Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel by Shahnaz Habib (Catapult)

“I am basically the opposite of Anthony Bourdain. Not cool, not adventurous,” Shahnaz Habib confesses as she begins Airplane Mode. When she travels to a new place, she approaches it cautiously, venturing into it a few steps at a time and gradually increasing her explorations. However she feels inadequate when she compares herself to a young, white, American female traveler whom she meets in Istanbul,  a girl propelled by ticking off sights she’s seen from a list of guidebook recommendations and who easily encapsulates what she was exposed to in a single sentence. Habib is brown, Muslim, who grew up in what is dismissed as the Third World. She’s  unaccompanied by this other girl’s sense of racial confidence and while she thinks of this as a deficiency, it’s truthfully an asset. Habib grew up outside of the Western bubble, in Southern India and she knows the world isn’t “neatly packaged” as it’s presented in a guidebook. That viewpoint is a privileged one and its privilege is a barrier. “I didn’t want a veil between me and the world,” she says and does her best to ignore Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, and the rest of the books that offer pre-digested experiences. 

While she ponders the differences in travel that separate her from the young woman she encountered in Istanbul, she begins to explore the history of travel, which began in the Western world as an aristocratic—and white male—pursuit. Young noblemen were expected to make the Grand Tour of European capitals before they settled into their comfortable lives at home, while their female counterparts contented themselves with strolls down country lanes and visits to other people’s manor houses. 

Even those strolls were a recent embellishment. “Walking for pleasure” and savoring the beauties of the natural world became popular through the poems of Wordsworth and the heroines in Jane Austen novels in the late 18th century. Continental travel for the untitled inhabitants of the West sprang into being in the early 1800s with the first Baedeker guidebook published in 1827. Slowly the mass tourism industry, that now contributes eight trillion dollars to the global economy, was born.

In its nascent stages, travel for pleasure was reserved for white tourists who wanted trips that showed them the wonders of the world while embarking upon no adventures in achieving this goal. Comfort was paramount, as well as a carefully maintained distance between the observer and the observed. Baedeker was consulted as frequently as the Bible and perhaps with even greater fervor.

Although many 19th century travelers couldn’t achieve the glamour of those who made the Grand Tour, they were still people of means. Using a passport became a status symbol and a class delineator, an ironic development when considering that this document used to be a way to keep people at home. Originally a passport served as a proof of residency, not as an invitation to explore. 

This was the underpinning of today’s “passportism” where scholars are denied entry to a country that welcomes them professionally because as one man put it, “the color of my passport was wrong.” As peasants in the 18th century were kept at home because of what was written on their passports, so are others three hundred years later if they fail to produce the required documents. 

Going back to the earliest travelers, Habib compares Marco Polo, an Italian merchant who had commercial reasons for his adventures. with the North African, Ibn Battuta, who began his odyssey with a trip to Mecca. Each man spent twenty-four years away from home, but while Polo had a financial impetus. Battuta expanded his sacred pilgrimage into a journey prompted solely by curiosity, one that left “a legacy of wonder” as opposed to the “amused knowingness” conveyed by white Western travelers.

Habib continues her exploration and careful dissection of travel in essays that look beyond the stereotypical journey. She shows how motherhood turned her into a connoisseur of New York city bus routes, exploring different boroughs that make up the city by staring out of windows with a baby in her arms. She admits that her favorite form of public transportation is a carousel, which keeps passengers in perpetual motion while always seeing the same things as they ride. Cleverly and plausibly she links that activity to modern tourism, where “we are not moving from place to place” but “from one moment in time to another.”

Looking at the consumerist nature of travel, where we succumb to wanderlust because of its marketing schemes, Habib claims everyone--”travelers and nomads and vagrants” are tourists “who have bought into the ultimate tourist myth, that we can escape tourism and simply travel.” 

Early in her first essay, Habib compares her solo trip to Istanbul with the experience she has in that city years later when she moves there with her husband and daughter. Without “the confusion and loneliness of traveling,” the city that had baffled her no longer contains a shopping list of sites to see but opens up, “blooming out of the rich soil of daily life.”

This is what changes a tourist into a traveler, as Habib illustrates in her delightful essay on bougainvillea. It’s not enough to come and stare. The painful process of transplanting, renaming, relearning, and putting down fresh roots is the only way to learn a new place as it turns a newcomer into one of its own. How else to escape falling prey to what Habib terms “the colonial knowledge sandwich?” ~Janet Brown

The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura, translated by Lucy North (Faber & Faber)

Natsuko Imamura is a Japanese writer who has been nominated three times for the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. She won the award in 2019 for her novel むらさきのスカートの女 (Murasaki no Skirt no Onna). 

The Woman in the Purple Skirt is the English translation of this Akutagawa Prize winner. It was published in English in 2022 by Lucy North, a British translator of Japanese fiction and nonfiction who also has a PhD in modern Japanese literature from Harvard University. 

The narrator of the story lives near the woman in a purple skirt, which she always wears. The narrator has already found out where the woman in the purple skirt lives. She has also kept a diary of the woman in the purple skirt’s schedule; when she works, when she doesn’t work, where she goes, where she sits in the local park. The woman tells herself she wants to get to know the woman in the purple skirt. She wants to become friends with her. 

The narrator calls herself the woman in the yellow cardigan. Why the woman in the yellow cardigan wants to get to know the woman in the purple skirt is a mystery. It’s a mystery to herself as well. She thinks it would be strange to just go up to the woman and say, “I want to be friends with you”. She just wants to talk to her and tells herself, “it’s not as if I’m trying to make a pass at her”. 

The woman in the purple skirt doesn’t know she’s being watched. Even if she did, it appears that she does not give a care in the world. As the woman in the yellow cardigan realizes that the woman in the purple skirt has been out of a job for a few months, she leaves a magazine that publishes help wanted notices in a spot where the woman in the purple skirt will surely find it. 

A few days later, the woman in the purple skirt is hired by a hotel that happens to be the same place where the woman in the yellow cardigan works. The narrator continues to watch the woman in the purple skirt throughout her entire training period but doesn’t introduce herself. 

The narrator almost doesn’t recognize the woman in the purple skirt because she comes to work wearing clothes in other colors. At first the new employee is very timid and her voice isn’t loud enough to satisfy the Hotel Manager. However, as the months pass, she becomes quite adept at her job. Her co-workers start talking to her more frequently and she is often invited out for lunch or for drinks after work.

The narrator has yet to introduce herself so she could become friends with the woman she formerly called the woman in the purple skirt. The woman is really good at her job and she’s also very friendly with the Hotel Manager. Soon, rumors spread that she is seeing the Hotel Manager who is a married man. The other workers are also surprised at the speed of her promotion and also find out she is getting paid more than they are. 

Her co-workers who were formerly kind to her now begin to ignore her and when the head of the Housekeeping Department suggests that some of the hotel’s employees are taking towels and other amenities from the rooms, the first one to be blamed is the newest employee. After being accused of stealing by the others, she leaves the hotel in tears.

When the narrator goes to the woman’s apartment to see if she is okay, she notices a familiar car in front of the apartment. It’s the Hotel Manager. The woman lives on the second floor of a pretty dilapidated building and when she and the Hotel Manager have a scuffle, the Hotel Manager falls down the stairs and appears to be dead. 

The narrator rushes to the woman and tells her she will take care of everything. She believes it’s fate that she can help the woman leave this town. She will quit the hotel herself and they can become traveling companions. The narrator plans everything out very carefully. She leaves a note and some money so the woman can leave first, saying she would meet her later. But not everything turns out as planned.

Imamura’s story reads like a thriller but the protagonist doesn’t seem to want to hurt the person she’s been stalking. It is one of the creepiest horror stories without any blood that you may ever read. It is up to the reader to decide what happens to the woman in the purple skirt. It’s also hard to consider the narrator as a villain as she doesn’t want to harm the object of her obsession. She only wants to become friends with her. Yes, you should beware of strangers who want to become your friend. ~Ernie Hoyt

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Counterpoint)

“Shortly after Olivia went away with the Nawab,” her abandoned husband, an English bureaucrat who was “upright and just” met his second wife. She was from a family of “cheerful women with a sensible and modern outlook on life,” ones who became fascinated by Olivia only after they became elderly widows. They told the scandalous story to the second wife’s granddaughter, augmenting the details with Olivia’s letters and journals that provided details of this shocking liaison with an Indian prince. The granddaughter, a woman with so little personality of her own that she narrates this novel without once vouchsafing her own name, takes Olivia’s private papers and follows in her footsteps to India forty years afterward.

She’s here to “do research,” she claims but instead she seems eager to lay claim to Olivia’s life. The Raj, however, is a crumbling memory. The Europeans who flock to India in the Sixties are a whole other species from the British who held sway over the country in the 1920’s. While Olivia was surrounded by solid and morally upright bastions of the Empire, her follower finds her fellow countrymen to be “a derelict lot” who congregate in the yard of the local guesthouse, looking like “souls in hell.” 

When she ventures to the palace that became Olivia’s home, she finds an empty shell with bits of discarded furniture. The Nawab’s descendants have abandoned it to live in London, disdaining its 19th Century discomforts in favor of 20th Century plumbing. However, through Olivia’s account of its romantic past, the narrator does her best to find those same details in her own experience of India.

But Olivia was pretty and charming and silly, while the narrator is homely and passive and imitative. While Olivia was overwhelmed by a dashing aristocrat who was an “irresistible force of nature,” her follower drifts into satisfying the sexual needs of an Englishman who claims to be a holy man. She then becomes pregnant by her Indian landlord. There is no true parallel between Olivia and the woman who struggles to assume her adventurous life in a place where that sort of life no longer exists.

The only similarity is one that was presented by a Major who was a contemporary of Olivia’s. For those who love India, the dangers of the country’s many beauties makes them vulnerable. “India always finds the weak spot and presses on it,” he warned. Olivia would never have listened to his words and her follower ignores them, eager for the immersion that she achieves in the cheapest way possible.

It’s a surprise to many that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was not in fact Indian by birth. The daughter of an affluent Jewish couple who fled to England from Hitler’s Germany, she married an Indian architect and made her home in New Delhi. She lived in India, raising her family and writing novels until 1975 when she and her husband left to live in New York. She is the only writer to receive both the Booker Prize and an Academy Award, earned when she joined the team of Merchant and Ivory as a screenwriter. 

Although her reputation was made by writing about the subcontinent, Jhabvala said her background as a British-educated German-born European made her “ill at ease with India.” That analytical separation is evident in Heat and Dust, making it a scathing examination of cultural appropriation and the people who profit from it.~Janet Brown

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Finger Bone by Hiroki Takahashi, translated by Takami Nieda (Honford Star)

Hiroki Takahashi is a Japanese writer who was born in Towada City in Aomori Prefecture. Finger Bone is his first novel. It was first published in Japan with the title 指の骨 (Yubi no Hone) in 2015 by Shinchosha Publishing and was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. Takahashi would win the Prize in 2018 for his book 送り火 (Okuribi).

Finger Bone is a war novel. Most war novels are often about battles or covert operations. The protagonist usually does something heroic and is rewarded for his efforts in helping to win the war. They are rarely told from the perspective of the losing country’s soldiers. This is a story told in the first person by an unnamed Japanese soldier. 

The soldier is stationed on the island of Papua New Guinea in 1942. The Imperial Japanese Army is on the retreat but since the soldier has no radio, he still believes that Japan is winning the war. In his pocket, he carries the finger bones of a dead comrade. However, on his march to his next destination he is wounded and sent to a field hospital. 

Before the soldier makes it to the field hospital, he comes to another facility built in a palm grove. There are men sleeping on stretchers suffering from the effects of malaria. Some of them might already be dead . 

Once he makes it to the field hospital, he is witness to what he thinks is kind of cruel. Whenever the medics make their rounds and one of the patients doesn’t answer, a medic slides a piece of wood under the dead soldier’s hand and cuts off his finger.

Another soldier tells him, “That’s a lucky man to have his finger taken for his family like that”. He’s told, “Die in the jungle all alone, and all the family gets back home is three stones”. 

As the soldier recovers, he’s able to walk around. Sometimes he and two of his comrades walk a little ways away from the hospital, always keeping an eye out for the enemy. They are confronted by a black man one time, but the man turns out to be a native who isn’t hostile to the soldiers. One of his comrades is able to speak a bit of the native language and they’re taken to the native’s village. 

However, the second time they see one of the natives, the man doesn’t speak or exchange words. The unnamed soldier doesn’t know why and shortly after that incident, the soldiers at the field hospital get their orders to move. That is when the unnamed soldier realized that Japan is losing the war and that most of the island is under Allied control.

The soldier wants to keep his promise to his comrade and is determined to take the finger bone he has in his pocket to his friend’s home in Japan. Will the soldier survive the war? Will he be able to keep his promise? 

It’s often been said that “in war, no one wins”. This book illustrates that point. Those soldiers who died serving their country had families. Well, so does the enemy. It’s a sad fact that Japan’s militarism during World War 2 led to untold suffering for their soldiers, and for the soldiers fighting against them.

Unfortunately, as long as there are people with different values and ways of thinking, war seems to be inevitable. I wish it weren’t true but conflicts continue in places such as the Middle East and in Central Asia. North Korea testing their ICBM missiles is no light matter either. 

If only every country in the world could follow the message of John Lennon’s song “Imagine”, the world might be a better place. ~Ernie Hoyt

Idol, Burning by Rin Usami, translated by Asa Yoneda (Canongate)

Idol culture in Japan is a multi-billion dollar business. The Golden Age of idols is said to be the seventies with artists such as Momoe Yamaguchi and Akina Nakamori. The end of the seventies was the rise of idol groups such as Pink Lady, Candies, and Wink.

In the mid-eighties, an idol group with a large number of members was conceived by producer Yasushi Akimoto. He was the mastermind behind Onyanko Club, a group that consisted of fifty-two original members. Each member was assigned a number so fans could easily follow their favorites.

The nineties would see a revival of idol groups with a large number of members, the most popular being Morning Musume, produced by former lead singer of Sharan-Q, Tsunku. The group was formed on a television audition program called Asayan. The production company Hello! Project also produced groups such as Country Musume, Coconut Musume, Berryz Koubou, °C-ute, and Melon Kinenbi, with most groups consisting four to eight members.

However, the 2000’s would see the rise of AKB48 and all its offshoots, once again produced by Yasushi Akimoto. The concept of the group was “Idols you can meet”. Their homebase was in Akihabara where the group had their own theater. Every year, an “election” would be held and fans would vote for their favorite members. The member with the most votes would be chosen for the center position for the next single. 

Fans continue to support their favorite members, not only in idol groups, but also actors, voice actors, anime characters, sports figures, and a whole host of others. The current term being used is 推し (oshi), meaning your favorite. One of the most popular manga and anime series now is 推しの子 (Oshi no Ko) which roughly translates to "My Favorite”.

Idol, Burning takes the life of the superfan to a different level. Akari is a high school student who has only one passion in her life and that is her oshi, her idol. His name is Masaki Ueno and he’s a member of popular idol group Maza Maza. 

However, Akari’s world is being turned upside down. Her oshi is on fire. The news media says that Masaki punched a fan. Akari doesn’t know if the news is true or just a rumor but the Internet is ablaze with people criticizing the star while others like Akari, continue to support him. 

In a news segment, Akari’s oshi admits to punching a fan but said it was a private matter between him and the victim. The Internet is soon inundated with comments about him after the interview.

Akari sees a number of negative comments on the Internet such as , “Who the f&*k does he think he is?” and “I’ve been going to his shows for years but I’m done. If you’re a brainwashed cult-follower victim-bashing the woman you’re not right in the head”. Of course there were some positive comments as well such as, “Learn your lesson and come back soon. We’re here for you Masaki”. 

Masaki Ueno has been Akari’s oshi for about a year. Everything has centered around supporting him. She has spent that time collecting as much information as she could so she feels she could predict most of his answers at a Q&A corner of his fan meetings.

She sums up her feelings by writing on her blog for other Masaki fans, “There is nothing you can really do about a fireball, is there?”, referring to the comments on the Internet after the incident. “The blaze gets fanned from all directions, and just when you think they’re starting to die down, someone tosses on more fuel, in the form of old tweets or photos, and sends the flame in a new direction”. 

Shortly after the incident, Maza Maza holds a press conference to announce that the group would disband and that their upcoming concert would be their last. Masaki also announces that he would be retiring from the entertainment business.

Akari is now at her wits end as her life has only held meaning because of her oshi. All the money she made from working part-time went to going to his concerts, buying his goods, and supporting him as any hardcore fan would. The support of her oshi borders on obsession. What will Akari do now that she has nothing to live for?

Rin Usami’s story is not only a coming-of-age story but also a parable about superfans and their oshi. Usami says in an interview, “To those who are not interested, the act of pursuing an idol can easily be dismissed as ‘only a hobby’ or ‘an unhealthy obsession’”. She further elaborates by saying, “But for some of those who do pursue an idol, it can become a reason to live or even be their salvation”. She wrote the book from the perspective of a superfan as she believes most people do not completely understand them and believes they are widely misunderstood. 

The main point of Usami’s story is for the reader to imagine what they would do, if the “meaning” or the “backbone” of their life were to disappear. How would they survive? What would they do? 

Imagine if you are a hardcore fan of former California Angels’ superstar Shohei Ohtani. What will do now that he is going to become a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers? Will the Internet go on fire because he decided to change teams?

In the age of SNS, there is no telling what people will say. However, if Shohei Ohtani was your oshi, even if he changed teams, wouldn’t he still be your oshi? It’s something to think about.~Ernie Hoyt

We Are Not Strangers by Josh Tuininga (Abrams Books)

Several years ago I was a guest in a Seattle house that was only a few years away from its one hundredth birthday. My host told me it had been built and owned by one family before he bought it. That family was Japanese and when they were sent to the internment camps, their neighbors made sure their house remained intact and in their legal possession until they were able to return home again.

When I told this story to other Seattle residents, they denied its plausibility. Japanese property was up for grabs after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the resulting incarceration of Japanese Americans in internment camps. The story I was told was a rosy little myth, designed to make Seattle feel less culpable in what was a national disgrace, according to people who were certain they knew the real facts.

And I believed them, until I was given a copy of We Are Not Strangers. Author Josh Tuininga is careful to note this is historical fiction that is based on oral history, written records, and an account told to him by his uncle, whose grandfather had helped his Japanese neighbors during their time in the camps. 

His story begins before 1942, when Executive Order 9066 imprisoned  over 120,000 Japanese Americans and those who had Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were native born U.S. citizens. The man who was the architect of this order spoke for President Roosevelt when he said “If they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp.”

In the city of Seattle, neighborhoods with racial covenants kept the most coveted parts of the city under white ownership. In an area known as the Central District, people who weren’t considered white made their homes. Sephardic Jews from Spain and the Middle East, known as “Oriental Jews” to many, lived side by side with Japanese families. Members of both ethnic groups who had recently immigrated to the U.S. were denied the right to naturalization by an immigration court and the state of Washington, which was a center of America’s pro-Nazi movement, made the position of Seattle’s Jews a precarious one.

The story of a friendship between two men who share a passion for fishing, a Sephardic Jew and an American-born Nisei Japanese, and the way one of them helps the other to keep his home is given depth and truth by the reproduction of headlines taken from newspapers of that time. Tuininga chose to put his book into the framework of a graphic novel so those headlines scream with the same force they held seventy years ago. Signs that greeted Japanese families when they were finally released from the camps a year after the end of World War II, “Japs Keep Out You Are Not Wanted” and “Japs Keep Moving This Is a White Man’s Neighborhood,” starkly illustrate the terrible hatred that Japanese Americans faced after living under internment for four years. (When the war ended, only 33% of Americans advocated the closing of the internment camps.)

Graphic novels are a robust and illuminating way to convey history. Blending words and art to show shades of emotion and the points of view revealed on the faces of every character makes this form of narrative cinematic and approachable in a way that a conventional novel can’t replicate. Tuininga created both the words and the art, frame by frame, in We Are Not Strangers, supplementing them with historical notes that will come as a revelation to many of his readers. Now more than ever, it’s crucial for us to know what happened in America’s past to keep it from recurring in the future.~Janet Brown
 

If an Elephant Loses Weight, It is Still an Elephant by Aftab Seth (Keio University Press)

Aftab Seth was the Indian ambassador to Japan from 2000 to 2003. He also spent a year as an exchange student at Keio University from 1962 to 1963 and served in the Indian Embassy between the years 1970 to 1972. He returned to Japan in 2004 to become the director and professor of the Global Security Research Institute. 

After coming to Japan in 2000 as Indian Ambassador to Japan, Seth was inundated with requests for interviews by different magazines and newspapers. He also met a number of editors from different newspapers as well. He was asked to summarize his discussions with various journalists by the Yomiuri Shimbun who later published the article. He was then approached by Shodensha (a publishing house) who asked him if he would consider writing about his experiences in Japan from the time he was an exchange student and to give his opinions on the current state of the nation. 

Seth had a series of interviews with the publisher starting in April or May of 2001 and was completed in October. The notes and manuscripts from those interviews became a book that would be published in the Japanese language in December of 2001. 

The English edition of If an Elephant Loses Weight, It is Still an Elephant was edited and revised as “there were several elements in it which would not be well known to non-Japanese readers and therefore would be of little relevance and even somewhat redundant”. Seth amended the text “keeping in mind a wider non-Japanese audience that may be interested in the English version”. 

Seth based the title of the book on a Hindi proverb - Agar Haathi dubla hoga to kitna dubla hoga to describe the Japan that he saw when he returned to the country as Ambassador. The proverb translates to “If the elephant is lean, how lean will it be?”. The author chose the title for this book because “despite 10 years of flat, or even negative growth in the economy, this is still a country with enormous reserves of wealth”. Seth further elaborates by saying that “while the Japanese elephant may be somewhat slimmer, it is still quite robust” He uses the elephant as a metaphor for Japan’s economy and says, “So while the Japanese elephant may have lost a little weight, it is still unmistakably healthy”. 

Seth arrived in Japan for the first time in 1962, a mere ten years after the Occupation of Japan ended. The country was having an economic boom as Tokyo was chosen as the site for the 1964 Summer Olympics. His second stay in the country was in the seventies when Japan was still experiencing economic growth. The World Exposition was held in Osaka in 1970. Plans for a new international airport were being discussed and Japan was on its way to its Bubble Economy. 

Seth’s third extended stay in Japan was in 2000. The bubble economy had burst and the country was suffering a long period of recession. However, Seth believes that Japan will recover from any problems it may face. He has seen the change in the country by living here at different times and he always finds the spirit of the Japanese people to be positive for the most part. 

As a long time resident of Japan and someone who has lived here continuously for nearly thirty years, it’s more difficult for me to see the vast changes that Seth saw. Of course you would expect big changes in ten or twenty years time. For me, the economy seems to be taking another downturn as the yen has lost a lot of its value. There was a time when the exchange rate was 360 yen to the dollar. The current rate is now 147 yen to the dollar. At this rate, I may not be able to enjoy visiting my home country. I can only hope that as the Japanese people have prevailed through many hardships that the yen will become strong again so I won’t lose any money when going home! ~Ernie Hoyt

Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore (Archipelago Books)

More than a hundred men are crowded into a rail car on the Trans-Siberian Express. They’re conscripts, drafted into the Russian army, the unlucky ones who couldn’t bribe or trick their way out of this grim fate. They have no idea of where they’re headed, other than that they’re in the middle of the “territory of banishment,” a place of “dead bodies under the permafrost,” a region of exile where few ever make their way back home. Siberia is “a world turned inside out like a glove.”

Aliocha was certain he would find a way that would keep him from conscription but he failed and at twenty, he’s certain his life is over. He’s heard of the unspeakable brutality that faces new troops under the guise of hazing; he’s already been beaten up by two of the other conscripts for no reason other than it amused his attackers. As he stares out the train window at the endless miles of forest, he becomes consumed with an urge that is far from a plan: “Run away, defect, jump.”

He has only a cell phone, a charger, and a hundred rubles, which has to be enough to let him vanish into a Siberian city. But when the train stops at the next urban station, Aliocha is surrounded by soldiers with no way to get past that barrier. Back on the train, watching the forest engulf the railway tracks as soon as the cars pass over them, he’s joined by a foreign woman who “smells of flowers and smoke,” and who provides another chance at escape. He grabs it.

Helene is escaping too, from a love affair that curdled when the Russian rebel whom she met in Paris chose to become part of his native country’s bureaucracy, “heir to the Soviet industrial epic.” Perhaps this is why she agrees to help Aliocha, a man she can communicate with only through pantomime and fragments of language. But what begins as a passing whim becomes deadly serious when the sergeant in charge of the conscripts realizes that one of them has vanished.

The search for Aliocha consumes the entire train, from the crowded third class cars that contain the conscripted men to the sanctuary of first class compartments. Everyone, whether they’re attendants or passengers, are drawn into the quest and are forced to choose sides.

Although Eastbound quickly turns into a thriller, a psychological drama played out between two strangers who become so linked that eventually “they have the same faces,” the narrative is filled with moments of unforgettable beauty. Through the windows of a train that’s become a kind of prison, Lake Baikal stretches like “a liquid ribbon…immense and violet.” A lonely city is “two hoops of fire, thrown into a leather sky.” Log houses sprinkled through the dense and bleak forest are graced with carved wooden shutters and lace curtains, brightened with flowers and vegetable gardens, like something from a fairy tale.. The end of the rail line is announced by “a sparkling ethereal horizon,” and at one part of the journey when passengers are given time away from the train, “the silence is so great that each sound explodes.”

Eastbound is a tiny volume, the size that’s usually associated with an appliance’s user manual. It’s only 127 pages, but it contains a mammoth journey, an adventure through cruelty, kindness, and the triumphs of soaring language on a legendary train that travels through the darkest edge of the world.~Janet Brown

Funaosa Nikki : A Captain's Diary by Hirochika Ikeda, translated by Richard F. Szippl (Chunichi Publishing)

In Edo Era Japan (1600 - 1868), there have been many tales of ships drifting away from the mainland. However, due to the isolationist policy of the Tokugawa government at the time, Japanese ships were only made for coastal trade. If the ships get caught in a storm, they were often blown off course or damaged beyond repair. The ships were not built for trans-ocean travel and many of the “drifters” were rescued by Americans, Russian, and Englishmen. The survivors of these drifters often spent many years abroad before making it back to Japan. 

One of the best-known of these survivors was a man named Manjiro Nakahama who was rescued by an American whaling ship. Manjiro and four others were shipwrecked on the island of Torishima, one of the southernmost islands of the Izu Islands which are all part of Tokyo Prefecture. Only nine of the islands are inhabited. Torishima was one of the uninhabited islands. The five men were rescued by an American whaling ship and were taken to Honolulu.

Manjiro was only fourteen at the time. He wanted to stay with the ship so the captain of the whaling vessel, Captain William H. Whitfield took him back to the U.S. where Manjiro would study English. Manjiro would later return to Japan and become a translator and interpreter after the opening of Japan to the rest of the world

Funaosa Nikki : A Captain’s Diary is the story of a lesser known account of a ship drifting at sea. Led by a man named Jukichi, he and his crew of thirteen men were blown off course during a storm and their ship drifted for seventeen months on the Pacific Ocean before being rescued by a British merchant vessel captained by Captain William J. Pigot. At the time of their rescue, the only remaining survivors were Jukichi and two of his crew.

As noted in the book’s subtitle, this is Jukichi’s Four-year Odyssey across the Pacific, through California, Alaska, Kamchatka, and back to Japan, 1813-1817”. It was written by Hirochika Ikeda after he met Jukichi ten years after his ordeal. Many stories were already written about Jukichi’s experience but Ikeda was “more interested in the account of the year and five months he spent adrift than in the strange things in foreign countries”.

Ikeda listened to and made a record of Jukichi’s story which resulted in this book. He had intended to only share it with his family. He wanted them “to appreciate just how fortunate they were, being able to live without want, without starving or freezing, unlike people such as Jukichi, who have suffered such extreme and tragic hardships”. 

One must take into account that Ikeda wrote this forward to the book in the fall of 1822. The first English translation of Funaosa was done in 1984 by Katherine Plummer in the journal Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan.

Richard F. Szippl, a long time resident of Japan, was approached by Dr. Muramatsu Suzuki who asked for his cooperation in translating the book when a former high school teacher discovered the original manuscript in 2000. The new edition was to be published on the occasion of the 2005 World Exposition which was to be held in Aichi Prefecture, Jukichi being a native of the area.

Although the title translates to A Captain’s Diary, the book is not written in diary form. It is written in the style of a story “as told to” someone. It may seem like a tall tale as Jukichi relates to Ikeda how his ship’s rudder was damaged in a storm and then set adrift. He relates how his crew thought about taking their own lives and how he tried to remain positive in such a dire situation. 

Jukichi’s experience on the high seas is just as interesting as the stories he tells of eating pork and beef for the first time, of meeting other foreigners, such as the Russians and Americans. His return to Japan seemed to be more tragic as the isolationist goverment held him under suspicion and often received the same treatment as a common criminal would. 

It is an inspiring story of surviving against all odds. One man who had to face the wrath of nature, the near mutiny of his crew, and of his own despair. And yet, something, or some power, pushed him to survive at all costs and make it back to his home and to his wife. It is a story that will make you appreciate what you already have. No matter how bad things may seem, there are always others who have suffered more than we can imagine, like Jukichi. ~Ernie Hoyt