Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (Vintage)

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie was originally published in 2000 and translated into English in 2001 by Ina Rilke. It is a semi autobiographical story set in the Republic of China during the latter part of the Cultural Revolution. The book was adapted into a film which was directed by the author and was released in 2002. 

Two youths from the city are sent to the village by a mountain called Phoenix of the Sky for “re-education”. The place consisted of twenty small villages clustered around the mountain and took in about five or six young people. The village at the summit of the mountain was the smallet and poorest and could only afford two people - the narrator and his friend Luo. The largest village was Young Jing which Luo describes as “so small that when the local canteen prepared a dish of beef and onions the smell reached the nose of every single inhabitant.”

The narrator and protagonist of the story gives us a little background on what “re-education” entails. “Towards the end of 1968, the Great Helmsman of China’s Revolution, Chairman Mao, launched a campaign that would leave the country profoundly altered. The universities were closed and all the ‘young intellectuals’, meaning boys and girls who had graduated from high school, were sent to the countryside to be ‘re-educated by the poor peasants’”. 

The two boys were refused permission to enter high school and then they were labeled ‘young intellectuals’ because their parents were labelled as ‘enemies of the people”. The narrator’s parents were doctors. His father was a lung specialist and his mother was a consultant for parasitic diseases. His childhood friend Luo who was sent with the narrator to be ‘re-educated’ had lived next door and the two were best friends who grew up together sharing all sorts of adventures. Luo’s father’s crime was being a ‘Reactionary”. 

The two boys have a friend named Four-Eyes who is also being ‘re-educated' in a nearby town. Four-Eyes is the son of a writer and a poet and he has a suitcase full of forbidden books, Western ‘reactionary’ novels translated into Chinese. Luo and the narrator convince Four-Eyes to lend them one of his books after helping him with one of his jobs. He reluctantly lends the two his copy of Balzac’s Ursule Mirouet. 

In the town where Four-Eyes lived, the boys met the daughter of the tailor. His services were very much in demand so he was often absent from home. The daughter was known as “the Little Seamstress”. She was the most beautiful girl in the Phoenix of the Sky and the two boys were taken in by her beauty and intelligence. They would make many trips to see her and to read to her from the books of classic literature - Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, and more. 

The narrator asks his friend if he’s fallen in love with her to which Luo replies,  “She’s not civilized, at least not enough for me.” It was as if Luo wanted to educated the little seamstress himself and although the narrator was also madly infatuated with her, he decides to help his friend Luo as best he can. 

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is more than just a coming of age story. It is a story of friendship and romance. It is a story of how humor and education can defy an oppressive system. The Western ‘reactionary’ literature helps the boys forget their woes of hauling buckets of excrement on their backs or working in the coal mine and it opens the eyes to a bigger world for the little seamstress.

The book epitomizes the old adage “The pen is mightier than the sword”. It shows how the world of books is more life-changing than any government or politicians and this continues to be true today. ~Ernie Hoyt

Death’s End by Cixin Liu (Tor)

When a man buys the woman he loves a star,  Earth’s fate is sealed. Centuries before, a Trisolaran identified humanity’s primary weapon as love. Now it becomes the instrument of the planet’s destruction.

This is not a plot spoiler, since this book concludes a trilogy called Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Nor is the conquest and subsequent destruction of Earth the most startling facet, or the culmination, of Death’s End. The trilogy has persistently pointed out that the betrayal of humanity will come from humans themselves and every character has shown to some degree that this is true. In this conclusion, the end of our world is set into motion by Cheng Xin, a woman so steeped in compassion and ethics that she’s unable to become an aggressor, not even when that’s called for.

Within the first half of this book, the Earth has been conquered, humans have become slave labor in migrant camps, and the entire solar system becomes endangered. At this point, we are all at the mercy of Cixin Liu’s diabolical imagination, cast out into space, exploring the threats of altered dimensions while swooping through millennia at dizzying speed.

It’s been obvious from the first book in this trilogy that Cixin Liu has a vast body of scientific knowledge that many of us lack. Footnotes provided by the translator can take readers only so far. When scientific theories and truths become intertwined with the settings envisioned by Liu, ordinary minds boggle. His plots range so wide that to summarize them is impossible. It’s hard enough to keep up with them when reading. There’s only one thing to do: buckle up, take a deep breath, hold on tight, and enjoy the journey.

There’s much to enjoy. Cities with buildings that hang like leaves from gigantic trees, an elevator that whisks humans through the Milky Way, the glory of a sunrise seen from space, an entire universe captured in an orb that creates a perfect Eden of only a few miles. 

Although Liu’s universe is alluring, its vast loneliness enforces its own rules. “Let me tell you,” the commanding officer of a rogue spaceship says, “when humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism.”

When humans are lost in Liu’s imagination, it takes only five minutes to reach fascination and fear. Questions of indvidual responsibility emerge into an uncomfortable precedence and fantasies feel unsettlingly close to predictions. Suddenly our forays into space seem as though they’re a foolhardy and naive act of hubris. What sleeping civilization might this provoke?

Does that sound absurd? On this planet where some people drown while fleeing in unseaworthy boats while others look for new sanctuaries in their private spacecrafts, it seems a quick step to reach the scenarios created by Cixin Liu. By combining his expertly observed insights of human nature with the terrors that can be found within a two-dimensional universe or in the body of a beautiful robot powered by artificial intelligence, he takes the realities of today and extrapolates them into the plausible horrors of the future.~Janet Brown

The Weary Generations by Abdullah Hussein (Peter Owen)

The Weary Generations by Abdullah Hussein was first published in Urdu in 1963. The English edition, translated by the author, was published in 1999. It follows the story of two Muslim families living under the British Raj up until Partition in 1947 when British India was separated into two nations - Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. 

Mirza Mohammed Beg, had two children. The elder son is Niaz Beg. His second son is Ayaz Beg. Niaz took after his father and had a love for metalworks and started his own workshop building many things.

Ayaz had a love for books. He studied at a madrasa, a school for higher learning. He found that he did not like it and helped his brother in the workshop but got bored with village life and left. He taught himself to read English and became a mechanic. “He did not return home”.

A major incident occurred which prompted Ayaz to return to the village. His brother Niaz was arrested “on the charge of having committed a grossly illegal act”. Niaz was sentenced to twelve years in prison. The government didn’t stop there. They also confiscated most of his lands which were in the names of both brothers, leaving just enough land for Niaz Beg’s two wives to get by on. 

Ayaz did not stay in the village. He came and took his brother’s son with to Calcutta. Although he was not formally educated, Ayaz rose to a good position as an engineer. He remained single throughout his life but felt he now had a purpose in life - to educate his nephew, Naim.

The main focus of the story centers on Naim and his relationship with those around him. He marries a woman whose father was a very prominent man who willingly works for the British. Azra, the woman, falls in love with Naim but her family does not approve of the relationship. After a long while, Azra’s father reluctantly gives his assent for the two to get married.

Naim was the son of a peasant who lived in a rural part of India. He marries Azra, the daughter of a rich landowner. Their relationship is strained from the start as Azra’s family was not supportive of the marriage, deeming themselves to be a higher caste of people. Their union reflects the relationship between the people of India and the rule of the British Crown. 

Shortly after Naim gets married, he is drafted into the military and is sent to Europe and Africa where he is wounded and loses his left arm. After he returns home, he is treated as a hero and is awarded lands for his bravery. However, it is what he witnesses that makes him question the validity and the oppression of his people under British rule and becomes involved in politics opposing the Raj. 

Naim’s marriage to Azra can be seen as a metaphor for the relationship between India and the British Empire as well. Naim is the underdog, the oppressed, he can be seen as the face of India while his wife Azra, who is from an upper caste represents the Raj. The class differences are hard to ignore. 

What makes Naim’s life more complicated is the Partition of the British Raj in 1947 when the British Crown arbitrarily set a boundary separating the mostly Hindu province of Bengal and the mostly Muslim area of the Punjab, setting off a vast migration of Hindus and Sikhs to India and Muslims to the newly created country of Pakistan. 

Hussein tells the story of Partition and the violence that followed in a way that creates a fear in the reader for Naim and his family. It is a story that opens the readers eyes to the dangers of colonialism and the arrogance of the British Empire. It’s a shame that the world still cannot live in harmony without conflict. We are supposed to learn the mistakes from history but as the old adage goes, “History tends to repeat itself”. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (Tor)

In his sequel to The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu steps out into a whole other world. The Earth is aware that its Doomsday is approaching and inevitable. Trisolaris has covered the planet with a shield of protons that receive and transmit every word that is spoken beneath its envelope of surveillance. Some humans who have the means are considering Escapism, a flight to safe planets, while others choose to undergo hibernation, planning to revive themselves when the Doomsday battle takes place. 

The woman who set this disaster into motion is preparing to die but first she finds an undistinguished academic, Luo Ji, and gives him two axioms that hold the secret of cosmic sociology, but only under the right conditions. Burdened with secrets that might save humanity but which he has no idea of how to use. Luo Ji becomes the most wanted man on Earth and is chosen as one of the men whose brains might forestall Doomsday.

In a transmission to an ally on Earth, Trisolaris reveals a fatal flaw and discovers a human advantage. Trisolarans communicate through thought alone and every thought they have is on visible display. They live in a society without hidden plans, lies, or subterfuge, and initially regard human speech as a biological weakness. Quickly they begin to understand that the human mind is something to fear and humans realize that duplicity is their key to survival. They assemble a group of intellectuals who will develop defense systems in silence, with alternate untruths being sent to Trisolaris in spoken words. The Wallfacers, as they are called, all succumb to the Trisolaris allies called Wallbreakers, all except for Luo Ji.

His plans are all self-serving and hedonistic, allowing him an earthly paradise shared only with the woman he loves. Trisolaris decides he’s ridiculous, worthy only of their extermination. When they infect him with a genetic weapon, a flu that will kill only him,  his doctors put him into hibernation, hoping when he revives in another century there will be a cure for his illness.

But Luo Ji not only carries a fatal virus, he has discovered the secret of the axioms given to him by Ye Wenjie. Can he use them to avert Doomsday?

Once again Cixin Liu has taken a cliched plot and enriched it with prophetic details,  puzzling science, and unexpected swerves. The Dark Forest is more opaque and difficult than its predecessor. Although the story rushes into new arenas, they seem to be dead ends, fascinating but unconnected to the general plot. Even when the ending seems to bring a conclusion, there are too many undecided fates for this to be satisfying--and far too many unanswered questions.

The perennial problem of constructing the middle of an adventure in a way that makes readers want to move on to the next installment is made murkier than usual because of a change in translators. Ken Liu provided quantities of footnotes that helped readers understand The Three-Body Problem and gave its characters ample dialogue to define and sharpen their different personalities. Translator Joel Martinsen has chosen to offer very little of either, evoking suspicion that he understood little of what he put into English and chose simply to translate The Dark Forest word by word. When the universe is at last revealed to be the dark forest, there will be many readers who have no idea of what this means. 

Fortunately the concluding volume of what has been named the Earth’s Past trilogy is back in the capable and brilliant hands of Ken Liu, the perfect choice to  clarify the complexities of Cixin Liu’s enigmatic genius. Don’t stop reading--help is on the way!~Janet Brown

The Pachinko Woman by Henry Mynton (Morrow)

Pachinko : a type of mechanical game similar to pinball but stands vertically and originated in Japan. It is widely used in Japan as a gambling device.

Harry Mynton is the pseudonym for a writer who has lived in Japan for over thirty-five years and was also a former business owner in Tokyo. His novel, The Pachinko Woman, uses his knowledge of Japan and Asia and has created a highly entertaining and provocative murder mystery involving the pachinko industry in Japan with its ties to North Korea. 

The story opens with an excerpt from a comfort woman’s diary. A Korean woman forced into sexual slavery during World War 2 to serve the soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army. This diary becomes a focal point of international intrigue as the woman writes about meeting an American woman who suffered the same fate as her.

Helim Kim is a naturalized American, born to North Korean parents and raised in Tokyo, Japan by her grandmother. The diary belonged to her grandmother who was from North Korea and is part owner of Allied International, one of the largest pachinko firms in Japan. Her mother disappeared when she was only seven. 

Kim worked for four years as a translator at the United Nations but has set up her own translating company in Los Angeles and still does client contracts for the UN. She had just returned from Pyongyang ten days ago and is now meeting with a Korean man who also has ties to the North.

She is meeting with Park Chung-Il, a North Korean officer who was a senior member of the intelligence department. However, in one of the hard-liners purges, he was stripped of all his powers and sent to Helsinki,Finland before being too liberal. They could not dispose of him because he was related to the current leader of North Korea, Park Tai Jin. 

Park Chung-Il has formed a group called Koreans for Democratic Action. The KDA’s main function is to sponsor indirect actions to destabilize Pyongyang and liberate North Korea. Park is using Helim Kim, the Pachinko Woman, to serve as a pawn for his own agenda. 

A few months ago, he contacted the FBI who were concerned about money laundering. Park told them he could give them information on Asia’s biggest money-laundering scam. “Blackmail from Japanese pachinko companies in the billions of dollars was being shuttled through offshore banks from Japan to North Korea. Someone inside the Japanese government was involved.”

Park has told the FBI how he could help stop the money-laundering operations. His group, the KDA, has managed to convince ten of the largest pachinko companies to file for Japanese stock listings. “Public listing in Japan demanded transparent accounting, stringent auditing, and recording of all funds transfers abroad. Japanese ownership and auditing would prevent extortion payments, dry up the money source, and decimate Pyongyang’s foreign exchange.”

There are multiple storylines happening concurrently and the number of characters are often hard to keep track of including an East German assassin hired by Russians to take out North Korean owners of pachinko parlors in Japan, a Japanese detective investigating the deaths, Kim’s former boyfriend who worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency, her current American lawyer boyfriend, FBI agents concerned with North Korea’s nuclear proliferation, and a former U.S. president who is to meet with the current leader of North Korea in Niigata, Japan. 

Many questions are left unanswered or are not satisfactorily explained. Who was the American comfort woman? Why is the Russian government involved in the killings? And how does Helim Kim’s grandmother’s diary tie into all this?

Mynton manages to use the current concerns surrounding the peninsula into his story such as North Korea’s attempt to continue making nuclear weapons. The comfort women issue is another delicate subject which is a thorn in the side of the Japanese government. Readers interested in the history of Asia and the politics surrounding both Koreas and Japan will be highly entertained, but should remember to keep notes about the characters. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Tor)

Although the Cultural Revolution wasn’t the greatest of humanity’s evils, three deaths that it caused during the late 1960s would be the impetus for the destruction of life on earth in the following century. Ye Wenjie saw her father and her favorite university professor die under the mental and physical torture inflicted by the Red Guards, while her sister was killed by those who had been in the first wave of this reign of terror.

When the 20th century makes room for the 21st, Ye Wenjie has the knowledge and the opportunity while working at a military installation to send a message out into space. When she receives a reply, it tells her repeatedly, “Do not answer.” Any response she might make would lead to the invasion and conquest of her planet. Wenjie, steeped in the brutal history of the past century, welcomes the thought of a hostile take-over and the doom of humanity is sealed by her next message.

An invasion from outer space is an ordinary theme in many works of science fiction, but this time it’s been twisted and turned by Cixin Liu into a trilogy, with The Three-Body Problem as its fiendish and confounding introduction. Using an intricate, multi-leveled virtual reality game as a snare, the extraterrestrial world of Trisolaris finds its way into the minds of other disillusioned members of the human world. Giving them peeks at the history of Trisolaris, with its three suns creating alternating time periods of Chaos and Stability, showing how Trisolarans survive times of Chaos by dehydrating into “dry, fibrous objects” which they rehydrate back to life  during Stabile Eras, Trisolaris gains toeholds into some of the best human intellects. With its superior technology, Trisolaris begins to damage the acceleration of human technological prowess, an acceleration that’s far swifter than their own, due to Earth’s environmental advantages. To Trisolarans, humans live in paradise, developing under the gentle power of a single sun, and they want this existence for themselves.

In a diabolical game of chess, Trisolaris begins a subtle destruction of Earth’s science, placing doubts of its importance in human minds and planting skepticism in the minds of scientists by carefully revealing the limits of what they thought were laws of the universe. Ye Wenjie becomes the leader of the Earth Trisolaris Organization, joined by an American plutocrat who carries on communication with the Trisolarans. Both of them welcome the destruction that Trisolaris promises. 

An attack force launched by Trisolaris will reach the Earth in four or five centuries, a successful capture of the interplanetary communication reveals. Trisolaris has no fear that Earth will find a way to repel its future invasion, sending human scientists a disdainful message through space and time: “You’re bugs.” 

However, as a nonscientist points out to the panic-stricken intellectuals, bugs are unconquerable, prevailing against attacks of technology.

The ffirst installment of Cixin Liu’s trilogy was first published in a Chinese magazine as a serial in 2006. Published as a book two years later, Its English translation came out in 2014, two years before politicians in the US placed science under attack. This time-frame makes the Trisolaran use of ignorance as a weapon seem prescient now. After all, how many people have died from Covid-19 in 2020 because they didn’t believe in the science that provided vaccinations? 

Along with its predictive qualities, The Three-Body Problem goes beyond ordinary sci-fi with its fully-fleshed characters, its enigmatic glimpses into the field of physics,  and its clever distortion of time as its story unfolds. “Science fiction should be the literary genre most accessible to readers of different nations,” Cixun Liu says in an afterword--not only accessible to science fiction readers but irresistible to those who usually would rather read the words on a cereal box instead. This book takes a soaring leap into the literary possibilities of science fiction, with its next installment, The Dark Forest, promising to extend that neglected genre even deeper into the realm of literature.~Janet Brown

The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck by Rory Nugent (Open Road)

Rory Nugent’s amusing account of his search for a rare bird started with a talk among five friends about lost treasures. They were talking about what is left to find in the world. One of his friends said, “India is the place”. He continued by saying, “One of us should go after the pink-headed duck. It hasn’t been sighted in years. Extremely rare…the most elusive bird in the world.” 

The next day, Nugent did some research and discovered that the last sighting of the bird was some fifty years ago in India. The more research he did on the duck, the more interested he became in finding it. Most scientists believe the duck to be extinct but from time to time, sightings of the bird have been reported. Nugent comes to believe that the bird may just be hiding. Then, two months later, he sold his apartment and put the rest of his stuff in storage, took a taxi to JFK airport and flew to India. 

The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck chronicles Nugent’s search for the rarest of birds as he begins his journey by looking for the Fowl Market in Calcutta. When people learn what it is he’s looking for, he is accosted by a number of people claiming to have the pink-headed duck although it is obvious even to the most casual of observers that the ducks presented to him have had their heads dyed pink. Not finding any luck in Calcutta, Nugent decides to go to New Delhi, the capital of India. 

Nugent spends the first few days riding the buses to give himself an introduction to the city. He buys a city map and a relief map of India where he discovers two areas that are unmarked and unnamed. “One is a narrow section near the giant rhododendron forest of Northeastern Sikkim; the other, triangular in shape, lies in the upper Brahmaputra River Valley, near the conjunction of Burma, China, and India. Rory decided then and there where next to start his search. 

As Sikkim is near the border of Tibet and Bhutan, permission has never been given to a foreigner to explore those areas. Nugent is also informed that it is only the federal government that can grant permits to those restricted areas. And so begins Nugent’s ordeal dealing with government red tape. One of the natives who befriends him suggests offering the officials some baksheesh, commonly known in English as a bribe. to the official but Nugent sticks to doing things the proper and legal way. 

His persistence pays off as he does get approval to visit Sikkim and can continue his search for the pink-headed duck. In Sikkim he meets smugglers who help him step inside Tibet even though his permit doesn’t allow him to visit that particular area. He checks into a hotel of questionable repute. He hangs out with the Gurkhas who want to claim land for themselves and establish Gurkhaland, but the pink-headed duck is nowhere to be found in the area. 

As the search was fruitless in Sikkim, Nugent decided to check out the other unexplored area on the map he bought in New Delhi. Once again, he subjects himself to government red tape in order to get permission to sail down the Brahmaputra River. As with getting permission to visit Sikkim, Nugent refrains from bribing any officials and his persistence and perseverance pays off. 

Nugent meets a man at a bookstore on his return to New Delhi and cannot believe his good fortune as the man had once attempted to paddle down the Bramhaputra himself. The two join forces and travel down the river from Saikhoa Ghat located in the east of the State of Assam, and paddle all the way down to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.  

At the time of Nugent’s journey, there was unrest in Bangladesh. Rioting had occurred in the capital city of Dhaka. Martial law was declared and the borders were closed. The two rivergoers decided to end their journey in Dhubri, the last town in India on the Brahmaputra. 

Did Nugent ever find the pink-head duck? Is it really extinct? Or is it just good at not being found? Whatever the results, Nugent’s narrative in the Himalayas and down the Brahmaputra River will keep readers glued to his exploits and may find themselves rooting for his success. His story is not only exciting, it’s also inspiring as we follow one man’s dream to rediscover a lost avian. In the process, you may find yourself wanting to pursue your own impossible dreams! ~Ernie Hoyt

O Beautiful by Jung Yun (St. Martin’s Press)

“So you’re Elinor Hanson, huh? You must have married a Viking or something, “ a North Dakota farm woman greets the reporter who’s come to interview her. Elinor’s used to this. She grew up in rhis area and has been asked the follow-up question since she was able to talk. “Your father was American and your mother was…?”

North Dakota is white people country, which is why Elinor’s Korean mother left it, deserting her half-white daughters and her white husband. Once she graduated from high school, Elinor did the same thing. She boarded a bus to New York City where her beauty allowed her to be  a model, a woman who’s “looked at for a living.” Now in her forties, still pretty, she’s back in her home state as a freelance journalist, assigned to a story on the changes brought by the Bakken oil fields.

Groggy after her journey from New York, uncertain if she was sexually attacked on the plane while she was knocked out by a sleeping pill, Elinor is unsettled by the unfamiliarity of a town she used to know. 

Her looks have made her accustomed to male attention and she grew up knowing she was an outsider, neither white nor Korean. But now, in Avery, North Dakota, she’s unique because she’s a stunning woman in a town that’s overtly and crudely dominated by men. “I’ve never been in a place where there are so many men. Where I feel completely outnumbered,” she tells her editor during a Facetime meeting. 

When she was a model, the gaze of a male photographer meant a paycheck. Now as she struggles to find work in a different competitive field, male gazes have become an annoyance. In  Avery, they strike her like a bludgeon. Catcalls and lewd gestures greet her when she gets out of her car, a raucous and obscene version of the attention she routinely receives from men in New York. Equally upsetting are the conversations in which racial slurs are casually directed toward anyone who’s not like the typical resident of North Dakota.   

A white town hit by a “diversity bomb” of oil workers, Avery has decided they’re the scapegoats for every problem that’s come with the petroleum industry. When a young white woman disappears, local vigilantes turn to the oil fields and grab two likely suspects, one Black and one Mexican. Nobody seems to know what was done to those men. They’re no longer around and that’s all that matters.

As Elinor spirals into a long series of serious mistakes, she’s caught in a claustrophobic web that’s tinged with horror. The view she loved as a child, the empty land that stopped only when it reached the horizon, is now clogged with drilling rigs and the crews that work on them. The air smells like Vaseline’s petroleum jelly. The women have turned into gleeful sexual trophies, their scarcity giving them an intoxicating illusion of beauty, making them prey. Then there are the American flags hanging upside down in random farmhouse windows, puzzling and shocking signals, but what are they signaling? Who are they calling? “Some people say it’s a distress signal,” a man reluctantly tells Elinor. The flags are placed that way, he says, because of “people who look like you.”

This difficult novel with its mixture of brutality and hope gives a bleak view of what America is and what it has lost. O Beautiful strips privilege from its readers as starkly as it does from Elinor. A graphic examination of misogyny, racism, class divisions, environmental damage, and xenophobia, it offers a form of Rorschach test. How much are we prepared to overlook? How much does it take to make us flinch? As Jung Yun sees it, we’re all being groped in a dive bar--or on a plane--and our beauty isn’t going to save us.~Janet Brown

My Falling Down House by Jayne Joso (Seren Books)

My Falling Down House is Jayne Joso’s third novel and the first one set in Japan. The book won the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Award whose aim is to “promote understanding and cooperation between the U.K. and Japan” in a variety of fields, including literature. 

Takeo Tanaka is a young man in his twenties who narrates the entire story. A year ago, he had everything a man could want. He was young and ambitious, and had a good job with a great salary.  He had a beautiful girlfriend he lived with in one of Tokyo’s more upscale neighborhoods. He seemed set for life. 

A year ago when he was out drinking with co-workers, he got so drunk that when he woke up, he found himself in an abandoned and dilapidated house. It seems he had also bought a cello before finding his way to this dwelling. 

It was sometime after his twenty-fifth birthday when a financial crisis occurred. Takeo lost his job, his girlfriend, and his home. For a while Takeo managed to sleep at the office creating a small nest under his desk with just a box and a blanket. His co-worker Shizuko nicknamed him the Box Man. But once he lost his job, he could no longer sleep at the office. 

After becoming jobless and homeless, Takeo decided to seek out the old house where he once spent the night in a drunken stupor. He was drawn to the place. He felt there was “a feel for nature here, a sense of a slow and simple way of living. A forgotten way of living.” He told himself it was only temporary. Once he recovered, he would move on. 

So begins Takeo’s new life of disappearing from society. He isolated himself by taking residence in an old house located on the grounds of a temple. He encounters a cat, finds his cello, and slowly settles into the life of a hermit. His supposed temporary stay extended to one season and then another. 

The longer Takeo stays at the house, he believes he sees or is being haunted by a yokai, a spirit or shapeshifter. As the summer turns to autumn and autumn turns to winter, Takeo seems to drift further and further away from the reality of life. It is becoming harder and harder for Takeo to determine what is real and what is fantasy. He thinks he may be slowly going crazy. In order to keep his sanity, he works on a number of projects just to keep his mind busy but still, he does not know if he is on his way to recovery. 

As Takeo had no room in a home to hide himself away in, he installed himself in a fragile wood and paper house. This phenomenon of hiding oneself away from people and society has become a very big problem in Japan. A new term was given to this phenomenon. It is called hikikomori in Japanese. It translates to “social withdrawal” in English. It can be described as a mild form of depression. 

Takeo’s story can be the story of any salaryman in Japan. Joso makes Takeo out to be an anti-hero. A man you hope will come out of his loneliness and self-pity to become a productive member of society once again. Anybody who has had a setback in life can relate to Takeo, however I believe there is no shame in asking for help. ~Ernie Hoyt