Woman of Interest by Tracy O’Neill

Tracy O’Neill grew up Irish a few miles out of  Boston. A frequent refrain throughout her years at home was “I’m your real mother,” stated by a woman who has been Tracy’s parent almost from birth. Knowing she and her younger brother had both been adopted from Korea has given rise to Tracy’s understandable curiosity about the woman who gave birth to her. This is crowded out by the task of getting two Master’s degrees and a PhD from Columbia, while learning how to live on her own in Brooklyn.

“I read and I wrote,” she says--but then Covid comes to town. Reading and writing in isolation begins to pall and Tracy starts a serious search for her birth mother.

Armed only with scanty facts from the adoption agency who placed her, Tracy resorts to a 21st Century solution, DNA analysis. She spits in a vial six different times. After the sixth try, she’s matched with a girl who’s her third cousin and puts Tracy in contact with that cousin’s father.

“She’s alive,” her uncle tells her. When Covid travel restrictions are lifted, Tracy buys a round-trip ticket to Korea that will give her 22 days with her birth mother and her newly-discovered Korean family. Suddenly she has three blood siblings, a sister and two brothers. All four of them, she’s told, have different fathers.

“Don’t give her anything all,” her uncle says of Tracy’s mother. “Never forget,” another man tells her, “These guys are strangers.”  

Armed with Google Translate, she’s met in Korea by her sister, her cousin, and the aunt who witnessed her birth. She’s also faced with ten days of quarantine that she spends in a bedroom of her aunt’s apartment and she begins a life in translation. Every question, every answer is conveyed in the dubious accuracy of telephone apps--Kakao Talk and Navur Papago, as well as the version offered by Google.

Tracy is back in isolation again, in the home of a cousin and an aunt who are obsessed with feeding her. “You’re too skinny,” they tell her on a phone screen.

This is the way facts emerge, through phones, skeletal and often contradictory. Her uncle in America tells her she’s being lied to because her relatives want “everyone to be happy.” When Tracy is at last able to meet her birth mother, she hires a phone interpreter to make certain the translations aren’t tarnished by family feelings. However the phone interpreter is as resolute in striving for a happy conclusion as the relatives have been.

Embraced by her mother, she fails to feel “the inimitable bond of mothers and children.” “I was nothing but a stone-cold cardboard cutout…in the iron clench of a shuddering old woman.”

When Tracy goes to her mother’s apartment, she is handed a drawstring bag that holds one million won, which is around $8000 U.S dollars. Then she learns she can’t meet her youngest brother because he has never been, nor never will be, told that she exists.

Covid, cultural shock, no common language, and a stay in a foreign country that’s shortened from twenty-two to only seventeen days, ten of which were spent in quarantine--this expedition is doomed from the outset. But Tracy O’Neill is a novelist and she knows how to tell a gripping story. A fan of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels, she cleverly drapes her narrative in noir-style, even coming up with the requisite hard-boiled PI whom she hires at the beginning of her quest. A man who provides no vital information, he remains part of the plot up to the very end, and real or not, he’s an enticing addition. So is the Serbian boyfriend who speaks in broken English. Another plot device? What’s real? Who knows the true usefulness of a common language?

What is true, Tracy concludes, is this. “I twice met a stranger…” The stranger who was her eomma remains an unexplored enigma to the daughter who was given away and to that daughter’s readers. “I hate endings,” Tracy says and this story remains shrouded in a haunting mist that’s skillfully reported—or perhaps created— in Woman of Interest. ~Janet Brown 

Cruising the Anime City : An Otaku's Guide to Neo Tokyo by Patrick Macias and Tomohiro Machiyama (Stone Bridge Press)

Any book on pop culture is sure to go out of date almost as soon as it’s published. It is no different with Patrick Macias and Tomohiro Machiyama’s book Cruising the Anime City which was first published twenty years ago. A lot has changed since then. 

Even the word otaku has changed. It was once a euphemism for young males who were seriously into games and anime. They were what we in the States would call “nerds,” geeky boys who couldn’t get a girl to talk to them if they tried. 

In 1989, Tomohiro Machiyama wrote a book called おたくの本 (Otaku no Hon) and would like to take credit for popularizing the term. Unfortunately、 a young man named Tsutomu Miyazaki was arrested the same year. He kidnapped and raped three little girls. 

Machiyama describes Miyazaki as a “walking worst-case scenario otaku. With messy long hair, a pale face, and geeky glasses”. He was twenty-seven at the time of his arrest. unemployed and still living with his parents. 

The police found a large number of anime videos and Lolicon (Lolita Complex) manga. Machiyama also states that “because the case was so sensational, many Japanese people began to wonder what kind of lifestyle had created such a monster.” 

Otaku no Hon had just come out and people “connected the dots and came to the conclusion that otaku were dangerous perverts”. It would be many years later that the astigmatism attached to otaku would be reversed. 

The change came about due to a former anime creator who became a social critic. He was a self-proclaimed “Ota-king” and would explain otaku culture in layman’s terms to economists and academics. He championed the otaku subculture as it was the otaku who “through their purchasing power, supported technological advances in Japan”. 

Macias and Machiyama’s book on pop culture covers manga (the Japanese comic), toys, idols, anime, games, movies, cosplay (people who dress up like their favorite anime or game character), Comiket (comic market), and pla-mo (plastic models). 

Although manga was still popular when I first moved to Japan in 1995, the market had changed in just a few years. When Macias made his first trip to Japan in 1999, he didn’t see people reading mangas on the trains or the buses. By 2004, when this book came out, people were reading manga on their smartphones. 

That doesn’t mean the manga has lost its popularity. The print production of the omnibus comics may have gone down but manga is alive and well in Japan. Just go to any Mandarake or Yorozuya shops and you will find manga and other manga- and anime-related goods for sale. 

The Comiket or Comic Market is still a strong event as ever too. It is held twice a year at Tokyo Big Sight and draws millions of comic and anime fans. It is also an event where you will see many cosplayers as well. 

Another interesting aspect of Japanese pop culture are idols. Idols mostly being cute young girls who dance and sing and are commercialized through merchandise and endorsements by talent agencies. When Cruising the Anime City came out, at the top of the idol chain was a group called Morning Musume. 

Tsunku, the vocalist of Japanese rock band Sharan-Q was looking for a new singer and held auditions on a televised program called [Asayan]. Morning Musume was formed by five of the candidates who were dropped. Tsunku produced a single for them on an independent label and gave them the task of selling 50,000 copies in five days or they would have to go back to their ordinary lives. 

The five members were able to accomplish the mission and debuted on a major label in January of 1998. Their rise to fame was quick and the group grew from five members, to eight, to eleven to who knows how many now. The group is still going strong even today but has been shadowed by another idol group that emerged in 2005, called AKB48. 

Although the subject of the book is quite dated now, it still makes for an entertaining read. I mean, how many of us old-timers remember what it was like to buy our first record or LP, or cassette tape for that matter? If you’ve lived in Japan through the nineties or if you’re just interested in Japanese pop culture of the past, you will be sure to enjoy this nostalgic trip into the past. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Little House by Kyoko Nakajima, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Darf Publishers)

Kyoko Nakajima worked at a publishing firm and as a freelance writer before becoming a novelist in 2003 with her book Futon. Her novel The Little House was originally published as 小さなおうち (Chisai Ouchi) in 2010 by Bungei Shunju and won the 178th Annual Naoki Prize. The book was adapted into a major motion picture in 2014, starring Takako Matsu and directed by Kyoji Yamamoto. The book was translated into English by Ginny Tapley Takemori who also translated Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (Asia by the Book, March 2018). 

The Little House is narrated by an elderly woman in her nineties named Taki who lives on her own in Ibaraki Prefecture. Her nephew and his family live nearby and they sometimes have dinner together. She has some savings and has her nephew invest in stocks on her behalf so she’s not hurting for money. She also lives frugally on her pension. 

Taki’s life changed two years ago when the daughter of her former employer’s daughter introduced her to a publisher she worked for and they produced Granny Taki’s Super Housework Book. Now an editor from the publisher has come to see Taki to discuss Taki’s next book. Taki says from the start that she doesn’t want to write about more household tips as she’s already covered that subject. 

The editor also says that they don’t want her to write about more household tips. She says, “We’d like you to talk about Tokyo in the old days, things that only you know about —your sense of the four seasons, your favorite dishes, social niceties, that sort of thing”. Taki doesn’t think it’s a bad idea, but from her perspective, “It’s just not quite what I’ve got in mind”. 

Taki feels she has more important things to write about. As a child, she lived in the Tohoku region of Japan, in Yamagata Prefecture. In the spring of 1930, Taki graduated from elementary school and immediately went into the service of a well-renowned author who lived in Tokyo. In the Showa era, it was not unusual for young girls from the country to move to Tokyo and work as maids.

Taki was the youngest of five siblings and all her elder sisters had already gone into service somewhere or other, the final destination not always being Tokyo. Although Taki didn’t see eye to eye with the young editor, she decided to keep a note of her experience of working in Tokyo before the outbreak of World War Two.

Taki never married and was a maid her whole life. She says her job “was effectively domestic training for young women pre-marriage”. She first worked for a renowned author but her employment with him was rather short-lived. 

Her most vivid memories of working in Tokyo were with the well-to-do Hirai family. She developed a close bond with her employer’s wife, Mistress Tokiko. Taki was also a nursemaid to their little son, Kyoichi.

As Taki continues to write about her time in Tokyo as best as her memory serves her, the book begins to read more like a diary than a personal biography. Most of her memories are happy ones but at times her nephew scoffs at what she writes.

Although she is writing about her experiences for herself, she soon realizes that she has a reader—her nephew. She becomes a little embarrassed but decides to continue writing and leaves her notebook where her nephew is bound to find it. 

The core of the story is about Taki’s life in Tokyo as a maid but Kyoko Nakajima makes it more interesting by blending the present with the past. Taki’s nephew seems to think he knows more about the history of pre and post-war Japan than his aunt. The interaction between Taki and her nephew draws the reader in until you are also lost in the nostalgia of the “good old days”. 

There is something comforting about listening to an elderly person speak of Japan at a time that we can only imagine. If only my Japanese skills were as good as they are now when my grandmother on my mother’s side was still alive, I would have loved to hear her stories about living in pre and post-war Japan even though she lived quite a distance away from Tokyo. ~Ernie Hoyt

Between this World and the Next by Praveen Herat (Restless Books)

Song and Sovanna are two halves of an exquisite whole, twin sisters whose beauty is perfectly mirrored in each other’s faces, until a misplaced attack leaves Song with only half of her face unscarred. Disfigured, Song works as an enslaved housemaid in a Phnom Penh guesthouse while Sovanna, still beautiful, is imprisoned as a sex slave. 

A war photographer with the nickname of Fearless comes to Phnom Penh at the invitation of an old friend, a man who once was his “fixer” in Bosnia. Recently widowed when his wife died in a car crash, Fearless is certain he has nothing left to lose. His friend Federenko has put him up in a guesthouse, a place where a young housemaid has half of her face deformed by scars. 

Song has a single goal, to find her twin and return with her to their home in rural Cambodia. In her attempt to achieve this, she finds an unlikely ally in the guest who has recently arrived. While Fearless agrees to help her, he’s puzzled by Song’s warning, “Don’t tell your friend.”

Fearless has known Federenko since he hired the boy long ago. The two of them have a battle-tested friendship that has bred the kind of trust that lies between brothers. But Song has evidence that this trust is misplaced. She has found a videotape that implicates Federenko in the cruelest form of sexual atrocities and although Fearless tries to deny the evidence, he’s told by his friend’s bodyguard in a veiled hint that Federenko’s help will lead to a trap.

This is not an easy book to read. It begins with a rape, continues with the murder of children, and lapses into torture. “Our ability to exterminate makes us who we are,” Fearless observes at the beginning of this novel and this seems to be the underlying theme. It’s Song who gives the plot a twist that somehow lights it with hope and love which carries through to the end.

Every detail in this intricate story is important. Vicious acts that seem random are all connected in a story that ranges from Cambodia to Liberia and is ensnared in the devious machinations of Dark Money. Characters who are drenched in violence become saviors and friends become enemies. 

Praveen Herat lived in Phnom Penh for years. Plot elements that may seem melodramatic to some readers are ones that are much too true. Parents have sold their daughters in an effort to keep their families from starving to death. Young beauties have had their faces destroyed by jealous wives hurling acid. Methamphetamine addiction is common among those who are exploited and poor in Southeast Asia. Russian mafioso have been a feature in Cambodia for decades with money laundering as one of their essential tools across continents. And Fearless isn’t the only Westerner who “did his best to make the facts do his bidding.” Innocence has been a liability and a danger long before Graham Greene pinpointed that in The Quiet American.

Herat has written a thriller that zeroes in on truths and reveals dark secrets held by those who are irreparably damaged and those who manage to survive. It’s going to hurt you and haunt you. Read it if you dare.~Janet Brown

What you are looking for Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, translated by Alison Watts (Penguin Books)

People go to the library for all sorts of reasons—to work on a research paper, to borrow the latest CD or DVD, to read the latest issue of certain magazines, and of course to check out books to read for pleasure. But what if you can’t find what you’re looking for? What if you don’t know what it is that you’re looking for. To answer those last two questions, you could consult with the resident reference librarian. 

In Michiko Aoyama’s book What you are looking for is in the library is set in in a neighborhood community center called Hattori Community House. It is located next to an elementary school and offers an array of classes and holds a number of events - “shogi, haiku, hula dancing, exercise classes, lots of flower-arranging classes and lectures on different topics”. 

Each chapter introduces the reader to a character who all have one thing in common. They find themselves going to Hattori Community House in Hattori Ward for one reason or another. They will also have one more thing in common. They are all introduced to the resident reference librarian, Sayuri Komachi. 

We are first introduced to Tomoka, a twenty-one year old woman who works as a sales assistant in the womenswear section in a general merchandise store called Eden. She moved to Tokyo from the country. The only reason she’s working at Eden is because it was the only place that accepted her. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to live and work in Tokyo, she just doesn’t want to go back to the country. 

She decides to take a computer class at the Hattori Community House, a community center in the ward where she lives. After class, the instructor tells Tomoko that there are no set books for learning how to use different programs but gives her a list of recommended books to check out. The instructor tells her she might enjoy looking in the library.

Tomoko goes over to the sign that reads “Reference,” peeks around the corner, and gets quite a shock! “The librarian is huge…I mean, like, really huge. But huge as in big, not fat. Her skin is super pale and you can’t even see where her chin ends and neck begins”. The librarian’s name is Sayuri Komachi.

We then meet Ryo, a thirty-five-year old accountant whose ambition is to run his own antiques shop. His girlfriend is Hina, one of the other students at the computer class who wants to open her own online store. We also meet Natsumi, a former magazine editor. She was a career woman who decided to have a child and thought she would be able to return to her former job and position only to find the reality was much different than what she imagined. 

We also meet Hiroya, a thirty-five-year old NEET (Not in Employment, Education, or Training). In other words, a slacker. And finally there is Masao, a sixty-five-year-old retired gentleman who doesn’t know what to do with his life now that he has more time on his hands. 

Libraries and bookstores are two places that I can spend hours in and never get bored. I don’t even have to be looking for anything in particular. Of course the big difference is you can borrow books for free at the library but if you find a title you want to read at the bookstore, you must buy it. 

I think it would be great if there were more people like Ms Komachi. She doesn’t judge anyone, she listens, then she hands the person a list of books that she believes might help them, even if some titles seem totally unrelated to what the person was searching for. 

If you’re an avid reader and love bookstores and libraries, this book will not disappoint. It will make you want to visit your local library at your earliest convenience. You may not find what you’re looking for but perhaps there will be a librarian like Ms. Komachi to guide you to some other worthwhile titles. ~Ernie Hoyt

Dallergut Dream Department Store by Miye Lee, translated by Sandy Joosun Lee (Wildfire)

Miye Lee is a South Korean writer who was born in Busan in 1990. After graduating from university she worked for Samsung Electronics as a semiconductor engineer. Dallergut Dream Department Store is her first novel which was entirely financed by a crowdfunding service in Korea, and was translated by Sandy Joosun Lee. 

Lee says, and most people know, we spend a third of our lives sleeping. “Dreams of wonder and bizarre events, recurring dreams about a particular person, and dreams of places we’ve never been”. 

Dallergut Dream Department Store is a story about a mysterious shopping village you can only go to when you’re asleep. “It’s full of interesting people and places that capture the hearts of the sleeping customers, like a food truck that sells snacks to ensure a good night’s sleep”. 

Penny has always dreamed of working at the Dallergut Dream Department Store. Her application has passed the screening and she has an interview scheduled for the following week. The Dallergut family is well known in Penny’s town. In fact, “the family is the origin of the city”. 

Penny is interviewed by Mr. Dallergut himself. Although she was unsure of herself, Mr. Dallergut asked Penny if she could start tomorrow. The Dallergut Dream Department Store is five-stories high. Each floor sells different genres of dreams. On her first day, Penny meets a veteran employee named Weather who is also the manager of the first floor. She tells Penny to check in with the manager of each floor before she decides on which floor she wants to work in. 

The first floor sells high-end, popular or limited dreams, Penny discovers that the second floor sells generic dreams and is managed by a man named Vigo Myers.  The third floor manager is a woman named Mogberry. On this floor, the staff sells groundbreaking and fun activity dreams. The fourth floor sells nap-exclusive dreams and is managed by Speedo. The top floor, the fifth floor, only sells leftover dreams from the first, second, third, and fourth floors. She also discovers there is no manager for the fifth floor. 

Mr. Dallergut is talking to Weather when Penny returned from her floor tour. They are discussing the need for a new face to help run the front desk on the first floor. Penny overhears them and when Dallergut asks which floor she would like to work on, she immediately says that she would like to work at the front desk. 

And so begins Penny’s adventure of working at her dream job in the Dallergut Dream Department Store, a store that sells dreams of all kinds. But Penny also discovers there is an entirely separate business that the department store deals with - the store’s supply of dreams are created by dreammakers. Penny is a fan of many of them who have names like Kick Slumber, Yasnooz Otra, Wawa Sleepland, Doje, and Babynap Rockabye. They all specialize in the type of dreams they make. There are even dreammakers who make nightmares. 

The dreams are bought on a deferred payment system and the currency used is emotion. However, none of the customers remember that they bought their dreams as when they wake up, they forget that they were even in a store. 

Penny also learns that Mr. Dallergut doesn’t sell dreams to just anybody and everybody. He always has a reason why he does or doesn’t sell a dream to a customer. Mr. Dallergut tells Penny it is only with time and experience to learn all the nuances of selling a dream. 

Lee’s story is a nice escape from reality. If we really could buy our dreams, I’m sure many of us would do so at a moment’s notice - a dream about becoming rich and famous, a dream about meeting a lost love and rekindling a relationship. It makes you think as well, what kind of dream would you buy? Readers will also be happy to know that a sequel has already been published as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Border by Erika Fatland, translated by Kari Dickson (Pegasus Books)

Erika Fatland begins her 584-page tome in a spritely fashion that’s as alluring as it is deceptive. Starting at the end of her 259-day journey around the edges of Russia, one that she has spread out over the course of three years, she’s at the edge of Eurasia, where Alaska is only about 50 miles away. She’s concluding a mammoth odyssey along Russia’s border, the longest in the world, extending for almost 38,000 miles along the edge of fourteen countries. 

Propelled by the question of what does it mean to have the world’s largest country as your neighbor, Fatland’s final jaunt is on an old Soviet research vessel that will take her through the Northeast Passage. For four weeks she is in the company of 47 other passengers, “a bevy of wrinkly stooped men and women,” all of whom have paid $20,000 to notch up one more exotic destination on their bucket lists. Their conversations consist of travel talk and Fatlander soon learns she’s the only one who hasn’t been to Antarctica. When she tells an 85-year-old Dutchwoman that she’s excited to make a trip in a Zodiac (a rigid, inflatable boat used in rough seas), the response she receives is “Why?’ Her aged companion has been on hundreds of Zodiac excursions and this is a matter of routine for her.

Tracing the journey of the fur trade that gave Russia a firm toehold on the Western part of the US, Fatland vividly recreates the history of explorers and Cossacks, while experiencing dismay at the condition of the islands she visits--”so much rubbish” creating environmental catastrophes. On one of their ports of call, an abandoned cabin bears evidence of a recent occupation. “Mammoth tusk collectors,” she’s told by her guide, “There is a lot of money to be made--we’re talking millions.”

This is the last portion of The Border to reveal humor or any form of delight. Moving swiftly into her time in North Korea, Fatland finds obfuscation, bleakness, and eerie contradictions. In Pyongyang, apartment buildings routinely soar to 20 storeys or more but their elevators are so faulty that residents clamor for spots near the ground floor. A hotel that’s over 1000 feet high dominates the city skyline but has never opened for business. Her guides all carry expensive Chinese mobile phones in a place where coverage to other countries is only available on mountain tops. The DMZ at the division line between North and South Korea holds no human residents while providing “a haven for threatened species.” The beaches in the North are “as beautiful as Vietnam’s” but are devoid of tourists.

On a tour of Chernobyl at one point of her journey, Flatland is disconcerted that it feels “like a package holiday.” Thirty years after the disaster, people still come to a local hospital with dire after-effects. “It takes time for the isotopes to break down,” a senior member of the medical staff says.

Fatland is a historian and this is her focus in The Border. As she makes her way through Asia, the Caucasus, and Europe, there are only vague hints of the current relationship between Russia and its fourteen neighbors. It feels as if she’s writing two separate books, a skimpy travel narrative and an overwhelming torrent of history from past centuries. When she ends her account with time spent in Ukraine, Poland, Finland, and her native country, Norway, history has fully taken over. Not even a camping trip to the final borderline with her father cuts through Erika’s daunting knowledge of the past.

Does she find the answer to her question of what comes with being a neighbor to Russia? Perhaps, but if she did, it’s lost in translation.~Janet Brown

Lost Cities of Asia by Wim Swaan (Elek London, out of print)

Once upon a time, travel was a luxury and Asia was an unexplored continent for many Westerners. The very wealthy might go to Tokyo or Hong Kong but Beijing was still Peking, with the entire city forbidden to tourists. Southeast Asia teetered in and out of being a war zone and Korea was a bad memory to most of the Western world. In those days, even European travel was still beyond the reach of many unless they submitted to package tours--”If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium.” It wasn’t until the late 1960s that Iceland Air introduced the concept of budget flights to the masses and Lonely Planet launched the era of the backpacker.

It seems vaguely ludicrous now to open a book called Lost Cities of Asia and find one of its topics is Angkor Wat, which is now one of the most heavily visited sites on our planet. But the age of this book is obvious when readers find another “lost” region is called Ceylon (not Sri Lanka). Of the three corners of the world that are explored by the South African writer, Wim Swaan, only one might still be considered “lost”— Pagan, which even now remains off the tourist circuit.

Although Swaan was also known as a photographer, the plates that fill this coffee-table book seem almost crude by 21st Century standards. Most of them are black and white, while the ones that are in color lack depth and look like antique postcards. Many of the black and white photographs are marred by heavy shadows, taken by a man who must have been unused to working in tropical sunlight. However since there weren’t many glimpses of Ceylon, Pagan, and Angkor Wat in 1966 when this book was published, few people would have criticized Swaan’s technique. They would have been fascinated by the flawed images that showed places few people had ever seen.

It’s Swaan’s scholarship that makes this book a valuable resource half a century after it was first published. The man was not a travel writer and there are no lyrical descriptions or charming anecdotes. The most diverting passages are ones he quotes from past travelers who had viewed these places in distant centuries. Swaan instead employs his academic expertise as an architect and a historian which makes this book heavy going for the casual reader. It’s unfortunate that it’s literally too heavy to accompany the casual traveler as they explore the sites upon which he elucidates, because Swaan’s knowledge would expand their understanding of what they see.

Since Swaan’s early background was far from Europe or America, this may have given him a perspective unshared by writers from these continents who were his contemporaries. While most accounts of Southeast Asian sites written in the mid-20th Century compare them to “the glory that was Greece and the splendor that was Rome,” Swaan immediately pinpoints India as the primary influence upon Southeast Asia, one that influenced its architecture, its irrigation techniques that enabled the existence of its legendary cities, and its religion. Long before China exacted tribute from this part of the world, India shaped it.

However the process of “Hinduization” often clashed heavily with the indigenous cultures of the region. In the kingdom of Angkor, “both descent and inheritance were in the female line…so deeply ingrained that the subjugation of women prescribed by Hindu custom was flatly rejected.” At Pagan, the ancient gods, the Nats, were joined by the Buddha, not supplanted by him. 

Although India has placed its stamp firmly upon Southeast Asia (to the point that when Pico Iyer took his mother to visit Angkor Wat, she viewed it as an ancient Indian colony), its past history was written by Chinese monks and merchants, whose quoted accounts bring life to Lost Cities of Asia. Perhaps one of the most invaluable portions of Swaan’s book is its bibliography which provides a springboard for future exploration. Yet even so, Swann’s writing offers a time capsule that evokes not only Asian history, but our own.~Janet Brown

Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda, translated by Alison Watts (Bitter Lemon Press)

Riku Onda is the pen name for Nanae Kumagai, a Japanese writer whose novels The Aosawa Murders (Asia by the Book, January 2023) and Honeybees and Distant Thunder (Asia by the Book, July 2024) have been published in English in 2020 and 2023, respectively. 

Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight was originally published in the Japanese language with the title 木漏れ日に泳ぐ魚 (Komorebi ni Oyagu Sakana) in 2007 by Chuo-Koron Shinsha. It is a psychological thriller. The book was translated by Alison Watts who also translated her novel The Aosawa Murders. Watts has also translated Spark (Asia by the Book, April 2021) by Naoki Matayoshi and The Boy and the Dog (Asia by the Book, January 2024) by Seishu Hase. 

Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight is set in a small apartment in Tokyo over the course of one night. The main characters, Aki and Hiro, have decided to spend one last night together before going their separate ways. Their relationship had been going on a downhill slide since an incident that happened one year ago. They talk about it as if there is someone else listening to their thoughts and worries, as if they’re telling their stories directly to the reader. 

Aki and Hiro went on a hiking trip in the Japanese Alps in Nagano Prefecture along with an experienced mountain guide. However, on that trip, the guide mysteriously died. Aki believes that it was Hiro who killed him. Hiro believes that it was Aki who killed him. They are both going to try to get a confession before the night is over. Who is the murderer and why was he killed? 

Each chapter is told in the first person by Aki and Hiro and begins with Hiro talking about a photograph. What he’s about to share “is the story of a photo”. He says it’s also about “the mystery surrounding the death of a certain man, and a mountain tale as well. Plus, there’s the relationship aspect : the break-up of a couple. But the photo is at the heart of it”. 

Aki is also nervous about this evening. Ever since the incident happened, things haven’t been the same with either one of them. As Aki looks back on their life together in this apartment, she says, “That trip, and the death of that man, changed things forever for us”. Aki feels that for the past year, both of them had been walking on eggshells. She shares her thoughts about the two of them. 

“We were so close until that point, but those few days tore us apart”. It’s still hard to decipher why they drifted apart so much. Is it because they both suspect the other of having a hand in killing that man. Or was it something about the man that led them to the predicament they’re in. 

What really keeps the reader interested is the way Onda has Aki and Hiro taking turns talking about the incident. We learn when and where they met, and then we discover something much more surprising than the death of the mountain guide and why the man’s death had led to this evening. ~Ernie Hoyt