The Many Daughters of Afong Moy by Jamie Ford (Atria Books)

I may be the only bookworm in the Pacific Northwest who has never read Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet and it’s all his great-grandfather’s fault. If Min Chung hadn’t changed his surname to Ford when he arrived in San Francisco from Hoiping, China back in 1865, I would never have unfairly categorized Jamie Ford as just another white guy following in the pathway of Snow Falling on Cedars. Since both David Guterson and Ford focused on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, with Ford speaking through the viewpoint of a first-generation Chinese boy, that wasn’t an unfair assessment on my part--except Jamie Ford isn’t just another white guy. He contains the genetic legacy that makes Chinese American history his own.

In The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, Ford blends history with genetics--and the result is fascinating. What threatens to become an ordinary family saga of fiction based on fact is given an intriguing depth with its interweaving of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, a theory that borders on science fiction but is based on reputable scientific research. Memories rooted in emotion and stored in the brain are capable of causing changes in DNA and can be passed on to future generations. Descendants of Holocaust survivors can inherit depression and anxiety spawned by memories of trauma that they have never experienced themselves. As Dorothy Moy, a descendant of Ahfong Moy, is told by a scientist, “We’re not individual flowers…we’re perennial. A part of us comes back each season, carrying a bit of the genus of the previous floret.”

Seven generations spin through this novel, appearing, fading, and reappearing like the bits of memory that tease and puzzle the descendants of Afong Moy. Based upon historical fact, Afong arrives in America at a time when Chinese women are banned from entering the U.S. Afong is allowed entry because she falls under the category of exotic curiosity, to be displayed in theaters in front of a crowd that has paid to see her. Her story ends in an alley where she dies in childbirth, a woman whose life is as stunted and tragic as her broken bound feet. 

Ahfong’s unhappiness and blighted love life are replicated over and over in her female descendants. None of them find love. Each of them bears a daughter whose father was a matter of random choice; all are driven by the “broken compass of her heart.”

In 2045, the city of Seattle is bludgeoned by ARk-Storms, vicious typhoons that sweep in from the Pacific at 110 miles per hour, flooding the streets and shaking skyscrapers. In the middle of environmental turmoil, Dorothy Moy is racked by her own mental storms that she can’t understand. When she sees her little daughter drawing the same strange images that she drew as a child, Dorothy follows her therapist’s advice and explores a controversial new form of treatment, one that believes present-day difficulties may have been spawned by inherited memories. If the past memories can be changed, so can the behavior that is troublesome now.

From the plague-ridden city of San Francisco in the 1890s to England’s experimental and bohemian school of Summerhill in the 1920s, from a nursing hospital in the middle of World War II to a booming tech business in the beginning of the 21st century, Afong’s “daughters” meet and lose the men who bring them happiness. Their tragedies echo and repeat themselves in kaleidoscopic glimpses that become almost unbearable to read. Although the ending is one that’s rooted entirely in speculative fiction, it’s so welcome that nobody could ever criticize it.

Jamie Ford has written a novel that all but demands more than one reading, if only to see how he manages to fit those puzzle pieces together. He provides a bounty of research titles for anyone who wants more information about epigenetics, ARk-Storms, and the history that each “daughter” lives through, making this novel a portal into other times and an introduction to other ways of looking at memory.~Janet Brown

The Curse of Kim's Daughters by Park Kyong-ni, translated by Choonwan Knag, Myung-hee Lee, Kay Ho Lee, and S. Keyron McDermott (Homa & Sekey Books)

Park Kyong-ni is one of South Korea’s most prominent writers. Her best known work is her ten-volume epic Land which started as a serial publication in a literary magazine called Modern Literature. The story debuted in the September 1969 issue. It took her twenty-five years to complete. The theme focuses on ordinary Korean people’s lives spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth-century, through Japan’s occupation and up until the division of the country into North and South Korea. It has been made into a television series, a movie, an opera, and has been translated into several different languages, including English. 

The Curse of Kim’s Daughters was first published in 1962 in the Korean language as Kim Yakkuke Ttadeul. The book was translated into English by a four member team of translators including three Koreans and one American and published in 2004 by Homa & Sekey Books, an American publisher that specializes in fine books on Asia, focusing mainly on China and Korea.  The translation was made possible by a grant from the Korean Literature Translation Institute (LTI Korea). 

The Curse of Kim’s Daughters is set in the town of Tongyong, a small fishing village near Tadohae Seashore National Park. It sits halfway between Pusan and Yosu. It is the story of one family’s struggle to live and survive in a rapidly-changing world. The Kim family’s patriarch is Songsu Kim. A man who was orphaned after his mother committed suicide and his father ran away from home after killing a man.

Songsu Kim was raised by his uncle and grew up to inherit the family pharmacy. He later sells the company and invests in a small fishing fleet. He marries a woman named Punshi who was chosen to be his bride by his uncle. Although Punshi gives birth to a son, the boy dies at an early age. Punshi then gives birth to five daughters - Yongsook, Yongbin, Yongnan, Yongok, and Yonghay.

We follow the lives of Songsu Kim, his wife and his daughters as they all deal with their own troubles. There does seem to be a curse set upon the Kim family’s daughter. The eldest became a widow, got pregnant and was accused of killing her own baby after giving birth to it, the second daughter despairs in not being able to find a suitable husband, the third has a mental breakdown and goes insane, while the youngest meets with misfortune while at sea. 

I’m sure there are some aspects of Korean culture that I just cannot understand which may have biased my opinion on praising this novel. I can understand arranged marriages, respecting your parents and your elders, and not shaming one's family but the abuse and neglect fostered upon the daughters of Songsu Kim by their various spouses can only be described as abuse and domestic violence. 

The most heart-wrenching incident involves the third daughter. She fell in love with one of the family’s servants. They eloped but were caught. The servant was made to leave town and because their daughter was no longer a virgin, the parents forced her to marry a rich man’s daughter who was not only abusive but was an opium-addict as well. Whenever she tried to come back home, her mother would force her own daughter to go back to her abusive husband because that is her duty as a woman. 

Although well-written, the story is sad and depressing and doesn’t seem to leave any room for hope. The parents attitude towards their own children borders on child abuse. If you want to be depressed and believe that living life is a curse, then perhaps you will be able to enjoy this story. As for me, I believe in the pursuit of happiness and that all relationships should be based on love and trust. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Map for the Missing by Belinda Huijuan Tang (Penguin Press)

In this new century fiction has changed. Autofiction blends truth with stories, teasing readers with what’s been made up and what is fact. Unreliable narrators are normal and plots often need an electronic microscope to plumb their enigmatic depths. Chapters not infrequently are no longer than a single paragraph and sometimes are never there at all. A book waiting on my shelf right now is a novel told in a monologue of thoughts silently voiced in the matter of  an hour or two.

These are all interesting journeys into new forms of story-telling but once in a while all I want to read is a straightforward, chewy, smart novel, one written in a 20th century mode, with a beginning that links coherently to its end and with characters whom I care about. 

These aren’t easy to come by in the realm of what’s now called literary fiction so when I picked up Belinda Huijuan Tang’s A Map for the Missing, I had no idea that my wish was was going to be granted.

The book begins with a language that I can’t read, translated into the words “Your father’s gone missing.” A swift phone call from his mother sends Tang Yitian from his life at a California university back to the rural Chinese village that he left fifteen years ago. He returns with the last words his father ever said to him echoing in his mind: “You owe us a son.”

It’s Yitian’s brain that took him from the family farm to Beijing’s top university, that sent him to America and made a home for him as a professor in Palo Alto. It also led to the death of his older brother and made his father cast him out forever. He returns to China eight years after his departure, promising his mother that he will find her husband. 

Rapidly he realizes his promise is an empty one. He’s never learned how to negotiate the intricacies of a Chinese bureaucracy, even on its lowest levels. He knows only one person who might help him, a girl from his past whose letters he has ignored, whom he hasn’t seen since they both were struggling with China’s recently revived national examination, the gaokao.

Once a “sent-down girl,” one of the urban teenagers whom Mao’s regime whisked off to the countryside as laborers, Hanwen is now the wife of a city official, living in an affluent gated community of a provincial city,. A woman who has bumped up against corruption, she has just begun to question the limits of her life when Yitian appears with his plea for help.

Skillfully taking her story through China’s transformation from the 1970s into the 1990s, Tang has based her novel upon the life of her own father, who left his ancestral village to live in the US and who spent a summer when he was seventeen searching for the man who had guided him through childhood. Her research has been both personal and scholarly, returning to her father’s village home as a stranger who’s welcomed by relatives she had never met, as well as unnearthing primary sources written in Chinese to discover how it was to live through the dizzying periods ot the Cultural Revolution, Reform, and Reopening. 

In her search for her own family’s history. Tang endows her characters with vivid and poignant life.  “Home,” she says in an interview, “is a place in your memory, more than a physical location.” Exploring what happens when memories are lost, she confronts the idea that places are defined as much by what is missing as by what now exists. The result is a deeply satisfying story of  journeys back and journeys forward, an odyssey everyone can recognize and understand.~Janet Brown

Beaufort by Ron Leshem, translated by Evan Fallenberg (Vintage)

Ron Leshem is an Israeli-American television producer and writer. Beaufort is his first novel and was first published in Hebrew in 2005 with a title that translates to If There’s a Heaven. It was the winner of the Sapir Prize in 2006, Israel’s most prestigious literary award. The English edition translated by Evan Fallanberg was published in 2007. 

Beaufort or Belfort Castle was the site of a fort that was captured by Fulk, King of Jerusalem in 1139. Fulk was also a Crusader and it is believed that the construction began on the castle shortly after the fort’s capture. It is located in a remote area of Southern Lebanon. 

In 1982, the Battle of Beaufort was fought between the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). It was dubbed by the Israeli government as Operation Peace for Galilee and later came to be known as the Lebanon War or First Lebanon War. However, in Lebanon, it is only known as “the invasion”. 

Israeli Defense Forces attacked the fortress and captured it and for the next eighteen years, the IDF occupied the fort in Southern Lebanon to prevent attacks from Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and militant group whose pimary goal was ending Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. 

Beaufort focuses on the final years of the IDF occupation of the fortress. It centers around the young soldiers who were all taught at a young age that the enemy are terrorists and the need to protect Israel from the “terrorists” is their duty to their country. 

The story is narrated by the unit’s commander, Liraz Librati. He has all his soldiers call him Erez and people think Liraz is a girl’s name and too feminine for an officer. The novel opens with the soldiers playing a game called What He Can’t Do Anymore. 

“Yonatan can’t see us growing ugly any more. ‘We’ll never be as handsome as we are today’ he’d say, and I’d ask if that was meant to make us feel better, because it didn’t.” Erez explains that this is a game everyone plays when a friend is killed. “You toss his name into the air and whoever’s there at the time has to come up with something he can’t do any more.”

Beaufort is an isolated area. The young Israeli soldiers defending the place have created their own world. They have their own games, they make their own rules, and at times clash with each other. But the infighting takes a backseat to the comradery when it comes to protecting each other against the unseen terrorists.

Erez and his men believe what they are doing is for the good of the country. But rumors have been flying that Israel is in negotiations to pull out of Lebanon. The soldiers are ready to fight, they are always ready to fight but lately, the soldiers feel that the Israeli government has long abandoned them. They are beginning to question why they are still in Lebanon, in enemy land without any support from their own government. 

When the order to withdraw comes, the team is given one last mission to accomplish. Will it be a sweet victory for Israel or will they be viewed as running back home with their heads between their tails?

Ever since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the Middle East has been a hotspot for the Arab-Israeli conflict and continues to be so today. Leshem being an Israeli, it’s only natural that the protagonists of the story would be the Israeli soldiers. They were taught at a young age that the Lebanese Hezbollah are nothing more than terrorists whose main goal is to destroy the country of Israel. 

There are no easy answers to solve the problem and the continued hostilities between Israel and Arab nations is not going to go away anytime soon. What a world it would be if as John Lennon said, “Give peace a chance”. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead Books)

When Anders awakens one morning to find that his body has turned “deep and undeniably brown,” he rushes to a mirror and sees an unrecognizable face staring back at him. The selfie he snaps and posts to a digital album goes unnamed by the algorithm that always knows who he is.. Anders has become a victim of the most severe identity theft. With a change in skin color, he has become a different person.

Anders is a man whose body is his livelihood. His job is at a gym, where he works with other men who want his level of fitness. After days at home, he finally realizes whatever has taken place isn’t going away, that his persistent “looking for whiteness” in his face only proves that he no longer is white and never will be again. When he comes back to work, his boss tells him “I would have killed myself. If it was me.”

Slowly rumors surface that other people are turning dark. At first the reports are rejected but then news from reliable sources confirms their truth. One man does indeed kill himself after he turns brown, the first case of a white man killing a dark man when both are trapped within the same body.

As more people transform, panic sets in. Those who remain white are convinced there will be a brown take-over. They empty the shelves of stores in a sudden burst of hoarding. A white militia appears on the streets, armed and looking for people they perceive as threats, giving other white people a sense of optimism that whatever this calamity might be, it can be righted with enough extermination.

The night Anders goes for a walk with his girlfriend, they both realize the inherent peril of a brown man with a white girl when they come across a group of boys skipping rocks against a stream. The thrown rocks suddenly come closer to Anders and Oona, evoking fears of a public stoning. When Anders drives through town, he finds himself cautiously peering for danger at intersections, “like an herbivore.” Then the riots begin and everyone, white and dark, stays home, hiding from a force that can’t be stopped, lying “outside the control of human beings.” They lock themselves away from “ancient horrors awakening,” their lives now limited to their online presences and their conversations on phones. When they sleep, their dreams hold normalcy while life awake is the stuff nightmares are made of. Anders realizes he’s “doubly, triply imprisoned, in his skin, in this house, in his town.”

Subtly Mohsin Hamid takes his narrative away from the echoes of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the hints of the savage stoning in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. His novel that begins as a fantasy turns into an allegory that everyone will recognize. As life grows tighter and more confined, as trust in other people becomes a luxury and hoarding a fact of life, as hysteria takes shape in “the sound of anarchy or revolution,” and the “final chaos” described in Revelations seems to be at hand, the death and terror of the past Covid years closes in once again. We remember altering our lives to escape the infection and hoping for “progress in discovering ways to undo the horror.”

Like Anders, many of us asked ourselves the same question of how much did we want to live, slowly learning to “abandon confinement and grow.” Venturing out of our protective spaces, “pale people who wandered like ghosts” we took our places in “a country in mourning, that had taken a battering,” “trying to find …footing in a situation so familiar yet so strange.”

The Last White Man is our century’s version of Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider. It’s a fable that mocks racism and an allegory of the world’s impotence against the threats posed by viruses. Hamid’s happy ending does nothing to dispel the claustrophobic memories this book evokes--or the fear of “another tidal wave” that can once again stop life as we prefer to live it, with the speed and force of a sneeze.~Janet Brown

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai translated by Donald Keene (Tuttle)

Osamu Dazai is a Japanese author and is also the pen name of Shuji Tsushima who was born and raised in the small town of Kanagi, located in Aomori Prefecture. He would gain recognition among the literati after the publication of his 1947 novel The Setting Sun. The book was translated into English by Donald Keene, an American scholar and Japanologist who moved to Japan after the 2011 earthquake and became a Japanese citizen. 

Keene is also the translator for No Longer Human, Dazai’s semi-autobiographical novel which was first published in Japanese with the title Ningen Shikaku in 1948. The book was translated into English in 1958. Keene writes in his introduction that the literal translation of Ningen Shikkaku is “disqualified as a human being”. 

The story is about a young man named Yozo Oba. He is a man who has trouble expressing himself to others. He had “a mortal dread of human beings” but was “unable to renounce their society”. In order to deal with his fears and insecurities, he refined the art of being a clown and making people laugh. 

In high school Yozo befriends a classmate named Takeichi who saw through his antics. This created a fear in Yozo’s mind so he deemed that the best way to deal with potential problems was to make Takeichi his friend so he wouldn’t be able to tell the other classmates that Yozo's hilarious antics were nothing more than a farce. 

Although Yozo wanted to go to art school, his father sent him to a regular university. More often than not, Yozo would skip his classes. He did go to one art class where he would meet Masao Horiki. 

Horiki would be a major influence on Yozo’s life, introducing him to alcohol, women, and general debauchery. Yozo gets involved with a married woman who also has a bleak outlook on life. They decide to commit a double suicide by drowning themselves in the sea. The woman dies but Yozo survives. 

Yozo is then expelled from the university and finds himself living with a family friend. Still, Yozo doesn’t see the errors of this way and runs away from the house and finds refuge with a single mother. He continues to drink and falls into a deeper hole as he still fears society as a whole. He runs away from them as well and ends up living with an older woman who works at a bar. His fear of humanity continues to haunt him and he becomes an excessive drinker. 

He gets involved with a young woman named Yoshiko who asks him to stop drinking. They get married and true to his word, Yozo stops drinking and even starts making money by drawing pictures for various magazines. Just when things were looking for the better, Horiki comes to visit him and Yozo relapses into his old ways. 

Yozo becomes an alcoholic, then gets addicted to morphine, and finally is committed to an asylum. He spends three months there before he is released by his older brother and family friend with the promise of him leaving Tokyo immediately and living in the country in a house provided by his older brother. He is now twenty-seven but says “people will take me for over forty”. 

Dazai’s Yozo Obo is the epitome of someone who fears society and yet cannot free himself from it. Everyday is a struggle just to live and survive. The story is written in the first person and separated into three different notebooks, covering Yozo’s life from his childhood until his mid-twenties. 

Yozo’s overwhelming inferiority complex and lack of self-esteem leads him on a downward spiral into hanging out with prostitutes and drowning himself in alcohol. But, does this really disqualify him from being human? ~Ernie Hoyt

Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen: Simple Recipes from My Many Mothers by Kim Thuy (Penguin Random House Canada)

“I depend on food to express as best I can my unconditional love.” novelist Kim Thuy says in her introduction to this cookbook. Although she herself is an accomplished cook who gave up a career as a lawyer to open a restaurant in Montreal, Thuy gives full credit to her mother and her “aunt-mothers” for the recipes that fill the pages of Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen. They are the women who taught her that food is love, “a tool for expressing our emotions.”

While most cookbooks introduce a particular cuisine and culture, Thuy’s introduces her family, beginning with her husband and two sons for whom she makes three separate meals every day between 3 and 8 o’clock, and then presenting her culinary lodestars, her mother and her five aunts.

Portraits of these stunning women introduce each section of the cookbook, beginning with The Fundamentals and ending with Desserts and Snacks. Their strong, beautiful faces and their brief introductory stories give this book an extraordinary dimension: the mother who “very easily gained a degree in aeronautical technology during our first years in Canada,” the aunt “who waited for her husband for ten years,” the aunt who kept her composure during a difficult divorce by silently conjugating French verbs, the rebellious aunt who found success in the United States, the aunt who lacks the ability to live alone but who has mastered “the art of conversation better than any of her sisters,” the aunt who is “the eternal beauty.” Thuy herself appears only at the very end, a dazzlingly radiant and “infinitely impatient” eater of desserts, with a self-description of ”Me, I tell stories.”

It’s difficult to take attention away from these women but the lessons they teach their readers are equal to that task. No detail is ignored nor previous knowledge assumed--cook rice noodles in cold water and turn off the heat as soon as the water boils; when cooking fish with turmeric, use “three times as much dill as fish;” serve heaping platters of vegetables, raw and cooked, with almost every meal; use a spray bottle filled with warm water to moisten and soften soften rice paper wrappers. And don’t forget the fish sauce, without which “most Vietnamese couldn’t cook, couldn’t EXIST,” or the fresh herbs that “leave a memory of their perfume long afterward…like a lover’s kiss.”

A bounty of soups, including one that’s made more rapidly than packaged instant ramen, one-dish meals of stir-fries and noodle bowls, vegetables that become the stars of any dining table, the hazardous and irresistible delights of fried food and the savory pleasures of grilled snacks, “slow-cooked” meals that rarely take more than an hour before they’re on the table; desserts that almost always feature fruit as the main ingredient--all of these are presented in tempting and uncomplicated recipes that range from summer food to hearty warming dishes for cold weather.

And of course there are the stories. In the middle of a war, while still living in Vietnam, Thuy’s father often made a dangerous four-hour drive to have coffee with his grandfather, coffee that was made from the beans eaten by foxes and excreted whole from their bellies. Thuy’s Saigon childhood was filled with the music of bells, announcing vendors who nestled scoops of ice cream within a small brioche--a gourmet’s version of an ice cream sandwich. She tells how her mother made dumplings in a refugee camp, rolling out the dough on the rusty metal cover of a water barrel and how in the camp her entire family once shared a bag filled with a cold and sweet soft drink, passing it from hand to hand so that each of the thirteen people had three tastes from the single straw inserted in the closed bag.

When Thuy’s first novel, Ru, received Canada’s Scotia Bank Giller Prize, the Giller jury praised her for “reinventing the immigrant story.” She quickly corrected them, saying she writes refugee literature. “Refugee and immigrant are different. A refugee is someone ejected from his or her past, who has no future…in a refugee camp you live outside of time.”

Her novels all convey that state of timelessness in its truest dizzying sense, a dream-like quality that gives her stories the opaque and distant feeling of  being “stateless, part of nothing.” Although Thuy’s fiction draws heavily upon her escape from Vietnam on a hardscrabble boat, her nights of sleeping in a cobbled-together shelter in a refugee camp, her time as a lawyer in Hanoi, her days as a restaurateur, and her mothering of an autistic child, she weaves her life into narratives that avoid sentiment or emotion, books that feel almost flattened in their straightforward and compressed plots. 

It’s within this book, through the faces and the food of her mothers, that she reveals bright flashes of who she is and where she comes from. Not quite a memoir, not only a cookbook, these secrets from a kitchen are nourishing on a number of different levels. They remind North American readers that we all are descended from refugees, people whose differences have  made our countries vibrant and our food choices delicious.~Janet Brown

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador) Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador)

From the author of the bestselling book Breasts and Eggs comes Mieko Kawakami’s second novel to be translated into English. Heaven was originally published in Japanese in 2009 with the title of Hevun. The English version was translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd.

Heaven centers around two fourteen-year-old junior high school students. The time is 1991. The boy is nicknamed “Eyes” by his classmates as he has a lazy eye. He describes his condition as “what my right struggled to see was part of what my left eye saw. Because everything had its blurry double, nothing had any depth”. 

The girl, Kojima, also has a nickname. Her classmates call her “Hazmat”. Kojima was “short, with kind of dark skin. She never talked at school. Her shirt was always wrinkled, and her uniform looked old. The girls in her class picked on her for being poor and dirty. 

Both students are the victims of ijime or bullying. Japan’s Ministry of Education defines ijime as a “physical or psychological aggression on someone weaker, which is detrimental to them.” Ninomiya is the leader of the pack of bullies. He is one of the most popular students in the school. He is also one of the top students at the school. His right hand man is Momose. 

Kojima reaches out to Eyes by sending him notes. Eyes at first believe the notes were left by Ninomiya or one of his cohorts. Around the beginning of May, Eyes receives a note that says “I want to see you”. Eyes fears going to the spot as mentioned in the note but is afraid of not going even more. He has no doubt in his mind that if he shows up, Ninomiya and his pals will give him the beating of a lifetime. 

Imagine Eyes' surprise as there is no Ninomiya or any of his friends waiting for him. Instead, sitting there with her back to him was a girl in her school uniform. It was Kojima. She befriends Eyes because she thinks that they are of the same mind. She feels that being bullied makes them stronger as people. Kojima and Eyes become close, however their only common bond is that they let themselves be bullied and don’t do anything about it. 

In one of the worst bullying episodes Ninomiya and his friends stick a cut volleyball over Eyes’ head and start to play “human soccer”.  Eyes gets a total thrashing as he is continually kicked in the head. He is left beaten and bleeding in a deserted auditorium. After Ninomiya and his friends have their fun, they tell Eyes that he should clean up himself and leave the premises a half-hour later. Meanwhile, Kojima watches the entire incident but doesn’t report it. 

At the hospital, Eyes sees and confronts Momose about the bullying. Momose says that bullying Eyes has nothing to do with his lazy eye. In fact, if it wasn’t him, it would be someone else they would bully. He sums up his own philosophy by telling Eyes, “People do what they can get away with”. 

The book stays with you long after you have finished. It often makes you angry and also makes you feel helpless. The senseless violence bestowed on Eyes and Kojima is more than just a little disturbing. It borders on the edge of brutality. I believe Kawakami makes the ending a bit vague and leaves it up to the reader to imagine what the fate of Ninomiya, Momose, and Kojima is like.  

Ijime or bullying continues to be one of the major problems occurring in schools throughout Japan. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times a teenage suicide due to bullying is featured in the news for the education system to change. Teachers and schools continue to ignore the cries of students who are being bullied, often hiding and or changing the facts to protect the school’s reputation and to deny any responsibility for the act. Although I've never been bullied myself, I definitely want the schools, the teachers, and the Board of Education to do an even better job than they are doing now. ~Ernie Hoyt

69 Sixty-Nine by Ryu Murakami translated by Ralph M. McCarthy (Kodansha)

Long before Haruki Murakami came on to Japan’s literacy scene and gained international recognition, there was Ryu Murakami. He was born in Sasebo, Nagasaki on Japan’s southernmost main island of Kyushu. His best known works which have been translated into English include his first novel Almost Transparent Blue, Audition, Coin Locker Babies and In the Miso Soup.

69 Sixty-Nine is his semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel and was first published in the Japanese language in 1987. The English version was first published in 1993 and translated by Ralph M. McCarthy. McCarthy has also translated the works of another famous Japanese novelist, Osamu Dazai, namely Self Portraits and Blue Bamboo, both of which are collections of short stories. 

The story is narrated by thirty-two-year-old Kensuke Yazaki, currently a writer living in Tokyo. He is reliving his third and final year of high school when he was seventeen years old. The year was 1969. It was the year “student uprisings shut down Tokyo University. The Beatles put out The White Album, Yellow Submarine, and Abbey Road, The Rolling Stones released their greatest single, “Honkey Tonk Woman”, and people known as hippies wore their hair long and called for love and peace.”

Yazaki’s character was inspired by the life of Murakami himself. Murakami formed a band called Coelacanth and played drums. He and his friends barricaded the rooftop of their high school and was detained in his house for three months after the school incident. Yazaki would be the mastermind of all these exploits as well. 

Yazaki has two really good friends that share in his escapades. His closest friend is Tadashi Yamada who spoke with an ultra-dialect as he grew up in the country in a coal mining town. His nickname was Adama because he looks like a French singer named Adamo. Adama was usually the voice of reason. When Yazaki had one of his hair-brained ideas, it was usually Adama that made the ideas plausible and possible. 

Yazaki and Adama are joined by Manabu Iwase. This trio of disaffected youths are only looking to have a good time. They want to listen to rock music, talk about foreign films and protest America’s involvement in the Vietnam war. But what Yazaki and most seventeen-year-old adolescents want is to get laid!. 

They claim to be anti-establishment and want to mimic the revolutionary students of Tokyo and other big cities in their backwater town of Sasebo which houses a United States military base. Yazaki has big plans for his final year in high school. Him and his friends are organizing a school festival which they have titled “The Morning Erection Festival”. 

To put it mildly, Kensuke Yazaki is the Holden Caulfield of Japan. Murakami’s novel of growing up in the sixties, in 1969, as a seventeen-year-old high school student is reminiscent of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. However, Murakami’s Yazaki makes Holden Caulfield look like an angel. Yazaki’s antics and attitude are bigger than life, and although he has friends who will do almost anything for him, he is first and foremost, a selfish bastard who only thinks about himself and about getting into the pants of the girl of his dreams. 

You can’t help but be reminded of your own high school years as a seventeen-year-old when you think you know everything and don’t have a care in the world. It’s hard to fault Yazaki for his actions. Even I remember doing things that were stupid and dangerous (although I won’t admit to what they were). Everybody goes through growing pains and surviving high school is just one tiny aspect of that. If you made it into adulthood without any problems, then looking back on high school can be a pleasant exercise in nostalgia. ~Ernie Hoyt

Em by Kim Thuy, translated by Sheila Fischman (Seven Stories Press)

When “truth is fragmented is it still the truth?” How is it possible to  encompass all the different truths contained in a war? Kim Thuy takes the stories told to her by others, the histories she’s read, and her own childhood memories to reconstruct the war that turned her into a refugee by the time she was ten. But, she says, “Memory is a faculty of forgetfulness.” It cloaks brutal truths with the vagueness that lends itself to myths and fables. 

In concise chapters that are spread over only 148 pages, Thuy presents true facts of the Vietnam/American war as seen through characters who appear and swiftly vanish, people of tragedy and coincidence. The improbability of their stories softens the brutal reality of the truth. A Saigon woman who has been recruited as a guerrilla to kill a French planter falls in love with him, bears his child, and dies with him in their plantation that’s become a combat zone. Their daughter is taken to My Lai during a school holiday by a servant who came from there. The girl goes to sleep in a veil of privilege, wakes up to the sound of killing, and is rescued from a pit of corpses. Later the child she abandons is picked up by a street orphan. Years afterward these two children meet in another world, another life, and find a happy ending together. 

This narrative is as improbable and magical as the frothiest of Shakespeare’s plays. It has to be. Interwoven with the fantastic is the history of the coolies who tapped the sap of rubber trees, exiles from China and India who labored beside their Vietnamese counterparts and died from the workload; the testimony of a man who took part in the My Lai massacre, saying “I was told to kill anything that moved,” the moment that an American plane holding Vietnamese orphans exploded on the runway, killing 78 babies, with the 178 surviving children put on the next plane in Operation Babylift. It tells how the actress Tippi Hedren launched manicure training classes for newly arrived women from Vietnam, creating a global industry in which Vietnamese control half of the market, making a living while breathing in toxic fumes. 

One chapter gives a glossary of French words that became part of the Vietnamese language, while the most commonly used Vietnamese word that entered French was con gai, that meant both girl and prostitute. Another tells how a homogeneous country became diverse, through the children who were never known by the foreign soldiers who impregnated their mothers. 

“Naked, the earth was no longer a dance floor for sun and leaves,” Thuy says before describing the rainbow of toxins, not just orange but green, pink, purple, and blue herbicides that descended in deadly clouds and ricocheted backward so “the sprayers were also the sprayed.” She describes pho in delicious detail and then tells how hungry street children waited to drain the leavings from bowls of it after customers had walked away. She enumerates the official numbers of dead and wounded American and Vietnamese soldiers, while asking “why no list included the numbers of orphans, of widows, of aborted dreams, of broken hearts.”

“I tried to interweave the threads, but they escaped, and remain unanchored, impermanent, and free,” Thuy says as she nears the end of her novel. What she has made from that elusive fabric has the force and agony of PIcasso’s Guernica, wrapped in the deceptive sweetness of a fairy tale.~Janet Brown

Clark and Division by Naomi Hirahara (Soho Press)

When Aki and her parents get off the train in Chicago, a city they’ve never seen before, they’re greeted with the news that Rose, the family’s oldest daughter,  won’t be there to meet them. On the day before, Rose died. It’s suicide, the police tell them. She leaped into the path of an approaching subway train. 

Newly released from the California internment camp of Manzanar, the Ito family is overwhelmed with culture shock as well as grief. Rose had been the family leader, beautiful, smart, and confident. She was the one who became active in the JACL, the Japanese American Citizens League, after the Itos had been sent to Manzanar and she was one of the first to be released from internment. She had found a job in Chicago and a place for her family to live as soon as they were allowed to follow her. Now she’s dead, leaving her younger sister to take her place.

Aki refuses to believe that Rose killed herself. As soon as her family settles into their new apartment, she begins to track down the people who had known her sister, the ones who might help to explain the circumstances around her death. In her search, she discovers dark depths to the recently established Japanese population and urban corruption that appears to be untouchable.

Clark and Division is a gripping mystery, a rite of passage story, and a journey into past history that’s illuminating and shocking. Naomi Hirahara is a journalist as well as an Edgar Award-winning novelist and the research she’s done for her latest book is deep and revealing, disclosing facts that have been ignored.

Even before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor sent Japanese Americans to internment camps, the discrimination against them was crippling. Those who had been born in Japan, the Issei, were unable to buy or lease land in Los Angeles. White women, as well as American-born Nisei women, who married Issei men were stripped of their U.S. citizenship. After war had been declared on Japan, Executive Order 9066 in 1942 demanded the removal of all Japanese residents, “alien and non-alien,” from California, Washington, Oregon, and parts of Arizona, where the city of Phoenix was split in half to facilitate the emptying  of Japanese neighborhoods. Japanese, Issei or Nisei, who had been educated in Japan were sent to Department of Justice detention centers. All others went to one of the ten internment camps where blocks of barracks held families, with separate Children’s Villages constructed for orphans. 

As the need for cheap labor became acute, by 1943 “loyal” Japanese were released to take jobs vacated by the men who had gone off to war. Even then they weren’t allowed to return home. They were banned from the Western Military Zone and were sent to midwestern and eastern cities that needed laborers and that had a scant Japanese population. This resettlement was overseen by the War Relocation Authority which aided the new arrivals with housing, employment, and education, while demanding that the Japanese congregate in public only in groups of no more than three.  In private, they were crammed into subdivided rooms in apartments and small studios, with often as many as six people in a single room.

Although World War Two ended in September, 1945, the last internment camp wasn’t closed until seven months later. The scars left behind by the internment are widely overlooked and the facts about the enforced creation of Japanese communities in cities like Chicago have been buried for the past eighty years.  At the same time that Naomi Hirahara has Aki uncover the truth behind her sister’s death, she skillfully reveals hidden corners of American history, with a back-of-the-book list of resources for readers to use in their own research. Let’s hope for Aki’s appearance in books yet to come that will disclose buried history while unfolding more of her own compelling story.~Janet Brown

The Japanese Lover by Rani Manicka (Hodder & Stoughton)

Rani Manicka is a Malaysian writer of Indian descent. The Japanese Lover is her third novel which was first published in 2009. It is once again set in Malaysia but begins on the island of Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka. 

The story opens with a young writer visiting Marimuthu Mami at her home in Kuala Lumpur. Marimuthu Mami is currently ninety-two years old. The visiting author is interested in hearing Marimuthu’s life story. What the writer is most interested in was Marimuthu Mami’s experience during the Japanese Occupation of Malaya. 

But Marimuthu Mami doesn’t want to remember the past. “Speak about the past, here in her daughter’s home? After she had finally mastered the art of forgetting things”. Her children would be surprised to know how much she does remember,  “how deeply rooted it was in her chest. She remembered all of it, every precious detail. They thought the past was dead because she never talked about it.” 

And so begins the epic story of Marimuthu Mami. She was born in a small town in North Ceylon in 1916. Her mother had already given birth to five sons. She was the family’s first daughter. A priest was present when she was born and as soon as she was out of her mother’s womb, he noted the exact time and cast her horoscope. He told the father “The child is destined to marry a man of truly immense wealth. But the marriage will be a disaster”. 

She was named Parvathi and at the tender age of sixteen, her marriage to a wealthy forty-two-year-old widow living in Malaya was arranged. Before leaving for her new home and new life, Parvathi went to a temple to pray with her mother. What her mother didn’t know was that Parvathi “had not been praying for a good husband and family but for the greatest love in the world, for one who would unthinkingly put his hand into fire for her. 

When Parvathi met her soon-to-be husband, he was very displeased. Her father had sent the man a picture of a different girl. Kasu Marimuthu, her husband’s name, said he would be sending Parvathi back to her father the following day. 

The next day, Kasu Marimuthu is asked a favor by one of his servants. A large woman named Maya. She says to him “I understand that you are unable to show the shape of your heart to your wife, but it is not right to leave the shape of your foot on hers.” 

Maya is not just a servant, she is a healer, a shaman. Someone who seems to have more power and understanding of the world than any rich tycoon or temple priest. Her words have the effect on Kasu Marimuthu that he does not send Parvathi home and lets her stay for a few more days. Days turn into months, months turn into years, and he has children with Parvathi. Maya also becomes Parvathi’s biggest influence and confidante. Maya seems to be a fountain of wisdom but never condescends to anyone. 

It isn’t until more than half-way through the book where the Japanese invade Malaya and Hattori-san comes into Parvathi’s life. By this time, her husband had passed away due to an illness. The Japanese have requisitioned her house and In order to save her daughter forms sexual slavery, Parvathi willingly becomes Hattori-san’s comfort woman, a woman used to satisfy the sexual desires of the Imperial Japanese Army. The more time Parvathi spends with Hattori-san, the love she prayed for seems to be within her grasp. 

Unlike Manicka’s first novel, The Rice Mother, the atrocities committed by the Japanese army are overlooked and Maya is overused as a proponent for New Age ideology. However, these are minor negative points in this story about love, passion, deceit, and acceptance. ~Ernie Hoyt

In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Ann Goldstein (Vintage Books)

Native speakers of English are crippled by the belief that learning another language is a matter of choice, something to “take.” French, Spanish, sometimes German--one of these is chosen in high school, flirted with in college, “picked up” in the way one might get a bad cold, and rapidly forgotten. Dimly students understand that fluency will only come with total immersion but few realize how disorienting that process will be. It is, Jhumpa Lahiri explains, a matter of risk and discipline, an abandonment of one culture for another, a kind of baptism that holds the threat of drowning.

Lahiri had two languages as a child, the Bengali that was spoken at home and the English that she needed for the world outside, once she had turned four. Her parents resisted English, clinging to the language of their native culture. Lahiri became a double exile in a linguistic quandary. Her imperfect Bengali failed to connect her to a place she had never lived in and her perfect English failed to give her a place of belonging in either her birthplace (London) or her country of residence (the U.S.). It was a precarious place for a child to stand in and Lahiri found her refuge in reading and writing English words. “I belonged only to my words…to no country, no specific culture.” “Writing,” she says, “makes me feel present on earth.”

Then she falls in love with Italian, a language that seems to have chosen her rather than the other way around. Dizzied by the notion of choice, she takes lessons that will allow her to speak. She chooses to read only books written in Italian. She moves to Rome and becomes “a word hunter,” with her vocabulary notebook slowly measuring her progress. But this isn’t enough. To feel present in Italy, Lahiri begins to write in Italian. 

At first this is like “writing with my left hand,” she admits, an activity “so arduous it seems sadistic.” For the first time in her life, she has found a language that gives her the “freedom to be imperfect,” but as a writer, she refuses to take comfort in that freedom. She begins to show her Italian writing to those who will correct and guide her, Slowly she turns away from her “dominant language,” the one in which she had won a Pulitzer Prize and a Presidential medal conferred upon her by Barack Obama. She abandons English to the point that when she wrote this book, it was originally published as In altre parole. When it appeared as In Other Words, Lahiri insisted that it would be published in both Italian and English, with the translation done by someone other than herself. She knew that as a writer who had an expert command of English, she would be compelled to improve what she had written in Italian. Instead her translator kept the raw and unpolished thoughts that Italian had conveyed upon Lahiri, with the Italian text on one page and the English translation facing it.

The translated sentences are like ungainly pieces of furniture. They aren’t smooth--in fact they come in fragments, carrying splinters. They lack grace and are often clunky. They hold immeasurable courage, written by a woman who has stepped away from her literary fame, embraced imperfection and found a different way to be alive. . “I remain, in Italian, an ignorant writer,” Lahiri says, but she’s one that’s discovered the art of metamorphosis, a transformation that can be terrifying but is an act of rebellion and release. Through another language, Lahiri has left exile and chosen a new form, one that she exercises with freedom and generosity.~Janet Brown

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian (Flamingo)

Gao Xingjian is the first Chinese writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, two years after he became a French citizen. His novel Soul Mountain, first published as Lingshan in Taiwan in 1990, was partly inspired by his own experiences of traveling to rural China after mistakenly being diagnosed as having lung cancer. It was first published in English in 2000 in Australia and translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee. 

There are two main characters who are only referred to as the pronouns “You” and “I”. It’s difficult to distinguish if these characters are one and the same. The reader may wonder if “You” means the person reading the story or if it's a manifestation of an imaginary self to hold conversations with.  

“You” finds himself in a small mountain town in the South. “You” is not exactly sure why he is even here. He explains that it was my pure chance that another person on a train sitting opposite of “You” mentioned that he was going to a place called Lingshan. The man explains that ling means “spirit” or “soul” and shan means “mountain”. 

“You’d been to a lot of places, visited lots of famous mountains, but had never heard of this place”. “You” becomes intrigued with this place that’s located at the source of the You River, another place “You” has never heard of. “You” asks what’s there, “Scenery? Temples? Historic Sites?” only to be told that it’s all virgin wilderness. 

On his journey “You” encounters a woman, only referred to as “She”. They become travel companions and as they become closer, “You” entertains “She” by telling her stories that he just makes up as they journey towards the mountain. 

We are then introduced to “I” who was diagnosed with lung cancer. While “You” goes in search of Lingshan, “I” is mistakenly diagnosed with lung cancer. At first, “I” was resigned to his fate as his father suffered the same outcome. However, once the error was discovered, “I” felt “Death was playing a joke on me but now that I’ve escaped the demon wall, I am secretly rejoicing”. 

“I” is an academic and after being misdiagnosed he decided to take a break from city life. “I” felt he “should have left those contaminated surroundings long ago and returned to nature to look for this authentic life”. It is “I”’s journey that makes up the autobiographical part of the story as “I” travels to the Sichuan province that walks along the Yangtze river to the coast. During his travels, “I” will meet minor ethnic groups such as the Qiang, Miao, and the Yi who are also known by the name Lolo. 

To be honest, I found Xingjian style of writing difficult to follow as it is hard to know who exactly are the protagonists. The blending of folklore, travel essay, history and anthropology are mixed into one smorgasbord of a story that seems to have no definitive plot and wanders all over the place. Is this part of the narrative or is it another story that “You” or “I” is making up? If existential psycho-babble is your thing, you might enjoy this. If not, it’s going to be a very difficult read. ~Ernie Hoyt

Escape from Baghdad! by Saad Z. Hossain (Unnamed Press)

Saad Z. Hossain is a Bangladeshi author who writes in English and lives in Dakka, Bangladesh. Escape from Baghdad is his first novel and was published in 2015 by Unnamed Press in the United States. Judging the book from its cover and its title, you may be led to believe it is a military adventure set against the backdrop of the war in Iraq and you would be partially right. It is much more than just a war-time novel. 

Set during the occupation of Iraq when it was ruled by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the transitional government set up after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and headed by the United States Government, the story focuses on two regular guys who were from Baghdad. 

Dagr and Kinza have lost everything to the war. They survive by their wits and dealing in black market goods. Dagr was a former university professor who taught economics while Kinza was and still is a streetsmart hoodlum. Their latest piece of contraband isn’t something but someone. They have with them Captain Hamid, a man known as the star torturer for Saddam Hussein’s recently toppled Ba’athist regime. 

Captain Hamid has promised them a hoard of wealth if they can smuggle him to the city of Mosul. With the help of an American marine named Private Hoffman, they agree to help him escape the authorities. But it isn’t only the Americans who want Captain Hamid, and getting out of Baghdad is not going to be an easy task. 

As the three were trying to escape the confines of Baghdad, Kinza had also killed a man who happened to be the younger brother of an imam named Hassan Salemi. A devout Shi’a muslim whose “obsession for vengeance had overtaken his mind”. 

While Kinza, Dagr, Hamid are being pursued by Salemi and his men, the trio had made a deal with another group of men to help them pursue a possible serial killer at large. A man presumed to be a member of the Druze. They have also come into the possession of an ancient watch that also belonged to the Druze but doesn’t seem to tell the time but which may hold the secret to eternal life. 

Who are the Druze? The Chrstian had their Knights Templars. The Catholic Church had the Illuminati, and even the Jewish faith had their Kabbalists. In the glossary provided at the end of the book, Hossain informs the reader that the Druze were a “secretive ancient sect of mystic within Islam who follow a number of esoteric beliefs that are known only to their sworn elders”. 

Hossain has created one of the most interesting and intriguing stories that blends the adventure and thrill of a Tom Clancy novel, the dark humor and absurdity of war a la Catch-22 and throws in a good measure of science-fiction and fantasy. It is a fast-paced and action-packed smorgasbord that will keep you riveted to your seat as you wonder if the three protagonists will reach their goal of leaving Baghdad and do they find the secret to immortality? ~Ernie Hoyt

Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop (W. W. Norton & Company)

A couple of centuries ago, a British diplomat decided the Chinese were “foul feeders and eaters of garlic and other strong-scented vegetables.” Even nowadays, when nutritionists extol the Mediterranean Diet, the Okinawa Diet, and the eating habits practiced by long-lived peasants of the Caucasus Mountains, “Chinese food” is firmly linked in the Western mind with MSG, cornstarch, and fortune cookies. 

British writer Fuchsia Dunlop has spent much of her life debunking this misconception. A food anthropologist of sorts, she fell in love with the food of Sichuan when she was studying in Chengdu and went on to explore the varied cuisines of Chinese regional cooking.  While concentrating on the food of Sichuan (Land of Plenty) and Hunan (Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook), Dunlop has traveled widely throughout China--and wherever she’s been, she’s talked to people about the food they eat and how they cook it. The result of her odyssey is embodied in Every Grain of Rice, a book that’s as much a work of travel literature and a health manual as it is an encyclopedia of recipes and cooking techniques. 

Throughout Chinese history, people have been guided by the words of the philosopher Mencius, who advised “Do not disregard the farmer’s seasons and food will be more than enough,” two millennia before Michael Pollan ‘s famous maxim “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” During her travels, Dunlop, who comes from the land of boiled cabbage and mushy peas, is struck by the preponderance of vegetables in the dishes she eats, all of them made delicious by the flavors they’ve been given. From Beijing to Guangzhou and through the regions in between, meat and fish are used sparingly in everyday meals, almost as condiments that provide a side note of flavor. “It’s interesting,” Dunlop observes, “ to see how modern dietary advice often echoes the age-old precepts of the Chinese table: eat plenty of grains and vegetables and not much meat, reduce consumption of animal fats and eat very little sugar.” Spartan? Stringent? Time-consuming? Not at all. Dunlop describes food that takes “only fifteen minutes to make but is beautiful enough to launch ships,” “with flavors that still amaze me.” 

The secret lies in buying fresh ingredients, collecting an arsenal of flavors to construct a Chinese pantry, which Dunlop carefully explicates, and mastering a few simple techniques which she shows step-by-step in clear photographs. Then the fun begins. 

When was the last time you read a cookbook with an entire section devoted to leafy greens, another to garlic and chives? Have you ever prepared cucumbers or celery or radishes to take center stage in a hot dish? Or cooked with lily bulbs? Or used only two ounces of meat as part of a meal? Dunlop makes all of this enticing, easy, and healthful too--who knew?

As she finds food, she describes the beauty of the countryside: the piercing green of rice fields and bamboo groves in Zhejiang, the dizzying scent of osmanthus blossoms in Hangzhou where the blooms are gathered and used to sweeten meals, the mountainsides of Southern China where “every spare inch is sown with crops.” She tells how strangers happily share their recipes with her when she stops on the street to ask what they’re eating, with stories of the meals she ate while “hanging out with some artist friends and a bunch of local gangsters.” She delves into culinary history in a story of how pirates in centuries past decided who among a ship’s passengers was worth robbing by observing how their prospective victims ate fish. She’s clearly enchanted with the Chinese names for vegetables which turn kohlrabi into “jade turnip” and bean sprouts into “silver sprouts,” transform broccoli into “flower vegetables from the Southwest” and aptly call chard “ox leather greens.” And while she gives rice all the honor that is its due, she warns not to leave it out within four hours of it being cooked nor to keep it for more than three days after preparing it, even if it’s refrigerated. Food poisoning is a distinct possibility for those who ignore her advice.

Even potatoes, those mainstays of Western kitchens, take on a tempting new guise as stir-fried mashed potatoes with “snow vegetable” (preserved mustard greens), made in minutes from leftovers. For devotees of Westernized Chinese food such as the ubiquitous Kung Pao Chicken, Dunlop offers Gong Pao Chicken, the honest-to-god Sichuan original dish as it’s eaten in Chengdu--made with two chicken breasts and ingredients that bring tons of flavor.

Augmenting Dunlop’s recipes and stories are gorgeous photographs of almost every dish, taken by Chris Terry, each one guaranteed to send readers into their kitchens with a bunch of spinach or garlic scapes in hand. Bring on the Chinese Diet--and viva Fuchsia Dunlop!~Janet Brown

T is for Tokyo by Irene Akio (ThingsAsian Press)

Irene Akio who was born in Japan but grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States with her mother and brother. In her youth, she spent time in Japan with her father and her Japanese side of the family. 

T is for Tokyo is an excellent introduction to the city for kids who have an interest in all things Japanese. In the book, Mina asks her father to tell her again about the city she was born in. He tells her it’s “a city halfway around the world where they speak a different language and eat different kinds of food”. Mina was born in a city called Tokyo.

He tells her about the archers called shashu, about shrines with pagodas. He tells her one of the most famous shrines is Meiji Jingu which is located in the center of the city. He says to her, you can go to temples “where you think you traveled back in time”. 

He tells her about the ravens that sometimes snatch food right from your hands and about the fashion center for young girls and boys called Harajuku where “they wear crazy and colorful costumes and you feel like you are in the future”. 

Mina’s father also tells her about the different kinds of foods people eat. In the winter, you can warm your insides by buying roasted chestnuts. You can look for ramen noodle shops by searching for a red lamp called aka chouchin. Or if you’re not in the mood for ramen, you could try takoyaki which are little balls filled with octopus. Or you can buy onigiri, rice balls wrapped in seaweed, at almost any convenience store. 

Mina’s Father also talks about the most ordinary things you can find in Tokyo - large green public telephones, bright red mailboxes, small police buildings called koban. He also talks about ordinary things you can only find in Tokyo, the maneki neko or beckoning cat, daruma which are wish dolls, and tengu which are demons with long noses. Everything Mina’s Father talks about is colorfully illustrated and will be easy for children and adults to understand. 

Many of the things Mina’s father tells her can be found throughout Japan. Shrines and temples of course, the police box, the ravens, and the different types of food.  Although I wasn’t born in Japan, I grew up in Tokyo during my elementary years. I also have a Japanese mother so I can attest to the accuracy of Mina’s father’s description of the things you can see and do in Tokyo. As an adult, I also spent twenty-one years living in one of the busiest areas of Tokyo - Shibuya before moving north to Aomori City in 2016. 

I was surprised that Mina’s father mentions a park near her grandmother’s house which is famous for its cherry trees but neglects to mention that it also houses one of Japan’s most popular zoos where you can see the giant panda. 

There are many things that Mina’s father talks about which are becoming harder to find. The large green public telephones are almost obsolete as everybody carries their own smartphones. The illustration of the cylindrical red mailbox is also becoming just a memory of the past as the mailboxes are little red square boxes now. You can still find the old-style mailboxes in the countryside though. You can buy hot roasted chestnuts all year round and not as many ramen shops display the red lanterns anymore. 

The book is written in English and Japanese. Also, for those who still haven’t learned to read the language, following the Japanese text, the romaji version is provided. Romaji being the Romanization of the Japanese language. It is a good tool for learning how to read once you’ve learned the basics of the Japanese alphabet and are familiar with a number of kanji characters. 

Still, the book is a wonderful introduction to a city I once called home. If you’ve never been to Tokyo, this book will make you want to go and see all those things for yourself. Tokyo may be a bit overwhelming at times but I believe there is something for everyone, children and adults alike. It is still one of my favorite cities in the entire world and if you visit, it might become one of yours as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen (William Morrow)

It’s easy to mistake Kirstin Chen’s Counterfeit as a bit of summer fluff, but this Singaporean American writer has other plans--and they are devious. What begins as a strange reunion between two women who were college roommates at Stanford turns into a unique partnership with a criminal bent. Winnie is a Mainland Chinese glamour girl with a brain who has caught the eye of a Guangzhou business magnate. Ava is a Chinese American prodigy who recently gave up a prestigious position in a law firm to raise her difficult child. She’s bored out of her skull so when Winnie offers her a new and somewhat dodgy occupation, eventually she accepts the job.

Suddenly Ava is immersed in the world of counterfeit handbags, buying the real thing at upscale stores and then making a return at the same place with a gorgeous forgery. She and Winnie split the refund and sell the purloined designer bags on Ebay at prices far below retail. 

When Ava has qualms of revulsion about this scheme, Winnie asks “What makes a fake bag fake if it’s indistinguishable from the real thing? What gives the real bag its inherent value?” Ava has no answer; the bags they use to defraud are not the “copy bags” hawked on the streets of Hong Kong or piled in the windows of dingy little shops. These are the “creme de la creme” of replicas, far above the “super A” and the mere “A” copies. The bags Winnie receives from China have been made with the same care and luxurious materials as their genuine counterparts. These are the replicas known as “one-to-one.” But while the genuine bag sells for five-figure prices, the gorgeous and identical copies go for a fraction of that. 

This is where Counterfeit becomes something more than the story of a bored housewife. The details of the replica trade are riveting and almost take over the entire novel. The makers of the world’s most coveted status symbols have contracts with manufacturing plants in China where labor is cheap, workers are skilled, and factories are state-of-the-art. When Ava goes to Shenzhen on a quality-control mission, she’s taken to the Baiyun Leather World Trade Center, “the world’s largest retailer of replica designer leather goods.” There she finds gorgeous boutiques, one selling Fendi bags, another focusing on Birkin and Kelly. All of the world’s most exclusive brands are there, in luscious colors and displayed like jewels at Tiffany’s. However when Ava meets the contact who will show her the merchandise that she’s come to inspect, he takes her to a shabby building where she’s ushered into a room filled with black garbage bags. Her guide locks the door and opens the bag of fifty Chanel Gabrielle Hoboes which Ava examines carefully and then purchases. When she leaves Shenzhen, she carries a Kelly bag in amethyst leather, exactly like the real thing, for which she’s paid less than 900 dollars.

Later she visits a manufacturing plant where the genuine bags are made under heavy security to prevent replication. Within the compound is another factory, under the same ownership as the business that has contracted to make the real thing. Plans, materials, and labels all migrate from one plant to another and then return, while never going beyond the heavily guarded gates of the complex. 

Just when Counterfeit threatens to become the story of a fascinating trade, Chen switches gears. Her plot twists take over the narrative once again and few readers will be able to figure out where this novel is taking them. But one thing is certain. Kirstin Chen has concocted a fiendishly clever story--and anyone who reads it will probably find themselves yearning for a one-to-one replica bag, scruples be damned.~Janet Brown

Nujeen : One Girl's Incredible Journey from War-Torn Syria in a Wheelchair by Nujeen Mustafa with Christina Lamb (Harper)

“I don’t collect stamps or coins or football cars - I collect facts. Most of all I like facts about physics and space, particularly string theory. Also about history and dynasties like the Romanovs. And controversial people like Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover”. 

Nujeen Mustafa says she hates the word refugee more than any other word in the English language. She says what it really means is “a second-class citizen with a number scrawled on your hand or printed on a wristband, who everyone wishes would somehow go away.”  In the year 2015, Nujeen “became a fact, a statistic, a number.” As much as she likes facts she goes on to say that “we are human beings.” 

Nujeen is the story of one girl’s incredible journey from war-torn Syria in a wheelchair. It is written by Nujeen with Christina Lamb who was the coauthor of I Am Malala. Nujeen says her name means “new life”. Her parents already had four girls and four boys so her birth was rather unexpected. The age difference between her and her eldest brother is twenty-six years. 

The family first lived in a town called Manbij in northern Syria, close to the border with Turkey. She calls her mother Ayee and her father Yaba. They are not Arabic words. Nujeen is a Kurd. 

As one of the few Kurdish families living in a town that was mostly Arab who she says “looked down on us and called our area the Hill of the Foreigners”. The family was forced to speak Arabic. They could only use their own language Kurmanji in their home. It was most difficult for her parents who were illiterate and didn’t speak Arabic. 

Nujeen was born with cerebral palsy. Her family moved to Aleppo so she could get better healthcare than she did in Manbij. Life was a little better. She even taught herself to speak a little English by watching the American soap opera Days of Our Lives.

During the Syrian Civil War, a civil war which started after the Arab Spring Protests - a series of anti-government protests against corruption and economic stagnation. However, unlike other Arab nations that managed to depose their corrupt government officials, the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad used violent force to suppress the demonstrators. 

This led to the Syrian Refugee Crisis where millions of Syrians left their country or have been displaced within their own nation. Nujeen is one of the millions of asylum seekers. She is an extraordinary young woman who escaped from Syria in a wheelchair. This is her story. 

Nujeen is a Kurdish Syrian refugee who traveled from the historic city of Aleppo to escape war and civil unrest to Germany where her brother lives. She made the perilous journey in a wheelchair with her sister who pushed her most of the way. Since leaving Aleppo, the girls “had travelled more than 3,500 miles across nine countries from war to peace - a journey to a new life, just like her name. It had taken them a month since leaving Gaziantep in Turkey where her parents remained. 

The trip had cost them nearly 5,000 Euros for Nujeen and her sister, mostly paid for by her elder brothers who were already living abroad. They traveled from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos in a dinghy. Then onto Athens on mainland Greece and continuing to Macedonia and Serbia and were hoping to go through Hungary as well. However, their luck seemed to have run out as Hungary closed its borders to all refugees. They had to change their plans and their journey took them through Croatia, Slovenia and Austria before they finally reached Germany. 

Najeen and other refugees not only had to leave the comforts of their home, they had to deal with smugglers, bribe corrupt officials, were persecuted by right-wing fanatics and yet Najeen retained her sense of dignity. Nujeen is an inspiration and a role-model to show the world that refugees are not all criminals and contribute to society if that society lets them. 

The Syrian refugee crisis still continues and Bashar al-Assad is still President of Syria. Now that the news is focusing on Russian aggression against Ukraine, people are seeming to forget the crimes committed by al-Assad and his regime. Why he is still in power is a mystery to me. Why can’t the international community depose people like al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and all the other tyrants around the world. Until we rid the world of these people, the world will never be a safe place. ~Ernie Hoyt

Ma and Me: A Memoir by Putsata Reang (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Ma is a woman with a “face spangled with light.” She took her children away from Cambodia’s genocide and brought them to a small town in Oregon, a place where she and her husband found a house and established their reputations as a leading Khmer family in the area. “Use your brain, not your back,” she tells her children, and shows them the consequences of ignoring her advice by taking them to the fields of berry farmers and harvesting crops for money every summer. Quickly they all learn to listen to Ma. All of them succeed in moving far from lives of physical labor.

On the ship that carries her family from Cambodia to a refugee camp, Ma holds tight to Putsata, her dying baby whom she manages to keep alive. “My first feeling was flight,” Putsata says of the memories she has inherited from that voyage. When she turns two, Ma teaches her a game, “Run and hide,” one that the little girl plays so often that it “forms into habit,” her “very best skill.”

“Both of us are storytellers,” Putsata  says. Ma carries a storehouse of Cambodian fables and myth, while her daughter becomes a journalist who quests for facts that might hold truth. The presiding fact in Putsata’s life is one she’s always known: Ma is the savior and Putsata is the saved. “I owed Ma my life,” and in return Putsata “tried to live an immaculate life.” She goes off to work in Cambodia, becomes fluent in Khmer, helps her relatives who survived the Pol Pot years. She turns herself into a model daughter and “Ma made a myth of me.” Nothing seems to shatter that myth, not even when Putsata tells Ma that she’s gay, right up until the day that she discovers that her mother never believed that disclosure was true.

When she finds that she needs to choose between the woman she will marry and Ma, Reang becomes “the single flaw in the beautiful fiction of a family Ma spun for the Khmer community.” Without bathos or drama, she conveys the agony that racks her mother and herself in the moment when long after their voyage to safety ended, “Ma had cast me overboard.”

Memoirs have become a tiresome genre but Putsata Reang has set an impossible standard of excellence with hers. Intertwining Ma’s folktales with the story of her mother’s life and her own, Reang burnishes this with the language of a poet. When her abusive father attacks one of Reang’s young cousins, the blood seeping from the child “lying like a broken bird on the floor”  is “the color of fresh berries.” When Reang visits the death chambers of Tuol Sleng, she feels “the million pinpricks of guilt, shame, and sorrow…calcify in me like a new bone.” The Cambodian monsoons strike as if “through a single slit in the sky, an entire sea crashed onto the land.”

Whether she’s a child working in Oregon’s strawberry fields, “zombie-like and without complaint,” or an adult alone in the country of her birth, seeing it as “an entire nation of the walking wounded,” “so physically beautiful and yet stained with such a grim past,” Reang takes her readers with her, imbuing them with her sense of beauty, her scalding honesty, her refusal to indulge in self-pity, and her extraordinary history.~Janet Brown