Have You Eaten Yet? by Cheuk Kwan (Pegasus Books)

Cheuk Kwan has lived in six different countries and speaks at least six different languages, including several Chinese dialects. Born in Hong Kong without ever having seen the Mainland village that was his family’s home for countless generations, he is a perfect example of the 400 million members of the Chinese diaspora.  Haunted by a single question, “Are we defined by our nationality or our ethnicity,” Kwan believes every member of the Chinese diaspora has a common set of values, even if they don’t, as a Chinese Canadian journalist believes they do, “carry that invisible baggage of ancestral China on our backs.” These shared values--”the importance of family ties, a desire for Chinese culture and education, and an underlying love for Chinese food”--can be found living in family-run Chinese restaurants all over the world. To back up his belief, Kwan embarks upon a four-year quest that will take him over 124,000 miles across five continents to make a documentary series, Chinese Restaurants. (Released in 2006, this series can be seen for free on youtube.)

Have You Eaten Yet? fleshes out what Kwan compressed into fifteen separate episodes and allows him a voiced subjectivity and breadth of experience that would be out of place on television. This book is a combination of travel and cooking literature, with a large helping of history and not a single recipe in sight. 

Kwan and his camera men have Hong Kong cuisine as their benchmark and are surprised to find “dim sum to die for” in Trinidad and Tobago, “a classic Cantonese rendition” of whole tilapia in Israel, “a sublime Chinese meal” in Kenya, issuing from a kitchen staffed only by Kenyan cooks. In Mauritius he finds “authentic Hakka cuisine” and Northern Chinese cooking in South Africa. In Madagascar Madame Chan serves Cantonese dishes that are “impeccable,” even though she herself has never been to China or Hong Kong and there are no Chinese workers in her kitchen.

In the north is where Chinese cooking submits to local flavors. In Saskatchawan, a seasoned restaurateur admits his cafe serves “American Chinese food, not what Chinese people eat, right?” In the Himalayan city of Darjeeling, Kwan tactfully calls his meal “Indo-Chinese…Hakka food adapted to Indian tastes.”

Kwan finds Chinatowns in almost every place he visits but it’s Barrio Chino in Havana that seems to haunt him. Once the largest and richest Chinatown in Latin America, it’s now a tourist destination with no more than 200 inhabitants, almost all of them elderly men. But when Kwan visits the Hong Kong Association and identifies himself as “a Kwan from Gao Gong,” he is thronged by members of his clan, making him remember his grandfather saying that many men from Gao Gong went off to Cuba in the early 1900s. Suddenly, in a Chinatown that’s almost dead, Kwan feels a strong connection to a place he’s never seen. “My grandfather,” he thinks, “would feel proud of me now.”

The old men in Havana still feel they are completely Chinese. In a Brazilian restaurant that makes perfect egg tarts, the owner says “This is our home, while his son adds that he himself is more Brazilian than Chinese. In Peru a restaurant proprietor talls Kwan, “This has never been my own country,” while celebrity cookbook author Ken Hom, born in Tucson and raised in Chicago, felt instantly at home on his first trip to Hong Kong “where everything talked to me,”  but now divides his time  between the south of France and Thailand. Kwan himself insists “I have six homes: Jiujiang (Gao Gong), Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Berkeley, and Toronto. Even so his journey has taught him that he is connected most strongly with the Chinese diaspora, people who retain their Chinese heritage and yet usually find their sense of belonging all over the world. 

As for “Chinese food,” Kwan raises his eyebrows more than a trifle. This catchphrase encompasses the “eating habits of more than a billion people,” spread out over “an area four times larger than western Europe.” Can anyone say there is such a thing as “Chinese food” or that “hyphenated Chinese food” is a lesser form of cuisine, he asks. 

Have You Eaten Yet? Is enough to make us believe in the idea of one world. John Lennon would have loved this book, and so will you.~Janet Brown

Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly (Grand Central Publishing)

Harry Bosch is a detective who works for the Los Angeles Police Department. He is separated from his wife and teenage daughter who currently live in Hong Kong. Bosch is familiar with a liquor store in South L.A. called Fortune Liquors. He was given a matchbook by the owner that had a motto written inside it - “Happy is the man who finds refuge in himself”. He has kept this matchbook with him for many years. Now, the store’s owner has been murdered and he vows to catch the criminal who did it.

The victim, John Li, was also the owner of the store. The person who found him was his wife, however, she doesn’t speak English. He was joined by a detective in the AGU, the Asian Gang Unit. In the course of their investigation, the two detectives managed to link the crime with a Hong Kong triad. Apparently, an LA-based triad was collecting protection money from various businesses, including Fortune Liquors. 

The detectives also learned that Li owned another liquor shop in the valley. It was run by his son Robert Li. The family lived together in a location between both shops. The son had told Detective Bosch that he and his family had tried talking to his father about closing the shop in South L.A. and the area wasn’t safe but his father wouldn’t listen. His father wasn’t going to let anybody drive him out. 

Bosch and Chu believe they found their suspect in the killing of John Li. Bo-Jing Chang is known to be affiliated with one of the Triad groups working in L.A. and his picture is captured on the liquor store’s security camera. Bosch then receives an anonymous call telling him to back off from the investigation. Bosch and Chu believe they are on the right track but then things get personal.

Bosch is sent a video clip of his daughter. He believes her kidnapping is related to his current investigation. He takes the next plane to Hong Kong to save his daughter as his number one suspect is planning to flee the U.S. and not return. Bosch knows he has only twenty-four hours to find his daughter before the suspect walks free. 

In Hong Kong, he is helped by his ex-wife, a former FBI agent, and her Chinese friend, Sun Yee. Bosch had determined where his daughter was being held from the background on the video he was sent. He is positive that she is in a room in Kowloon.

Kowloon - which translated into English means Nine Dragons. The name was spawned from a legend. Bosch’s daughter had told him that “during one of the old dynasties the emperor was supposedly just a boy who got chased by the Mongols into the area that is now Hong Kong. He saw the eight mountain peaks that surrounded it and wanted to call the place Eight Dragons. But one of the men who guarded him reminded him that the emperor was a dragon too. So they called it Kowloon - Nine Dragons”. 

Michael Connelly’s Nine Dragons is the fourteenth book in a series that features LAPD detective Harry Bosch. The fast-paced and exciting mystery takes you from the streets of L.A. to the gritty underside of Hong Kong and Kowloon. It is a page turner that keeps you guessing until the end who actually committed the crime of killing John Li. Was it a member of the Triads? Could it have been John Li’s son? And how did they get to Bosch’s daughter so quickly? The answers to these questions may surprise you and may shock you as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America by Saket Soni (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

The U.S. Gulf Coast had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A year later, it was “a construction site of postwar proportions.” Over a million houses had been devastated and crippled oil rigs needed repairs or outright rebuilding from scratch. To hire skilled American labor meant paying union wages--welders, pipefitters, plumbers, and electricians didn’t come cheap. But there was a pool of experience that waited to be tapped--workers on Middle Eastern oil rigs who came from India, all of them easily lured by the thought of getting a U.S. green card. Not only would they be a source of cheap labor, they were a way to make some fast money. These men would pay anything to bring wealth and security home to their extended families and to give their children the opportunity to live well in America.

Five hundred Indian workers paid $20,000 each in response to an ad that promised Permanent Lifetime Settlement In USA For Self And Family. In two years or less, they would be given green cards. Their parents borrowed the money, sold their land, mortgaged their lives to give their sons this chance. Almost ten million dollars went to the men who made this swindle a success. 

When the workers arrived in America, they were shunted into labor camps where they paid $245  a week for a bunk in “a sardine-can trailer. They waited in line for their turn to use the toilets and showers in another trailer and then queued up to get breakfast in the cafeteria. The toilets overflowed, the showers leaked water that soaked the walls and floors, the bread was moldy, and the workers fell sick. They complained about the conditions but their main concern was when could they expect to receive their green cards. Nobody had answers for them and their complaints were met with a force of hired goons. They were threatened with deportation if they didn’t submit to the conditions of the camp. Then one of them heard about an Indian in New Orleans whose job was to help workers. He called a number on a business card and reached labor organizer Saket Soni.

A man still in his twenties with immigration difficulties of his own, Soni was a man who wasn’t afraid to take desperate measures. Slowly and carefully, he arranged a solution that deserves to be in a movie. In the two camps that housed the five hundred workers, one located in Mississippi and the other in Texas, the Indian workers walked out of the gates that barred them from the world outside.

Soni made the case that human trafficking had been reinvented in 21st century America. The five hundred men had been recruited through fraudulent means, with the recruiter keeping their passports as insurance that none of them would back out of the arrangement. Once they were on the job site, their impressive debt incurred in hopes of obtaining a green card kept them in involuntary servitude. They had to pay off that debt before they could return home.

When appeals to the Department went unanswered, Soni ventured into deeper drama--a march from New Orleans to Washington DC, a hunger strike to call attention to the workers’ case. But this is America where politics run deep below every surface. When it became known that ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) had been blocking their case from the very beginning, the workers and Soni himself were certain their cause was a hopeless one.

This book is a crash course in immigration policy, labor issues, and the intertwining of business interests with government agencies. Both a human tragedy and an example of how justice can prevail in spite of apparently insurmountable obstacles, The Great Escape rivals any fictional thriller for sheer nail-biting scenarios--but in this case they all happened in real life. Although this group of workers ended up with what they’d been promised, who knows how many more are being defrauded without recourse in this country, every day?~Janet Brown

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Books)

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet whose debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous became a New York Times Bestseller. The main character, Little Dog, is writing a letter to his mother. He knows it’s a letter she will never read as his mother is illiterate. It is more about Little Dog coming to terms with his own life by revisiting his past. 

Little Dog first reminisces about his mother. The way she hurt him when he was still a child. The first time she hit him, he was only four years old. Then there was the time with the remote control that left a bruise on his forearm but told his teachers, “I fell playing tag”.  Another time, he wrote about his mother throwing a box of Legos at her head. 

Little Dog writes to his mother and says he was thirteen when he finally told her to stop hurting him. He looked deep into her eyes, the way he learned to do with the bullies that used to hit him. His mother, turning away as if nothing happened. He writes to say, “we both knew you’d never hit me again”. 

Little Dog writes this letter when he’s in his late twenties. He is putting down on paper the history of his life. He knows he was born in Vietnam and was given a name that meant Patriotic Leader of the Nation. He not only writes about his mother, but his grandmother, Lan, as well. They were survivors of the war, then they were refugees, and now they were living in Hartford, Connecticut. 

He writes how Lan ran away from an arranged marriage and became a prostitute during the Vietnam War. How she married an American serviceman, then gave birth to a child, the child being his mother, Rose. However, Rose was not the child of the soldier Lan married as she was already four months pregnant when she met him. 

Rose doesn’t have much of an education as her schoolhouse collapsed after the Americans dropped napalm over the place she lived. It is because of the war that Rose suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Rose marries an abusive man but manages to leave him. 

Halfway through the novel, Little Dog makes his confession to his mother about his first true relationship - a white boy named Trevor, born and bred in America. who meets while working on a tobacco farm one summer. He was only seventeen. This relationship would continue into adulthood but would end in tragedy as Trevor becomes a heavy drug user. 

What’s fascinating about this story is the fact that it mirrors Vuong’s life, however Vuong makes no attempt to write a chronologically correct timeline of Little Dog’s life. His non-linear approach makes the story hard to follow at times. The reader is often left wondering what Vuong is actually trying to convey and although the book has received praise and many accolades for a first novel, I may be in the minority as I found it self-indulgent and tedious. If this is the new wave of fiction, I will gladly find my way back to the classics. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Great Passage by Shion Miura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (Amazon Crossing)

Award winning Japanese writer Shion Miura has written a story about compiling the most comprehensive Japanese dictionary titled Dai Tokai which translates into English as The Great Passage. Originally published in Japanese as 船を編む （Fune wo Amu）in 2011 by Kobunsha Co. Her novel is once again translated into English by Juliet Winters Carpenter who also translated Miura’s books The Easy Life in Kamusari and Kamusari Tales at Night.

The novel was adapted into a major motion picture and released in 2013. It has won several awards including  the Japanese Academy Award for Best Film in 2013. It was selected as the Japanese entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards but was not nominated. 

Kohei Araki had been fascinated by words ever since he was a little boy. He was amazed that one word could have so many different meanings. He received his first dictionary from his uncle when he started junior high school. He enjoyed opening his dictionary and leafing through it. He loved “the entrancing cover, the closely printed lines on every page, the feel of the thin paper. Most of all, he liked the concise definitions”. 

After he graduated high school, Araki found a job working for Gembu Books. He became an editor and for the next thirty-seven years, all he worked on were dictionaries with his mentor Professor Matsumoto. Araki is a lexicographer, a person who compiles dictionaries. He believes that a dictionary is “a boat to carry us across the sea of words” and the latest project in the Dictionary Editorial Department is to create The Great Passage, however, he is on the verge of retirement and wants to spend more time with his ailing wife. He is determined to find a suitable successor to take his place. 

Araki is tipped off by Masashi Nishioka, a salesman for the department,  that there is a likely candidate in the company. A person by the name of Mitsuya Majime in the Sales Department. Socially awkward, quiet and reserved. He had been with the company for only three years after finishing graduate school, has a background in linguistics and is a collector of antiquarian books. 

Mitsuya Majime joins the Dictionary Editorial Department and is introduced to the rest of the team - Professor Matsumoto, Masashi Nishioka, the person who gave the tip on Majime to Kohei Araki, and Mrs. Kaoru Sasaki whose job it is to keep track of index cards and classify them. 

Majime lives in a rooming house with his landlord, an elderly woman named Take. He is currently the only boarder and currently uses the rooms on the first floor of the building to store his immense collection of books. 

He meets Kaguya Hayashi, a new boarder at the house and is also the grandchild of Take. She has returned from studying cooking at a culinary school. Her presence flusters Majime. He is smitten with her but does not know how to talk to girls and has never dated one either. 

The Great Passage reads like two stories in one book. The first is the creation of the dictionary. The other is about the budding romance between Majime and Kaguya. The story is reminiscent of The Professor and the Madman, which is the story of the making of the English Oxford Dictionary. Majime and Araki may come off as madmen themselves, as dedication to their work knows no bounds. It’s a moving story of friendship, love, and romance, and about one thing that all bonds us together - words! ~Ernie Hoyt

Welcome Me to the Kingdom by Mai Nardone (Random House)l

A teenage couple comes to Bangkok from the rural northeast of Thailand hoping to find the good life they’ve seen on television, only to discover the glittering metropolis “didn’t live up to our expectations.” They arrive with a 30-day deadline to find good jobs. When that expires, the girl goes to work in a bar, meets a middle-aged American, marries him, and has, despite her best—or worst—efforts, a daughter who grows into brilliance. 

A child whose wealthy family escaped from the Cultural Revolution by floating down the Mekong into Thailand loses his fortune when economies topple across Asia in 1997. His Thai-born daughters speak three languages, one which they acquire at a British International school that was built on land endowed to it by their grandfather.

A cluster of “strayboys,” rescued from the streets by a collective of former bar girls, build a shack of their own in the undergrowth of the slum they live in. Using an abandoned badminton net that they scavenged, they fish glass and plastic bottles from a canal and sell their catch to a recycler for a handful of coins.

The daughter of an Elvis impersonator is trained to take over his bar when he dies and becomes the prey of a corrupt policeman. Submitting to his appetites, she indulges her own only when she’s away from him, ordering a banquet of succulent dishes and then taking only a taste or two from each. 

All of these children grow into their destinies, with their lives colliding, intersecting, jolting apart. Within their orbits lie Thai boxing matches, cockfighting battles, clandestine gambling dens, routes of the impromptu first responders--”corpse carriers” who vie to be the first at every accident scene, the bars filled with “cheer-beer” girls who make a living by providing the “girlfriend experience” to male travelers in search of “make-believe,” the brutal, easily obtained jobs on construction sites. 

The settings of these interlinking short stories are grim, the characters within them are survivors, each bearing a hard-won form of triumph. At the heart of their lives, Bangkok blazes like a ravenous flame, its sensual beauty giving a luster to the grim environment that all of these children know intimately, regardless of how they grew into adulthood.  Placed in random order, their stories convey the jangling energy and random chaos of Thailand’s primate city, a place where social classes intersected without mingling, until everyone’s life was disrupted by the downward mobility that comes with the rapid fall of the Thai baht in 1997.

Thai American Mai Nardone was born in Bangkok and lived there into his teen years. Now he’s come back to it, reclaiming his home. He knows his city in a way that only those who have grown up in it can, while exploring every corner of it with the perspective gained from reaching adulthood in another country, another culture. His characters soar beyond the ordinary stereotypes that a lazier writer would have allowed them to assume. Each one of them is fully capable of moving on into their own novel, while living incandescent, unforgettable lives in the form Nardone has given them in Welcome Me to the Kingdom.~Janet Brown

The Miracles of the Namiya General Store by Keigo Higashino, translated by Sam Bett (Yen One)

The Miracles of the Namiya General Store was originally published in the literary magazine Shosetsu Yasei Jidai from April of 2011 to December of the same year. The Japanese title is ナミヤ雑件店の奇跡 (Namiya Zakkaten no Kiseki) and was published in book form in 2012 by Kadokawa Corporation. It was also adapted into a feature length film in 2017.  

The year is 2012 and three good-for-nothings, Atsuya, Shota, and Kohei, end up taking refuge in an old abandoned building after their latest robbery. The sign out front shows it to be the Namiya General Store. To their surprise, while they were hiding in the building, someone dropped a letter in through the mail slot. 

A notice had been floating on the Internet. It said, “From exactly midnight until daybreak, the Namiya General Store Advice Box will be reopening for one night only”. It is the same night the three delinquents break into the store. 

The boys decide to open the letter and read the contents. A woman wrote to the store asking for advice. However, the letter wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular, only to the Namiya General Store. Atsuya recalled seeing the name of the store in one of the magazines that was left in the house. He found the page he was looking for which featured a short article on the owner of the store, Yuji Namiya.

The article starts off by saying:

This neighborhood store has developed a reputation for being fully stocked with answers to life’s toughest questions. 

If you come to the Namiya General Store in XX city after hours and slip a letter through the mail slot in their shutter, an answer will be waiting for you in the milk crate around back in the morning. 

The boys become more confused because the article was written over forty years ago. And yet people are still leaving letters and asking for advice. The boys had opened the letter and felt the need to write her back. Atsuya was worried that Kohei had left his fingerprints on the letter they wrote, but as Kohei went to retrieve the letter, it was no longer in the box. There was a noise out front which Shota went to check on and in his hand was another letter. 

After a few more exchanges, the boys have determined that the letters have been coming from the past. They managed to narrow down the year to 1979. But they still have no idea why the house is functioning as a time machine. Following the first letter, the boys begin receiving other letters throughout the night. 

What started on a whim becomes more serious as the store continues to receive more letters. For each person who writes for advice, the boys answer to the best of their ability, in the same vein as the original owner.Their advice spawns many little miracles and intertwines with seemingly unrelated characters. It’s a night that will change their lives forever. 

Japan’s master of mystery, Keigo Higashino, has written a light-hearted fantasy that will make you laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time. In a world full of conflict, wars, and a pandemic, it is refreshing to read about miracles that will change people’s lives for the better. Just imagine what kind of advice you would give if you received a letter from the past asking for help. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Easy Life in Kamusari by Shion Miura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (Amazon Crossing)

Yuki Hirano, a city boy born and raised in Yokohama, thought he would be a “freeter” after graduating from high school, making a living while being a part-time worker. He didn’t get good grades in school and he didn’t like studying. Because of his attitude towards academics, his parents and even his teachers never once suggested going to college to receive higher education. He was also put off by the thought of becoming a company man, working for the same company until retirement. 

Yuki already worked as a part-timer at a convenience store. He knew he couldn’t do this for the rest of his life but he didn’t have anything particular he wanted to do and didn’t expect he ever would. He thought, “after graduation, nothing would change, that my life would go right on the same as ever”. 

Imagine his surprise when he is told by a certain Mr. Kumagai, that he has found Yuki a job. He thought he must be kidding, but when he got home, he could see his mother moving a lot of her stuff into his bedroom. His mom looks at him and tells Yuki that she has already sent some clothes and other essentials he will need to Kumasari village.

So begins the tale of The Easy Life in Kamusari, the first volume in Shion Miura’s Forest Series, first published as 神去なあなあ日記 (Kamusari Naa Naa Nikki) in 2012 by Tokuma Shoten. The English version was published in 2021, and was followed the next year by Kamusari Tales Told at Night (reviewed on Asia by the Book January, 2023), and is translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. 

Yuki Hirano has no idea where Kamusari Village is. Without his knowledge, Yuki’s parents had enrolled him in a government-sponsored program called Green Employment. The idea is to “support the reemployment of people returning to their hometowns or moving to rural areas for the first time”. 

Yuki thought if the program was willing to hire someone like him, right out of high school, it tells him how shorthanded rural communities are. Mr. Kumagai had taken Yuki to the train station at Shin Yokohama station, gave him a piece of paper that tells him how to get to Kamusari Village and told him, “You can’t come back for a year. Take care of yourself, Hirano. Hang in there.”

Yuki finds himself in a rural community in Mie Prefecture. There is no phone, no convenience stores, no Internet access, and no means of escape. He also didn’t understand the Kamusari dialect and their use of “naa-naa” which could mean anything from “take it easy” to “relax” or be a simple greeting. 

Yuki was still unsure of what kind of work he would be doing but once he made it to Kumasari. He woke to find himself in the home of the forest owners’ cooperative. He also learned that his first three weeks would consist of basic training - listening to lectures such as “Dangers That Lurk in the Mountain” and “Forestry Terminology”. He learned how to use a chainsaw. It finally hit him that he would be working in the forestry industry.

The more time he spends in Kamusari, the more it grows on him. He learns how to cut trees and plant saplings. He takes part in local festivals and learns more about the history and traditions of Kamusari as well. He thinks he might even be falling in love. 

It wasn’t until I was half-way through the book when I realized I saw a movie with a similar plot. I did a little research and found out the book was adapted into a movie titled [Wood Job!] in 2014. If I had bothered to read the subtitle of the movie, Kamusari Naa-Naa Nichijo, then I would have known the movie was based on this book. 

Miura’s coming of age story is heartwarming and light-hearted. It is an often told story of being a “fish out of water”. A city boy learning how to live in the country and work with nature. Miura adds a bit of the supernatural to add a bit of tension and mystery. The setting, the folklore, the legends, the people of Kamusari, all of it will make you wish you could find a similar community to be a part of as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer (Riverhead Books)

“What kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of increasing conflict?” This is the question that prompts Pico Iyer to cast his lively mind upon finding a paradise in earth, a location that  many of us would love to find after these past three years of illness, isolation, and death. Iyer, being a tease and iconoclast, explores the spots conventionally agreed upon as paradisiacal and ones that few would think of in those terms. His search begins in a country that attracts few tourists, the place he claims where the idea of paradise began.

Iran is where “paradise” began. “Paradaija” was coined in Iran and made its way to Greece where it was stolen and transmitted to a multiplicity of languages. In the Farsi language of Iran, “garden” and “paradise” share the same word, one that is reflected in Persian gardens, “ravishing visions of paradise,” and is used generously by that country’s poets. Iyer finds a foretaste of paradise when he’s driven down “quiet country roads lined with orchards of cherries and peaches.” When he reaches his destination, the home of the Iranian equivalent to Shakespeare, his driver unexpectedly recites one of the dead poet’s famous works, declaiming “I have made the world through a paradise of words.”

It’s through words that Iyer discovers the underlying puzzle of this beautiful country. Iran, a guide tells him, invented the double-edged sword and Iyer finds that same double purpose in the enigmatic words of the Iranian people whom he talks to. This is, he decides, “a world of suggestions, not certainty.”

Moving on, he chooses North Korea, which calls itself “the people’s paradise.” Examining this, he discovers the “ruthless elimination of imperfection,” beside which the fate of humans is secondary. The urban glories of Pyongyang he dismisses as a “massive stage set,” in which the skyscrapers are “ghost towers,” unused and empty. If paradise is a surreal state, Iyer has found it here.

From there he travels to Kashmir, long acknowledged to be India’s paradise, beloved by travelers, and filled with 600,000 Indian soldiers to quell the threat of Islamic rule; to the most remote Australian town that he can find, Broome, which isn’t paradise at all but shows “a different kind of reality”  to those who aren’t its Aboriginal inhabitants; to Ladakh, where he relives his “video nights” in a mountain paradise that was once a stop on the Silk Road and still absorbs imported foreign influences that change the surface but leave the core intact; to Sri Lanka, a legendary island paradise steeped in Buddhism and racked by suicide bombers, where Hindu Tamil and Buddhist Sinhalese are locked in a bloodbath of warfare.

In the end, Iyer goes to Varanisi, saying “I was unlikely to mistake it for paradise,” even though if one dies there, on the banks of its filthy river, paradise in the form of moksha, the end of reincarnation and all suffering, is guaranteed. Therefore it’s a city where people come to die, with flaming corpses lying upon burning ghats in “twenty-four hour cremations”, where others purify their lives by bathing in the Ganges, a holy river that flows past thirty sewers and is clogged with fecal coliform bacteria. In this place that Iyer calls a “Boschian riddle,” a city of ideas and belief, guided by ancient customs, he remembers a teaching of a Zen master, “The struggle of your life is your paradise.”

Iyer has always been a writer of froth and charm, with brilliant observations and shallow thoughts. In The Half Known Life, he returns to cities he visited in the past and examines them with the intellect he denied his readers in the past. This may well be the closest he will come to a biography, with his hints of his personal life--still a tease in spite of his often dazzling ideas that lurk beneath his cleverness. He’s written an invitation for all of us, to examine the struggle of our lives and discover our own paradise.~Janet Brown

Nine Lives : In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury)

William Dalrymple is a Scottish born writer who has lived on and off in India since 1989. His first book, In Xanadu, he followed the path of Marco Polo starting his journey from The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to the site of Shangdu, which is known more commonly as Xanadu, which is located in Inner Mongolia in China. Since then, he has written a number of travel books focusing mostly on Asia. 

Dalrymple’s books usually focused on what he experienced on his travels. The idea for Nine Lives came to him as he was walking up a mountain leading to the temple of Kedarnath, believed by the Hindus to be one of the homes of Lord Shiva. Dalrymple talked with many people on their pilgrimage to the temple. He met a naked and ash-smeared sadhu, one of India’s holy men. A sadhu is a religious ascetic, mendicant, or any holy person in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions. They have given up the worldly life in order to pursue and attain spiritual enlightenment.

Dalrymple was surprised by the sadhu he met. A man named Ajay Kumar Jha. Dalrymple had always assumed that most of the Holy Men he had seen in India “were from traditional village backgrounds and were motivated by a blind and simple faith”. So we asked Jha to tell him his story. Jha revealed that he had been a sales manager for an electrical company in Bombay, had received his MBA from a university and was highly regarded by his employers. 

Dalrymple met many people like Jha on his travels. With India’s rapidly growing economy and modernism, Dalrymple began to wonder what the effect of modernism had on religion. He believes that most Westerners view Eastern religions as “deep wells of ancient, unchanging wisdom”.  Dalrymple also says, “much of India’s religious identity is closely tied to specific social groups, caste practices and father-to-son lineages, all of which are changing very rapidly as Indian society transforms itself at speed”. 

Dalrymple wanted to know what does it mean to be a Holy man or a Jain nun in modern India. In this book, Dalrymple features nine people with differing religious views. He introduces by writing about how he met them, describes their practices, then asks the interviewee to tell their story in their own words of how they came to be where they’re at in this point of life. 

We are introduced to a Jain nun who is striving to reach moksha, which refers to the freedom from samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth. It is especially hard on her to stick to her vow of detachment while watching her friend slowly die by sallekhana, death by ritual fasting. The nun also decided to follow the path of her friend. 

You will meet Hari Das, a dalit, previously known as an Untouchable, the lowest caste in the caste system of India.  Das works as a manual laborer during the week and a prison warden on the weekends,  but for three months, during the Theyyam season which runs from December to February, he becomes a dancer possessed by a God and is respected by Brahmins, the highest caste in the Indian system. 

Each of the nine individuals' stories is different and eye-opening. As an irreligious person and a skeptic when it comes to the power of faith, I find the stories fascinating and incredulous. However, I’m also respectful of other people's beliefs and practices. Listening to these people tell the stories of how they came to follow their spiritual path may open your eyes to follow your own. 

For me, although I admit to being irreligious, I do follow the “Golden Rule” as said by Luke in the New Testament (Luke 6:31),  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  It sounds like good common sense to me. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit and Peril by Sarah Stodola (HarperCollins)

Blame it on the British. Stuck on their soggy little island with its chilly shoreline, bordered by a sea that could induce hypothermia if an intrepid adventurer immersed so much as a single toe into its frigid waves, once they learned that a beach could be pleasant, there was no stopping them. The south of France, the coast of Italy, even England’s sworn foe, Spain, were suddenly prime targets for English bodies yearning to be warm. Time spent on a beach became the fashion for cold and restless residents of northern countries until at last the words “vacation” and “beach” became almost synonymous, first only for the wealthy and then for the masses. Today there are over 7000 beach resorts on our planet, not including the ones that have fewer than ten rooms or aren’t directly on the beach.

When the invention of the air conditioner tamed the “soupy heat” of the tropics, new destinations opened up for the world’s sun-worshippers. First came the readers of Lonely Planet guides, followed by people with more money to spend and were reluctant to relinquish the comfort they were used to. Beach shacks were supplanted by more comfortable accommodations, built for the travelers who wanted to be “far from home while never having left.”  Local residents soon realized that their beaches yielded more money than any of their agricultural efforts and suddenly resorts studded coastlines all over the world.

Sarah Stodola, like many other tourists, became enthralled with the concept of a beach vacation when she went to Southeast Asia. Although she surveys seaside destinations from the Jersey Shore to Senegal, the bulk of her explorations take place in tropical Asia. This is where the idea of the resort ranges from rustic bungalows for surfers to entire islands that only the wealthy can afford, where the cheapest accommodations begin at $2,200 a night. 

People will pay for solitude. Some pay with the discomfort of discovering an undeveloped paradise while others yearn for “barefoot luxury,” “peace without challenges,” and a “frictionless experience.” Asia has both extremes and everything in between the two. It also holds the largest number of potential tourists. Before the advent of Covid, in 2018 150 million Chinese tourists traveled outside their borders, enriching the tourist industry with $255 billion dollars in 2019. China,” Stodola speculates, “has the power to remake the global tourism industry” with India as a close contender.

Chinese travelers are already changing the beaches of Vietnam, their “fourth-most-visited destination, after Thailand, Japan, and South Korea, with 4 million Chinese descending upon this small country in 2017. Most of them flock to Vietnam’s two thousand miles of coastline, where, a developer says, “you see a new resort opening every three months.” The perils of over-development have been slowed by Covid but the signs are clearly there. Dams have prevented the replenishment of beach sand while illegal sand mining takes place offshore with impunity. It’s a small indication of how the ravenous appetite for beach holidays are endangering the coastlines of the world.

An island in Malaysia points the way that disaster could be averted. One locally-run NGO is making recycling an island-wide practice. A machine that cost only $6000 takes empty beer bottles and turns them into sand. This is mixed with concrete and used in the island’s construction projects, eliminating the need to import expensive sand from outside the island and making illegal sand mining from the sea an irrelevant operation. With thousands of beer bottles emptied constantly by tourists, this is a vastly sustainable solution.

Others are less palatable and more difficult to bring into being. With a world full of paradise-seekers who are accustomed to jumping on planes to get what they want, how to stuff that genie back in the bottle by discouraging long-haul flights? Maybe by making beach holidays what they were at their very beginning, a privilege reserved for the wealthy.~Janet Brown

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot (Picador)

A dimly lit basement cafe with sepia walls, no windows, no air conditioning, three antique clocks that each show a different time, with seating for no more than nine customers at a time, Funicula Funicula is as old-fashioned as the song that gave the place its name. Tokyo is filled with far more attractive places where there are far more choices of coffee, so why do people persist in coming to this drab little spot where the owner will use only Ethopian mocha beans, the kind that makes a cup of bitter coffee? 

Although it’s received no publicity since an article in the paper years ago, this cafe’s famous. It’s the only spot in Tokyo where customers are promised a journey into the past, if they meet all of the stringent conditions for doing this. A prospective time-traveler must always sit on a stool at the counter which is almost always occupied, vacated only when the seated woman gets up to use the toilet. The traveler must order coffee and never leave this seat during their adventure. They can only meet someone who has visited the cafe and they can’t change the present during their visit to the past. Most important is the timing involved. If they don’t drink all of their coffee before it gets cold, they will return to their present life as a ghost.

Within this rigid framework blooms four poignant stories of coffee drinkers who have submitted to all of the restrictions. A young woman goes back in time to say the words that she was unable to speak before, ones that can’t change the present but may, in the future, possibly bring back the man she loves. Others learn how to live with present tragedies, a fatal automobile accident that takes place in an estranged family, a memory so fogged by aging that a wife must reintroduce herself again and again to the husband she’s lived with for decades. Then comes the impossible journeys that no one has made before. A daughter comes from the future to take a photograph of her dead mother and a mother goes into the future for a glimpse of the daughter she will never know. 

Anchoring these sweet and charming episodes are the cafe staff, the mysterious woman who rarely leaves her seat, and the cafe itself which is gradually revealed to be the sort of sanctuary that every urban resident longs for--a refuge that’s quiet, unrushed, and comfortable, where eventually customers and staff become friends. Even if the only wish that’s granted is a plate of toast and a cup of coffee, in a metropolis like Tokyo this can be enough.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi at first wrote this novella as a play but the cafe and its denizens weren’t ready to leave his imagination. Before the Coffee Gets Cold was quickly followed by a sequel. Tales from the Cafe (reviewed on Asia by the Book in February, 2022). Recently the third volume in the series, Before Your Memory Fades, appeared in the U.S. with Last Chance to Say Goodbye slated for its American debut at the end of this year. 

Kawaguchi’s novellas have tapped into the regret and sadness of the covid era with his delightful fantasies, each one posing the question, “If you could go back, who would you want to meet?” No matter how cynical any of his readers may be when they first open a book in this series, they’ll be possessed by that question long before they turn the last page.~Janet Brown

A Backward Place by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Fireside Book)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Germany. She married an Indian national and moved to New Delhi in 1951. She wrote many novels and several screenplays, including Room with a View which won an Academy Award. She is also the recipient of the Booker Prize for Fiction for her 1975 novel Heat and Dust. 

A Backward Place which was originally published in 1965 is set in India is a comedic look at the life of a group of expats and one Indian national. It is the story of their lives, their hopes and dreams, and is also full of everyday drama which any layperson can relate to. 

Bal, the Indian national and protagonist of the story, is a young and struggling actor, who dreams of making it big in the theater. Although he is dedicated to his profession, he is also married and has two children he must support. 

His wife, Judy, is an Englishwoman who works in a small office for the Cultural Dais and helps support the family. While Bal is a dreamer, Judy is pragmatic and a realist. As Judy works with government officials and other important and wealthy people, Bal tries to convince her to receive support from the Cultural Dais in starting a new theater troupe and production. 

Judy is friends with Etta, a woman originally from Hungary and carries the attitude of a Parisian. She is also not as young as she once used to be and tries desperately to hang on to her youth and continues to use her charm and body to get the men around her to do her bidding. She still retains a colonial attitude and looks down on the natives and speaks her mind as well. 

Then, there is Clarissa. A young woman who left her native Britain because she couldn’t stand the customs and attitudes of her own country. She feels as if she is more Indian than most Indians. For some reason, Clarissa enjoys being friends with the mean and spiteful Etta.

Finally, there are the Hochstadts. They are a German couple who had settled in England many years ago. They often thought of themselves as English but still spoke the language with a thick German accent and looked very central European. Dr. Franz Hochstadt accepted a two year appointment in India teaching economics at the University as an exchange professor. 

The story opens with Etta telling Judy she ought to leave her husband. Judy, who often comes off as timid or naive, was thrilled. Although she has no intention of leaving her husband, hearing Etta say it makes her feel worldly and proud. Judy loved visiting Etta because her home was more elegant than her own. 

Judy’s husband tells her that he must work one particular evening. He tells her, he was called by the great Bollywood actor Kishan Kumar. Judy had met Kumar previously and did not like him. She knew he was a successful film star and had an entourage of hangers on, and Bal was one of them. 

The lives of these six characters take a life on their own. Judy does get the Cultural Dais to support creating a new theater group, mostly at the persistent request of Bal, but when Bal’s dream seems to be coming to fruition, he tells Judy that he doesn’t want any part of it. Kishan Kumar has called him to Bombay with the promise of starting a new movie production office there. Now Bal is trying to convince Judy and the kids to move to Bombay. 

The story will make you laugh, will make you cry and at times will even make you angry. If a story can make you feel all these emotions, you know you are in for a good ride and no matter what the outcome, you can’t help but support all the characters in their endeavors. 

Bal will certainly want to make you follow your dream! ~Ernie Hoyt

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff (Ballantine Books)

Nobody in her village is precisely sure of how to categorize Geeta. Is she a widow? Is she a witch? Is she a murderer? Or perhaps she’s all three possibilities rolled into one. 

The only true fact that everyone can agree upon is that several years ago, Geeta’s abusive husband Ramesh disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again.  Finding--or creating--an explanation for this has kept the village gossips busy ever since and Geeta’s tarnished reputation has kept her old friends at a distance. 

That Geeta doesn’t seem to miss her husband allows the stories about her to take on an even darker shadow. She has developed her own jewelry business and appears to be more than happy to live alone. Some of her neighbors call her a churel, possessed by a demon that eats children and makes both men and women unable to come up with replacement offspring. Others speculate that she must be “mixed with dirt,” abandoned because she had betrayed Ramesh with other men. However many women secretly envy her. Geeta has no husband to drink up her earnings, to beat her, or to make any demands upon her at all. At last one of the unhappy wives comes to her, begging that she “remove my nose ring,” a veiled plea to get rid of the woman’s husband the way Geeta is rumored to have disposed of her own. Suddenly a woman who was happy to have been abandoned becomes a reluctant murderer, not once but twice, at the behest of women who are trapped in miserable marriages.

With two murders to her credit, Geeta loses the pariah status bestowed upon her with her supposed killing of Ramesh. She even acquires a male admirer. In spite of her pangs of guilt and the threat of imprisonment, her life is good--until Ramesh shows up, alive and repentant, eager to resume his marital privileges and take his share of his wife’s financial success.

This is a promising beginning to a novel that’s quickly burdened with too many characters all talking at once and far too many social issues. Domestic violence, the injustices of the caste system, the preference for light skin over dark, the dangers of adulterated booze sold at a profit, the history of the Bandit Queen Phoolan who became an outlaw to wreak revenge after she had been gang-raped, even the intricacies of village council politics are all tossed into what at first seemed to be a pleasant little black comedy with feminist undertones. 

If that weren’t enough to sink the story, it quickly becomes burdened with a surfeit of unnecessary dialogue and an overdose of slapstick plot twists, giving the impression that Parini Shroff might have originally intended this to be a movie script or a television situation comedy. Even its dramatic ending falls prey to a never-ending conversation between almost all of the leading characters. What should have been suspenseful and maybe even thrilling goes on for an interminable thirty-five pages of threats and quips until at last someone mercifully takes action.

It’s tempting to tell San Francisco attorney Shroff not to quit her day job, but that would be cruel. Instead let’s hope that she concentrates on what she seems to do best, creating entertainment content where her crowd of characters and their jumbled lives will find themselves perfectly at home.~Janet Brown

その本は (Sonohonwa) by ヨシタケシンスケ (Shinsuke Yoshitaka) and 又吉直樹 (Naoki Matayoshi) (ポプラ社）

Sonohonwa is a delightful and magical fairytale that would appear to book lovers all over the world. Unfortunately, it is only available in Japanese. The title translates into English as About that Book… It was written by popular children’s book writer and illustrator Shunsuke Yoshitake and Akutagawa prize recipient and one half of the comedy duo Peace, Naoki Matayoshi. 

It is the story of a kingdom whose elderly king loves to read books. However, in his old age, his vision is no longer what it used to be and he is nearly blind. The king summoned two of his subjects to the castle and said to them, “I love books. I’ve read many books in my lifetime. I’ve read almost every book there is to read. But now my eyesight is bad and I can no longer read books. Still, I love books. So I want to listen to more books. Therefore, I command you to go out into the world, find and talk to people about the world’s most fascinating books. Then, come back and tell me about all those books.”

So the men were given money and provisions and set out on their journey. They wander the world collecting stories of the most fascinating books. The men would return to the castle a year later. The king could no longer get out of bed but he could hear well, so the two men would take turns each night, telling the king about the books they heard about. 

On the first night, one of the men tells the king about the fastest book in the world. It’s so fast that nobody could catch up and read it. The people got a cheetah to run after just to read the cover. But the people were wondering how to get the cheetah to tell them what the book title was. Fortunately, that particular book had a twin. The shape and the contents were nearly the same. The book was being chased by the police and was finally arrested at the house of Volume 8. They had known that the book only had seven volumes.

But what was the name of the book? The storyteller gave the king a hint. He said the book stretches from north to south, many people live in it, and it’s located in the middle of an ocean. He also told the king, you can see cherry blossoms in the spring, a Star Festival is celebrated in the summer, the leaves change colors in the autumn, and in the winter, people sit under a kotatsu while eating oranges. In the end, the storyteller told the king, “about that book”, it is Ni-Hon (hon being the Japanese word for book). Nihon → Nippon → Japan!

The other storyteller told the king about a book related to music. This story also uses a play on words. He tells the king sonohonwa (so no hon wa), which translates to, “The so book” can be found between the fa book and la books, which of course are part of the Do-Re-Mi solfege.

After the two men took turns telling the king all the stories, the king assembled them into one book. He told the two men, “Yahari hon wa omoshiroi!” which roughly translates to, “It’s just as I thought, books are interesting.” The following day, the king passed away with a satisfied look on his face. 

However, six months after their stories were assembled and published into one book, a surprising fact came to light. The two men never left their homes. They used the money the king gave them for their own living expenses and made up all the stories they told the king. They were taken to court and found guilty of two charges - not using the king’s money properly and lying to the king. The judge asks the two men if they had any final words they wanted to say. The two thought about it and at the same time said, “About that book…”

You would be hard put to enjoy the story unless you have a firm grasp of the Japanese language. Many of the stories use puns and wordplay which would get lost in translation.  It reminded me of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, Khan asks Polo to tell him about one city he has never mentioned directly - his hometown. Polo responds by saying, “Everytime I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” 

Of course Polo did travel all over the world so Khan would find it difficult to doubt Polo’s experience. In the same way, the King believed that the two men traveled the world and collected all those stories. The King died a happy man which just goes to show you how strong the power of words are. ~Ernie Hoyt

Not Yo' Butterfly by Nobuko Miyamoto (University of California Press)

Misao was a picture bride who arrived in the U.S. in 1912 to marry a man she’d never met. By 1914, she had two daughters, both born in Oakland, whom she sent to live with her parents in Japan for ten years. Soon after the girls returned to her, Misao died, leaving them to run the family household in a country they’d been separated from during their formative years.

Hatsue, the oldest, had been molded into a traditional Japanese girl but her younger sister Mitsue called herself Mitzi, studied fashion design, and insisted on marrying for love. The man she loved was half Japanese and half Caucasian, the son of a Mormon farm girl from Idaho who had fallen in love with a Japanese laborer and married him in spite of anti-miscegenation laws. Mitzi was as determined as her future husband’s mother had ever been. She defied her father, married the man of her choice, and gave birth their first child two years before President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.

“I was born where I didn’t belong. At two, I became the enemy.” Although Noboku’s first memories were of the internment camp that had been hastily cobbled together at the Santa Anita racetrack in which the confined prisoners were housed in horse stalls, Mitzi knew a way out. Telling the authorities that her father-in-law had a farm in Idaho that her family could go to, she discovered that not only was the man she spoke to from Idaho, he had gone to the controversial wedding of her husband’s parents. Once again two rebellious women changed the life of Noboku Joanne, known as Jojo. The little girl was given the freedom of farm life and the attention of everyone around her. She soon showed a love of music that seemed to pour into her and came out in the motions of dance.

When the war was over and the Miyamoto family returned to California, Mitzi turned her own artistic ambitions toward her daughter. Jojo had tap lessons, ballet training, and began going to professional auditions by the time she was fourteen. At fifteen she was dancing in the filmed version of The King and I and a year after high school graduation, she was on her way to New York alone as a cast member of the Broadway musical, Flower Drum Song. Jojo became JoAnne Miya and the stage became her natural habitat—until she met an Italian filmmaker with an ambition to make a documentary about the Black Panthers.

This is how a rebel became a revolutionary. JoAnne Miya met and immediately gravitated to Yuri Kochiyama, the Japanese American activist who held Malcolm X on the night he was killed. Through this friendship she met the Black community leader who would become the father of her child and the one who insisted she return to her Japanese name, Nobuku. The glamorous performer became a protest singer who wrote songs that came from her own history and that of her parents, songs of rebellion that galvanized young Asian Americans and drew the attention of Yoko Ono and John Lennon.

This autobiography is a stunning social history, showing how America’s crucible of racism can bring rebellion into full flame in three generations, from a picture bride to a performer who uses her art to buttress her principles. It casts a bright light upon Asian, Black, and Latine activists, working together to bring change and transform their country.~Janet Brown

Aama in America : A Pilgrimage of the Heart by Broughton Coburn (Anchor Books)

Vishnu Maya Garung is an eighty-four-year-old Gurung woman from Nepal. Everyone in her village calls her “Aama” which is the Nepali word for “mother”. Author Broughton Coburn lived and worked in Nepal and the Himalayas for nearly twenty years. First as a Peace Corp volunteer teacher, then as an overseer for rural development and wildlife conservation projects for the United Nations and other agencies.

It was when Coburn lived in Nepal as a teacher that he met Vishnu Maya Garung (Aama). When he met her, Aama was a widow in her seventies. Coburn moved into a loft above a water buffalo shed that was owned by her. Aama became his landlady, and from these humble beginnings a friendship would form. Aama treated Coburn like her own son. Coburn says she saw him as a “dharma son, the male offspring she had never given birth to, sent from the heavens by the deities to be spiritually adopted”.  Coburn immediately felt a close bond to Aama as he had recently lost his own mother. 

He wrote a book about living with Aama and working and traveling with her throughout Nepal. The book was titled Nepali Aama : Portrait of a Nepalese Hill Woman, originally published by Moon Travel Handbooks in 1991. A new version was published in 2000 by Nirmal Kumar Khan with the subtitle being changed to Life Lessons of  a Himalayan Woman. 

While working in Nepal, Coburn met a woman from the U.S. who had also been working in the country for more than ten years before they met. They soon dated and became a couple. After living together for four years, they decided to travel the U.S. together to see if they were as compatible as they had been while living in Nepal. However, Coburn wanted to see one more person before leaving the country. 

It had been two years since Coburn visited Aama. He went to see her with his girlfriend Didi in tow. Didi was well aware of Coburn’s relationship with Aama and was looking forward to meeting Aama as well. Aama would be well into her mid-eighties by now. When Aama saw Did, she said to Broughton, “You’ve brought me a daughter-in-law”.

Relieved at finding Aama still alive and healthy, on an impulse, Broughton said, “Aama, how would you like to go to America with us?”. Aama’s only daughter, Sun Maya was the first to react. She looked at the two foreigners and just laughed, imagining her eighty-four year old mother in a land where she doesn’t know anybody or speak the language. Even Didi thought they should discuss it further.

Aama surprised all of them by answering, “Why wouldn’t I want to go? Why wouldn’t I want to see my dharma son’s and daughter-in-law’s home and meet their relatives?” And with those words, the preparation of taking Aama to the U.S. begins. 

Their travels throughout the U.S. resulted in Aama in America. The three unlikely travel companions spent time in Seattle, Washington - the start of their twenty-state tour of America. Aama is very spiritual and often questions why Americans don’t worship any deities or say prayers for their good fortune. 

Every natural wonder she sees - the redwood trees in California, the Pacific Ocean, the famous geyser, Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park, she is awed by and makes a prayer for each place. Coburn and Didi also take her to the “World’s Most Happiest Place” - Disneyland. 

Every experience she has - the places she sees, the people she meets, things we take for granted, are all given special attention. At times humorous and at times a bit frustrating as Coburn and Didi are often scolded about their lack of spirituality. 

While mostly a travel journal of an extraordinary trip, Aama in America is also a very spiritual narrative. As the subtitle suggests, it really is A Pilgrimage of the Heart. However, this pilgrimage wasn’t only made by Aama, it was also a pilgrimage for the author himself who still had unresolved issues concerning his mother’s death, his relationship with Didi, and of course his bond with Aama. The trip may have been an unforgettable journey for Aama and is a story you will not likely forget as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Thorn Puller by Hiromi Ito, translated by Jeffrey Angles (Stonebridge Press)

Hiromi Ito is a woman caught in a situation that’s a familiar scenario for many middle-aged women. She’s a mother whose youngest daughter is ten. She’s a wife whose husband is aging more quickly than she is. She’s a daughter whose parents can no longer take care of themselves unassisted. But Ito faces a complication that most of her counterparts don’t. She lives in California and her parents are in Japan.

Daily phone calls aren’t enough. Ito’s mother frequently begins these conversations with “When are you coming back to Japan?” This is a journey Ito makes several times a year, arriving in a fog of jet lag to face a city she abandoned long ago, and a new medical emergency that only she can cope with. Confronted with her past, a complicated present, and what will eventually be her own future, she does her best to make her parents comfortable. At the same time she  takes care of her youngest daughter, who often accompanies her to Japan. Meanwhile she receives querulous phone calls from her husband who complains that he’s ill, her four-month absence is much too long, and isn’t it time for her to come home?

No wonder Ito becomes preoccupied with Jizo, the god who protects travelers, comforts children, and removes “the thorns of human suffering.” Although she’s no longer religious, she carries the rituals with her, clapping her hands to summon a god, tossing a coin as an offering, acts done reflexively when she passes a shrine. Visiting a temple where Jizu is venerated, she buys the amulet that’s said to banish pain, burns incense before the deity’s statue, and washes herself in the smoke, telling herself the smoke is what she believes in. She needs something to work with because her tasks never end--coming and going, back and forth, phrases repeated in Japanese and in English throughout the narrative.

This threatens to be a bleak and hopeless novel but that isn’t what this is. The author says it’s a long poem and she should know. Not only is The Thorn Puller based heavily upon her own life while using her own name, Hiromi Ito has been a well-known Japanese poet for the past forty years, famous for writing frankly about experiences that are exclusively female. 

Although American reviewers have categorized this book as a novel--or even worse, as “autofiction”--Ito’s U.S. publisher has refused to put it into any sort of pigeon hole. The cover bears only the title, the author, and the translator; not even the copyright page gives a name to what The Thorn Puller might be.

A poem? A memoir? A series of meditative essays? A novel dripping with surrealism? Every reader is given the chance to assign a name to what they’ve read. It’s a work that’s puzzling and at times repetitive, steeped in folklore and skepticism, with actions not usually encountered in fiction nor admitted to in personal essays. While taking an unflinching look at the cruel way that bodies age, Ito moves into her final pages with an examination of dying, observing that “everyone who dies is experiencing it for the first time.” Unlike pregnancy that  comes with books like Lamaze Technique for Dummies, death has no instruction manual. But, Ito suggests without ever saying so directly, perhaps it’s death that’s the true thorn puller.~Janet Brown

Journey Under the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino, translated by Alexander O. Smith (Abacus)

Keigo Higashino is Japan’s premier mystery writer. He has written over fifty novels, more than twenty of which were adapted into feature length films and television series. A number of his works have been translated into English as well. 

Journey Under the Midnight Sun is the English translation of Byakuyako which was originally written as a serialized story in the monthly literary magazine Subaru from 1997 to 1999 and published by Shueisha. It was first written as a series of short stories following a chronology spanning almost twenty years. Higashino then connected the stories into one plot line and compiled it into a single volume. 

The story opens with a murder that happened in Osaka in 1973. A man was found in an abandoned building stabbed to death. Investigating the case was Detective Junzo Sasagaki. He discovered the victim’s name to be Yosuke Kirihara, the owner of a small pawn shop. In their investigation, the police uncover a connection with Fumiyo Nishimoto, a single mother barely scraping by, and her boyfriend Tadao Terasaki, one of Kirihara’s customers. They become the prime suspects. 

Unfortunately, the police cannot prove their involvement and setting the investigation further behind, the two prime suspects mysteriously die shortly after the murder. Nishimoto’s death was ruled as an accident caused by a gas leak in the house. Terasaki dies in a car accident. With the loss of their two prime suspects, the investigation stalls and is eventually closed, remaining as an unsolved case.

The two people most affected by the murder are two elementary school aged children who were also friends - Ryo Kirihara, the son of the murdered victim, and Yukiho Nishimoto, Fumiyo’s daughter. The story then follows the life of the two kids, as they become university students, and then adults. 

Ryo grows up to be a man without emotions and doesn’t get close to anybody. He also has a knack for manipulating people to do his bidding. He gets involved with a series of less than legal activities such as a housewife prostitution ring and pirating and selling popular video games. He also manages to stay one step ahead of the police and is never caught for the crimes he has committed. 

Yukiho Nishimoto is adopted by her wealthy aunt, Reiko Karasawa. Yukiho receives a good education and blooms into a beautiful upper-class woman full of elegance and charm. She becomes the successful owner of an upscale boutique shop. However, those close to her seem to end up in misfortune. The hidden dark side of Yukiho is not revealed until the end.

The thoughts of Ryo Kirihara and Yukiho Karasawa are never mentioned directly. It is through the viewpoints of a number of characters whose lives all intersect with either Ryo or Yukiho. Detective Sasagaki never accepted the official reports on the death of Fumiyo Nishimoto or Terada Terasaki and continues to follow the lives of Ryo and Yukiho. As he slowly pieces together the twenty-year old puzzle of Kirihara’s murder, the end results may shock you as well. 

The plot twists and character relations will have your head spinning and may make you as obsessed as Detective Sasagaki in finding out the truth. And what’s you do, you may be in for quite a shock. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Interpreter's Daughter by Teresa Lim (Pegasus Books)

When Teresa Lim began to investigate her family history, she thought the primary figure would be her great-grandfather, a man who emigrated from China to Singapore when he was young and the British still controlled their island colony. Known to his descendants simply as Law, Law Foong-Siew’s father made sure that he and his sons paid for their tickets to Singapore themselves. Although this put them in debt to relatives, that was preferable to having a future employer pay for their passage and ensuring them to a life of indentured servitude, working as coolies to pay off a never-ending debt.

Law had two other advantages working in his favor. He had received an education and he had a flair for languages. Immediately embarking on English classes that were almost free, Law stood out among his fellow students who were almost all without education or an aptitude for learning English. He eventually became part of the colonial bureaucracy, an interpreter for British officials and a member of the Chinese Protectorate. Even though he abandoned the life of officialdom when the pay proved to be insufficient to support his wife and children, the prestige of that post carried him into a successful business career.

Long before Lim began to excavate Law’s history, when she was a little girl she asked her mother if their family had a tragedy befall them when the Japanese occupied Singapore during World War Two. Yes, her mother said, it happened to her aunt. No more was said and Lim forgot about this until she saw this woman in family photos.

Fanny Law was Law’s youngest child, much younger than her sisters and brothers, and she seemed to have been erased from the family history. Nobody wanted to talk about her and it took Lim huge amounts of painstaking research to discover who her great-aunt was and why she had become a non-entity in her family.

Fanny was her father’s favorite, the one who remained with him after her older sisters had married and her brothers pursued their careers. Law made certain she was educated, first by her oldest brother who steeped her in Confucian thought and codes of duty, then at an elite girl’s school where Fanny excelled. She was a brilliant scholar, one of the few Singaporeans to be accepted at the University of Hong Kong.

But before any of this took place, Fanny persuaded Law to allow her to take the vows of a “sworn spinster.” She had seen how one sister died within her marriage while the other left her husband when he insisted on having a concubine and was now, with her young children, dependent upon her father for shelter, food, and economic support. Fanny was determined to remain single and eventually persuaded her father to agree. Standing before the family altar with guests in attendance, she vowed to live a life of independence and celibacy, setting up her own household and taking on full support for her sister and her sister’s children. In return, her father ensured that Fanny would receive an education in English.

By the time she was 26, Fanny had a teaching position in Singapore, had her own house, and provided the sole support of her sister, niece, and nephew. She spent a brief period at the University of Hong Kong, failing her examination in English at the end of her first year, but that was enough to launch her teaching career.

But World War Two is brewing, boiling over when the Japanese invade China and move onward to take North Vietnam. From there they have a clear path into Southeast Asia and Singapore, supposedly impregnable, becomes a target for Japanese bombers. “Singapore won’t fall,” Winston Churchill proclaims after the British lose Penang, but once Malaysia is invaded, Singapore is doomed.

The conquering Japanese have around 30, 000 troops to control more than 300,000 Singaporean Chinese men. They single out those whom they discover are leaders and they execute them. One of these men is Fanny’s oldest brother and Fanny reverts to the Confucian ideals that he had taught her. The decision she makes is enough to eradicate her memory—until her great-niece uncovers her story.

“I wish I had known Fanny,” Lim says but discovers that without her great-aunt’s fateful decision, Lim herself would never have existed. Lim’s mother had been given to Fanny with the understanding that she too would become a sworn spinster. But while Fanny’s adopted daughter couldn’t keep her aunt’s memory alive, her own daughter becomes the one to return her to the family history.

The Interpreter’s Daughter takes on too much and this sinks it. A biography mingled with a detailed family history and the writer’s personal memoir, along with a concise account of the opening years of World War Two would be a substantial weight for any book. The crushing addition comes when Lim embroiders upon a brief sentence spoken by her mother. When Lim asks about the conclusion to Fanny’s education, her mother tells her, “There was a young man.” From that Lim invents a romance between Fanny and a family friend, with stilted conversation and a melodramatic conclusion. Since this is the only attempt at a novelization of Fanny’s life, it falls flat and diminishes Lim’s careful research.

Even with this flaw, the Law family history and the woman who honored all who came before her is a remarkable record of how rapidly the world has changed in such a dazzlingly short time. Fanny Law was a woman born too soon and paid the price for that accident of birth.~Janet Brown