Masquerade by Mike Fu (Tin House)

Anyone who has made a round-trip flight across the Pacific knows the price exacted by these hours on a plane. The traveler often loses control of ordinary life at the end of these journeys, sleeping and waking at times far from one’s normal schedule, feeling ravenous hunger at four in the morning, finding the world at large has taken on an unfamiliar, almost hallucinatory, cast. “A legal drug,” Pico Iyer has called jet lag and when mixed with illegal ones or even alcohol, it removes even more controls.

Meadow Liu is well acquainted with jet lag. He’s been flying back and forth between the U.S. and Shanghai once or twice a year since he was ten years old. Even so he’s always felt that “he’s lost a piece of himself on these journeys” and on this latest one he has the feeling that not only is he “intensely disconnected” from everything he knows, he’s become “31 going on 13”.

He has many reasons to feel this way. His entire life has become a liminal space. He was given a job as bartender in a hip Brooklyn hangout after he abandoned his academic career. He was forced to move from his apartment and is now plant-sitting for Selma, an artist who is so perfect she seems like a “splendid illusion.” He was recently ghosted by a man who seemed to be the perfect boyfriend until he vanished without a word of explanation. To cope with his floating existence, Meadow drinks a lot and takes every drug that comes his way.

To complicate things even more, while searching for his passport several hours before his flight, he comes across an old book on Selma’s shelves. Drawn to it because the author and he have the same name, he’s intrigued that the story takes place in Shanghai, where he himself is going. Tossing it into his carry-on, he forgets about it in the flurry of living with his parents as their temporary guest and making contact with Selma who is here to launch an art show.

When he dips into the novel that he borrowed, he’s surprised that he and the narrator seem to be living parallel lives, with each of them attending decadent Shanghai parties. Things become stranger when he returns to Brooklyn. The book disappears and resurfaces at odd intervals. A man who shows up at closing time in Meadow’s workplace warns him to “pay attention to symbols,” an admonition that he later finds is also given to the narrator of the peculiar book.  Before this warning is given, Meadow finds a white switchblade that’s been left behind on one of the bar’s tables. The same knife is given to the narrator in the novel.

Selma has mysteriously vanished from Shanghai so Meadow is unable to ask her about the eerie coincidences that he’s found in the book that she owns. Meanwhile his life becomes increasingly bizarre, with a bedroom mirror almost liquefying as he stands before it one sleepless night. He’s followed by strangers as he makes his way through New York. Awakened by pounding on the apartment door one night, he looks out through the peephole and sees Selma standing there, only to have her disappear from view. Confronted with someone who looks disturbingly like him, Meadow follows his double who leads him to an off-off-Broadway theater. A poster near the theater’s entrance has photos of the actors. One of them is the man who ghosted Meadow.

And as his life becomes increasingly unhinged, Meadow finds it’s being replicated, page by page,  in the novel written by the man who shares his name.

Is this being scripted and manipulated by Selma, a woman who has always been enigmatic or is Meadow immersed in a form of psychosis that he’s nourished with cocktails, drugs, and jet lag? Is this a puzzle he’s meant to solve or is it a temporary state, a “translucent jelly,” that will eventually fade away?

Mike Fu is a translator based in Japan who in 2019 translated Sanmao’s classic travelogue, Stories of the Sahara (Asia by the Book, April 2021)  into English. Masquerade is his first novel, one into which he seems to have poured everything he’s ever observed and experienced. A smart writer and a skillful observer, Fu’s gift of creating atmosphere along with his well-turned phrases (“thunder purred with the malice of a sleeping cat”) make this book a compelling one—with an annoying ending.  As the narrator of the novel within this novel concludes, “If any trace of doubt remains--then write this story anew.” Every reader of Masquerade is given a chance to create their own explanation, their own end to the story.~Janet Brown

Landbridge: life in fragments by Y-Dang Troeng (Duke University Press)

Y-Dang Troeng was born in the safety of a refugee camp, to parents who had made the perilous journey over the Thai border to escape from the Samay-a-Pot, the Pol Pot Time. With their daughter’s birth coming a month after they had arrived in the camp called Khao-I-Dang, they gave their baby that name. This meant that Y-Dang carried a story before she could talk, which she finds is both a burden and a gift.

Eleven months later her parents were given asylum in Canada and Y-Dang grew up surrounded by “Alice Munro country,” in the shadow of a writer who brought grim stories under an unsparing light. But when Y-Dang is old enough to tell her own story and that of her parents who had lived under “the ruination of wartime,” she finds other people have told it already. Many of these people have researched it, studied it, and given it an academic cast. But they didn’t live it.

Those who have lived it write about their history in a particular form, in memoir that tears at the heart and carries a narrative. When Y-Dang, who is herself an academic, an Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of British Columbia, finds that her voice demands a different form of expression, her writing is rejected.

When she tells her own story, “theory, fiction, autobiography blur through allusive fragments.” When she attends an international conference on genocide studies in Phnom Penh, she listens to Western intellectuals explain “Cambodia’s history to me and to other Cambodians.” When she goes to the trial of Cambodian war criminals and hears the verdict that states the Khmer Rouge leaders are “guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide,’ she wonders if the Americans who sent bombers to her country will ever be brought to justice. When she hears a Westerner discuss “who gets to decide who gets to be a victim,” as the speaker stands before the faces of three girls who died in the Khmer Rouge prison of Tuol Sleng, girls whose faces have been photocopied from the photographic record of those who died in that place, she’s sickened that these faces are being used as “background wallpaper for this woman’s presentation.” When she and her mother go to Tuol Sleng, her mother finds her brother’s picture hanging on the wall, taken before his death,  by a Khmer Rouge photographer who was given the job of documenting who the prisoners were.

Her parents and others who came to Canada were also photographed as they got off the plane, “smiling in the blistering cold.” They had to smile. They were being met by beaming politicians who welcomed them without ever acknowledging what the Cambodians had lost in their decision to leave their own country. They were people who smiled in spite of baksbat, broken courage or broken form, their smiles made possible by kamleang chet, the strength of the heart. 

When Y-Dang approaches their histories and their lives as refugees, the pain of it forces her to write it in fragments. When her own story becomes consumed by her cancer diagnosis, she charts it through letters to her young son. She refuses “to be silenced, letting other people tell {her} story.”  She wonders “if I would ever find the level of stability of body and mind required to write my family’s own story?” She reflects on the word “asylum,” “a word that evokes “comfort as much as it does madness,” “a sanctuary for the displaced and a ward for the mentally ill.” It is, she says, the “one English word that I rely upon to understand my family’s history…It is so precise.”

Precision is what governs Landbridge, in its short and brilliant essays that were written in haste but with extreme care.  The book is Y-Dang’s legacy. Diagnosed with cancer in 2021, she died in 2022. Landbridge was published in 2023.

Y-Dang Troeng was unable to hold her own story in her hands but she triumphed. She told it in her own way, on her own terms.~Janet Brown

Rental House by Weike Wang ( Riverhead Books)

On their way to Martha’s Vineyard where they’ll be steps away from the ocean in a cottage with a guestroom, Nate and Keru have the sort of marriage everyone dreams of. Young professionals who live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, they’ve emerged from the isolation of the pandemic ready for a vacation. There’s only one glitch--their parents.

Both Nate and Keru are “first-gen” graduates of Yale. Nate is the son of rural parents who marvel that he’s made it “from Appalachia to the Ivy League,” or as Nate puts it “from white trash to the White House.” Keru is the only child of successful parents who immigrated from rural China when she was still a baby, who regard her as their “built-in translator.” While Nate’s parents feel dubious about Keru’s US citizenship, Keru’s parents treat Nate like “the store clerk at their favorite TJ Maxx, a person they recognized and smiled at.” 

Within the framework of this marriage, Weike Wang has created a scathing comedy of manners. Keru’s parents visit with their Chinese cultural standards unchanged by their American lives. Nate is told by his father-in-law that using a dishwasher is fine for him but not for Keru. “To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat.” Keru’s mother, while watching a TV program about upscale real estate transactions, remarks that “they make deals look too easy. Where’s the suffering?” 

When the votes are finally counted in the 2016 election, Nate is crushed by his parents’ choice of candidate while Keru’s mother points out that having a president in office for eight years is nothing compared to “an entire childhood spent under Chairman Mao.” 

When Keru first meets Nate’s parents, it’s at a Yale gathering where almost all of the mothers are garbed in floral print dresses and wearing floppy sun hats. “How do you tell any of them apart?” Keru asks Nate as they approach her future mother-in-law. She’s amazed at “how innocuous the conversation can get” and wonders if all white families chirp at each other “like a set of affable birds.”

When their parents age, Nate and Keru no longer have them as part of their vacation. Instead they meet a couple at an Adirondacks retreat who have come to New York from Romania. An affluent expat, the husband immediately offers up his Brooklyn zip code as a status marker and nods approvingly when Nate provides the one in which he and Keru live. Swiftly the Romanian couple establish their point of view--napping schedules are scrupulously adhered to when the wife is ovulating—and they identify Nate and Keru as DINKs, Double Income No Kids. The epithet becomes an attack on Nate and Keru’s enviable life as the Romanian husband advises them to become expats themselves. “Even a few months will give you a better perspective.”

If Jane Austen were alive in the 21st Century, this is a book she might have written. Satirical without carrying a vicious bite, Rental House is a novel that evokes startled laughter on one page and uncomfortable squirming on the next. Under Wang’s lens, marriage, families, race, and class are artfully dissected and recast in a different light, one that’s sometimes uncomfortable but that’s been needed for a very long time.~Janet Brown

Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka, translated by Sam Melissa (Vintage)

Bullet Train is the third book in Kotaro Isaka’s Hitman series which includes Three Assassins, Mantis (Asia by the Book, September 2024), and Hotel Lucky Seven. It was originally published as マリアビートル (Maria Beetle) in 2010 by Kadokawa Shoten. It was adapted into a stage play in Japan in 2018 and also adapted into a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt. 

I had watched the Hollywood movie and was excited to read the book in English which was translated by Sam Melissa who also translated Mantis. I wanted to see how closely the movie adaptation followed Isaka’s book. 

A former hitman boards the Tohoku Shinkansen “Hayate” at Tokyo Station which is bound for Morioko in Iwate Prefecture. He is determined to take revenge against a teenager named Satoshi Oji whose nickname is the Prince.  The Prince had pushed Kimura’s son, Wataru, off the roof of a department just for fun. 

Unknown to Kimura, the Prince has lured him onto the shinkansen knowing full well that Kimura wants to take revenge. Fourteen-year-old Satoshi is no ordinary teenager. He is a sociopath who enjoys manipulating people. Before Kimura can shoot the boy, he is tasered and when he wakes up, he is bound hand and foot. 

The Prince tells Kimura that he has an acquaintance watching over Wataru and if anything should happen to him, Kimura’s son will be in danger. Kimura has no choice but to do the Prince’s bidding. 

On the same train are two professional hitmen, Lemon and Tangerine. Tangerine loves books and is well read while Lemon is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends. They’ve been hired by a ruthless Yakuza boss named Yoshio Minegishi, to rescue his kidnapped son and to bring back the suitcase full of ransom money to Morioka.  

Lemon has stashed the suitcase away but when he goes to retrieve it, the suitcase is missing. As Lemon takes his time coming back to his seat, Tangerine goes to check on his partner. When the pair come back to their seat,s they discover Minegishi’s son is dead!

Also boarding the train is yet another hitman. His name is Nanao but has the codename “Ladybug”. Although his last few assignments have been successful, something always goes awry. His handler, Maria, decided to get him an easy job. All he has to do is steal a suitcase of money and get off at the next station. 

The job seems simple enough. Ladybug finds the suitcase, which happens to be the suitcase that Lemon and Tangerine were to return to Minegishi. Just as he is about to step off the train, he is confronted by another hitman, “The Wolf” who has a vendetta against Ladybug. 

In a scuffle between Ladybug and the Wolf, Ladybug gains the upper hand and has the Wolf in a chokehold. Unfortunately, the train jerks and Ladybug unintentionally breaks the Wolf’s neck. Now he has to hide a dead body and must try to get off at the next station. 

The Prince notices something odd about some of the other passengers and decides to see how he can manipulate them as well. 

Although I enjoyed the Hollywood adaption of the movie, I found the book to have more substance. The movie was one action scene after another, including heavy doses of humor. The book is not only full of action but it’s a psychological thriller as well. Isaka has created one of the most evil characters with Satoshi Oji, the Prince, a very intelligent young boy who is also a total psychopath. 

The book goes into more detail about how Kimura gets acquainted with the Prince and the events that lead to him boarding the train at Tokyo Station with the intent to kill. What really lures in the reader though is trying to decide who is going to survive. The other mystery is why are they all on the same train? Will anybody be left alive by the time the train pulls into Morioka? And who killed Minegishi’s son? You will just have to read the book to find out. ~Ernie Hoyt

My Humorous Japan Part 3 by Brian W. Powle (NHK Shuppan)

Brian W. Powle is a British citizen and teacher who taught at Aoyama Gakuin in Tokyo for many years. He has published a number of textbooks for high schools and universities and has also appeared on NHK radio and television, as well as contributing articles to newspapers. He says that he tries to be an entertainer as well as a teacher. It’s his belief that “If students can laugh and enjoy themselves while learning English, so much the better”.

My Humorous Japan Part 3 is Powle’s third book on what he finds amusing and humorous about living in Japan. As much as I would have liked to feature Parts 1 and 2, only Part 3 was available at my local library. 

Part 3 was first published in 1997 so some of the content that was current at the time of publication may seem a bit dated now. However many of the topics are still relevant today, such as school bullying and train pests, more commonly known in Japan as chikan (which is usually translated as pervert and refers to people, mostly men, who molest women on crowded trains). 

As a long-time resident of Japan myself, I find Powle’s experience quite similar to my own. His first essay in this collection is about the obatalian. The term isn’t used as often now but the actions of the obatalian haven't changed. 

So who and what are obatalians. They’re usually middle-aged women from about forty to elderly women in their eighties and nineties. Powle points out that there are many theories about the origin of the word and how some people think it should be spelt obattalion as the word combines “obasan” (aunt or older woman) and “battalion” and “we get an aggressive middle-aged lady who looks something like a fighting soldier”. 

They’re the kind of women who rush on to the train to grab the last available seat. They talk loudly in public complaining about their daughter-in-laws. They often stand and talk to their other obatalian friends in the pool, getting in the way of others who actually want to swim. They may also be tight with their husbands’ allowance. Thankfully, my wife doesn’t fit into the description of an obatalian. 

One of my favorite essays of Powles is titled My Strange Experience at a Hot Spring Resort. Japan is famous for its hot springs and ryokans (traditional Japanese inns). There’s nothing better than soaking in a hot bath to get rid of all your anxieties. Some baths may be located near a natural river or waterfall. 

Powle was telling the proprietor of the inn about how much he enjoyed the nice sound of the waterfall that made him fall blissfully asleep. However, the woman told him “that was not the sound of the waterfall. The toilet next door is out of order. The water won’t stop running. That’s what you heard”. Needless to say, Powle could not fall asleep the next evening as his perception of a nice waterfall was replaced by the image of a broken toilet!

Even today, many visitors to Japan are not sure what to make of the Japanese toilet. The old traditional squat toilets have been replaced by washlets, toilets with a computer console that some people find as confusing as the cockpit of an airplane. Imagine if you’re a man and press the button for bidet instead of oshiri (the Japanese term for your backside). 

Aside from the two essays mentioned above, the book includes sixteen other stories of Powle’s experience in Japan with titles like Why Do Foreigners Get Angry in Japanese Barbershops and A Fortune Teller Who Couldn’t Predict Her Own Death. 

It’s very light reading for the Japanophile and will give you a glimpse of what it’s like to live in Japan as seen through the eyes of a foreigner. Also, it’s just entertaining. ~Ernie Hoyt

Koan Khmer by Bunkong Tuon (Northwestern University Press)

A little boy and his extended family make their way out of Pol Pot’s Cambodian horror, going from a refugee camp to life in the U.S. where the boy grows up to become a university professor. This affirms that the American Dream is still possible, right? Not according to Samnang Sok, the leading protagonist of Koan Khmer, who asserts at the end of this novel that “my American dream was more of an American nightmare,’ one that didn’t end until after he leaves adolescence. 

A child who never knew the date of his true birthday, Samnang’s first memory is of his mother’s death when he was three. Born into a peasant family in a rural village, his Pol Pot years were spent as a naked boy in the woods,” surrounded by the natural world. Although his family were relatively unscathed by the Khmer Rouge, unlike urban, educated Cambodians whose privilege made them targets of Angkar’s rage, Samnang’s uncle and grandparents decided it would be wise to head for the Thai border and the safety of a U.N. refugee camp. The family will live in three different camps before they’re sponsored by an American minister and board a plane for the United States.

At first they’re dazed and delighted by the wonders of a washing machine, a dishwasher, a bathtub, and a television. Then slowly they begin to realize what they’ve lost. Samnang’s uncle is disheartened by the lack of farmland in this small city in Massachusetts. There’s no place for him to fish and he despairs over how he will feed his family. 

When Samnang accepts the minister’s invitation to go with him to church, he begins to realize the difference between his family and the parishioners sitting near him on a pew. When the congregation begins to pray, Samnang mutters curses in Khmer under his breath and is later praised for his piety.

Finding an apartment in an Italian neighborhood, the Sok family finds no welcome there. People whose own origins stemmed from immigrants resent the new inhabitants who evoke memories of the Vietnam War. Other boys attack Samnang for being a “gook” and he takes refuge in his schoolwork, gaining English fluency through ESL classes and TV programs. Skipping a grade, he enters high school before he enters puberty, an accomplishment that guarantees he’ll continue to be a social pariah. He stops caring about academic achievements and then stops caring about anything at all. All that he’s found in America is a state of permanent displacement.

What saves him is a chance to move to Long Beach, a city with a large and established Cambodian community. For the first time since his introduction to the U.S he hears his own language, eats his own food, moves among crowds of people who are Khmer. He walks into a library and discovers the poems of Charles Bukowski. He begins to write his own poetry, mining his own experience, and slowly his education begins, with a hunger to learn everything.

It takes years for him to recover from “growing up Cambodian in the 1980s on the East Coast.”

Samnang’s story is “based loosely” on the life of Bunkong Tuon and the stories of his family. The details that unfold in Koan Khmer are often cruel and unsparing: the physical examinations before coming to the US when modest Cambodians stand naked, powerless and humiliated while inspected by doctors; the day Samnang is spat at by a boy while he’s taking a walk with his grandfather who stares in shock at the child’s parents and is met only with a hostile gaze; the terror felt by every Asian in the Los Angeles area when Koreans are attacked during the chaos after the Rodney King verdict. If this is what comes with the American dream, then it’s long past time for us all to wake up.~Janet Brown