The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda, translated by Alison Watts (Bitter Lemon Press)

Riku Onda is the pen for Nanae Kumagai, a Japanese writer who was born in Aomori Prefecture and raised in Sendai. She has won several awards in Japan for her works such as the Eiji Yoshikawa Prize, the Japan Booksellers’ Award, the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, and the Naoki Prize. Many of her works have been adapted into television series and feature length films. 

 The Aosawa Murders is her first book to be published in English. It was originally published in the Japanese language in 2005 with the title Eugenia by the Kadokawa Corporation. The English version came out in 2020 and is translated by Alison Watts who has also translated Spark by Naoki Matayoshi, a book that won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize in 2015. 

The Aosawa Murders is also Onda’s first mystery novel. It is part psychological thriller and part murder mystery. However, the murders were committed over thirty years ago. It was a summer day in an unnamed town in an unnamed Prefecture. However, there are clues to pin down the place as Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture, a fairly large town located on the coast of the Sea of Japan. 

There was a celebration for three members of the Aosawa family who share their birthdays on the same day. However, the celebration became a tragedy as seventeen people died - by drinking soda and sake which was laced with cyanide. The only family member who survived was the Aosawa’s daughter - Hisako Aosawa. Unfortunately, Hisako Aosawa didn’t see the people dying around her - as Hisako is blind.

The story opens with a transcript of the police interview with Hisako Aosawa. In the interview, Hisako mentions a blue room and a white flower - a white crepe myrtle flower. This would become a clue as to what happened at that party. 

Although a suspect is later found, the case falls apart as the prime suspect commits suicide. As the years pass by, the detective who first worked on the case was convinced that Hisako played a part in the crime. A lot of the townspeople suspected Hisako as well, including one of Hisako’s childhood friends, a woman by the name of Makiko Saiga who was a little girl at the time of the tragedy and was one of the first people to witness the hellish scene.

Saiga would write a book about the incident more than ten years after that fatal day. It became a bestseller but the author herself would not say if it was either fiction or nonfiction. She was telling an unnamed interviewer, “What do you think a person should do when they come across something they don’t understand? Should they reject it, pretend they never saw it? Be angry or resentful? Grieve or simply be confused?” 

She felt she had to write the book to make sense of what happened, but as with the case itself, the book doesn’t come to any real conclusions and leave the reader with more questions than answers. 

This is the beauty of Riku Onda’s story. As with Makiko Saiga’s novel, which she titled The Forgotten Festival, The Aosawa Murders also ends ambiguously. Her style of writing may take a little getting used to at first. Even after you realize that each chapter is told through the perspective of several different characters who are somehow connected to the Aosawa’s or the Aosawa house, the book still leaves the reader with more questions than answers. Was Hisako Aosawa the mastermind of the poisoning? Did she have a role in what happened? And why did the prime suspect kill himself? Everything is left to conjecture. The story is very thought-provoking but frustrating as well. It is up to you to draw your own conclusion. ~Ernie Hoyt

We Have Always Been Here by Samra Habib (Viking, Penguin Random House Canada)

Samra Habib’s freedom is curtailed from the time she turns four. Left alone with a friend of her father’s while her mother runs an errand, she is sexually assaulted by the man who is supposed to protect her. Although she doesn’t say if the molester suffered any repercussions, she writes “I lost my right to be a child.” While her friends play without adult scrutiny, she has a constant chaperone, a nanny who monitors her whenever she leaves the house.

Other losses lie ahead of her. Her family belongs to one of Islam’s seventy-three sects, the one that is considered heretical. The Ahmadiyya believe in a Messiah who succeeded the Prophet Muhammed, a successor to Christ who will bring about a peaceful triumph of Islam, uniting it with other religions. This is disputed by other sects who refuse to acknowledge the Ahmadi as followers of Islam, often violently. Habib learns to keep her religion a secret but not even discretion allows peace. When her father’s life becomes endangered, he moves his family to Canada.

Fiercely homesick for Pakistan, Habib has that loss compounded by the role reversal that afflicts the children of immigrants. She becomes an English tutor to her parents and as her mother struggles with her efforts to gain a high school diploma, Habib frequently does her parent’s homework. 

Assimilation is difficult but slowly Habib works to become a Canadian teenager. Her parents--and her culture--have other ideas and by the time she’s sixteen, she’s caught in an arranged marriage.

This is too much. Before she moves in with her husband, with their marriage still unconsummated, Habib runs away from home. Taking refuge in the apartment of a classmate, she slowly begins to form her own life, with the privilege of her own freedom.

She earns her own living, discovers her own sexuality that awakens with her love of women, and explores the potential of her own brain. 

Her odyssey is a story of pain and discovery as she works to reconcile herself with her family and to find a way back to the religion that nourishes her. When at last she finds a mosque where gay Muslims are welcomed, she recovers an essential part of herself, her “desire to understand the beauty and complexity of the universe and to treat everyone, regardless of their beliefs, with respect.” It’s a path of heartbreak and inspiration, made vivid by Habib’s gift for detail and her sense of place.

A dozen years ago I sat in a room full of Muslim men who were asked what they would do if they learned their daughter loved women, not men. All of them talked about honor killing, except for one man who said although he couldn’t call for his child’s death, he would never be able to see her again. She would be dead to him.

Those men stayed with me as I read We Have Always Been Here. Their rigid form of Islam that demands the sacrifice of an errant child contrasts sadly and horribly with the words of Habib’s father as he finally accepts who his daughter is. “You can’t help it,” he tells her, “It’s just who you are.”~Janet Brown

When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433 by Louise Levathes (Oxford University Press)

Who could imagine that a ten-year-old boy, captured by Chinese troops in the Mongol-ruled state of Yunnan, would become China’s greatest explorer of the seas? 

Ma He was a lucky child. While most of their enemies’ sons were immediately castrated on the battlefield, he avoided that fate until he was thirteen, when he became the personal eunuch servant to a son of the emperor, Prince Zhu Di.

When his father died, Zhu Di launched a rebellion against the chosen successor, a long battle in which Ma He proved to be a skilled soldier and a loyal ally to his master. After Zhu Di took the throne as the Yongle Emperor, Ma He was given a new name and as Zheng He, had a privileged position in the imperial court.

Over the past dynasties, eunuchs had gained power, rising from humble servants to form their own bureaucracy. Taking the lead as military men and heads of the emperor’s household, their influence eclipsed the Confucianist leaders who had held sway for centuries. The pragmatism of the eunuchs meshed well with the aspirations of the Yongle Emperor and trade soon became the major source of revenue.

Earlier when the Tang Dynasty had conquered Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria, and Korea, this expanded territory gave rise to expanded markets and formerly unknown prized goods. Slowly China moved beyond the Confucian belief that trade was a menial occupation and the Middle Kingdom needed no contact with foreign countries. Chinese ships gradually became essential instruments for trade expansion and the Yongle Emperor grew eager to increase his trade borders by building more—and much bigger—ships.

Looking for a commander of his future fleet, he turned to Zheng He. His teenage servant had become a man with “glaring eyes” and “a voice as loud as a huge bell,” who towered above other men with extraordinary height. His military prowess and leadership skills prevailed over what was seen as his advanced age of thirty-five and made him the emperor’s choice to command the fleet that would accompany the newly created treasure ships.

Filled with porcelain, silk, brocades, iron, salt, and other luxurious commodities, the treasure ships were sumptuous and impressive, as befitted their status as representatives of China’s wealth and splendor. The largest of them is estimated to have been over 400 feet long and 166 feet wide; all of them were the only ships to have nine masts. 

They were accompanied by eight-masted “horse ships,” seven-masted supply ships, six-masted troop transports, and five-masted warships. Among the 27,000 men aboard these vessels were astrologers, Arabic translators, official secretaries and advisers in matters of protocol, skilled workmen for necessary repairs, and 180 medical officers, one for every 150 men.

This armada of 317 ships set off in 1405 on a journey that would last two years. “Our one fear,” Zheng He announced, “is not to be able to succeed.”

He returned in 1407, his ships laden with spices, ebony, ivory, pearls and precious gems. He had defeated and captured Southeast Asia’s most dreaded pirate and brought him back to China for execution. He also carried ambassadors from India, Sumatra,and the Malay Peninsula, all of them coming to pay tribute to ChIna’s emperor.

Six more expeditions followed, from 1407-1433, with Zheng He in command of all but the second. The number of ambassadors bearing tribute from the countries visited by the treasure ships became so numerous that a special compound was set aside to house them all. Technological advances were introduced by the fleet, such as a gift of magnifying lenses mounted on handles, along with “two skilled glassblowers, presumably from the Middle East.”What would become an enduring animosity between Korea and China was sparked when, along ginseng, gold,silver, and leopards, the treasure ships carried 300 beautiful Korean virgins for the emperor’s pleasure.

In 1418, the fifth voyage sailed beyond the coastal cities of the Middle East to the ports of East Africa, beating Vasco da Gama’s arrival by eighty years. Although Arab traders had told Zheng He about the riches found in Europe, he had no interest in expanding trade to that continent. The economic benefits found across the Indian Ocean and the China seas were more than enough to enrich the Yongle Emperor. What came back in the treasure ships financed the move of China’s capital from Nanjing to Beijing and made possible the creation of the Forbidden City.

Perhaps Zheng He knew the seventh voyage of the treasure ship fleet was going to be his last. Before his departure in 1431, he had two tablets made that documented the achievements of past expeditions. These proclaimed success in “unifying seas and continents,” with “countries beyond the horizon from the ends of the earth have all become subjects,” through voyages that made “manifest the transforming power of imperial virtue,” while increasing China’s “geographic knowledge.”

He was sixty when he set off on his final voyage and died on the journey home, his body consigned to the ocean.

His emperor followed him in death two years later. Under his heir,  both the tribute system and China’s maritime dominance withered. Confucians, with their belief that land was more important than the sea, regained their ascendancy. Zheng He’s ship logs were called “deceitful exaggerations of bizarre things” and in 1477 were destroyed to prevent others from following his example. In 1525 all ocean vessels were destroyed and it became a crime to go to sea on a multi-masted ship. 

But the treasure ship fleet had expanded the boundaries of those who sailed on them. At one time three Chinese envoys had jumped ship in Cambodia, never to return. Others illegally emigrated to Siam and to islands in the Philippines or made their homes in North Vietnam, Singapore, and Java. “The legacy of Zheng He was the diaspora of Chinese to Southeast Asia.”

The amount of detailed information revealed by Louise Levathe is almost overwhelming. She gives a concise history of China from Neolithic times up to the 16th century. Although her scholarship is rigorous,she can’t resist touching upon enticing conjectures, while carefully couching them in “maybe” and “perhaps.”

Did Chinese voyagers, long before Zheng He’s time, reach Australia and Africa, settling in Arnhem Land as “Baijini” and on Kenyan islands as “Bajuni”? Did they make contact with South America long before Columbus? Levathe dwells upon these possibilities just long enough to tease imaginations while wisely leaving any conclusions to future historians. 

Certainly the known history that she offers in just over 200 pages is more than enough to dazzle, inform, and enshrine Zheng He as a hero for all time.~Janet Brown

Kamusari Tales Told at Night by Shion Miura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (Amazon Crossing)

Shion Miura is an award winning Japanese novelist. Her second novel Mahoro Ekimae Tada Benriken won her the 2006 Naoki Prize. The novel and its sequels have been adapted into feature length films, a television series, and a manga as well. Her first novel to be translated into English was Fune wo Amu which translates to “Compiling the Boat''. It was published in English with the title The Great Passage and is about the making of a Japanese dictionary. You could call it the Japanese version of The Professor and the Madman. 

Her other novels available in English are the two books of the Forest Series, The Easy Life in Kamusari and its sequel Kamusari Tales Told at Night. The second book in the series can be read as a stand-alone novel.

Yuki Hirano just turned twenty. His father works for a company in Yokohama and his mother is a homemaker. After Yukio graduated from high school, he left home and came to live in a small mountain village in Mie Prefecture. Or to be more precise, he came to live in this town after he was kicked out of the house. 

Hirano wrote about the first year of his life in Kumasari, which became the first book in the Forest series. Why is he in Kumasari? Forestry. Yuki Hirano is a woodsman. He spends everyday on a mountain “planting cedar or cypress saplings, cutting underbrush, pruning, or chopping timber and hauling it off”. 

He was a trainee in his first year living in Kumasari. This spring, he became a full-time employee of Nakamura Lumber. Of course that puts him at the bottom of the pecking order. Hirano writes about his life in Kumasari on a computer. He writes it with the intention of having others read it, but is too embarrassed to make it public. 

As there is nothing to do in Kumasari, “no place to hang out, no convenience store, no clothing store, no restaurant. Nothing but mountains on every side, layer on layer, covered in green”, Hirano spends his free time writing about his life on the computer. He gives a little information about Nakamura Lumber, its owner, Seiichi Nakamura who is also his team leader. He then goes on to write about the other members of his team. 

Yuki lives with Yoki IIda’s family.  Yoki is a childhood friend of the owner of Nakamura Lumber. He has a wife named Miho, and his grandmother, Granny Shige also lives with them. They also have a pet dog named Noko. 

During his first year in Kumasari, Yuki wrote about what he saw in the mountains and what was going on in the village. After giving up writing for a few months, Yuki heard an old village story which inspired him to start writing again. He decided, “Why not record village legends, stories about the villagers, and other items” he came across. 

Shion makes you care about the villagers in this small village that has nothing to offer outsiders, except a job in the forestry. The characters are varied and interesting. The protagonist, Yuki Hirano, is neither offensive nor cool. He is a hard worker, enjoys his job, and gets flustered as he tries to get a date with the local school teacher, the only available woman in town close to his age. The simplicity of the story and the interaction between the characters, along with the legends and lore of the village makes this a very heartwarming read. The story might make you want to move to the countryside. ~Ernie Hoyt

Penance by Kanae Minato, translated by Philip Gabriel (Mulholland Books)

Kanae Minato may be the queen of Japan’s psychological thriller. She is the author of the award winning novel Confession, titled Kokuhaku in Japanese. Penance is her third novel and is her second to be translated into English. It was originally published in Japan in 2012 with the title of Shokuzai which is often translated as “atonement”. However, in this novel, “penance” is the more appropriate term. It was translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel who is a professor of Japanese literature in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. He has also translated short stories and novels by Haruku Murakami.

Penance was also made into a television mini series. It is just as disturbing as her previous novel Confession. It is the story of five childhood friends. One summer during the Obon holidays while the girls are playing on the school grounds, they are approached by a man. Soon, one of the girls is dead and the man has disappeared. Unfortunately, for the grieving mother and the police, not one of the girls can remember the face of the man and the man was never caught.

At the time of the incident, the young girls were only ten years old. Their names are Sae, Maki, Akiko, Yuko, and Emily. Except for Emily, the girls grew up together in a small rural town. The only thing the town was known for was having the cleanest air in Japan. And because of this, Adachi Manufacturing decided to build a factory there to make their precision instruments. Heading the factory was Emily’s father. 

Three years later, the police still have no leads and the killer is still on the loose. Asako, Emily’s mother, asks the girls, who are now thirteen, to come to her house. She tells the four girls that if they can’t find the murderer, then they should atone for their crimes in a way that will satisfy her. If they don’t, Asako said she would take her revenge on each and every one of them. 

Emily’s mother moved back to Tokyo and the four girls did get on with their lives and gradually had forgotten the threat Asako made against them.  The statute of limitations for the crime against her daughter was about to take effect (although this law has been amended in Japan in 2010 for capital offenses) and the death of her daughter remains a mystery. Fifteen years later, Asako’s threat comes back to haunt all four of them.

Kanae Minato’s novels are dark and chilling. They also make you think. If you were as young as they were when one of your friends was killed, what would you do? Would you be able to take charge like Maki who gave her friends directions before seeking help as well? Would you have been able to go to the police like Yuka? Would you be able to sit near a dead body on your own like Sae? Would you have handled informing Emily’s mother more tacitly than Akiko when Emily’s mother asks her where Emily is only to be told, “She’s dead”? If you know the killer is still on the loose and has seen your face, would you live in constant fear until he is caught? 

And of course the biggest question remains? Will the killer be caught before the case reaches its statute of limitations? ~Ernie Hoyt

Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd (MacMillan)

There are catastrophic events that are just too big for the human mind to absorb. On March 11, 2011 an earthquake hit Japan, the fourth most powerful ever recorded, measuring between 9 and 9.1 on the Richter Scale. It lasted for six interminable minutes, during which it knocked the earth ten inches off its axis, moved Japan four inches closer to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, and generated a 120-foot tsunami that came less than an hour after the shaking stopped.

Japan is accustomed to earthquakes and its national protocols are firmly in place. Swiftly all the country’s highways, airports, and railways were shut down. Along the coast,tsunami warnings were broadcast. However in that crucial period between quake and wave, nobody knew exactly how strong the earthquake had been. Nor could they envision the size and power of the approaching tsunami.

When the wave struck, it caused a meltdown of three reactors in Fukishima’s nuclear power plants. The death toll measured 18,500 and half a million of the survivors were left homeless. Richard Lloyd Parry, who lived in Tokyo with his family, described the aftermath as a “disordered dream…like a huge and awkwardly shaped package without corners or handles.” Despite his years as an Asian-based journalist, he found that this story was almost impossible to convey in words. It wasn’t until he went to Okawa, a tiny river town on Japan’s northern coast, that the horror became imaginable.

Seventy-five children died in the tsunami. Seventy-four of them died in the schoolyard of the Okawa Elementary School, where they had proceeded in an orderly fashion once the school stopped shaking. With them were eleven teachers. Out of 108 students, only thirty-four children survived and just one teacher.

The school was located in front of a seven-hundred-foot hill. As parents dug their dead children out of the field of mud that the tsunami left behind, some began to wonder why the teachers hadn’t led their pupils up that hill. This issue became far more pointed when the timeframe was widely known. The earthquake was over by 2:46. The tsunami arrived at 3:37, pushing its way up the nearby river.

A parent who came immediately after the quake to pick up her daughter had urged the teachers to take the children up the hill. She was told that she was over-reacting. Two boys later made the same suggestion. They were ignored. 

When the school’s emergency manual had been written, nobody thought of tsunamis as being a danger. The procedure recommended for one was almost criminally vague. 

The national ability to accept earthquakes without panic leached into the reactions of the teachers at Okawa Elementary School and that, along with an ingrained deference toward authority figures, led to a tragedy that became a country-wide issue. But even as the facts slowly came to light, the parents of the dead children grew divided to the point of hatred. The ones who wanted justice through the courts were seen as betrayers of a national code of honor by the others. “Why lay blame,” asked one mother whose child didn’t survive, “What do you expect to come of it?”

By concentrating on one small area of Japan, Parry has made the disaster that wracked the entire country heartbreakingly comprehensible. Interviews with grieving parents, a student who survived, and a man who swam out of the wave through the front door of a friend’s house will make anyone who lives in a coastal community on a fault line begin their emergency planning while searching for the closest high ground.~Janet Brown

Little Soldiers by Lenora Chu (HarperCollins)

“I am a little soldier, I practice every day.” When Lenore Chu overhears her little son singing this in Mandarin, she takes it in stride. After all, he’s already serenaded her with The East is Red, extolling Mao as the “Great Savior.” This is Rainey’s second year as a student in an elite Shanghai kindergarten and he and his parents have all made sizable adjustments during that time.

Chu and her husband feel fortunate when their three-year-old is accepted at Song  Ching Ling Kindergarten, a “model school” with special rules. Although it’s part of China’s state-run public school system, it doesn’t have an open admission policy. Most of its small students are the children of Shanghai’s elite. Chu’s wealthy, influential uncle is flabbergasted. His granddaughter was denied entrance in spite of his connections that usually “made the impossible materialize.”

Born and raised in the U.S., Chu was taught Mandarin and received a strict Chinese upbringing from her Taiwanese parents. Her husband speaks fluent Mandarin which he learned as one of the first Peace Corps volunteers to show up in an isolated village in rural China. They want their child to become bilingual and they’re impressed with the accomplishments of China’s education system. Even so  they’re taken aback when Rainey tells them his teacher forces him to eat eggs, a food he detests, at lunch. When Chu tries to discuss this with the teacher, she’s told, “Eggs are good nutrition and all young children must eat them.” A week later, the teacher lets her know that Rainey now eats eggs and Chu doesn’t dash that triumph by telling that Rainey still refuses to eat them at home.

Meanwhile  Chu sees her son’s focus, attention span,and self-discipline soar. Academically he flourishes while at home his parents nurture his imagination and creativity. Chu begins to realize Rainey’s childhood is the mirror-image opposite of her own. She was given an American education and a Chinese upbringing while  Rainey has American freedom at home coupled with the rigorous life of a Chinese student. When the family returns to the U.S. during summer vacation, Rainey’s parents are relieved that their son fits in perfectly.

Chu begins to delve into China’s school system, visiting classrooms, making friends with teenage students, and researching the history of education through the centuries 

In 1949, she discovers, four out of every five Chinese were unable to read. Forty years later most children receive nine years of free compulsory education, with the goal of providing nation-wide preschool for all. However the historic dominance of tests that will determine success in later life still prevails, with the National College Entrance Exam looming over every student. Around 10 million teenagers take this annually. Only two-thirds of them will pass and go on to a university. The rest will become unskilled laborers or entrepreneurs.

The pressure of this exam permeates the lives of students, beginning when they’re only toddlers. One of Rainey’s three-year-old classmates is enrolled in three after-school classes where she learns English, Math, and Pinyin. One of Chu’s friends sends his six-year-old to eight after-school classes every week.

Chinese educators believe very young children are in a “golden period of memory expansion” which is essential for true learning. “You have to work hard to achieve,” a Chinese educator says, and effort is demanded of every student. Hard work is stressed over and above innate ability. “There is little difference in the intelligence of my students,” a teacher tells Chu, “Hard work is the most important thing.”

And yet Chu finds that Western methods are being incorporated within Chinese schools, while maintaining the core belief that learning depends on individual industriousness. “Maybe,” a Chinese educator concludes, “the hybrid of American and  Chinese systems is perfect.” If so, Rainey, whose parents plan to keep him in Chinese schools until sixth grade when the pressure of exams and political indoctrination becomes intense, is well on his way to becoming the perfect student.~Janet Brown

Confessions by Kanae Minato, translated by Stephen Snyder (Mulholland Books)

Yuko Moriguchi is a single-mother who teaches at a Middle School. She is thanking her students for participating in “Milk Time”, a program designed by the Ministry of Education to promote dairy products, even if it was without their consent. Moriguchi decided to tender her resignation and on the last day of class before summer vacation, she also had one last lecture to give to her homeroom class.

The apple of her eye is her four-year-old daughter Manami. Unfortunately, her daughter died in an accident on the school grounds. She told her students she was resigning, not just from the school, but from teaching. When one of her students asked if it was because of her daughter, she says that’s part of the reason, but she shocks her students by announcing she’s retiring “Because Manami’s death wasn’t an accident. She was murdered by some of the students in this class.”

So begins Confessions, Kanae Minato’s first novel, originally published in the Japanese language in 2008 with the title of Kokuhaku. It has received many awards including the Detective Novel Prize for New Writers, and the National Booksellers’ Award. The English version was published in 2014 and translated by Stephen Snyder. The book was also adapted into a feature length film in 2010 which also became a major hit. 

Ms. Moriguchi She also shares with her students why she became a teacher and how she ended up being a single mother. She tells them her engagement was called off by her fiance after she got pregnant because her soon-to-be husband discovered that he was HIV positive and didn’t want to burden her and suggested terminating the pregnancy as he feared that the baby would be HIV positive as well. 

After making the shocking announcement that the killers were in the same room as their peers, she talked about Japan’s Juvenile Law. She asked her students if they were aware of why the law was implemented. She tells them, “it was written with the idea that young people are still immature and in the process of becoming adults, so when necessary, the state, in place of parents, needs to find the best way to rehabilitate those who commit crimes”. This meant that a child under sixteen who commits a crime, even an atrocious crime as murder, is handed over to the Family Courts and usually doesn’t even end up in a juvenile detention center. 

Ms. Moriguchi tells the class that she’s surprised by their reaction or lack thereof, knowing full well that two of their peers are murderers. What they can’t understand is why their teacher didn’t go to the police. She tells them, “I’m not noble by keeping the identity of A and B a secret”. She hasn’t told the police because she doesn’t trust the law to punish them. For her parting words, she thanks the class once again for finishing drinking their milk. She also mentions that she added a little extra something to A and B’s milk that morning. A little bit of blood, blood from her ex-fiance. And so begins Ms. Moriguchi’s revenge. 

A psychological thrill that will keep you turning pages until the very end. After Ms. Moriguchi’s last lecture in her homeroom, the story shifts from a different character’s point of view. A powerful story of alienation, abandonment, bullying, mind-games, and murder. It’s not a simple whodunit as you already know who the criminals are. It’s what happens after the teacher’s speech that makes this a novel that’s hard to put down. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Field Guide to Happiness : What I Learned in Bhutan about Living, Loving and Waking Up by Linda Leaming (Hay House)

Linda Leaming was a young American woman who left her comfortable life in Nashville, Tennessee and went to the small Himalayan country of Bhutan, the country known for its Gross National Happiness, to teach English. Not only did she fall in love with the country but she fell in love with one of its citizens and started a new life there. She wrote about it in her first book Married to Bhutan which was previously reviewed on this blog by Janet Brown.

Leaming has now written a follow up book titled A Field Guide to Happiness with the subtitle of What I Learned in Bhutan about Living, Loving and Waking Up. Leaming has been living in Bhutan since 1997. She married a renowned thangka artist, thangka being a religious painting usually depicting a Buddhist deity. She now shares what she learned and continues to learn in Bhutan about finding happiness. 

When Leaming talks about happiness in this book, she says she’s talking about well-being. She thinks of happiness as “being a state wherein we are ‘without want’”. Her four main points of what she thinks about happiness is, first - “Everyone wants to be happy”. Secondly, she believes “happiness begins with intent”. Her third point, “Happiness doesn’t just happen; it’s a result of conscious action (and sometimes that “action” is to do nothing). Finally, she believes “this action involves doing simple things well”. 

One of the first things she says she had to learn was patience. This was before she got married and became more grounded in living in Bhutan. Her first visit to the Bank of Bhutan was emotionally challenging as she was the epitome of an American living in a foreign country. Americans, those people known for being busy, loud, obnoxious, demanding, and impatient. Perhaps it is an unkind stereotype but may be an accurate description. She says, “In Bhutan, if I have three things to do in a week, it’s considered busy. In the U.S., I have at least three things to do between breakfast and lunch.”

Living in Bhutan has taught her more about herself than she would learn from any psychologist or self-help book. She has learned to be more patient, to “go with the flow”, to do without the modern conveniences of America, such as buying groceries at a supermarket or having a washing machine to do the laundry. She has learned to love and accept herself for who she is, she strives to be a kinder and generous person to others, and she can now talk about death without fear. 

To say this is a self-help book would be an overstatement. Leaming doesn’t push her beliefs on others, she just shares what works for her. She tells her stories in a way that’s delightful and amusing and never condescending. She shares her own weak points and tells the reader how she tries to overcome them or at least not worry about them as much as she used to. What works for Leaming may not work for everyone but I believe as Leaming does, that everyone just wants to be happy. ~Ernie Hoyt

Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63 by Marcelino Truong, translated by David Homel (Arsenal Pulp)

It was a normal 1960’s childhood in a Washington DC suburb, one filled with hula hoops, Play-Doh, and winter sledding “like a Peanuts cartoon…something that Norman Rockwell might imagine.” Suddenly this all changed and the Truong children were on their way back to Vietnam. Their father, a diplomat serving in the Vietnamese Embassy, was needed by President Diem, a career swerve that took his family from the land of “cherry pie, a corner store, and Coca-Cola” to Saigon, a city filled with soldiers and Skyraider warplanes, with a naval destroyer moored in the river.

Now the children eat pho at street stalls with the family’s driver, Chu Ba, while their French mother struggles to make her housemaid realize that fish sauce isn’t an ingredient in boeuf bourguignon. Their father becomes part of what American journalists call the Diemocracy, serving as the English translator for President Diem and becoming the director of Agence Vietnam-Presse. His children go swimming at the pool in the exclusive Cercle Sportif de Saigon, learn to live without glass in the windows of their modern apartment, and enact spirited battles with their captured crickets and Siamese fighting fish.

Western journalists come to report on the “lovely little war, with just enough adrenaline,” flying to battlegrounds for the day and returning to the peace of Saigon in time for dinner. Then an unsuccessful coup attempt by two Vietnamese fighter pilots brings the war to the capital and grenades become a routine danger. Caught in a traffic jam, the children and their mother smell “something charred” and learn later that it came from a monk who set himself on fire to protest what is now being called “the dirty war.”

This is too much for Madame Truong. Her nerves shatter, she becomes prey to manic depression, and the war enters the Truong home. The children overhear the parents’ bitter fights. Their driver is forced to sell his blood to cope with the rising inflation caused by the advent of U.S. troops. Soon he‘s drafted to serve as a soldier, one who rides at the front of an armored train.

Interspersed with this child’s view of the war is a concise history, much of it based on his father’s memories and excerpts from his mother’s letters to relatives in France. This provides a brief but detailed summary of the Diem regime, the machinations of Madame Nhu, the role of Catholicism in Vietnam, and the symbolism of the legendary Trung sisters. “We should have done it on our own, with American weapons but without their soldiers, the way the Communists did,” the father concludes years later.

The “graphic novel” format of this mingled memoir and history gives it a vivid depth that makes it emotionally wrenching, while the frequent use of Vietnamese sprinkled throughout the book gives it the feeling of watching a film with subtitles. Like Maus and Persepolis before it, Such a Lovely Little War takes what once were “comic books” into a whole new realm of literature, blending art and text to create another world of creative possibility and a work of art that should become a classic.~Janet Brown

Triage by Scott Anderson (Pan Books)

Kurdistan. Wikipedia describes it as “a roughly defined geo-cultural territory in Western Asia wherein the Kurds form a prominent majority population and the Kurdish culture, languages, and national identity have historically been based”. It is an area that covers northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northern Syria. The Kurds, like the Palistinians, hope one day to establish their own independent country. 

Scott Anderson, a veteran war correspondant who grew up in Asia, mainly in Taiway and South Korea has set his novel Triage in Kurdistan in 1988 during the Anfal campaign, also known as the Kurdish genocide, was carried out by Ba’athist party of Iraq shortly after the end of the Iran-Iraq War. 

Mark Walsh is a photojournalist. He was on assignment in Kurdistan with fellow war photographer and friend Colin. The story opens with Mark lying on his back looking up into the sky. “He didn’t hear the artillery shell, but he believed he saw it”. He shouts for his friend Colin who doesn’t answer. Mark knows he will die if he doesn’t move. 

He does manage to move but slips and falls in a nearby river. The next time he awakens, he finds himself in a makeshift hospital in a cave. As he regains consciousness and looks around, he realizes where he is - the Harir cave, “A forty-bed ward and an operating theater carved out of solid rock, with no ventilation, no running water, no medicine”. 

Mark has been to this cave on many separate occasions and was thinking of creating a photo-essay titled “The Worst Hospital in the World”. And now here is, not as a photojournalist, but as a patient. He has previously met Dr. Talzini, a Peshmurga, who runs the place. 

Mark knows that the Peshmurga are the military force of the Kurdistan Regional Government. He was told by Dr. Talzani that the meaning of Peshmerga is “those who face death”. Mark also knows that Dr. Talzani holds a number of colored tags which makes Dr. Talzani a triage doctor. Triage meaning “deciding the order of treatments or casualties”. 

Fortunately for Mark, he survives and makes the long journey home to his Spanish girlfriend, Elena. Elena is happy that Mark is back but she becomes worried as Mark seems to have come home a changed man. She talks to her mother, who then calls her grandfather who was a renowned psychiatrist in Franco’s Spain. 

Once Elena’s grandfather is in the picture, the story becomes a bit more complicated. Although Elena was close to her grandfather in her childhood, when she learned that he was a supporter of Franciso Franco and his government. He ran a psychiatric institute and many of his patients were war criminals. He was called the “Fascist Father Confessor”. She said, “if you had wiped out a village, if you had tortured people to death, all you had to do was go see Dr. Joaquin Morales at the Morales Institute for Psychological Purification, and he absolved you of all guilt”. 

Or course Elena doesn’t want her grandfather to help Mark and cannot understand why Mark thinks it may be beneficial to him. The book was also adapted into a movie in 2009 starring Colin Farrell. It is about the psychological effects that war has on people, on both participants and victims. It is also about forgiveness and letting go. A very powerful story about the underreported aspects of war. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Silent Dead by Tetsuya Honda, translated by Giles Murray (Minotaur Books)

Reiko Himekawa is tall, beautiful, and ambitious. Not yet thirty, she’s already made her way up through the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department to the rank of lieutenant and leader of a homicide squad. She’s famous--and in some quarters infamous--for the preternatural knowledge she can garner from a murder victim which has propelled her rapid ascent through the ranks. Men in equivalent positions find her talent a direct challenge to their own methodical case work. Reiko’s intuition seems to them like a kind of parlor trick--but her flashes of insight prove essential to solving cases. Many resent her but they grudgingly admit that this new addition to the homicide department is pulling her own weight.

When a body wrapped in a blue tarp is found carelessly discarded in a residential neighborhood, the police are puzzled. Why was the corpse dumped in a spot where it would quickly be discovered and why does it have a long cut in its abdomen that was inflicted post-mortem? Reiko comes up with a plausible theory and begins the investigation, one leading to a horrendous online group that pays to watch a killer who is an artist of murder.

Reiko has a weakness; she makes certain that she’s off the street by nightfall, particularly in the summer. An older squad leader discovers the reason why and uses this to taunt her, hoping to break her nerve and diminish her success. Instead he forces Reiko to face her memories and conquer her fear, as the two of them vie to discover the grisly game and its star performer.

This novel opens with a chapter that may deter squeamish readers but none of the later scenes match it for brutality and horror. Unlike novels by other Japanese crime writers (Natsuo Kirino immediately comes to mind), Tetsuya Honda is more focused on detection than he is on blood and guts. Even the culminating scene when the killer and her director almost come up with another corpse is less revolting than the sights and smells that dominate the book’s first pages.

A cast of characters is listed before the story begins but this is insufficient. It gives the names of only the fourteen police who figure prominently in the novel. A host of victims and the people who knew them offers sixteen additional names to keep straight--making a list for quick reference is highly recommended.

Reiko, with her “all-too-perfect looks” and her fear of “hot summer nights,” is the sort of detective that series are made of and this is only the first of several novels in which she appears. Her rival and tormentor, Lieutenant Katsumata, is equally compelling and his understanding of Reiko’s psychology provides a scene that upstages even the bloody solution to the crime spree. With luck, he’ll be a figure in the series because he’s a much more interesting figure than the two police officers who lust after Reiko, (each in different ways).

An unexpected strength in The Silent Dead is its close attention to details that are especially helpful to readers who don’t know Tokyo or the intricacies of its police hierarchy. Tokyo neighborhoods are crisply and vividly described, to the point that, for the first time ever, I’d like to explore this city. Full points go to Giles Murray, the book’s translator, a man who lives in Tokyo and who is able to escape the stilted dialogue that pervades many English versions of Japanese novels. From the first sentence of this thriller, “A putrid rain was falling, turning the whole world gray,” to its last scene when Kumata pinpoints the startling reason for Reiko’s success, Murray’s translation comes alive for western readers while always maintaining a strong sense of a distant and unfamiliar culture. 

Both Honda and Murray have introduced a detective to watch out for and Reiko Himekawa thoroughly deserves her own television series. Japan gave her one. Are you listening, HBO?~Janet Brown

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador)

All the Lovers in the Night was originally published in the Japanese language as Subete Mayonaka no Koibitotachi in 2011. It is the latest book by Mieko Kawakami to be published in English who first came to prominence on the international market with her book Breasts and Eggs which was published in 2020, followed by Heaven which was published in 2021. 

Her latest book focuses on a single woman living in Tokyo. Fuyuko Irie works as a freelance proofreader. Before that, she worked for a small publisher “that nobody ever heard of. Where they produced books that made you wonder who would ever read them”. It is the company where she started her career as a proofreader, “spending every moment of her day, from morning to night, hunting for mistakes”. 

Irie is the type of person most people would classify as a social outcast. She has no friends, she rarely talks, and only speaks when she’s spoken to. The only thing that keeps her mind off her loneliness is walking by herself at night and looking at all the lights around her. “All of the lights of the night. The red light at the intersection, trembling as if wet, even though it isn’t raining. Streetlight after streetlight. Taillights trailing off into the distance. The soft glow from the windows. Phones in the hands of people just arriving home, and people just about to go somewhere.”

Her only friend seems to be her go between between her and various publishers. Hijiri Ishikawa is almost the exact opposite of Irie. She’s young, beautiful, and full of energy. She wears the latest fashions and has a very active social life. She also has a reputation of being a loose woman and is described as difficult to work with. On the few occasions when Irie would meet Hijiri for drinks, she usually let Hijiri do most of the talking. 

One day, on her way home, she was talked into donating blood. Once she was done and filling out a survey, she caught a glimpse of her reflection from the window. What she saw there was “the dictionary definition of a miserable person”. It made her think that she’s “just a miserable woman, who couldn’t even enjoy herself on a gorgeous day”. After that, Irie was determined to change her lifestyle.

She started slowly by drinking a can of beer a day. With the help of alcohol, she was able to come out of her usual shell. She even went to a cultural center to see if there might be a class she would be interested in taking. Before she could make a decision, she was feeling a bit nauseous and headed to the ladies room. She doesn’t quite make it and vomits before she can get to a sink. At about the same time, a man exits the men’s room and Irie believes she also threw up on his shoes. 

From this embarrassing incident, she meets Mitsutsuka. At first, they are both awkward with each other but over time, they develop a friendship. Irie feels something a bit more and she’s not sure how to go about expressing herself to Mitsusuka. 

As any single person living in a large city may know, at times it can be difficult to meet that person of your dreams. Or even someone you just want to spend more time with. Kawakami writes with the average, everyday person in mind. Sometimes you may need a little push from your friends or acquaintances or some experience to take that first step in finding happiness. Even I spent my first year in Tokyo alone and experienced my first Christmas in my cold and sparse apartment watching a Christmas video while eating a seven-eleven burrito. I felt the same as Irie and thought I really need to get out more and interact with people. It was that sad Christmas that made me search for happiness and I’m happy to say that I was able to tear down my own walls. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara (W.W. Norton & Company)

Born with his eyes wide open to a mother who died soon after his birth and a father who is disliked even by his own family, the ugly new baby needs an advantage and his stepmother provides it. Raj, she calls him, and his educated uncle gives the name its English translation, King.

King Rao is “a big name for a little runt,” his family says, but within a matter of years the child lives up to it. Through cleverness and chicanery his grandfather became owner of a coconut farm, even though he is a Dalit, one of the Untouchables. King Rao is the smartest of the grandchildren and he’s told often that someday Rao’s Garden will belong to him. 

This never happens. King Rao is sent to school, moves on to University, and is sent to the U.S. for graduate school. Out of a village that is “a hot wet nothing,” comes a man who will change the world and ultimately preside over it. 

Already known as a programming genius in India, in the U.S. King Rao becomes a software programmer who makes personal computers a staple in every household. He learns how to collect and use data in a way that gives him unprecedented power. When nationalism threatens to destroy the world, he presents his plan, Shareholder Government that unites every country and is guided by the Master Algorithm. “Algo” makes decisions based on the data provided by Social Profiles that every Shareholder, as in every person on earth, has from birth. The most successful Shareholders sit on the Board of Corporations and the chairman of the board is King Rao, a man who has taken on the status of a god but who is human enough to fall.

It’s his own mind that’s to blame for his ouster. King Rao has developed a means to connect human brains to the Internet but fails to realize that old brains no longer have the plasticity to make this happen. People die, King Rao evades responsibility, and a revolution is averted only by his voluntary exile.

Although this may sound like a run of the mill dystopian novel, Vauhini Vara isn’t the sort of writer to follow that path. She’s braided together three separate strands that take their turns in forming an intricate and diabolically clever plot. Life on the coconut farm with its traditions and inevitable dissolution continually alternates with King Rao’s rise, success, and eventual dethronement in the outside world, and then lapses into the idyllic life he shares with his young daughter on a lonely island. 

Once again hubris gets in the way. King Rao has given his daughter the Internet connection that once led to his downfall but even more dangerously, he has devised a way to filter his mind into hers. Not only is Athena constantly deluged with the Internet, she’s also a receptacle for her father’s brain--his thoughts, his memories, his consciousness. As all this flows into her,  King Rao quite literally begins to lose his mind.

Athena escapes, but with a terrible and inescapable knowledge. Like the system it toppled, Shareholder Government is based on consumption which has brought the planet to Hothouse Earth. Ever-increasing temperatures will destroy the world in a few generations unless corporate greed is stopped. She’s also the only one who knows that King Rao is not immortal.

Vara has constructed a heart-wrenching tragedy that has nothing to do with her human characters. It’s the beauty of the world, in Rao’s Garden and on the dreamlike island that demands our love and grief. “The sun, spraying its sweet, glittering light;” the intricate white lace that covers the world and enchanted an astronaut when he viewed the earth’s clouds from outer space; the beauty of an island that has been reclaimed by forests and fields of ferns that reach shoulder-high, where racoons and deer have no reason to be afraid; a Garden with a thousand trees, each one of them a source of food. 

The Immortal King Rao holds too many facets of contemporary life to be seen only as a novel. Vara, who was once a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal and then business editor of The New Yorker, isn’t just an astute observer. She’s put the pieces together in a way that feels uncomfortably like a prophecy--and a tragedy. This is a book that will keep you awake at night, staring into the dark and looking for answers.~Janet Brown

The Dragon Hunt : Five Stories by Tran Vu, translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong (Hyperion]

The Dragon Hunt Is a collection of five short stories, some of which are based upon the life of writer Tran Vu. The stories were translated from the Vietnamese language by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong. A couple of the stories have previously been published in other periodicals. 

The lead story, “The Coral Reef” was first published in Granta: Fifty in the summer of 1995. The second story in the collection - “Gunboat on the Yangtze” is a slightly altered translation that first appeared in the anthology Night, Again : Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam which was published by Seven Stories Press in 1996. 

“The Coral Reef” is about a boat full of refugees that runs aground on a coral reef. The crew and passengers do their best to free the boat from the reef but their efforts seem to be in vain. After the first day of being stranded, there are already changes in the people as they scramble to find food and provisions from the wreckage and think only of their own survival. 

“The Coral Reef” was based on an incident in Tran Vu’s life. Tran was born in Saigon in 1962. When he was sixteen, he and his older brother fled Vietnam on a boat. The war was over but the siblings didn’t feel safe with the communist government. Their boat, filled with four hundred passengers, shipwrecked on a coral reef. 

Tran escaped through a porthole and survived in the ocean for ten days, thanks to the life jacket that was given to him by his mother, who stayed in Vietnam. He was a refugee in the Philippines until he was granted asylum in France where he currently lives. 

“Gunboat on the Yangtze” is a disturbing story about a disfigured boy named Toan, and his elder sister who currently live in a small house in Paris. The boy suffers from extreme loneliness so his sister promises to find him a girlfriend. Once elder sister’s friend sees little brother’s face, she screams and storms out of the house yelling for help. Even after leaving the house, “her ghoulish scream haunted the corridor for a long time”. 

Elder sister gives in to her brother’s demand about being loved and they start an incestuous relationship. Things get a bit more complicated when Toan says he wants to have a child of his own. What happens between them defies the imagination.

“Hoi An” is the setting for a love triangle between a married woman, a servant girl, and the man who lives in the same house with the married woman, although in a different rented room. Hoi An is a small forgotten town in central Vietnam. The married woman’s husband is an archeologist and has moved his family to Hoi An to continue his research into the Cham and Sa Huynh people. The husband seems to be oblivious of his wife’s actions which makes her bold and dangerous at the same time. 

“Nha Nam” is a story where Vu mimics the style of a well-known Vietnamese writer named Nguyen Huy Thiep. Vu’s story was inspired by Thiep’s “Nha Nam Rain”, but Vu points out that the two stories have nothing in common besides their titles. Vu says that “Nha Nam” translates to “Delicate South” and is both ancient Vietnam and the Vietnam of today.

The final story which the book takes its name from is about a group of Vietnamese exiles who gather together in a European nation to kill dragons and eat their flesh. Even after reading Vu’s notes in which he mentions “The Dragon Hunt” is a metaphor for the divide between North and South of Vietnam, not in the sense of a nation, but as a people. It’s the difference between those who remained in the country and those who left. 

This book is a good introduction to contemporary Vietnamese fiction. Vu’s own experiences add to the realism of his stories. Although a very short book, it will impress you enough to want more. ~Ernie Hoyt

Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road by Kate Harris (HarperCollins Publishers)

Kate Harris, like many of us, was struck by wanderlust at an early age. Marco Polo became her role model and even after she realized his explorations were prompted by commercialism and not adventure, she still longed to imitate his journey. However she became terrified that the world had become too settled to satisfy her desire for wild travel and at seventeen sent letters to every leading political figure of the time, pleading her case for a human mission to Mars. She of course planned to be in that spacecraft. 

Nowhere on earth meets her stern criteria for untouched wilderness until she stands on an Alaskan glacier in the Juneau Icefield. Going back to the trail set by Marco Polo, she discovers Fanny Bullock Workman, an early 20th Century traveler who reached the Siachen Glacier, once part of Tibet and now claimed by Kashmir. Still an unvisited piece of the world, due to the military dispute between India and Pakistan, this glacier claims Harris’s imagination. It becomes the subject of her master’s thesis and eventually sends her off on a bicycle in the company of a childhood friend, following Marco Polo along the Silk Road. Her goal is the Siachen Glacier, along a route that will take her from Turkey through the Middle East and into China, Tibet, Nepal, and India.

There’s something about bicycle travel that lends itself to travel literature. The boozy old Irishwoman Dervla Murphy wrote a whole library shelf full of books about her cycling around the undeveloped world. Andrew Pham launched his writing career with Catfish and Mandala, his emotional rediscovery of his native Vietnam on a bicycle. Barbara Savage’s Miles from Nowhere has become a travel classic, telling how she and her husband spent two years traveling around the world on their bikes. Lands of Lost Borders is different from any of its predecessors, however. Although Harris disdains Henry Thoreau, her book is much like one he would have written, had he ever pulled himself out of Concord.

Anyone who travels across countries by bicycle is an athlete. Harris takes that part of herself for granted. Instead she gives voice to her wide-ranging intellect. She’s a scientist, a historian, and a poet which makes this book a constant source of surprise. She’s a risk-taker, who happily crawls under a border fence into another country when she lacks the appropriate papers for a conventional entry. She’s also a very young woman with a tinge of bitchiness, an occasional lapse into whining, and a generous helping of humor. One of her heroes, Alexandra David Neel, would have loved her. 

“Fat grey birds scattered,,,like a toss of ball bearings…Clouds pinched the sky.” Harris says of the first moments of her journey. In Georgia, she looks at Mount Ararat and sees it as “less an upheaval of rock than a cold clump of stars.” She finds a vital link between  environmental protection and trophy hunting--”Putting a price tag on wilderness can pay off.” And the farther she rides, the more she agrees with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement, “Nationalism is babyishness for the most part.”

Linking the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk to bicycling over the Caucasus Mountains isn’t far-fetched. Wilbur and Orville were avid cyclists before they developed their first plane and icy slopes occasionally send Harris and her companion into short flights that end in crashes. As they cycle into spring, the theme of her journey becomes clear to Harris:”No road was long enough to learn all I wanted to know and get where I wanted to go.” She learns to be tolerant of Polo’s unadventurous pragmatism since she is “so privileged, so assiduously comfortable that risk and hardship hold rapturous appeal.” Even so, as she crosses Uzbekistan’s desert, sleeping during the day and traveling after dark, she understands why “the Uzbek language has no word for fun.”

In Tibet they meet two elderly pilgrims who are crawling down a highway to reach Lhasa, their knees and arms protected with thick cloth but their foreheads sporting a thick callus “like a third eye.” In Nepal, the Buddha becomes an omnipresent entity after the cyclists pass through Lumbini. Any mystical connection is broken when Harris sees Siddhartha everywhere on shop signs and wonders what he would think of the Siddhartha Internet Cafe. 

She’s too much a scientist to dabble in mysticism but her observations of the natural world come close to that in the “absolute unmixed attention” that Simone Weil called prayer. And in the end, Harris concludes that her goal was never “a place to reach to reach, but a reason to go.” She now lives near the Canadian-Alaskan border, not too far from the Juneau Icefield that had first satisfied her hunger for wilderness. With any luck, someday she’ll write about that--an adventure in which she stays in one place.~Janet Brown

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Granta)

In Sayaka Murata’s previous novel, Convenience Store Woman, the main character feels like she doesn’t fit into society and doesn’t understand why people won’t leave her alone. Now, in Earthlings, her second book to be published in English and translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, she has taken the subject of “fitting in” to an extreme as Natsuki, the main character, does her best to be a functioning part of society. 

However, readers should be warned that this is definitely a title that should not be judged by its cover. The image of the cute stuffed doll may have one imagining that this might be a heartwarming fantasy about an alien stranded on earth, like E.T., who just wants to go home. The reader would be so far off the mark and may be disappointed to find out that Sayaka Murata’s world is not that simple. Her world is much darker and more real than any fantasy. 

As a child, Natsuki thought she was an alien. She believes that she is a wizard and has magic powers, given to her by a stuffed animal she bought with her new year’s money when she was just six. Her special friend was called Piyyut. She’s now eleven but still believes she is a magician,  “a real one with actual magical powers”. 

Every summer, Natsuki and her family would leave their home in Chiba and go visit her grandparent’s home in the fictitious town of Akishina, located high up in the mountains of the Southern Alps. Along with Piyyut, she carried an origami magic wand and a magical transformation mirror in her bag. 

Piyyut is from the Planet Popinbopopia. “The Magic Police had found out that Earth was facing a crisis and had sent him on a mission to save our planet”. By now, we can either believe that Natsuki really does have magical powers or that she just has an extremely active imagination. It’s also hard to determine if Piyyut is just a stuffed animal that doesn’t say anything or if he really is an alien, come to help save the earth.

The only one who knows her secret is her cousin Yuu who lives in Yamagata. Summer is the only time when they meet. Natsuki calls him her boyfriend. They made a pledge to each other when they were nine. Yuu shares with Natsuki his own secret, telling her that he is also an alien. 

After returning to Chiba one summer and going back to cram school, Natsuki has an experience that will affect her for the rest of her life. She is molested by her teacher. A teacher that is popular among students. She once tried to tell her mother about the incident but her mother wouldn’t listen.

The following summer, the family is once again in Akishina. Natsuki is happy because she will see her boyfriend who is also her cousin (of course the parents and relatives don’t know about their relationship). Unfortunately for Natsuki and Yuu, they are caught having sex togther the night before Natsuki’s family was to return to Chiba. 

The book then goes twenty three years into the future. Natsuki is now a housewife. However, her marriage is a marriage of convenience. Her husband is desperately trying to escape society while Natsuki hopes to become “tool for the Factory”, meaning she hopes to be able to be a “baby factory” because that’s what society expects for women. Her husband thinks otherwise. 

Natsuki’s husband convinces her to take him to Akishina since he’s heard so much about it. The family feels it might not be the best timing as Yuu is currently living in the house. After the two were caught together, both families refused to let them see or talk to each other. It would be twenty-three years since the incident. 

Will Natsuki’s husband be in shock if he learns about their secret? Does Yuu remember the promises they made as children? And will Natsuki become a “tool for the Factory” to produce “humans connected by flesh and blood”? 

Sayaka Murata’s new world in Earthlings is not for the weak of heart. She deals with a lot of taboo subjects - incest, rape, murder, violence, cannibalism, secrets, and spins it into a story that will stay with you long after you have finished reading it. I’m still not sure if Natsuki was an alien to begin with, like she said! ~Ernie Hoyt

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng (Riverhead Books)

At first only a small boy is able to find the islands. Ah Boon is on his father’s fishing boat when the first island appears, with its bounty of fish that will bring financial stability without effort. Elusive and mysterious, the island is gone when the next trip to it takes place, reappearing only when Ah Boon is on the boat to search for it. It turns out to be one of several islands, never before seen by the small village of fisherman who profit from this discovery. 

Money from the steady crop of fish sends Ah Boon to school, an unusual step for a child raised in a kampong, one of many villages at the edge of the sea, surrounded by mangrove trees. There he meets Siok Mei, a spirited, smart orphan from the kampong and their friendship is a fiercely loyal one, even when politics drives a wedge between them. Siok Mei becomes a Communist activist while Ah Boon finds an opportunity to join the Gah Men, British-educated Chinese from the city who find an economic goldmine in the mangrove swamps on the coast. First lured by the air-conditioned coolness and the television set in the newly built community center that has been built in the kampong, the villagers begin to understand that another, more comfortable, life exists outside of what they’ve always known. When Ah Boon tells them about the apartments that will soon be built nearby, ones with electricity, plumbing, bathrooms, and refrigerators, slowly they abandon their fishing village for these newfound luxuries and the construction equipment moves in. 

Singapore, the island they live on, needs more land. To get it, the Gah Men remove the mangroves, fill in the swamp, and extend Singapore into the sea. The kampongs disappear, the fishermen who live in high-rise buildings lose their livelihood, and Communism becomes a threat to be eradicated. Ah Boon and Siok Mei are on separate and dangerous pathways but their friendship pulls them together again.

Rachel Heng juxtaposes a mythic way of life against the hard truths of history, taking her characters from 1941 into the Japanese occupation from 1942-1945 and up to Singapore’s independence from Great Britain and its short-lived merger with Malaysia. The Great Reclamation shows how Singapore stamped out kampong culture in the service of its expansion, an act that would lead to the island eventually increasing its land mass by 22%. Since 1965, Singapore has gone from 227 square miles to 277 square miles and plans to reclaim another 38 by 2030, bringing it to over 300. In the process people who have traditionally been rooted to the seacoast are now far from it, suspended in buildings that keep their feet from the earth.

Rachel Heng’s characters are all servants of this history, each of them representing a fragment of Singapore’s past. None of them go much beyond this and the tragedy that engulfs them seems pallid as a result. It’s the kampong that’s given vivid life with descriptions that are bound to make readers mourn its disappearance--and when the enigmatic islands become threatened, this has more resonance than what takes place between Ah Boon and Siok Mei. 

This is a fine introduction to Singapore’s modern history but as a novel it falls short. Rarely does fiction cry out for a timeline but this book definitely does.~Janet Brown

The Windfall by Diksha Basu (Crown)

What happens when a middle-class Indian family  becomes extremely wealthy overnight? That is the question Diksha Basu answers in her debut novel, The Windfall. She doesn’t specifically ask this question but she has created a situation that is plausible as it is hilarious. 

Mr. Jha and his wife live in a small complex called Mayur Pallin in East Delhi. The atmosphere of the place reminds one of the bar on the American sitcom “Cheers”, “where everyone knows your name”. It is not a slum but a community where everyone knows everyone else’s business. The complex is filled with neighbors who like to gossip, where people still hang laundry on ropes from their balconies, and where you can hear the clatter of dishes as the neighbors prepare for dinner. 

The Jhas had lived in the complex for almost twenty-five years. He was fifty-two and his wife forty-three and their twenty-three year son Rupak is studying for his MBA at a university in the U.S. He has asked his closest neighbors and friends to gather in his living room so he can make an announcement before the gossiping could start. The Jhas were “moving out, and not just moving out, but moving to Gurgaon, one of the richest new neighborhoods in Delhi”. 

Mr. Jha had created a website which became quite successful and he managed to sell it for twenty million dollars. He overheard one of his neighbors saying the sale of the website and his newly acquired wealth was “a lucky windfall”. However, Mr. Jha knows that it was no “lucky windfall”. He had worked hard on the website for four years before selling it.

The Jhas were moving into a two-story bungalow with front and back yards. The house was located in a quiet area of Gurgaon, “away from the traffic and chaos of the rest of Delhi”. It was a place “that hawkers and beggars avoided”. The houses in Gurgaon were widely spaced apart and interaction with the neighbors was minimal. “Mr. Jha knew he was supposed to want that - that was how rich people’s tastes were supposed to be.”

Now that Mr. Jha is rich, he wants to fit in with his new neighbors. He recently bought a new car, a Mercedes, which was embarrassingly delivered to his home in Mayur Palli. After he meets his new neighbor, Mr. Chopra, he feels the need to one-up Mr. Chopra on everything, much to the chagrin of his wife.

Meanwhile, his son in America is failing his classes. He is currently on academic probation and if his grades don’t improve he will have to return to India, a failure in his parents’ eyes. He also has a white girlfriend named Elizabeth that he knows his parents will not approve of. Elizabeth keeps pressuring Rupak to talk to his parents about them but he uses every excuse he can think of to avoid this particular conversation. 

Rupak’s parents are planning to visit him and he is at his wit’s end as he has no idea how to tell his parents that his real interest is in film, not business. He is afraid to introduce Elizabeth to them, and is having a crisis of his own. 

The Windfall is a satire about wealth. It’s an Indian version of “keeping up with the Joneses”. The comical antics of Mr. Jha will have you shaking your head as he thinks of different ways to let his new neighbor know that he is as good as or better than they are. At times, Mr Jha’s actions will irritate and annoy you, but you can’t help smiling as you try to picture yourself in Mr. Jha’s shoes. 

What it all comes down to is that this is a story about family and belonging. It is also about ambition and failure. Who’s to say what we will do if we unexpectedly become rich beyond our means. I must say, I wouldn’t mind finding out. ~Ernie Hoyt

Daughters of the New Year by E. M. Tran (Hanover Square Press)

Xuan “wears her American citizenship with discomfort,”  she marinates the holiday dishes of her new country in soy sauce because fish sauce is impossible to find in New Orleans, and she reads a book of Chinese horoscopes every year “like a very important yearly report.” She has to. How else can she monitor the lives of her American daughters, the Earth Goat, the Fire Tiger, and the Earth Dragon? A Metal Tiger herself, Xuan knows the importance of these annual predictions and it’s her responsibility to keep her children informed. 

Trac, the Earth Goat, has graduated from Columbia Law with the knowledge that New York shares New Orlean’s racism without realizing it. Deciding she preferred the clarity of Southern bigotry, she now practices law in her hometown while struggling with the truth that as a Vietnamese American, she’s “not we, not them.” In love with a woman who’s a white Southerner, Trac knows the only ones who can understand her position are her sisters.

Nhi, the Fire Tiger, is in the city where her mother had captured the title of Miss Saigon 1973. As a contestant in an American get-the-bachelor reality show, this girl raised in New Orleans knows Saigon is “no more home to her than Bogota or Brussels, but here she feels her ancestry. She’s surrounded by people who look like her, whose language she’s heard all her life but can barely speak, and she feels as though in Saigon she’s “both a stranger and an intimate.”

Trieu is the youngest, still living at home, the Earth Dragon who knows her sisters’ secrets and guards them from their mother. Graduating from a “magnet” school where the elementary students were all gifted and mostly white, Trieu is alien in middle school where she’s surrounded by Black and first-generation Vietnamese American kids. She’s the Twinkie, yellow on the outside, white on the inside--and as the outsider, Trieu becomes an observer whose ambition is to write. 

Just as these women begin to take shape, they dissolve into a family history, one that mirrors the history of Vietnam. Suddenly Xuan is in a boat with her mother, her sister, and thirteen other people, with jewelry and gold sewn into her clothing, in danger from starvation, thirst, and Thai pirates. Tien, Xuan’s mother, prepares her own mother for burial and sorts through photographs of a vanished life, before their family’s grand house and their rubber plantation was destroyed by a never-ending war. And back through the centuries the story goes, revealing secrets that were never told, the heroic exploits of women whom the New Orleans sisters will never know. 

A family tree traces the existence of these women, from the legendary Trung sisters who led an ancient rebellion to rid their country of Chinese rule to Xuan’s three daughters who each rebel in their own fashion. (All on the family tree are provided with their own zodiac sign, buttressing the novel’s title.)

Anyone who has grown up American in a family based upon immigrant ancestors, which is to say all of us, will understand E. M. Tran’s attempt to recover her shrouded family history. Her novel is essentially a collection of linked short stories, with no single character developing into fullness. The wit and scathing observations that bring the first portion of her narrative to life fade into a patchwork of history, with characters who are as faded as blotched and deteriorating photographs from the past. This is a book that should have gone deeper-- and should have been much longer--to give its characters the life they deserve.~Janet Brown