Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan edited by Bruce Rutledge (Chin Music Press)

When Bruce Rutledge, after living in Japan for fifteen years, thought briefly of writing essays about his time there, he realized “it’s been done to death...Who needs the views of another lanky Westerner?” Instead he “brought together a group of writers--a mix of Westerners and Japanese--who probably wouldn’t even get along if they were stuck in the same room.” 

The result is a volume that’s outstandingly gorgeous as an object and delightfully eccentric in its multiple points of view. Not your ordinary essay collection,  Kuhaku also contains short stories, paintings, a map that’s a single line of stark black ink and lists the businesses, over a hundred of them, crammed into one street, a satirical advice column, a gallery of canned coffee, each can described in the language of usually used for wine tastings, and an anecdotal glossary that’s illustrated by peyote, an artist whose drawings  resemble a kinder, jollier Ralph Steadman. This book is dizzying.

Kuhaku is defined as “a blank, empty space, a vacuum, a void, a tabula rasa” which means every reader can decide for themselves what the theme of the book might be. The opening essay provides one possibility with an expat’s claim that the even-tempered nature of Japan goes against the soul’s need for upheaval and tempestuousness. That assertion is backed up later by keruru, a newly-coined word defined as a sudden violent act that erupts when a person reaches a breaking point.

An upheaval of sorts is found in every piece that follows. It’s expressed benignly when an American tells of the confusion he causes in public by addressing his dog in Japanese as well as in English. It teeters on a kind of domestic insanity when a woman confesses to turning a bathroom into a storage unit for unclassifiable garbage, rather than facing public humiliation by putting it in the wrong trash bin. A short story by a Japanese writer, portraying a husband who explores the sex trade first-hand while writing a magazine article, is counterpointed throughout the book by translations of interviews with unfaithful wives. Modern-day Dharma Bums come perilously close to burning down a three-hundred-year-old wooden temple and Haruki Murakami explains why young Japanese men engage in “father-hunting,” when they set upon middle-aged salary men and beat them up in the street.

Grim? Oddly enough, not at all. Somehow every upheaval seems as natural as an earthquake, coming unexpectedly and releasing pressure before resulting in a tsunami. The elegance of the book itself--its compact size, its embossed cloth cover, the tiny illustration that ornaments a title page for every piece--makes it  a sensory pleasure, while its glossary gives it a thoroughly unexpected conclusion, a splendid potpourri of stories, descriptions, facts, words of warning, and even a couple of recipes. 

Somehow without ever nailing down a linear description of what it is to live in Japan, Kuhaku gives a vivid, impressionistic sense of how that life would feel. The first book published by Rutledge’s Chin Music Press, it’s set a standard that his small press has continued to nurture: books that find and reveal unexplored territory with skill, care, and beauty.~Janet Brown

Behind the Fire by Steven D. Salinger (Warner)

Steven D. Saligner’s debut novel Behold the Fire is a thriller set in the streets of New York. The murder of a man comes to the attention of NYPD homicide detective and Vietnam vet Mel Fink. However, at the scene of the crime, there was no sign of a struggle, no signs of a break in, and nothing was stolen. 

The victim was Franklin Grelling. He was an employee of Parker Global, a big defense contractor for the Pentagon. The company maintains that Grelling was “a traveling salesman with a fancy title”. Grelling’s partner, Barton believes the murder was related to drugs or to a relationship gone bad. Grelling spots a map of Vietnam on the wall and has a hunch that Barton is dead wrong about why the victim was murdered. 

Clear across the globe, in the jungles of Cambodia is Army Corporal Isaac Johnson, known to everybody as Zach. He is listed as an M.I.A. from the Vietnam War. Johnson was held captive in the Cambodian jungle by the Khmer Rouge for over twenty years. After saving a fellow American and former POW Ev Ransom and illegal arms dealer who works as a broker for Parker Global. 

Ransom agrees to try to return Johnson to his home in the U.S. It is Ransom that sets in motion a roller coaster ride that affects Washington and its relation with Vietnam as Ransom sends the fingerprints of Johnson to an MIA/POW activist senator named Antel Grantham. This is the proof the Senator has been waiting for even though the Pentagon has denied the existence or knowledge of any MIAs. 

To complicate matters even further, Fink has taken a liking to the wife of the first victim and Marissa Grelling seems to have ties to Ev Ransom and Parker Global as well. And the was another murder. The victim is also an employee of Parker Global. The mode of operation was the same as that of Frank Grelling. 

Fink’s continuing investigation leads him to find that the killings were done by a professional. He has also determined that the assassin is Cambodian. The only piece still missing from the puzzle is why the assassin has singled out personnel from Parker Global. What is the connection between Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam and Washington? Does Corporal Isaac Johnson ever get to set foot in his home country again? These are the questions that will keep the reader involved in the story up until its ultimate end.

Salinger’s story is fast-paced and exciting. The character development is great and makes you want to help Fink solve the crimes. His descriptions of New York City and the jungles of Cambodia are detailed and make you feel as if you are in the middle of all the turmoil as well. The action may not be enough for fans of John Rambo but this story doesn’t get preachy about alleged MIAs still being held prisoner in Vietnam or Cambodia. The book will appeal to fans of W.E.B Griffin and other military and detective fiction. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Woman Who Fell from the Sky by Jennifer Steihl (Broadway Paperbacks)

When her old high school sweetheart persuades Jennifer Steihl to spend three weeks in Yemen’s capital city, Sana’a, as a volunteer journalism trainer at an English-language newspaper, she has no idea this will change her life. After all, she’s a fast-talking, flirtatious New York woman who is one of the founders of The Week and has been a senior editor there for the past five and a half years. Her life is successful and established, but when the owner of the Yemen Observer offers her the position of editor-in-chief, making $1500 a month at a newspaper where reporters’ salaries top out at $200, it takes her only a few months to give up her $60,000 a year position in Manhattan.

Steihl has succumbed to Sana’a’s 2500-year-old charm and she’s captivated by the Observer’s reporters, especially the young women who have taken a large step in becoming journalists. Her New York confidence keeps her from being quelled by the city streets that are filled almost exclusively with men, all of them wearing the traditional dagger, the jambiya. She’s done her research and knows that neither the abaya that obscures women’s bodies, nor the hijab that covers their heads, nor the niqab that veils their face is mandated by the government or the Qur’an. It’s a cultural practice, not a religious one, and the women who wear these shrouds usually are clad in jeans and t-shirts beneath the outer covering. The women she meets tell her the coverings are “a statement of identity, an important defense against men, and a source of freedom.”

Out of respect for the culture she’s immersed in, Steihl wears the hijab but forgoes the veil. Like Lawrence of Arabia, her blue eyes immediately brand her as an object of curiosity and the niqab would do nothing to forestall attention, even though it hides her pale skin. Without realizing it, she picks up a larger physical change within a matter of weeks. Her walk is transformed from a New York stride to a gait that prevents her hips from swinging and her face stares at the ground. Facing declarations of love each time she walks outdoors has taught her not to return a man’s gaze and she realizes she’s become “someone else” under unflagging public scrutiny.

Within the newsroom, she’s faced with deeper challenges. Although the men she works with treat her with deference, that, she knows, is because for them she’s not really a woman--she’s the human equivalent of a giraffe. The women reporters long to be recognized as professional journalists yet social restrictions keep them from interviewing men, until Steihl persuades them to work in pairs. The men use their freedom to prolong their daily lunches with bouts of chewing qat, a mild stimulant that’s an ingrained feature of Yemeni culture and is indulged in for a minimum of two hours.Although the reporters have all studied English and speak it with ease, their writing is lengthy, stilted, and subjective. Deadlines are a foreign concept and stories are often intended to bolster the government or enhance the status of advertisers. 

With fleeting episodes of a personal life, Steihl works twelve hours a day, six days a week, not only as the paper’s editor but still working as a trainer, while negotiating unforseen hurdles. Within her first two weeks she’s faced with “kidnappings, stampedes, and suicide bombings.This,” she decides, “is a news junkie’s paradise.” But within this paradise, one reporter refuses to cover a story because it could get him killed. When the Observer reprints three Danish cartoons, each obscured with a black X and placed next to an editorial that condemns them, Steihl’s Yemeni co-editor is briefly imprisoned and is on trial for ten months. The owner of the paper insists that opinion pieces should be placed on the back page because that’s the most important part of the paper. “Arabic is read right to left. So Arabs will naturally turn first to what for you is the back page.” Only by pointing out that the Observer is an English paper does Steihl retain an Op-Ed page in its customary place.

When her contract is up at the end of a year. Steihl is reluctant to leave Yemen. The story of how she is able to remain gives her work-laden life a romantic twist and provides a happy ending to a book that skillfully handles serious matters with a light touch. Jennifer Steihl is far from being Bridget Jones but her book wouldn’t be out of place on a sunny day at the beach.~Janet Brown

The Householder by Ruth Pravwer Jhabvala (Penguin)

The Householder by Ruth Pravwer Jhabvala was first published in 1960. It is the story of Prem, a teacher at a local college. Until recently, Prem was a student at university. His marriage to Indu was arranged by his parents and now he is a “householder” with a wife who is pregnant with their first child. 

Indu’s pregnancy is an embarrassment to Prem as “now everybody would know what he did with her at night in the dark.” Prem’s current salary at the college is 175 rupees a month. His rent is 45 rupees. Aside from becoming a new father, his new worry is the increase in expenses that would occur. What he needs is a better paying job. 

It finally occurs to him to look through the classified ads in the newspaper. However, Prem could not find any jobs he was qualified for. It appeared that nobody wanted a Hindi teacher, “or if they did, they wanted him to be a first-class M.A. with three years’ teaching experience, not a second-class B.A. with only four months’ teaching experience, such as he was.” His only option was to ask his boss for a raise. 

Asking his boss for a raise is not something he would like to do but he took his father’s advice to heart. His father had told him, “Put all your strength into the things you don’t like to do.” Prem tries to find the courage to talk to his boss but instead of coming straight to the point, he talks about his colleague, Sohan Lal. The more he talks about his colleague, his boss comes to the conclusion that Sohan Lal had sent Prem to ask for a raise in salary.

Prem is also having trouble at home with his wife who says she is going to her parents, due to her condition. At the same time, Prem has received a letter from his mother who says she will be coming to help her only son to prepare for the child’s birth. Prem is having a hard time establishing his authority as the head of the household and seems to have crossed an invisible line when he tells his wife that he forbids her to go home. 

As much as you like to support Prem, he sometimes comes off as being a Charlie Brown-like character. He has a very wishy-washy personality and doesn’t assert himself. He’s taken advantage of by his only friend in New Delhi who he grew up with. There are times when you may want to smack him and say, “Grow up!”, which is what he is trying his best to do. Still, the humor in Jhabvala’s writing makes you forgive Prem his wishy-washyness.

Jhabvala’s story has the universal theme of what it is to become an adult and all the responsibilities that come with adulthood. It is filled with humor and drama  and readers of all ages may identify with Prem as he goes from being a student to getting married and then becoming a father. Family ties can also be a very delicate matter as one tries to find a fine balance in pleasing your partner and keeping other relatives happy. 

Prem is no different from any of us who have dreams of making more money and living a comfortable life. However, being rich and famous doesn’t doesn’t guarantee comfort or happiness. One must do their best with what life has to offer them. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed (Penguin)

“You’re an Arab! An Arab! And you don’t know your own language,” a teacher screamed at Leila Ahmed when she was twelve. “I am not an Arab,” she replied with equal fury, “I am Egyptian! And anyway we don’t speak like this!” 

In 1952, the Egyptian Revolution that stripped the country of British colonialism brought with it shouts of “Arab nationalism! We the Arabs!” But Ahmed, born in 1940,  is already shaped by the final days of the British Empire that had vouchsafed only partial independence to Egypt. She and her siblings have grown up speaking French and Egyptian Arabic but English is their preferred language. That’s what they speak at school and when they’re with their friends. Their father is a man with a “colonized consciousness” who had gone to university in Birmingham, “cherishing things European and undervaluing the very heritage that had shaped him.” He teaches his children to love Western classical music and to place it above the Arabic music that their mother, who is staunchly and thoroughly Egyptian, sings. Ahmed and her siblings begin to see Arabic as inferior, although it’s the language they use when they talk with their mother. This, Ahmed admits, “in some way marked her too, in some way silently, silently in my child’s mind, as inferior.” She realizes much later that this is one of “the hidden, uncounted costs of colonialism” that her mother pays, as her children speak a language she doesn’t understand and go away from her to be educated, and to make their lives, in distant countries. 

Ahmed’s mother lives in a world of women, talking, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes with her sisters and her friends. She teaches her children that the core of Islam is to hurt no one, to harm oneself before injuring someone else. “He who kills one being kills all of humanity, and he who revives, or gives life to, one being revives all of humanity.” She, and the women around her, have distilled their own “essence of Islam,” separate from the stern, fierce “orthodox interpretation” that’s the male version. They live in houses surrounded by gardens that are rich with trees and flowers, wrapped in desert silence, light, and shadow, a world of beauty. It’s one that Ahmed learns to disregard as “women’s culture,” gentle, generous, and powerless, in which “women bowed their heads and acquiesced” to the men “who did things.” “The only escape from this,” she tells herself, “ would be for me to become either a man or a Westerner.”

Ahmed grows up immersed in politics, living through a bloodless revolution that turned into a dictatorship and then through a war that prompted Ahmed’s British and Jewish friends to leave Cairo. Her father falls out favor with the government and Ahmed is long denied permission to leave Cairo for England, where she has been accepted at Cambridge. When she goes there at last, she has the label of “Arab” thrust upon her by English society and begins “puzzling out what it means to be Arab.” 

“In Egypt,” she says, “I’d be just another Egyptian, whereas in the West it’s impossible for me to escape, forget this false constructed Arabness.” In a country whose colonization of her own has made her English in language and thought, Ahmed takes on an imposed identity that is foreign to her. Yet while she learns about being Arab, she sees more clearly what it is to be an Egyptian from Cairo, a city where, throughout its history “Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Morocco, Istanbul, Alexandria” were all blended into “its own unique Cairo brew.”

Discovering the beauty of Arab literature, written in a literary language that no one speaks, Ahmed recognizes the richness of oral culture, expressed in the “mother tongue” spoken by the women whom she once dismissed. Her journey is farther than from Cairo to an academic American life. Her struggle to achieve a wider knowledge of who she is and where she came from is long and painful, told through a memoir steeped in rigorous intellect that opens new worlds of thought to its readers. ~Janet Brown

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami (Picador)

Mieko Kawakami’s novel Breasts and Eggs was originally published in the Japanese language as 夏物語 (Natsu Monogatari) in 2019 as a novella. The Japanese title translates to Summer Story. She then expanded the story into a full length novel and is her first book to be published in English. It was translated by Sam Bet and David Boyd. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is the original novella. The latter half of the book takes place ten years later and follows the lives of three women.

In the first half of the book we are introduced to the main characters - a thirty-year old woman named Natsuko, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s 12-year-old daughter Midoriko. Natsuko moved from Shobashi in the Kansai area to Tokyo ten years ago to pursue a career as a writer. She works at a minimum-wage job, her blog gets only one or two hits a day, and she still hasn’t had anything published in print. 

Makiko works as a hostess and is really concerned with her appearance and sex-appeal to her male customers. Makiko has become obsessed with the size and shape of her breast and has come to Tokyo to find a clinic that will perform breast augmentation surgery. In simple terms, she wants bigger boobs. As Natsuko describes them when they went to the public bathhouse together, “Her breasts themselves were little more than a couple of mosquito bites, but her nipples were like two control knobs stuck onto her chest. 

Makiko is accompanied by her 12-year-old daughter although the two are currently not on speaking terms. Midoriko has taken to communicating by writing everything down. She keeps two notebooks. One to “talk” to people with and the other to write down her most private thoughts. Midoriko cannot understand her mother’s obsession with getting breast implants and writes about it in her private notebooki. She also writes about the changes in her body as well and wonders “Why does it have to be like this”.

We then fast forward ten years into the future. Natsuko is now a published writer and her editor is encouraging her to complete her first novel. Her older sister Makiko is still working as a hostess in a less than elegant bar and Midoriko is now a college student with a boyfriend of her own. 

Now that Natsuko has turned forty, she has been giving considerable thought to having a child of her own. However, she doesn’t have a steady boyfriend and there are no other prospects to be a potential father figure. She once had a boyfriend when she was in her twenties but they broke up because she could not have sex. It was too painful and the thought of someone or something penetrating her made her incapable of enjoying the act. 

Adoption is out of the question as Japanese law doesn’t allow for single mothers to become parents. She investigates artificial insemination but finds that this is also not allowed in Japan for single women. Her only other option is to go to a sperm bank in a foreign country or to make an illegal arrangement with a willing donor. 

Natsuko meets two people who were the product of sperm donors. The first person she meets is Aizawa who is suffering from an identity crisis and longs to know who his biological father is. Through Aizawa, she meets Yuriko who was abused by her stepfather and she believes bringing a new child into the world is irresponsible and is “an act of violence”. Natsuko finds herself in a conundrum. Is it right for her to become a mother, raising a child who may never know their father. Is it a selfish act to want motherhood? How will the child feel when they grow older and learn the truth of their origin? 

The story is thought provoking and disturbing at times but it is well written and if you’re a woman, I imagine that you cannot help but ponder the same questions that goes through Natsuko’s mind about having a child or Makiko’s obsession with beauty and self-image or Midoriko’s confusion about the changes in her body. These three women share their feelings of what it is to be a woman. These women defy the conservatism of a male-dominated world and it may be time for men to wake up and see the light. ~Ernie Hoyt

Married to Bhutan by Linda Leaming (Hay House)

When Linda Leaming told people that she was leaving the states to live in another country. a common response was “Butane? Where’s that?” Oh,” she began to tell people,” It’s near Africa. It’s where all the disposable lighters come from.”

A tiny, mountainous country that shares its borders with Nepal, Bangladesh, China, and India, Bhutan has an agrarian, cohesive population that would fill a medium-sized U.S city. Historically isolated by its geography that holds only five habitable valleys and its weather, that often makes any sort of invasion problematic, including aircraft landings, it’s a country that has developed on its own terms. Currency replaced the barter system in the 1960s, both the Georgian and the lunar calendars are observed, and time is cyclical, not linear, based upon the seasons and the belief in reincarnation. Its king voluntarily abdicated in 2006 to make room for a democratic form of government and espouses a system that prioritizes Gross National Happiness, rather than Gross National Product. It has never been colonized, with astute monarchs that made Bhutan one of the few winners in Britain’s South Asian Great Game.

Leaming fell in love with the place in 1994, when she was one of the scant number of tourists to visit it. After two weeks in Bhutan, this 39-year-old American, whose daily life was removed from it by twelve time zones, was captivated. After two more journeys that cemented her feelings, she found a job teaching English and moved there in 1997. It’s been her home ever since.

Candid about her initial difficulties with culture, language, and manners, which she describes as a time of facing “minefields, so many opportunities to make an ass of yourself,” Leaming is too busy learning what she needs to know to indulge herself in the usual expat self-pity. Dzongha, the national language of Bhutan, is her primary preoccupation in which she’s frustrated by her teacher’s insistence that reading and writing come before speaking. Her oral language learning is a clandestine activity, aided by a phrasebook that gives her crucial tools to use at work, in the market, and at a doctor’s office. Unfortunately she’s enchanted by phrases that she’ll never have reason to use, which stick with her and emerge at inappropriate moments. The day she thinks she’s asking a physician a routine pleasantry and discovers his shock when it comes from her mouth as “Take off your clothes and lie down,” ought to be quelling but probably was not. Leaming is too eager to assimilate for chagrin to stand in her way.

Her language acquisition becomes total immersion when she falls in love with another teacher, a painter of thanka, works of religious art that are highly prized in Bhutan. He’s a man from a highly traditional family who lives in a large apartment within his sister’s home and when he and Leaming decide to marry, he’s reluctant to take his bride away from the hot water heater of her Bhutanese home to a small town.

But Leaming is aware that when she marries this man, she’s also marrying his country and insists the two of them live in her husband’s home. Here she discovers that her domestic skills are decidedly below par and relearns how to sweep, wash clothes, cook, and sew. In a town where almost everything is made locally, with a husband who wore deerskin moccasins made by his father and clothes woven by his mother, Leaming feels that she’s married to “the Last of the Mohicans.”

Her personal anecdotes are quite funny and rather sparse. Leaming’s focus is on the country that has let her become a resident as much as on how it has changed her. Buddhism is integral to every part of Bhutanese life, a daily practice rather than beliefs espoused on Sunday. From the obscene, scatalogical 15th-Century monk whose used underparts are still enshrined near her house to the elaborate, medieval process of her husband’s thanka art, Leaming’s life is pervaded with a system that gradually becomes part of her. So does the beauty of her surroundings which she loves best during the severe cold of winter and the barriers against rapid progress that geography and weather still forestall. She learns to savor the slow pace of her life, in which buying stationery involves going to a spot where handmade envelopes are constructed as she waits, finding sealing wax in an over-stuffed shop with a patient shopkeeper, and falling prey to the seduction of Bhutan’s gorgeous postage stamps.  

Bhutan is under threats, Leaming describes in her final essay. Surrounded by a “geopolitical equivalent to a trailer park,” with its squabbling tribes, avaricious leaders, and drug problems, it works hard to avoid the fate of the former kingdom of Sikkim which is now an Indian state. Climate change is melting its glaciers and flooding is a constant danger. Conversely there’s a shortage of water that may destroy the country’s agriculture. And. as is true all over the world, globalization is closing in through the inexorable incursions of the internet. 

“The world needs Bhutan,” Leaming concludes. Certainly she herself needed it. As a Bhutanese friend told her early on, “You are the arrow that hit its mark.” Her lovely little book poses an irresistible question: how many of us are still arrows in search of our own marks?~Janet Brown

American Shaolin by Matthew Polly (Gotham Books)

Matthew Polly’s biographical novel American Shaolin has the long and amusing subtitle of Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of the Iron Crotch : An Odyssey in the New China. It is the story of an American man who drops out of a prestigious college and goes on a journey to learn the art of kung-fu from the Shaolin Temple in China.

Matthew Polly grew up in Topeka, Kansas. He was the epitome of the 98-lbs weakling who was tormented by bullies at his school and while many people have an inner voice telling what they ought to do, Polly was fifteen and had an inner “to-do list”. When he was fifteen, there were five main points on his list of “THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT”. 

Topping the list was “ignorant”, followed by “cowardly”, “stil a boy / not a man”, “unattractive to the opposite sex”, and “spiritually confused”. In dealing with his ignorance, he once picked up the New York Review of Books but even with a dictionary in hand, he couldn’t understand it. This inspired him to study and read more and his efforts led him to being accepted at Princeton University and was doing quite well, so he felt he could cross off being ignorant from his list of THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT.

However, number one on his list was being cowardly. Polly started learning kung-fu when he was in the ninth grade after seeing a rerun of David Carradine’s television series Kung-fu. He was inspired by Carradine’s character - “the half-Asian Shaolin martial monk who wandered the Old West righting wrongs” and “seemed to be as strange and helpless and yet was a total badass.”

Polly’s obsession with kung-fu led to his interest in China and Chinese culture. He took courses in learning the language as well. As Polly was busy with his studies, he didn’t have time to practice his kung-fu which he had been studying for three years. He felt even after three years, he would not be able to defend himself adequately. That’s when he came across Mark Salzman’s memoir Iron and Silk, a story about a Yale graduate who studies with a martial arts master in China. This sets his plan in motion.

In 1992, Polly left Princeton and using the money from his college which his father had set up for him, went to China in pursuit of dreams to learn martial arts from the birthplace of kung-fu - at the Shaolin Temple. It did not matter to him that he did not even know where the temple was located. 

So begins Polly’s real adventure as he first goes to Beijing, then travels north to the Shaolin Temple and learns that there are numerous forms of kung-fu and that foreigners are only allowed to study at one of the state-sponsored schools. He manages to find a school that accepts him and for the next two years training and studying and learning that there are different types of “iron kung-fu” in which “a part of the body (such as the head, neck, stomach, or, most frightening of all, the crotch) is made impervious to pain.”

This book is a must read for any fans of old Jackie Chan movies where the harsh training seems to be exaggerated, only it’s not as Polly can well attest to. The story is an inspiration to anyone who has a dream and to see that dream fulfilled. ~Ernie Hoyt