Kenji Miyazawa Picture Book Series by Kenji Miyazawa (International Foundation for the Promotion of Languages and Cultur

Kenji Miyazawa was a Japanese novelist and a writer of children’s books. He was born in Iwate Prefecture in the town of Hanamaki. He is known internationally for his novel Night on the Galactic Railroad which has also been published in English with the title of Milky Way Railroad, Night Train to the Stars or Fantasy Railroad in the Stars.

Kenji Miyazawa Picture Book Series consists of ten  books published by the International Foundation for the Promotion of Language and Culture (IFLC). The mission statement of the IFLC is “to translate and introduce Japanese literature to the world: to translate and introduce outstanding literature of other countries: to aid and encourage excellent translators of various languages: to provide scholarships to students of all nationalities: to sponsor seminars for language learning; and to conduct translation-proficiency examinations.”

To put it more simply, the aim of the IFLC is “to further linguistic and cultural exchange and mutual understanding throughout the world” and is authorized by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science of Japan. 

At the time of writing this review, the local library in Aomori Prefecture carried only three of the ten titles in the series. I will be featuring Books 1, 5, and 7. The titles of the books are [The Shining Feet], [The Bears of Mt. Nametoko], and [Crossing the Snow]. 

The Shining Feet - originally titled Hikari no Hadashi was published in 1997 and is translated by Sarah M. Strong with illustrations by Miyuki Hasekura. This story centers on three characters. Ichiro, his younger brother Narao, and their father. The setting is the cold harsh winter of northern Japan. The father is making charcoal in the mountains as an extra means of earning income for the family. The boys are visiting their father for the weekend. As Miyazawa was a devout Buddhist, this story is all about karma and the enduring pain and suffering while still holding compassion for others. A little heavy for a picture book if you ask me. 

The Bears of Mt. Nametoko - originally titled Nametokosan no Kuma was published in 1998. It was translated from the Japanese by Karen Colligan-Taylor and illustrated by Maso Idou. This story is about matagi culture. Matagi are traditional winter hunters of Japan’s Tohoku region. They mostly hunt deer and bear. In this story, Kojuro is a matagi and is about to kill a bear, but the bear begs Kojuro to spare her life for another two years as she is pregnant. In return, the bear will willingly sacrifice itself to Kojuro after the two years are up. 

Crossing the Snow - originally titled Yuki Watari and was published in 2000. It was translated from the Japanese by Karen Colligen-Taylor and illustrated by Maso Ido. This story is about the relationship between humans and animals. However, in Miyazawa’s story, it is only children who are less than twelve-years-old as they are still considered quite innocent and pure. Crossing the snow is a metaphor for leaving the human world and entering a world where humans and animals live harmoniously together. 

I always find that children’s books are not only for children but can be enjoyed by adults as well. As a resident of the Tohoku area of Japan since 2016, I have become more interested than ever in the writers from this area. Whenever I find their publications are available in English, I can’t help but buy them or check them out from the library. I believe local writers often give you insights to their hometowns and if you decide to move and live there, what better way to get to know your neighbors if you can discuss stories they are most likely familiar with. ~Ernie Hoyt

Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie (Bloomsbury)

Vicki Mackenzie was taking part in a month-long Buddhist meditation course in Pomaia, Italy when she first laid eyes on a woman’s whose life story she would eventually write about. “A somewhat frail-looking woman in early middle age, with fair skin and a rather rounded back. She was dressed in the maroon and gold robes of an ordained Buddhist nun and her hair was cropped short in the traditional manner.”

It would be late in the evening at dinner when a man sitting next to her at the table pointed out the woman again and said, “That’s Tenzin Palmo, The Englishwoman who has spent twelve years meditating in a cave over 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas.” 

It would be a few months later when Mackenzie would pick up a Buddhist magazine and found an interview with Tenzin Palmo. What Tehzin Palmo said in that interview would change Mackenzie’s life as well. Palmo had stated, “I have made a vow to attain Enlightenment in the female form - no matter how many lifetimes it takes.” 

Mackenzie felt that female spirituality was seriously lacking in role models. “The lamas who taught us were male; the Dalai Lamas (all fourteen of them) were male, the powerful lineage holders who carried the weight of the entire tradition were male, the revered Tulkus, the recognized reincarnated lamas, were male, the vast assemblies of monastics who filled the temple halls and schools of learning were male; the succession of gurus who had come to the West to inspire eager new seekers were male.” 

Mackenzie wanted to know, “Where were the women in all of this.” Now here was a woman who said she was going to change that. From that article in the Buddhist magazine, Mackenzie would seek out Tenzin Palmo to find out more about her - Where did she come from? What had she learnt in that cave? What made her take the vow. 

Cave in the Snow is Tenzin Palmo’s story. It is about how an Englishwoman, formerly named Diane Perry, had become an ordained Buddhist nun. It is the story of Palmo’s spiritual journey which takes her from her small town in England, to finding a guru in India, then making a vow to meditate in a cave high up in the Himalayas. 

Tenzin Palmo spent twelve years meditating alone in the cave, dealing with the harsh weather, wild animals, near-starvation and facing her own personal demons, all in the name of following the path to enlightenment. 

It is the story of her overcoming many obstacles along the way - people telling her it was too dangerous, monks saying women would not be able to survive the harsh conditions or cope with the solitude. But Tenzin Palmo is no ordinary woman. She proved all her detractors wrong. She’s very modest about saying what she has gained from her near isolation but her determination to help women on their spiritual path has not waivered one bit. 

I, for one, am a skeptic about the mysticism and seemingly supernatural powers of spiritual leaders and gurus but I find the spiritual journeys people take to be inspiring and admirable. It isn’t anybody who can give up their comfortable life, their family, their friends, and move to a foreign country whose language you don’t know or don’t understand to find the answers to your own question about “Who am I?” or “Why am I here?”. Tenzin Palmo is definitely an interesting individual. You will be moved by her courage, admire her perseverance, and you may even be inspired to take on your own spiritual journey. ~Ernie Hoyt

Ghost Music by An Yu (Grove Press, release date January 2023)

Even before the pandemic came to change the world, every body contained a city of ghosts, one that got rid of dead cells, facilitated the departure of those that were dying, and formed new replacements. Physically we’re all mixtures of what was, what is disappearing, and what is new. Mentally we struggle to reconcile memories of what’s past with the memories we make of a confusing present. In our external environments we’re faced with the same predicament each time we walk outside, working to make sense of death and flux. Seeing how quickly the memories of what once was in place fade away, we’re confronted with the inevitable question: When we’re gone will we be remembered? How can we ensure that we’ll survive in the memories of others?

Song Yan, a young urban housewife, is disturbed one night by a lucid dream, so vivid she can’t find her way out of it. Confronted by a small orange mushroom that has the power of speech, she asks it whether it’s real or a dream and is told “Sometimes these two things are not so different.” 

“I’d like to be remembered,” the mushroom says before it vanishes.

At one time, Soon Yan was once a gifted pianist.  Now she’s a piano teacher, a woman, still young,  who believes she has turned her life over to her husband. It takes a series of mysterious gifts, boxes of fresh mushrooms, to reawaken her curiosity, especially when a letter arrives that reveals the giver. The boxes have been sent by a legend from her past, China’s most famous concert pianist, who disappeared so thoroughly years ago that he’d been given up as dead.

The letter contains Bai Yu’s address and a request that she come to visit. When Song Yan musters enough courage to grant this wish, Bai Yu tells her, “Help me find the sound of being alive.”

Together the two pianists search for what lies within the cave of a musical composition and slowly Song Yan discovers a depth in her life that extends beyond the routine she’s fostered. Then Bai Yu goes away once more and the orange mushroom returns, larger and more invasive than when it first showed itself.

An Yu has written a novel that’s is as haunting and elusive as a musical composition played on a piano. Is Bai Yu dead or alive? For that matter, is Song Yan truly alive after submerging her musical talent in a life over which she has no control? And what the hell is that mushroom and its attending crop of orange fungi that eventually cover an entire room--plus the piano that stands within it?

In a story that’s both eerie and revelatory, dabbling in magic realism and yet firmly rooted on a real street in a real neighborhood in a real city, An Yu posits that to be remembered after death, it’s necessary to live a life of joy and purpose. Song Yan slowly recovers her authentic self in a process that’s both painful and exhilarating, a survival story for our time.~Janet Brown

Meatless Days by Sara Suleri (Penguin)

Sara Suleri Goodyear was born in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the daughter of Z.A. Suleri and Mair Jones. Suleri was a Pakistani journalist, author, and was also an activist for the Pakistan Movement, a political movement whose aim was to create an independent Muslim nation from British India. Mair Jones was from Wales and was an English professor who taught at a university in Pakistan. Suleri herself taught English at Yale University.

Originally published in 1989, Meatless Days is Suleri’s memoir. A new edition was published in the Penguin Women Writers series in 2018. However, this book is not just a biography of her life, it is about the people and nations that shaped her life. It is about living and experiencing life in the newly created nation of Pakistan, having an early education in the United Kingdom, and dealing with the mystery of the American Midwest. It also reads like a soliloquy on what it means to be a woman. 

In her discourse, Suleri says leaving Pakistan was the same as giving up the company of women. She goes on to say that “the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary: we were too busy for that just living, just living, conducting precise negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant”. 

In her numerous autobiographical accounts, she starts off with talking about her Dadi, the mother of her father - her grandmother. It seemed to Sara that her grandmother had a special relationship with God. “God she loved, and she understood him better than anyone.” Sara’s Dadi could also be greatly moved by food. Sara and her sisters “pondered but never quite determined whether food or God constituted her most profound delight”. 

One of the most interesting chapters is about Suleri’s friend Mustakori, a woman who had an array of nicknames - Congo Lise, Fancy Musgrave, and Faze Mackaw. Suleri met Mustakori at Kinnaird College which she was attending. Her memory of Mustakori, although humorous, sometimes verges on the disrespectful as when she and her friend Dale were talking about her. Dale says, “That girl is amazing because…” to which Suleri responds, “Because…she was born stupid and will die stupid. And that’s the end of that.” What a thing to say about an innocent friend. Suleri and her older sister Ifat and other friends found Mustakori’s innocence confounding.

However, Suleri’s most profound chapters focus on her older sister Ifat. Early in the novel, we are told that Ifat was killed in a similar way as her mother. They were both the victims of being hit by a rickshaw. The rickshaw driver who hit Ifat never stopped and looked back and was never caught. The incident happened just two years after their mother died. The love for her

sister is evident in the way she wants to avoid the tragedy and to focus on how her sister had such a big impact on her life. Ifat was four years her senior. She was born beautiful, according to Sara. It was one of her casual friends that told her she had to write about her sister’s death. She responded with a loud “Nonsense”, but after getting home she recalled the conversation, Suleri comes to the conclusion, “Ifat’s story has nothing to do with dying; it has to do with a price the mind must pay when it lives in a beautiful body.”

Suleri’s memoir does not follow convention as we learn of her mother and sister’s death, only to have them come to life in later chapters telling the reader how each of them has shaped her lives. Her prose is flowing and full of metaphors and at times are quite hard to decipher. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if she was actually talking about a person or some object of her imagination. And as Suleri jumps from one relative or friend to another, we find ourselves in Pakistan, Great Britain, the American Midwest, Kuwait, and back to Pakistan. Sara Suleri had definitely lived a full and interesting life so I was a bit sad to hear of her passing this year in March. I hope one day to be as passionate about my family and friends and all those who shaped my life as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Betrayed by Reine Arcache Melvin (Europa Editions)

The story flowing from the pages of The Betrayed has the thickened, sweet darkness of freshly drawn blood. Reine Arache Melvin has created three main characters who could easily take center stage in a Greek tragedy. They inhabit a place that everyone has heard of, during an unnamed time that many will think they can identify. But the portraits of the two sisters, Lali and Pilar, along with Arturo,  the man they both long for, reveal only enough of what takes place around them to create skillful traps. One quick snap and all that seems to be understood becomes a lie.

The death of their father brings Lali, Pilar, and their mother back from a U.S. exile to their home in Manila. “The General” has been ousted but politics are so convoluted that even the new female leader must honor his godson, Lali’s husband Arturo. As new alliances are forged, Lali and Arturo’s marriage weakens. Arturo fell in love with a seductress. Now she’s soon to become a mother, a truth that shakes them.

Confused and floundering, they both take refuge in old habits. Arturo becomes attracted to his wife’s younger sister and pregnant Lali gives Pilar permission to comfort him. Lali, horrified by her changing body that no longer rivets the male gaze, comes across a foreign man in a shopping mall and decides he’ll become her prey. She fascinates him, but not for the reasons she expects.

Then both sisters are ensnared in the brewing revolution that lurks beneath the surface of the Philippines. Their story swiftly encompasses a burning village, a public decapitation, a dinner party with a man who would cheerfully see everyone at the table dead at his feet.

“I was wrong about Lali. People surprise you,” Lali once heard her father tell someone over the phone. She and everyone around her continues to surprise, going against easy assessments, right up to the conclusion of their stories. 

So does the novel’s setting. Arcache Melvin, in tactile detail, shows Machiavellian cruelty, casual corruption, and wealth that makes all wishes come true. Her trio are aristocrats, born into privilege and comfort that’s denied to the majority of Filipinos. Yet even with the insulation provided by their birth and breeding, both Lali and Pilar understand more about the people who surround them than does the foreigner Lali picked up in the mall, an investigative photographer who has steeped himself in places the sisters have yet to see, or the foreign missionaries who have made their homes in the middle of a revolution.  

“You don’t go deeper, “ Lali tells her photographer, “It’s all one-sided.” Yet within the kaleidoscope of violence and shifting loyalties of the Philippines, going deeper is like being hacked with a machete. The pain is excruciating and unfathomable.

Aracache Melvin takes her readers deeper. With skillful twists of her kaleidoscope, she shows one side, then another, with vertiginous speed and clarity. The Betrayed splits open a crack into a hidden world, quickly showing its brutality, its tenderness, its ghosts, and its darkest corners--and still by the end, readers will find themselves for answers to the enigmas they’ve been shown. “In the end, life gave more than it took away,” but for whom?~Janet Brown

Nuclear Blues by Bradley K. Martin (Great Leader Books)

Martin K. Bradley worked for decades as a foreign correspondent. He was mainly based in Asia. When he worked for Bloomberg News he was chief North Korea watcher. He gained his reputation on being a North Korea expert after writing the nonfiction bestseller Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader : North Korea and the Kim Dynasty. It was a comprehensive history of the country under the leadership of  Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

In Nuclear Blues Bradley has now turned to the world of fiction and has created a unique murder-mystery set in the Hermit Kingdom under the new leadership of Kim Jong-un. Included in his story is a Korean-American journalist-turned blues musician, suspicious men from the Middle East, and a Christian college in North Korea, credit-default swaps, Russia, nuclear missiles, and a mysterious woman who may or may not be related to the current leader. 

Heck Davis is a photo-journalist but has decided to give up the profession and become a blues musician. He still takes on the occasional story and finds himself at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, also known as the DMZ. It is a strip of land that runs across the Korean peninsula separating the countries of North Korea and South Korea and was established as a buffer zone between the two warring countries.

Davis was on assignment for an Internet-based news agency called AsiaIntel. He was with three other cameramen visiting the Joint Security Area (JSA) located in Panmunjom. His journalist friend Joe Hammond was also scheduled to show up at the JSA. But because Pyongyang has a strong distaste for foreign journalists, Joe had come to North Korea as a member of an ordinary sightseeing tourist. Davis timed his schedule to coincide with the tour group so he could see his friend. 

Davis’ current assignment was to take video for AsiaIntel. His editors want him to “gather military-themed footage from the southern side of the Cold War border relic.” Heck spotted his friend Joe but he felt there was something not quite right about him. “There was something wild in his eyes, something coiled and edgy about his posture.” 

Davis focuses his camera on the friend when said friend crouched, bent forward and rammed his head into one of the North Korean guards. As Joe was making a run toward the South Korean side of the J.S.A., he flashed his passport and yelled, “U.S. Citizen! U.S. Citizen” and looked at Davis and shouted “Sixty-seven twenty” before he was shot down and killed. Davis also noticed three letters scrawled on the palm of his friend’s hand - “CDs”. 

With the death of his friend, Heck Davis journalist instincts take over. He is determined to solve the mystery of what happened to Joe. He also needs to know what “Sixty-seven twenty” and “CDs” mean. But first, he must find a way to get back into North Korea. 

Thus begins one of the most original stories involving Kim Jong-un and a host of other characters. The further the story takes you inside North Korea, the more interesting and surreal the plot. Highly implausible but extremely entertaining, I for one couldn’t put this book down. It may not be the true essence of North Korea but with Martin’s background as a North Korea watcher, he makes it as real as it can possibly get. You may even want to visit the world’s most isolated country just to see for yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (Ballantine Books)

We all need a dash of romance in our reading lives, no matter how cynical we believe ourselves to be. History buffs can read volume after volume of past events but are rarely moved to tears as they turn the pages. Is it important to cry? Yes. Tears are a sign that we’ve moved beyond empathy into sympathy--feeling the same pain. Without that, our understanding is still removed, dispassionate, and easy to forget. 

History and romance are a hard combination to unite in literature, since one frequently threatens to submerge the other, but Jamie Ford did it in his debut novel, published thirteen years ago and still in demand. Cleverly juxtaposing past and present, Ford makes the days that began World War II in the US as real as anything we experience today, and he does this through the story of a childhood friendship that becomes a doomed love story--or is it?

Henry Lee and Keiko Okabe are both scholarship students at an exclusive white school, working together in the school lunchroom. Henry lives in Chinatown, Keiko in Japantown, Nihonmachi. Their two neighborhoods are adjoined but are divided by nationalism, prejudice, and privilege. The Japanese feel superior to the Chinese and the Chinese, like Henry’s father, hate the Japanese for atrocities Japan is committing in Nanjing and other Chinese cities. Even before Pearl Harbor brings the US into war with Japan, Henry leaves his house every day with a badge his father has pinned to his shirt. that says “I am Chinese.”

Born in the same city hospital, Henry is the child of Chinese-born parents while Keiko’s parents were bon in the US. Even so, when headlines are filled with Japan’s act of war, Keiko is the one at risk. In Nihonamchi bonfires in the streets consume anything that will link its residents with Japan. Family treasures are tossed from apartment windows and find their way to the flames. Signs for Mikado Street are replaced with ones with its new name, Dearborn. Japanese-owned businesses that have given economic life to the area are closed or are taken over by new owners. Japanese residents from all over the region are rounded up under Executive Order 9066 and are shipped off to internment camps, with almost 10,000 removed from Henry and Keiko’s city alone. When the Okabe family is put on a train and sent to improvised shelters built from cattle stalls in the county fairground, Henry discovers a way to visit Keiko. When her family is transported to Camp Minidoka in another state, Henry finds her. But Henry is only thirteen. His parents bitterly oppose his friendship with a Japanese girl and the two of them lose touch.

Decades later, when Henry is in his fifties, a discovery at the Panama Hotel that was once the pride of Nihonmachi makes headlines. In the basement of this neighborhood landmark are trunks and boxes that had been left in safekeeping when their owners were interned with only the possessions they could carry. As these artifacts are unearthed so are Henry’s memories and as he remembers, a vibrant community that has vanished comes vividly into light.

Ford has based his novel on solid facts. The Panama Hotel that was the sanctuary for jettisoned treasures stands in Seattle’s International District/Chinatown with belongings that were never reclaimed still in its basement. Along with a scant number of businesses and restaurants, this is all that remains of the prosperous community of Nihonmachi that once spread over almost the entire district. Until very recently its history had been forgotten and was given an impetus for revival by the meticulous renovation of the Panama and, in no small part, by Ford’s depiction of the past. 

The area has never recovered from the expulsion of its Japanese American residents. After reading Ford’s descriptions of the jazz clubs, the Japanese-owned barber shops, photography studio, the Nippon Kan Theatre, the Nichibei Publishing Company, all gone, a walk through the area is tinged with its ghostly past. Passing the historic King Street Station where Amtrak trains whisk passengers across the country, its carefully preserved architecture makes it easy to see the thousands of families being herded onto trains under the guns of soldiers. The cattle stalls of “Camp Harmony” haunt the shadows of the Puyallup Fairgrounds. The sadness of the past is palpable in the present, reawakened by Ford’s story of an interrupted friendship and a shattered community.~Janet Brown

Three Paper Charms by Shosuke Kita and Seion Yamaguchi translated by M. Owaki and S. Ballard (Shinseken)

Shosuke Kita was born in Aomori Prefecture, the northernmost prefecture of Honshu, the largest of Japan’s four main islands. He is a professor at a local university and researches folk tales of the Tohoku Region. Seion Yamaguchi is also an Aomori native whose occupation is an illustrator. Yamaguchi provides beautiful pictures to accompany the text.

Three Paper Charms is the English translation of Sanmai no Fuda. The tale is believed to have originated in either Aomori Prefecture or Saitama Prefecture in the Kanto area. Other scholars argue that the original telling of the story can be traced back to Niigata Prefecture. Although there are many variations, the core of the story remains the same. 

In the Tohoku region, the title is Kozokko ga Madadaga and was published in English in 2001. The story is about a mischievous little boy who is also an apprentice monk. As he was always causing trouble, the head monk decides to send the boy on a journey to learn self-discipline. 

The monk gave the boy three paper charms and said to use them only when he finds himself in trouble. As the boy walked and walked and walked, it became dark and he needed to find a place to stay for the night. 

He was fortunate enough to spot a light in the house and went to ask if he could have a bed for the night. A young and beautiful girl greeted him at the door and said he was more than welcome to stay. The woman fed him and he fell asleep shortly thereafter. 

The boy woke up in the middle of the night after hearing a strange sound coming from another room. As he took a peak, what he saw wasn’t the beautiful girl who greeted him at the door. He saw an old hag sharpening a knife and heard say, “How delicious the boy must be! He is young, plump and healthy!” The boy also heard her saying, “Let’s sharpen the knife, make it as sharp as possible, and then I can chop him up!”

The boy then tries to run away but the hag hears him and even though he says that he is just going to the bathroom, the hag ties a rope around him so he won’t be able to escape. This is when he remembers the three paper charms the head monk had given him. 

His first wish is for when the hag asks him if he’s done, to have it answer “Not yet”. He ties the rope to a pillar in the bathroom then runs away from the house. After a while, the hag realizes she’s been fooled and chases after him. As she almost catches up to the boy, he uses the second paper charm and asks it, “Please turn into a big sand mountain”

The sand mountain had slowed down the hag but she eventually made it over and soon caught up with the boy again. The boy then used his last wish and asked it to turn into a big river. Once again the hag slowed down and the boy ran as fast as he could back to the temple. The hag entered the temple as well and told the monk to give her the boy. 

The head monk was a wise man as well and praised the hag for her magic. He said he would hand over the boy if she could prove how great her magic was. First, the monk asked her to become as tall as the ceiling. She once again demanded the priest to hand over the boy. 

The priest was undeterred and asked if the hag could become as small as a pea and stand on the palm of his hand. She proved that she could do this as well and shouted, “Now, admit your defeat, priest! Give me the boy!”

But as she was just a little pea-sized hag, the priest picked her up with his fingers and threw her into a burning candle. Even the hag couldn’t stop the heat of the candle and that put an end to her life. 

Old folktales are timeless. It doesn’t matter if you're a child or an adult, they never go out of style. You can also enjoy them in all their variations. Reading old folktales and picture books can remind you of the child that still lives within you. ~Ernie Hoyt

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