dream of opening and running their own bookshop. This is her first novel which was originally released in 2023 in her home country. 

The book became an instant bestseller and was translated into several languages the following year, including English. The Japanese translation won the Japan Bookseller’s Award in 2024. 

The main character, Yeongju, did everything she was supposed to do. She went to university, married a nice man, and had a decent paying and well-respected job. She adhered to the principle that if she were to do her best, things would go well for her. 

At her job, she was a contract worker. However, her manager promised her that if she did well before her next evaluation, she would eventually become a permanent employee. She was given an important assignment that she put her blood and guts into, thinking this time, the company will recognize my worth and make me a permanent full-time employee. How shocked she was to find that her manager not only took her name off the project and added an inept co-worker who was then promoted over her. 

So, Yeongju does what only most people dream about doing. She quits her job, she divorces her husband and decides to open a bookshop which was a dream of hers since she was a child. However, she has no experience on how to run a bookshop or how to run a business, but that does not deter her from following her dream. 

She finds a spot in a suburban area of Seoul that she just fell in love with. She thought that if she fills the store with books, people will come. But the reality of the matter was far from what she imagined. After opening the shop, she would ask herself, “if this was her first visit, would she have faith in the staff’s recommendations? How does a bookshop earn trust? What makes a good bookshop?”

For the first few months after opening, Yeongju started writing to do lists, prioritizing what needed to be done first. Before opening the shop, her old life was tearing away at her soul. The only thought in her mind was, “I must open a bookshop”. 

The bookshop has a few early regulars but is still nowhere near to being called successful. Even Yeongju herself says, “I must do better than this”. She starts an Instagram account for the shop and decides to hire a barista so people could enjoy coffee while browsing, perhaps buying a book or two. 

The first employee she hires is Minjun, a young man who also seems to have no direction in life as yet. In the beginning Yeongju tells him that the shop will probably be open for two years or so. She still did not have the confidence that she could run a successful and busy independent bookshop. 

But as the years pass, she begins to think differently from when she began. She now wants her bookshop to be more than just a bookshop, she wants it to be a place where people can come and forget about their everyday, stressful lives, enjoy a cup of coffee and read books they might enjoy. 

As a longtime bookseller myself, I couldn’t help but admire the change in Yeongu’s attitude when starting the shop and how she gains more confidence in believing in herself, her small group of friends, and her employees who make the Hyunamh-dong Bookshop a place I want to go to as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks by Natsuko Imamura, translated by Lucy North (Faber & Faber)

Natsuko Imamura is a Japanese writer who won the 2019 Akugatagawa Prize for her novel The Woman in the Purple Skirt (Asia by the Book, December 2023) and has also won a number of other literary awards as well. Her latest book to be published in English is Asa : The Girl Who Turned Into a Pair of Chopsticks. Originally published in the Japanese language as 木になった亜沙 (Ki ni Natta Asa) which literally translates to “Asa who turned into a tree”. 

The book is a collection of three short stories. Asa : The Girl Who Turned Into a Pair of Chopsticks is the lead story. It is about a girl named Asa. When she was little she lived with her mother in a small apartment. One day Asa’s mother brought home a bag of sunflower seeds, tossed them in a frying pan and added a little salt. Asa tasted them for the first time and thought they were really delicious so she wanted to take some to share with her friends at daycare.

Asa called over her best friend Rumi and showed her what was in the paper bag she brought. She told Rumi they were sunflower seeds and that you could eat them. She also said they were really delicious. She offered some to Rumi and said to try them, but Rumi refused. Rumi was confused and asked why but Rumi just told her she didn’t want them, then pushed Asa’s hand away and went outside to jump rope. 

Even as Asa grew older, not one person would accept or eat anything that Asa made or offered. Her classmates began to shun her and she went from being totally ignored to becoming a bully. She was sent to a juvenile correctional center when she was still in middle school. She became a model inmate and before being released some of the other inmates talked her into going snowboarding with them. However, the other inmates left her alone at the top of the mountain and since she was a beginner, she went off course and hit a tree. 

When she came to, she saw a small raccoon dog and offered it a bit of chocolate that she had in her pocket. The raccoon dog sniffed the morsel but then turned and left. She started laughing at the top of her head and shouted, Nobody has ever accepted my food. Why? Somebody tell me! Why?”. Then she tasted something sweet from the tree. Some kind of fruit. Her last thought before giving out her final breath was “I want to become a tree. Let me become a tree”. If she were a tree that bears fruit, people would eat it. Although Asa did become a tree, she didn’t become a fruit tree, she became a cedar tree and cedar trees don’t bear fruit…

The second story is Nami, Who Wanted to Get Hit (and Eventually Succeeded). The final story is A Night to Remember. As with the first story, both start off quite normally but in Imamura’s world, normal doesn’t last long. Nami was a girl like any other but whenever someone tried to throw something at her—acorns, water balloons, a ball while playing dodgeball, she would never get hit. A Night to Remember centers on a girl who refuses to get up and walk. She thought that being a biped was a waste of time and was determined to spend as much time as possible not standing up. 

Bizarre, weird, or strange doesn’t come close to explaining any one of these three stories. Imamura has created a world where you may have a hard time distinguishing between reality and fantasy. By the end of the book, you may even question your own reality. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston (Knopf)

When Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior was published in 1976, it was a literary phenomenon on several levels. Memoir was a nascent genre, just beginning to be seen as different from autobiography. Folklore belonged to scholars and was seldom blended into literary works. Most of all, young Chinese Americans had yet to find a footing in the world of best-sellers. Long before Amy Tan became famous for The Joy Luck Club or Jung Chang electrified readers with Wild Swans, Hong Kingston’s first book soared to the top of national best-seller lists and won the National Critics Circle Award. Almost fifty years after it first appeared in bookstores, it’s still selected by book clubs for discussions. It’s become a classic, praised, criticized, and loved.

Cover of the first edition of The Woman Warrior

Although its subtitle proclaims it’s a memoir, Hong Kingston mingles family history with folk tales and enigmatic glimpses of her own life. This isn’t a linear narrative as much as it is a collection of personal essays that range over space and time. 

An ancestor who strayed from her marital vows in a small Chinese village and threw herself and her newborn illegitimate child into a well is used by Hong Kingston’s mother as a cautionary example of why girls should guard their chastity. Hong Kingston turns the disgraced woman into the leading figure in a vivid piece of fiction and concludes that her suicide was an act of rebellion and warfare, since she drowned herself in the village’s source of drinking water.

An extended folk tale follows the life of a mythic swordswoman whose bravery rivals Mu Lan’s. Much later, this “woman warrior’s” name is given to Hong Kingston’s mother, herself a redoubtable and unvanquished opponent in her daughter’s eyes. Brave Orchid buried two children in China and was trained as a village doctor, a respected professional before she joined her husband to begin a new family and run a laundry business in America. When her sister, Moon Orchid, comes to the U.S., Brave Orchid drives the new arrival into madness by hurling her into the deep end of a new culture. Raising her American-born children in the Chinese fashion, she creates barriers and confusion as her offspring grow up. Not until her most rebellious daughter is near adulthood does Brave Orchid explain that the girl has misunderstood why she had always been called ugly, to confuse predatory spirits who might seize the child if she was acknowledged as beautiful. “My American life,” Hong Kingston says, “ has been such a disappointment…I’m not a bad girl, I would scream." She is being raised to do battle and prevail as a victor.

For Brave Orchid, America is filled with ghosts--Taxi Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Newsboy Ghosts. In China, she knew how to battle specters. In America, she uses her children to combat these new ghostly figures. Aging in a country that she’s never accepted as her own, she insists “I would still be young if we lived in China,” ignoring her daughter’s insistence that “Time is the same from place to place.” And yet when Moon Orchid arrives, steeped in the behavior of a Chinese lady, Brave Orchid reveals how American she herself has become in her years away from China, shocking her sister as she pushes her into a new world. 

Living in a household dominated by contradictions and traditions that exist only within the walls of their home, Hong Kingston and her siblings learn early on which behaviors to choose. “I want to be a lumberjack,” Hong Kingston says when she’s a little girl. To make sense of the world Brave Orchid lives in, Hong Kingston turns history into fiction and finds answers in folklore.

She writes with the evocative language of a poet, blending it with the unflinching harshness of a girl who has been raised to fight, to protect her parents, as a woman warrior. ~Janet Brown

Ordinary Disasters by Anne Anlin Cheng (Pantheon Books)

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.” This piece of wisdom, originally spoken by Aristotle,  has been claimed by St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of those rigorous Catholic educators, the Jesuit order, and by Valdimir Lenin, founder of the Russian Communist Party. This unlikely group all recognized a common truth: children are irrevocably shaped by their first seven years of life. 

Anne Anlin Cheng lived in Taiwan until she was ten. She outwardly assimilated within the United States to the point that when her grandparents came from Taiwan for a six-month stay when she was twelve, she had little to say to them. English had outstripped the words she had spoken with them only two years before, putting “a language barrier between my grandparents and me.”

And yet assimilation, Cheng says, is a matter of covering over differences to fit within another culture, “a shell game.” The “forces of family, of race and culture” that shaped her are Taiwanese, which she realizes most often in her marriage to a white native-born American. Their racial differences are alive “in the pockets of everyday intimacies.” 

America lumps her differences into the category of “Asian. ” Quoting another writer, David Xu Borgonjon, Cheng points out “You can only be Asian outside of Asia.” A “scholar of race and gender,” Cheng attends a meeting at her university that’s held for Asian and Asian American staff “in response to the rise in violence against people of Asian descent.” Within a matter of minutes “ethnic and national differences” take over, showing the artificiality of the “Asian” label.

The common thread uniting people from the continent of Asia is the racism and stereotype that’s been fostered by three centuries of America’s “cultural and legal discrimination.” When this resurfaces during Covid, it proves to be as virulent as the physical virus.

Shortly before Covid struck, Cheng was diagnosed with cancer.  Slowed by her fight against this disease and by the enforced isolation of the pandemic, she’s confronted with “unabashed racism sweeping our country,” which leads her to examine what she calls “ordinary disasters” and others call microaggressions. She finds them in her everyday life, in her profession, and in her history. She explores what they are and their relentless effects in this collection of personal essays, all of them blazingly smart and mercifully free of academic language. Scathing, tender, funny, and wide-ranging, these pieces turn a harsh magnifying glass on the ways U.S. culture and behavior chips away at what it calls “a model minority.”

An article in the New Yorker entitled Where the Future is Asian and the Asians are Robots prompts Cheng to observe the similarities between the stereotypical “China Doll” and the female cyborgs portrayed in contemporary cinema. When a relative gives her daughter an American Girl doll who is fashioned after a child in colonial Williamsburg, Cheng examines the role that dolls play in reinforcing white supremacy. She links Joan Didion’s essays with their “exquisite study of whiteness” to the Modernist Orientalism of Marie Kondo, pointing out that Didion’s obsession with self-control is closely related to Kondo’s rigid rules of orderliness. Both, she says, elevate efficiency and organization to “the status of Virtue.”

Cheng grew up in Georgia where Atlanta had the aura of “a multiracial heaven.” Her parents made the six-hour drive from Savannah frequently to buy ingredients at a Japanese grocery, eat at a “decent” Chinese restaurant, and browse at a Chinese bookstore. Then in 2021, “that Atlanta happened.” A white man killed six women “of Asian descent” who worked in “Asian-owned spas.” The killer was characterized as a man who “was having a bad day.” The murdered women were commonly and immediately assumed to be sex workers. “Let me name the victims,” Cheng says, and gives their ages. The youngest was 33, the oldest 74, all of them dead because of “racialized misogyny.”

Cheng ends her book with the universal truth of old age and death. “Aging is itself an incurable illness,” she says, pointing out the irony of “that even as you own more and more of yourself, your body is becoming less and less yours.” Her voice that’s explored the “ordinary disasters” underlying America’s undying racism illuminates the end that comes to us all, with the same strength and clarity that’s identified cancer and racism as “diseases of the most cellular level,” malignant and deadly.~Janet Brown

We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth, Random House, release date 1/21/2025)

Kyungha is a writer who’s haunted by nightmares of black human forms standing in the snow as the tide surges toward them, of massacres that send women and their children down the steep side of a well to escape death, of holding a single flaming match that  could reveal the face of a mass murderer. Engulfed by these phantoms, she struggles to overcome them and to regain her life. 

When a friend summons her to a hospital room, she finds the photographer and filmmaker with whom she’s worked for years, immobilized and crippled by an accident that took place when working in a rural studio. Inseon is from the island of Jeju, where she has lived alone in the company of a caged bird. Pleading with Kyungha to go to her home and give the bird food and water before it’s too late, Inseon persuades her to leave Seoul and travel to Jeju, in spite of an approaching snowstorm that threatens to make the journey impossible. 

Arriving on the last flight before the storm hits, waiting beside a lonely road for the bus that will take her close to Inseon’s house, Kyungha at last begins a walk to safety that instead plummets her into a deep pit. When she emerges, she’s lost her phone and when she enters Inseon’s dark, cold house, she finds the bird is dead.

Suddenly this story slips into the hallucinatory quality of Kyungha’s nightmares. The bird that she buries returns to life. The friend whom she had left in the confinement of a hospital ward suddenly appears in the unheated house and begins to reveal the history that Inseon’s mother lived through and archived, in notebooks, letters, and newspaper articles. The massacres that have haunted Kyungha’s sleep unfold as a tragedy of death and horror, one that was covered up the minute after it took place. Bodies were buried under the runway of Jeju Airport; shot as they waded out to sea where the waves carried off their corpses; dumped into pits where the snow covered and erased them, staying invisible for thirty-four years and remaining forever anonymous.

The dead dominate in this eerie novel. But who is dead? Who’s alive? Perhaps the most vivid character is Inseon’s dead mother, forcing her history upon her daughter and Kyungha, telling her terrible stories in a voice that lives through pieces of saved paper. “Extermination was the goal.”

Extermination is what fills the history and the nightmares, wrapped in the surrealism of snowfall: Snowflakes land on the fronds of palm trees and freeze bright blossoms; snow crystals “swirl wildly as if inside a giant popcorn machine;” snow clouds emerging“like tens of thousands of white-feathered birds flying right along the horizon.” Snow extinguishes the light of a final candle and threatens the life of the one remaining match, held by a woman who may already be a ghost.

We Do Not Part is an unsettling work of art, with each sentence holding a new masterpiece of beautiful and bone-chilling words. It should be read slowly, like poetry, because the narrative is unbearably painful if approached in the way novels are usually consumed. Han Kang combines the supernatural with the inhuman, history with its denial, the living with the dead, as she blurs every boundary line, with the finality of snow.~Janet Brown

Han Kang received the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature five days after this review was posted.

A Perfect Day to Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama, translated by Jesse Kirkwood (MacLehose Press)

Nanae Aoyama was born in Saitama Prefecture in 1983 and began writing career while working full-time as a travel agent. Her first novel, 窓の灯 (Mado no Akari) was published in 2005 and won the 42nd Bungei Prize. 

A Perfect Day to Be Alone is her first novel to be translated into English. It was originally published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha as ひとり日和 (Hitori Biyori) in 2007. The book won Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, the 136th Akutagawa Prize in 2007. It is the story of a young woman who is a freeter, a Japanese term used to describe someone between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four who is “unemployed, underemployed, or otherwise lacks full-time paid employment”. 

Chizu is a twenty-year-old woman living with her mother in Saitama Prefecture who decides to move to Tokyo to make her own way in life. Her parents got divorced when she was five. Her father had moved to Fukuoka two years ago and she hasn’t spoken to him since he left. Her mother is a teacher who taught at a private secondary school and is going to China as part of a teacher-exchange program. 

Although her mother invites Chizu to come with her to China, Chizu refuses and says she plans to make a go of it in Tokyo. After exchanging a few words, her mother tells her, “Well, if you aren’t coming with me, then I’m sorry, but you’ll have to earn your own keep. That, or go to university. There’s only so long I can keep supporting you”. 

Chizu tells her mother, “Guess I’ll earn my own keep then” because she really doesn’t want to return to being a student. Her mother relents but says she does know someone with a house in Tokyo that Chizu might be able to live with. 

So Chizu finds herself moving into the house of a distant relative. The only thing she knows is that the relative has let others stay with her before until they found places of their own.

It’s a rainy spring day when Chizu arrived at the house which is located near Sasazuka station on the Keio Line. The first thing Chizu notices about the house are the walls of her room. They are lined with cat photos. That’s when she meets the owner of the house, a woman in her seventies. Chizu remembers when she first came to the house and saw her, she was thinking, “she looks like she’s barely got a week to live”. 

It wasn’t until the woman gets Chizu settled in her room and shows her around the house that the two properly introduce themselves. The old lady’s name is Ginko Ogino. Chizu can’t help but ask about the pictures of the cats in her room—there are twenty-three of them. 

Ginko tells Chihiro that she calls the room with the cat photos, the “Cherokee” room. When Chizu asks why, Ginko tells her she calls all the cats Cherokee because she can never remember all their names. Chizu thinks perhaps Ginko is a little senile and has some reservations of her own, living with this woman she barely knows. 

A Perfect Day to Be Alone is a coming-of-age novel. It follows a year in the life of twenty-year-old Chizu Mita as she finds herself living with a seventy-year-old woman she barely knows. At first, Chizu comes off as cold-hearted, selfish, and entitled. She is very difficult to like. However, as the story progresses, we see her mature into a responsible adult. I’m sure many young people will relate to Chizu. She reminded me of when I was in my twenties and I thought I owned the world and knew everything, but as many people have said, “Live and learn!”. ~Ernie Hoyt

Mata Tabi (またたび) by Sakura Momoko (Shinchosha) Japanese text only

Momoko Sakura was a Japanese manga artist, essayist, lyricist, and screenwriter who grew up in the town of Shimizu in Shizuoka Prefecture. She is best known as being the creator of one of Japan’s longest running anime series, Chibi Maruko-chan, which was based on her own childhood. 

Chibi Maruko-chan was serialized in the magazine Ribon from 1986 to 1999 and continued in serialization until 2022. The first anime series began in 1990 and continued until 1992. The second anime series began in 1995 and continues today, even though Sakura passed away from breast cancer in 2018. She was fifty-three at the time. 

Her first collection of essays, もものかんづめ (Momo no Kanzume) was published in 1991 and became a million-seller in Japan. Although the title translates in English to Canned Peaches, Momo is short for Momoko and she describes being stuck in a hotel room to write her essays. Her follow up collection of essays - さるのこしかけ (Saru no Koshi Kake, or Monkey Trick) and たいのおかしら (Tai no Okashira, or Seabream Head) were also million-sellers. 

In January of 2000, Sakura Momoko became the editor-in-chief of a magazine called 富士山 (Fujisan). Although the title imitated the look of a magazine, its distribution was handled as a book. All five volumes include an ISBN number. またたび (Mata Tabi) is a collection of Sakura’s travel essays taken from all five volumes of Fujisan. The majority of the essays are her stories about her travels in various parts of Asia. The title translates to Travel Again. The only two essays outside of Asia she wrote about were her trip to London and her visit to Venice. 

One of her first projects for an article was visiting foreign countries close to Japan. One of the first destinations she chose was Khabarovsuk in Russia. All the times she traveled to Europe, she would hear an announcement saying, “We are now flying over Khabarovsk. However, when Sakura looked out the window, all she could see were mountains, plains, and rivers. She thought, if it’s popular enough to be announced then there must be something special about the place. 

When Sakuro told some of friends, “I’m going to Khabarovsk”, she was usually met with, “Huh? Khabarovsk?” One of the staff members of the magazine said they had been there before and told Sakura, “Don’t expect the food to be any good”. Another staff member who had been there informed Sakura that canned crab and caviar are cheap. Still, Sakura was determined to go and see for herself. 

Another destination, a foreign country close to Japan, was Guam. Guam is only a three hour flight from Tokyo but Sakura had never been there. She thought the only thing to do in Guam is swim in the ocean, go golfing and maybe do a little bit of shopping. She talked to a few of her friends who had been there and when she asked what did you do in Guam, almost all of them answered, “swam in the ocean, played a bit of golf, and did a bit of shopping”. 

Khabarovsk and Guam may not have seemed like interesting places to visit but Sakura’s writing and experience makes that a joy to imagine. In this collection, she also writes about her adventures in South Korea, gem mining in Sri Lanka, eating unusual foods in Guangzhou and  buying large quantities of tea in Yunnan Province in China, suffering from altitude sickness in Tibet, checking out one of Japan’s World Heritage Sites—Toshogu in Tochigi Prefecture, cruising to a small resort island near the hot spring resort town of Atami, and ending the book with a trip to Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture to thank the people of the town for being the biggest supporters of her work. 

Every essay is a pleasure to read. They are filled with humor and you can feel the joy and pain of all her experiences abroad. Reading the book may inspire your wanderlust. I’m ready to pack my bags and go! ~Ernie Hoyt