Tales from the Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Hanover Square Press)

A tiny cafe set in central Tokyo, Funiculi Funicula is easy to overlook, but for some it’s a destination worth traveling to. In this place, if all of the conditions are met, customers can travel back in time to see anyone they wish--provided that person had once visited this cafe. The time travel can only begin when the would-be traveler has sat in a particular chair, one that is always occupied by the same woman who leaves it only once a day, when she goes to the toilet at a time that always changes. Travel begins once a cup of coffee has been poured and must end before the coffee gets cold, and during the visit to the past, there is nothing the traveler can do that will change life in the present. If the visit doesn’t end before the coffee gets cold, the visitor can only return to the present as a ghost, sitting in the cafe forever.

One man orders his coffee because he’s been lying to his daughter for 22 years. A young man who hadn’t gone to his mother’s funeral drinks his coffee while planning to let it turn cold because he intends to stay in the past.  A homicide detective wants to give his dead wife the birthday gift he had never been able to present to her. One unusual customer travels in reverse. He comes from the past to visit the future, longing to know that the woman he loved and was unable to marry is living a happy life. Each of these stories is heartwarming but even more so is the underlying plot--the lives of the people who run the cafe. The owner, the young waitress who is his cousin, his little daughter who longs to be the server of the coffee, and the mysterious woman who chose never to return from the past become the primary focus of this charming narrative and each one of them finds a satisfying, happy ending.

A combination of fable and fairy tale with a dash of science fiction, this is a novel that comes just at the right time. It sparkles with hope and love, with a piercing question posed on the page that would usually hold a dedication: If you could go back, who would you want to meet? In this era of loss, when many people died alone without the people they loved beside them, this is a haunting thought to consider, one that has been posed in many different mediums.

Tales from the Cafe is a sequel.  Playwright Toshikazu Kawaguchi adapted one of his own plays to become a novel, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, in 2015. It then became a film, Funiculi Funicula, in 2018 and in 2021 was underway to become a television series. Kawaguchi’s underlying message--that we honor the past by seeking happiness in the present--continues to resonate and comfort, both in its original Japanese versions and in its English translations. “Spring,” he says, “hides inside winter,” a thought we need to keep in mind, especially during a winter that seems as though it will never end. ~Janet Brown

eatlip gift : COOK BOOK for COOKING PEOPLE by Yuri Nomura (Magazine House)

eatlip gift is a cookbook and photography book by food director Yuri Nomura with full color pictures taken by photographer Yurie Nagashima. Unlike most cookbooks, pictures of the food are given one or two full pages with the name of the dish and the page where you can find the recipes. The recipes are all provided at the end of the book, after the pictures. There are fifty-seven recipes in total. For each dish, Nomura also provides an amusing anecdote related to the food item. 

At the time of this writing, Yuri Nomura presided over the food creative team “Eatrip”. She went to London in 1998, after that she worked at various restaurants. In 2010, she gained a lot of experience as she was employed at the highly praised organic restaurant in Berkeley, California, Chez Panisse. Her main job now consists of working reception parties, catering, teaching cooking classes, writes a food-related column in a magazine, hosts a radio show, and does a lot of food direction for television and commercials. She also opened her own restaurant in Tokyo called [eatrip] in 2012.

Totte oki nikushiminaku tsukuru. Nomura says this is something her mother passed on to her when making food. It translates to “Make special foods without loathing.” Cook, eat, and share. This is the ideal that Nomura strives for. She has divided the book into four categories - timeless, sharing, seasons, and for you. 

In the timeless category you will find recipes for the French specialty coq-au-vin (chicken braised with wine, lardons, mushrooms, and the optional garlic), an Italian dish from Milan called osso buco (cross-cut veal shanks braised with white wine, vegetables, and broth), Russian favorites pirozhki (baked bun with a variety of fillings) and borscht (beet soup). Nomura being Japanese, she has also included recipes for chirashi-sushi (scattered sushi, as you can add any toppings to sushi rice) and gyusuji no shiro miso nikomi (stewed beef tendon by white miso).

In the sharing section, you will find recipes that would be great at parties such as cheese dip or cauliflower dip. Also featured are avocado with ricotta cheese, the Spanish favorite paella, shrimp salad with lemon dressing, fruit shortcakes, octopus tapas and more. 

Next are some seasonal dishes. As the book was published in 2010, the year of the tiger according to the Chinese zodiac, Nomura starts off with a recipe for a dish called kuri-kinton pudding. Kuri-kinton is a sweet chestnut paste with a yellowish color and says it represents the color of the tiger. Spring is the season for mimosa flowers to bloom in Japan and Nomura has a recipe for mimosa cake. She shares her recipe for corn pancakes which she remembers were made from the white corn harvested in the summer from her father’s vegetable garden. 

Finally, in the “for you” section, recipes for food and snacks to share with friends, co-workers, and more. There is a very traditional Japanese tradition called sashiire in which a person will bring snacks to a group of people, such as people working late at the office or they can be for entertainers, musicians and actors alike, who can snack on them in their dressing rooms. 

Photographer Yurie Nagashima brings all the dishes to life. Full color pictures in all their mouth-watering glory. The text for the recipes are in Japanese and the measurements for ingredients are all in the metric system but even if you don’t cook or can’t read Japanese, it is still a wonderful book to look through. Perhaps the pictures of the dishes will inspire you to create your own culinary delight. ~Ernie Hoyt

Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang (Random House)

Joan is the kind of woman who makes dinner table conversation by complimenting her host’s utensils. At 36,  she has never had a boyfriend. She has no hobbies. She has no idea who or what Seinfeld is because she doesn’t own a television. Her apartment is so spartan that when her next door neighbor sees it, he asks if she had recently been robbed. 

Under five feet tall and weighing less than one hundred pounds, Joan is easy to overlook, unless she’s at work. In the ICU of a busy Manhattan hospital, she’s the attending physician, the one who teaches and supervises the other doctors, ““the most senior person in the room.” She’s “a gunner, and a new breed of doctor, brilliant and potent, with no interests outside work and sleep,” the hospital director says approvingly. 

Neither he nor anyone around her thinks this is peculiar behavior until the day Joan asks other doctors to cover her weekend shift. Her father has had a fatal stroke in Shanghai and she needs to attend his funeral. When she returns to the hospital 48 hours later, with 32 of those hours spent in the air, both the director and the human resources department are forced to realize that this may be an excessive work commitment that “the gunner” displays. She’s told to take time off, “to reassess, recenter, release.” “It’s only six weeks,” the director assures her, “time will fly.” “I couldn’t quite picture that,” Joan decides, “unless I was put in a coma.”

“I love my brother,” she tells the director when he asks about her family, “we met in Wichita.” Like many of Joan’s statements, this is eerily true. She didn’t know she had a brother until she was four and a twelve-year-old boy showed up, her parents’ first child whom they’d left in Shanghai with relatives six years before. That elusive quality characterizes her familial relationships. The minute Joan turns eighteen and enters Harvard, her parents move back to Shanghai, “their jobs as parents complete.” `Her final visit with her father is a quick chat in the hospital cafeteria that ends before she’s finished her cup of coffee and soon after his funeral, her mother announces her unexpected US arrival in a phone call that she begins with “This is your mother. I’m having terrible jet lag.” Her brother, rich and successful,  owns a ten-acre compound in Connecticut where the grass is cut “more often than I cut my nails,” Joan observes. Their visits are filled with his nagging that she leave the hospital and take up a more lucrative private practice. “I lost my brother,” she says, “the day he decided to become my parent.”

This should by rights be a grim novel about a woman who is clearly somewhere on the spectrum, with social skills that hover around absolute zero. Instead it’s hilarious. Although Joan’s mother is scathingly accurate when she tells her daughter, “You’re a very literal person,” Joan is a woman who refuses to tolerate pretensions and who regards the world without filters. She’s smart and funny and completely devoid of self-pity. “A person of two languages and two cultures,” Joan gives a unique perspective on “the gulfs within families…the migrations we have to make…the cost of love” without pomposity or finger-pointing. She --and this book--radiate pure delight and both are absolutely, stunningly, more than okay.~Janet Brown

2:46 Aftershocks : Stories from the Japan Earthquake (Enhanced Editions Ltd.)

Next month is the twenty-first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, commonly referred to as 3-11. On March 11, 2011 at 2:46pm, a massive earthquake that registered 9.0-9.1 magnitude hit the Tohoku area of Japan. It was the most powerful quake to hit Japan and triggered a tsunami that reached a height of over one-hundred feet (over forty meters) which washed away people and their homes. The tsunami caused the disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant as well. 

2:46 Aftershocks was recorded, written and published in just over a week after the disaster.  It was the brainchild of a man living in Abiko, Chiba Prefecture. The man who calls himself Our Man in Abiko explains, “The idea for this book came out of desperation; desperation to do something for a country on its knees.”

On the morning of March 18, 2011, one week after the quake, Our Man in Abiko wrote to @fatblueman, a group who became popular for their song “Christmas in Japan” on YouTube, to start writing a song for Japan quake survivors. It was this Tweet which got him thinking, “I want to compile a book of quake experiences and publish it like within a week and donate all profits to Red Cross.” 

Our Man in Abiko created a Twitter account with the #quakebook hashtag and tweeted, “If  everyone wrote 250 words - one page - or submitted their favorite (original) tweets, pics or artworks, I could edit, publish it in days.”

People from all over the world contributed pictures, stories, illustrations, prayers, and words of hope to unite the world in helping Japan get back on its feet. Many of the stories were written by the people who were there, living and experiencing one of the world’s worst disasters. A couple of celebrities donated their time and gave support to the project including Yoko Ono and cyberpunk author William Gibson. 

The Foreword to the book was written by Barry Eisler, the creator of a half-Japanese, half-American assassin named John Rain. Eisler says, “If my books have been love letters to Japan, this one is an SOS. I’m both proud and humbled to be a part of it, to be in a position to reach others who love Japan and long for Japan so that together we can give back some of what we received, and to do something to help Japan back to her feet.”

American journalist and Japanophile Jake Adelstein rewrote an article titled Muenbotoke, a term that literally translates to ‘Buddhas without connections’. The piece was originally published in the magazine Shambhala Sun. He related the story of a double-suicide of a couple whose bodies were never claimed by anybody. This made him think of the bodies that were never recovered from the tsunami. Adelstein ends his article with “May their memories last longer than the accident that took their lives. Because remembering them is all we can do for them now and for all those who lost their lives. And in the act of remembering, hopefully we will lead better lives and remember to care for all living things. We owe the dead that much.”

According to a press release on March 9, 2021, twenty years after the quake, the official figures reported 19,747 deaths, 6,242 injured, and 2,556 people still missing. Anybody who was living in Japan at the time knows exactly where they were and what they were doing. I was living in Tokyo at the time of the disaster as well. I had taken the day off from work and was sitting on the couch with my wife. She was watching television while I was on the phone with my parents who live in the States. The room started shaking but we didn’t give it much notice as we have been through the routine many times before. But this time, the shaking wouldn’t stop and was getting stronger as well. I had to cut my call quickly as my wife and I headed out the door of our fourth floor apartment. It is definitely not an experience I wish to relive. I currently live in the Tohoku area and hope and believe that I am also contributing to its recovery. ~Ernie Hoyt

Fate: The Lost Decades of Uncle Chow Tung by Ian Hamilton (Spiderline, House of Anansi Press)

When Ian Hamilton decided it was time for Uncle to depart from the Ava Lee series, apparently he missed Ava’s mentor as much as his mournful readers did. Uncle was a power behind the throne, influential, omnipresent, and subtle. Ava asks no questions about his past, although she knows from seeing his friends and employees that the man she cares most about in the world came from shadowy beginnings. And although Uncle is her mainstay throughout the first six volumes of her adventures, neither she nor Uncle ever reveal the details of when they first met.

Piece by piece, in six books, Uncle comes into focus: where he lives, what he eats, what he wears, along with his loyalty to those who work for him, and his paternal love for Ava. From the very first Ava Lee novel Uncle is old but his network of influence spreads far beyond his Hong Kong home and his mind can understand--and withstand--the most devious acts that any human is able to conceive. When at last he was removed from the series, even though he left a younger counterpart to stand with Ava, it was enough to bring at least one devoted fan to tears. 

Prequels are usually books that are picked up with a healthy degree of apprehension and it could be easy to dismiss Fate as an opportunistic spin-off. That would be a mistake. Uncle is as fascinating and dominant a character when given the spotlight as he once was as a presiding genius on the sidelines. His life is chronicled in three volumes: Fate (2019), Foresight (2020), and Fortune (2021), carrying him from his swim from Shenzhen to Hong Kong, an adventure that cost him the love of his life, up to his meeting with the woman who would become his partner and his daughter in every way but biological. Unfortunately only Fate is available in the U.S. at this time, perhaps because of covid-spawned difficulties in the world of publishing.

Chow Tung arrived in Hong Kong with little more than enough clothes to keep him from being naked.. Within ten years he’s become the White Paper Fan, the accountant, money manager, and administrator of legal and business matters, for a branch of The Heaven and Earth Society. Also called the Hung society, named after the Chinese character that showed the union between heaven, earth, and man, this organization had been in existence since the 1760’s within China until Mao chased it out of its country. Now in Hong Kong, it’s known as the triads and has become a major power in all parts of that region. In the town of Fanling, Chow Tung’s swift rise to a level of management has made him an integral part of that area’s triad and, through his financial acumen, he’s made his branch a leading player in Hong Kong’s vast underworld. Because of his remarkable maturity at a young age and his professional formality, his associates have begun calling him “Uncle,” and what was first a joke soon becomes the name that replaces Chow Tung for everyone.

When the Mountain Master, or leader,  of the Fanling triad dies in what seems to be a random hit and run, Uncle has doubts about the ability of the man slated to become the next chief. Calling for an election by secret ballot--one man, one vote as was always the traditional method--he begins a subtle campaign to elect a more qualified candidate. But politics is never a straightforward enterprise and Uncle becomes challenged by the twists and turns involved. When a neighboring triad senses weakness and moves in to take over, Uncle’s administrative skills are stretched to the limit. How much violence can be exerted upon the problem without beginning a fullscale war that will cause a crackdown by the Hong Kong police? Fortunately Uncle is a skilled user of the bonds forged by guanxi, and his web already is a wide one. But as he learns, guanxi can exact an unexpected price, one that even he is reluctant to assume.

Ian Hamilton has done his homework. Anyone who reads Fate is going to come away with an assortment of facts about the Triads, Hong Kong’s racetracks, and traditional funeral etiquette. Even a detailed description of chicken feet, how to cook them and how to eat them, is provided in succulent detail, and Hong Kong history comes into play with the appearance of a Saracen, the armed and armored vehicle that Hong Kong police once used in dangerous situations. 

However it’s always Uncle who keeps every page turning at a rapid rate, revealing the events that shaped him and brought him into power. Ava Lee is a hard act to follow but Uncle has proved to be more than equal to the challenge. May Foresight and Fortune show up soon on U.S. bookshelves!~Janet Brown

Monsoon by Di Morrissey (Macmillan)

Monsoon by Australian author Di Morrissey is the story of two women who grew up together and have ties to Vietnam. Sandy Donaldson has been working with an NGO for the last four years and her contract is about to expire, however, she doesn’t really want to leave the country she has come to love. She persuades her friend Anna, whose mother was a Vietnamese boat person, to come and explore her mother’s heritage. Anna is reluctant to leave Australia and feels she has no ties with the country as her mother died when she was a very young girl. 

Sandy has one other connection to Vietnam. Her father, Phil Donaldson is a veteran who served in the war and was at the Battle of Long Tan, a battle that took place at a rubber plantation in Phuoc Tuy province. The clash involved Australia’s D Company, 6th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment (6 RAR) seeing action against the Viet Cong and People’s Army of Vietnam. Phil Donaldson was a member of the 6th Battalion. He comes home a bitter man and resents the fact that his daughter is helping what he still considers “the enemy”. 

I wasn’t familiar with Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, so the Battle of Long Tan was a bit of a history lesson for me. I know I may get some flack for this as it’s sexist but I would classify this story as chick-lit. It is without a doubt aimed more towards women and the romance they may find in a foreign country. However, It is also a story about coming to terms with one’s identity. 

Sandy and Anna meet Tom Ahearn, a former war correspondent for an Australian newspaper. He was in Vietnam around the same time as Sandy’s father and may have interviewed him at a hospital that housed wounded soldiers who saw action at Long Tan. 

It has been forty years since the siege at Long Tan and the government of Australia is finally giving it the recognition the soldiers thought it deserved. A ceremony is to be held and many of the surviving veterans are planning to attend. Only one person is adamant about not attending - Phil Donaldson

Monsoon is a very moving story of people facing the ghosts of their past. Phil with the demons that haunt him. Anna, coming to terms with what it means to be Viet Kieu, a foreign-born Vietnamese, and finally there is Sandy’s relationship with her father who never speaks about the war, what he saw, or what happened to him. Most of the characters are people you can care about except for Anna’s boyfriend Carlo, who seems to be a two-dimensional model of an egotistical, narcissistic specimen of machismo that’s just a bit over the top. 

Monsoon blends present day Vietnam with the memories of war and the damage it has done to both people and country. The streets of Ho Chi Minh City and Saigon and other locales come to life with Morrissey’s vivid descriptions, as does the food and the atmosphere of each city, from the World Heritage designated Halong Bay in the north to the island of Phu Quoc in the south. It’s enough to make you want to visit the country yourself.~Ernie Hoyt

Shopping by Gavin Kramer (Fourth Estate)

Gavin Kramer is a British writer who was born in London, graduated from Cambridge University. Shopping is his first novel. In 1998, it was the last book to win the David Higham Prize, a literary prize which was established in 1975 and named after a literary agent. The prize was awarded to citizens of the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland, Pakistan, or South Africa for a first novel or book of short stories. It was canceled in 1999 due to "the lack of publicity its winners received."

Kramer set his story in the heart of Japan. The metropolis that’s called Tokyo in the mid to late nineties. The bubble has already burst but there are still three types of foreigners you can find in the country or so we are told by the narrator of the story who isn’t even the main character. That falls on Alistair Meadowlark, a British lawyer in his thirties who has accepted a two-year assignment in Japan with his firm. The narrator is Meadowlark’s colleague in the same office. 

Meadowlark’s colleague breaks down the category of young professional expatriates working in Tokyo. He does not include the other expats such as English conversation school teachers or students. He also discludes “the shaven-headed failures who fancied themselves to be Buddhists.” He also does not include the most-despised group of expats, “the slight dark-skinned men who worked on building sites and lived maybe a dozen to a room in the back streets of Shinjuku.”

Of the three categories of professional expatriates, Meadowlark’s colleague believes that Meadowlark belongs to the first group. The kind of person who is in the country not because they want to be but because their company sent them here. The type of person who constantly suffers from culture shock and longs to go home. 

The second type are the graduates of the first. Although they still feel out of place, many of the white men in suits take solace in dating or hooking up with local girls who find foreigners fascinating. They can usually be found wandering the night clubs and bars in Roppongi. 

Then there is the third, to which the narrator considers himself to be. The kind of expat who avoids places that most gaijin, the catch-all term for all foreigners, hang out. The kind of expat whom the narrator says, “We knew our tanzen from our yukata, Our Dazai from our Mishima, our udon from our soba.” So the narrator wasn’t surprised by Meadowlark’s assessment of living and working in Tokyo when he says, “There’s nothing to do here apart from work. Is there?”

But then we follow Meadowlark’s downward spiral as he meets Sachiko. A precocious sixteen-year old high school girl who’s very much into the latest fashions and brand names. Meadowlark becomes obsessed with her and boasts to the narrator that she is his girlfriend and he is more than happy to spend his hard-earned money on whatever she wants. He is in denial of the fact that is just another middle-aged man taking part in a social phenomena of the nineties called enjo-kosai which translates to “compensating dating”. 

Kramer brings to life the excesses of living in Tokyo in the mid to late nineties as seen through the eyes of someone who has actually lived there. He focuses a lot on what was happening during that nineties - the “subsidized dating” problem with minors, the tamagotchi fad which was a hand-held digital pet. Although the city and its environs are well-described, his characters are not flushed out quite so well. They remain two-dimensional which makes it hard for the reader to care about any of them. Still, if you plan on living and working in Japan, this story could provide you with some insight as to what to expect. ~Ernie Hoyt

Around India in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh (Nicholas Brealey Publishers, Hachette UK)

“London had never looked so grey,” as it did on the day Monisha Rajesh decides to travel through India by train--on 80 of them, in honor of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. More than 20 million passengers travel that way in India every day, along routes that stretch for 64,000 kilometres, so she figures her dream is possible. 

Rajesh’s parents both came to England from India as doctors. “Two children and fifteen years later,” her family tried to resettle in Madras but when her father discovered that the hospital he worked in did a flourishing business in selling the hearts of dead patients, he decided this wasn’t a place where he wanted his children to grow up. That two-year stint was all Rajesh had experienced of India. Now she prudently decides that if she’s going to explore the country the way she plans, she needs a traveling companion and settles on a young Norwegian photographer who (for reasons of discretion) she refers to as Passepartout (the name Verne gave Phileas Fogg’s comrade in the 80-day journey).

Although they miss their first train in Chennai, Rajesh has an uncle who assures her “Leave it to me, my dear,” and finds them seats on what she calls The Insomnia Express. This is only the first of many sleepless nights enhanced by snores from neighboring bunks and itchy blankets that come in a paper bag wrapping. Passepartout quickly discovers the black coffee that he requires every morning is hard to come by in the land of chai and makes the mistake of cooling a prized cup of his favorite brew with a dribble of tap water. Rajesh learns that her basic Hindi leaves her prey to questions of whether she and her comrade are married and why her father allows her to travel as she does. “To be honest, “ she says, “the only place where I feel like a foreigner is in India,” where she’s immediately pegged as an NRI, non-resident Indian.

Part of that foreign identity is probably because she’s traveling with Passepartout. When a bitter skirmish over Indian temples and belief causes them to go in separate directions, Rajesh becomes accepted by her fellow passengers and the solitary journey she feared is essentially nonexistent. “On the rare occasions you find yourself alone in India, it is never for long.” In a compartment with three strange men for 28 hours, by the time the first meal appears, it’s “like eating with family.” “You haven’t eaten very much,” the men chide her in tones reminiscent of her mother, “By Indian standards, you are very underweight.”

By the end of her four-month journey of 40,000 kilometers on 80 trains, (all listed at the beginning of her book), she disembarks at her starting point, back in Chennai, and happily allows the crowd “to sweep me into its embrace.”

Rajesh’s crisply written descriptions range from the unsparing to the lyrical. From the “worst hotel in India,” which gives a new dimension to squalor, to the grand luxury of the Indian Maharajah-Deccan Odyssey, “a five-star cruise on wheels” that whisks passengers through India at night like “a luxury Tardis,” her experiences are recounted in a lively and humorous fashion that never falters. Whether she wakes to find a hand groping her, which she circumvents by swiftly changing bunks with Passepartout, gleefully imagining that hand fondling “a tired and grumpy Norwegian” or hears the familiar voices of her best friend’s Cambridge parents soon after she begins her first solitary train trip in tears, Rajesh takes it all in stride. 

Her conversations with strangers are illuminating and delightful, even when a man tells her without rancor that she’s a very selfish person, adding “Why are you caring if I am telling such a thing,” and then presents her with a translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. Another one scolds her, “You have traveled on 64 trains and you still don’t know how to make a bed.” After doing that for her in the proper fashion, he gives her a tutorial on the meaning of the numbers painted on each car that gives the age of the carriage. “It was like learning a secret handshake.”

India comes alive under her skillful writing--rain that’s “the kind that lacerates human skin” and mixes “mud and stone into a paste of Rocky Road ice cream,” “halos of light from candles in doorways,” a train that looks like a “metallic version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, “mynahs muttering quietly to themselves as the sky took on an eerie orange glow” at dusk. 

Rajesh is the perfect traveling companion. Even if it’s impossible to accompany her while eating chicken lollipops, drinking Thums Up, and discussing the palanquin carriers’ strike, buying an IndRail pass and carrying her book as a guide seem to be the only sane response to this absorbing work of travel literature. Reaching its end prompts the sentiment voiced by a New Delhi ticket agent, “Oh God…where are you going now?” To discover the answer, a quest for Rajesh’s Around the World in 80 Trains is the next step--I can’t wait to find it and go off with her on another journey.~Janet Brown 

Ava Lee: The Triad Years : A Series by Ian Hamilton (House of Anansi Press)

Ava Lee isn’t the kind of woman to work her way up a corporate ladder, although her skill as a forensic accountant would guarantee a swift ascent.  Her university degree has given her a marketable career but she’s more devoted to the practice of bak mei, a subtle and deadly form of martial arts that’s taught her how to kill with one of her knuckles. 

While working at a Canadian firm, Ava meets an elderly man from Hong Kong whom everyone calls Uncle. Impressed by her accounting talents, he offers her the chance to join forces with him as a “debt collector.” 

As humble as this sounds,the work actually involves the recovery of missing money--and lots of it. Uncle is only interested in jobs that involve sums of at least twenty million dollars US and his fee is 30% of what’s recovered, which in one case brought him one-third of 80 million dollars. His background is shadowy and the people he employs are rough around the edges. He needs Ava’s beauty and professional polish to get the jobs that will be most lucrative, and Ava is drawn to the variety and challenge of the work that Uncle can provide.

A deep affinity begins to take root between the septuagenarian who once swam from the coast of China to begin a new life in Hong Kong and the young Chinese Canadian woman who has a comfortable existence in Toronto but welcomes difficult jobs that come with a threat of danger. Uncle discovers that Ava can hold her own against the burliest goons that are brought to bear against her and Ava finds a smart and kindly mentor whom her distant father has failed to be. 

A woman with her own style, Ava begins each job dressed in crisp Brooks Brothers shirts, black linen slacks or pencil skirts, and conservative black pumps, enlivened by jade cufflinks, a simple gold chain that holds a small crucifix, a Cartier Tank Francaise watch, and the ivory chignon pin that has become her good luck charm. These details are far from trivial. The clothes aren’t just a uniform,  they’re armor, in good taste with a dash of luxury, but unobtrusive. When Ava’s dressed for work, nobody can guess that she’s also dressed to kill, professionally and literally. Small and slender, Ava is easily underestimated and she uses this as one of her primary weapons.

Uncle finds the jobs, through contacts from a subterranean life that Ava never asks about. She’s the one who’s the public face of their enterprise, who can gain entry to the highest levels of any world she needs to access, but who can also render an assailant helpless with one quick and strategically placed blow. Men hold no menace for Ava, nor any attraction either. She prefers women.

Her adventures become addictive and luckily there are many of them, recounted in fourteen books to date, beginning with The Water Rat of Wanchai and most recently found in The Diamond Queen of Singapore. The earliest volumes slowly unveil the world of Hong Kong’s triads, complete with a flow chart of their structure. Within that framework are detailed looks at the business of art forgery, the gambling worlds of Las Vegas and Macau, international money laundering, and the complexities of the seafood industry.  All of these settings involve sums of money that are almost unimaginably huge, a whole lot of violence, and a staggering amount of travel. Ava Lee books first class air tickets the way other people jump on a city bus. 

Hong Kong, Metro Manila, Surabaya, London, Shanghai, Las Vegas--wherever she goes, Ava’s destinations, along with the meals she has when she gets there, are described in mouthwatering detail, giving Lonely Planet guides a run for their money. A walk though one of those cities is charted carefully enough that any reader could follow in Ava’s footsteps and reach her destination--and because Ian Hamilton is such a good writer, many of them are going to want to do that.

Hamilton became an author after a long and varied career in over thirty different countries, with positions ranging from journalist to Canadian consul to international businessman whose specialty was runnning seafood companies. Obviously his journalism training in taking notes has served him well as a novelist but his talent goes way beyond that of a painstaking observer. His novels abound in descriptions that are both witty and evocative. “He looked like a garden gnome in a suit,” is the way he introduces one of his most repulsive characters and he pinpoints the prevailing odor of Southeast Asia with “The air was humid, thick with the smell of cooking oil, rotting vegetation, exhaust fumes, and garbage.” (Mmmm, I can smell it now.)

“People always do the right thing for the wrong reason,” Uncle frequently reminds Ava. It’s certainly true when it comes to this series. One book picked up to kill time in an airport is going to take the reader on a multi-volumed literary rollercoaster ride, one that’s going to give them more pleasure (and information) than they ever expected to find. Enlaced within Ava’s adventures are facts: the splendor of Surabaya’s Majapahit Hotel (“better than Raffles”), how long it takes for flunitrazepam to kick in (popularly known as roofies), who the Ndrangheta are and where they come from, the delights to be found in the Arab quarter in of Surabaya,  which kretek (Indonesian clove cigarettes) are the most expensive and the best,  the importance of an Italian collar on a well-made shirt--and all of that in a single book (The Scottish Banker of  Surabaya. Perhaps none of these tidbits are essential to know, but they open new windows into unknown corners, and that’s indisputably essential.

However these books come with a caveat. Anyone who ventures into Ava Lee’s territory will probably end up with her primary addiction--cups of Starbucks Via Instant Coffee. While her preferences for Cartier, Shanghai Tang, and five-star hotels may be out of reach for most of us, Via can be found all over the world at prices anybody can afford. Prepare to succumb to the inevitable. ~Janet Brown

The 13th House by Adam Zameenzad (Fourth Estate)

“Traditionally The Twelve Houses of the Zodiac are called mundane houses because they refer to every day life on earth activities.”

“Not much is said about The Thirteenth House”.

The 13th House is narrated by an unnamed person in the beginning. As the story progresses, we learn the narrator is someone close to Zahid. The narrator is the son of the man Zahid’s father worked for and embezzled from. It is the narrator who makes the story flow as he describes Zahid’s descent into his own private hell. We also learn the complicated story of the narrator as he also becomes a victim of the “Thirteenth House”.

As the narrator explains it, the Thirteenth House is “the house of perpetual pain and therefore no pain; the house of perpetual darkness and therefore no darkness; the house of perpetual despair and therefore no despair.”

So begins Adam Zameenzad’s story of a man named Zahid who has suffered much in life. He doesn’t understand his wife Jamila, he lost his first two sons at an early age, he is trod upon by his employer, and the political situation in Pakistan where he now resides is not one of peace and harmony. 

Zahid has two other children - a seven-year old daughter named Azra and a four-year old son who is not named in the novel and doesn’t seem to be quite normal. His parents had already passed away. He remembers his father as a kind and gentle man but ran away from home with a woman of “ill-repute” and was also discovered to have embezzled money from his employer. His mother was a hard-worker bringing up five children on her own and “would slap him each time he asked for anything, and advised him in a hard, grating voice to go and get it from his good-for-nothing thief of a father, wherever he was.” 

Zahid feels that his luck is about to change. He has found a new home to rent in a nice neighborhood in Karachi. A larger house than the room he currently lives in with his wife and two children. The joys of moving into a larger home and at a bargain price. So what if there are ‘stories’ about the house. What could go wrong? In Japan, this house would be considered a wake ari bukken which is a “discounted property due to special circumstances”, a stigmatized property.

Zahid was not bothered by what people said about the house. It took him a little while to convince his wife that it was the right thing to do for the family. She reluctantly gives into his wishes even though she believes the house contains some evil power.

What happens in the house is enough to make anyone believe that it is “evil”. A good friend is shot by the police in the home, Zahid’s wife is seduced by some religious guru, and most shocking of all, is what happens to the narrator and Zahid himself. 

This is Adam Zameenzad’s first novel. He is a Pakistani-born British writer. He was born and educated in Pakistan, lived in Kenya, Canada, and the U.S. before moving to the U.K. He has created a novel that makes you think of the absurdities of life and how people blame it on superstitions and other supernatural suppositions. It is you, the reader, to decide, was it just bad luck and misfortune that fell upon Zahid or did he bring it upon himself as an unwitting pawn in the circle of life. ~Ernie Hoyt

Hiromix Works (Rockin' On)

Hiromix is the pseudonym for Hiromi Toshikawa who was born in Tokyo’s Suginami Ward in 1976. She is a multi-talented individual who is mainly known for being a Japanese photographer.  She is also a writer, DJ, model, artist, and musician.

As a high school student, Hiromix took part in being a hishatai (a subject for photography, not to be confused with being a model), for Nobuyoshi Araki. At the shoot, she met Araki’s then assistant Takashi Homma, who has become a famous photographer in his own right. It was Araki and Homma who inspired her to take pictures on her own.

In 1995, she won the New Cosmos of Photography Award, an award sponsored by Canon. The youngest person to do so. The award was established in 1991 and is “Canon’s cultural support project to discover, nurture, and support new photographers pursuing new possibilities in creative photographic expression”. Hiromix was nominated by world-renowned Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki for her series of pictures titled Seventeen Girl Days which depicts life from a teen’s point of view. 

After winning the award, Hiromix has gone on to publish nine books of photography between the years of 1995 and 2005. She became known outside of Japan with the publication of her book Hiromix by Steidl in 1998 which was edited by French photography critic Patric Remy. She also won Germany’s Kodak Photo Prize in the same year. 

Hiromix Works is a collection of her full-color photographs taken between the years 1995 and 1999. Her subjects range from musicians to models, actors to artists and illustrators. All the pictures are candid shots and have a very casual feel to them. Some of the featured subjects have become known in the West as well such as actor Tadanobu Asano and designer Nigo, creator of fashion brand A Bathing Ape. Other photos are of ordinary everyday items such as a rack of bowling balls, pizza, a school bag, a shelf full of masks and more. 

Hiromix could be looked upon as the Annie Leibovitz of the East as her pictures are often used in music and fashion magazines such as Rockin’ On Japan, Men’s Non-No, Cosmopolitan, and Cutie to name a few. Her works also feature international recording artists such as The Beastie Boys, Marilyn Manson, Sean Lennon, and Skunk Anansie. 

Being an amateur photographer myself, there was a time when I was hooked on buying photography and coffee table books by a variety of photographers. I had picked up Hiromix Works shortly after its publication but only recognized a few faces. All the others were like Japanese citizens to me. 

After living in Japan for well over twenty-five years, I decided to revisit Hiromix Works to see how her pictures stand up today. I am glad to say they are great now just as they were when this book was first published. On a more positive side, I now recognize almost all of the subjects of her pictures including Hiromix’s self-portraits. 

I still enjoy taking pictures but I’m not confident enough to make them public. I admire people who pursue their dreams and become successful. Hats off to Hiromix and others! ~Ernie Hoyt

Mother Land by Leah Franqui (HarperCollins)

When Rachel Meyer opens the door of her apartment, she expects to find the vegetable seller, bringing produce and a bout of linguistic frustration.  Instead she sees her husband’s mother with a suitcase, waiting to enter and stay, and she knows disaster has arrived.

Newly married to a Kolkata man who has chosen to return to India, Rachel is a New York woman who’s thoroughly befuddled by Mumbai. Her Hindi phrasebook is almost useless because the people she interacts with speak Marathi. When she ventures out to buy food in the local market, she’s assailed with embarrassment and incompetence. When she goes out to explore the city, she’s faced with inexplicable chaos on every sidewalk. Her apartment is her only refuge and now that’s been invaded by a woman she barely knows, one who says she’s left her own home and intends to stay forever.

Floundering in a new country that baffles her, Rachel has ceded all decisions to her husband but this is too much. Suddenly the culture that’s thoroughly shocked her is in her bedroom, taking over, and her husband is acquiescent. After all, this is his mother and this is India. Blithely he takes off on an extended business trip, leaving Rachel with a problem that’s apparently her own.

Sometimes all that’s expected of a book is comfortable entertainment. Mother Land is the perfect antidote to winter’s darkness and the mind-boggling, apocalyptic speculative fiction of The Three-Body Problem trilogy. While it would be unfair to characterize the story of Rachel and her mother-in-law as chick lit; it’s definitely a warm-bath book, with a delightful twist at its end. Yet it’s more than that. It’s an insightful examination of culture shock in different forms--Rachel’s, her mother-in-law’s, and that of other Mumbai transplants with varying nationalities.  

Leah Franqui knows her fictional territory. Her home is Mumbai where she, like Rachel, is  married to a man from Kolkata. A self-proclaimed Puerto Rican-Jewish Philadelphia native and Yale graduate, she undoubtedly endured much of what Rachel suffers, but, as Franqui makes clear in her acknowledgments, without the intrusive mother-in-law. Her life in Mumbai gives depth and richness to Rachel’s, making this novel an illuminating, realistic, and occasionally satirical view of expat life in that city.

Rachel makes the classic rookie mistake by withdrawing from her new city and taking refuge in a world she can control, within her own apartment. Outside she spends “long afternoons, lost, aching with heat,” discovering that “the business she was trying to find had moved, or she had passed it twelve times, or that it had never existed at all.” “The crushing, bustling masses” and the cacophony of horns, bicycle bells, and cries from vendors that assail her on the streets lead her to conclude that New York “was a ghost town compared to Mumbai.” She stays home and amuses herself by cooking, until her privacy is invaded by the culture she’s hiding from.

As Rachel is forced out of her sanctuary, her tolerance for noise and crowds increases. At one of those ubiquitous gatherings of expat wives, the kind that lapses swiftly into criticisms of “them” as opposed to “us,” Rachel’s back goes up and her perspective takes on a new cast. Gradually she and her mother-in-law both begin to examine the concept of “home,” with startling results.

Anyone who has ever lived in another country, or who’s dreamed of doing that, needs to read Mother Land. While its setting is specific and stunningly descriptive, its stumbling blocks go beyond India’s boundaries. Entertaining? By all means, but it also provides a realistic guide to expat life anywhere in the world while presenting smart and seductive insights into one of the world’s great cities. ~Janet Brown

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