Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura, translated by Phlip Gabriel (Penguin)

Mizuki Tsujimura is well known in Japan as a mystery writer. However, her novel Lonely Castle in the Mirror has elements of fantasy and science-fiction in it. It centers on seven junior high school students who wake up one morning to find the mirrors in their rooms to be casting a shiny light. As they touch the surface, they are pulled into the mirror and find themselves in a beautiful castle. There, they meet each other for the first time, and are greeted by a little girl wearing a wolf’s mask who calls herself the Wolf Queen. Although none of the students are aware of it yet, they all have one thing in common. 

Originally published in the Japanese language as かがみの孤城 (Kagami no Kojo) in 2017 by Poplar Publishing. It was adapted into a manga by Tomo Taketomi and serialized in Shueisha’s Seinen Magazine from June 2019 to February 2022. The manga has also been published as a five-volume series. The book was also adapted into an animation film and released in December of 2022. 

The English version was translated by Phlip Gabriel, an American translator and Japanologist. He is also known for translating a number of works by Haruki Murakami. Although Gabriel is an American, the first English publication of this book was published by Penguin Random House UK and therefore, the book is written in British English. 

Kokoro is a student in her first year of Yukishina No.5 Junior High School. However, Kokoro stopped going to school. A couple of days ago, she and her mother went to check out a private alternative learning school. Kokoro thought she may be able to make a new start there but when on the day she was to go, she had a severe stomachache. She knew she wasn’t going to make it. 

Kokoro started regular school in April. She had gone to class for the first month, then just stopped going. When she first went with her mother to check out the school, she thought it would be a fun place. The day she was planning to attend, she had a stomachache which prevented her from going and then had no desire to go there at all. 

As you delve deeper into the story, it becomes clear why Kokoro stopped going to school. She would not admit it to herself but she was being bullied, or to put it lightly, she was shunned and ignored which is still a form of bullying. After a particular incident, she made a drastic decision - she stopped going to school. 

It is when she’s alone in her room that the mirror shines. The first time she stepped through and met the Wolf Queen, she just ran away. The following day when the mirror is shining again, she takes the initiative to go back in. There she meets six other people who seem to be around her age. 

What they found that they have in common is they all stopped going to school. Later, they even find out they all go to the same junior high school. Their names are Aki, Rion, Subaru, Fuka, Masamune, and Ureshino. They all have their own issues as well. 

The Wolf Queen who gathered them together tells them they’re all in a castle which can grant them a wish. She tells them, “Deep inside this castle is a room none of you is permitted to enter. It is a Wishing Room. Only one person will actually have access. Only one of you will have your wish come true. One Little Red Riding Hood.”

The students don’t understand what the Wolf Queen means by calling them ‘Little Red Hood”. She says, “You are the lost Little Red Hoods”, and continues to tell them, “from now until next March, you will need to search for the key that unlocks the Wishing Room. The person who finds it will have the right to enter and their wish will be granted.”

Mizuki Tsujimura’s novel is a fantastical tale of overcoming your fears, working together, and becoming self-confident and having empathy for others. Not only does she hit upon the subject of bullying, but she also deals with abuse, neglect, social withdrawal and other issues facing teens today, not only the Japanese, but of the world in general. 

At times heartbreaking but very inspirational. You will think back to the times when perhaps you were considered “different” at school and shared the same trauma as these seven students, but you will also feel compassion for how they were able to overcome their fears. You will care for the characters, you will be pulled into their world, and you will be thinking about his book long after you have finished it. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Scent of Sake by Joyce Lebra (Avon)

“She was taught to submit, to obey… but she dreamed of an empire.” 

Rie is a nineteen-year-old woman. She is the heir to the House of Omura, a sake brewing family in Kobe. As a young girl, Rie loved the yeasty smell of brewing sake. However, sake brewing was a man’s job. Women weren’t allowed in the kura where the sake was made. 

“Let a woman enter the brewery and the sake will sour”, the old ones always said. It was a warning her mother often repeated since she was a child. It was the women’s duty to scrub out the sake barrels though and Rie always tried to clean them as near to the kura as she could get and not once has the sake gone sour. 

The Scent of Sake is an epic family spanning generations and focusing on a woman who was told she could never be the head of house for the simple fact that she was a woman. Now that she is of marriageable age, her mother has found a husband for her. She knew her parents were expecting her to continue the line of Kinzaemon, the patriarch of the family. Her father was Kinzaemon IX. 

In feudal Japan, everyone knew that brewing sake was exclusively a man’s world. Rie continues to feel the guilt for having taken her eyes off her younger Toichi when she was eight years old. She thought if she were more careful, he would not have fallen into the well. Now, Rie is the oldest and sole heir to the empire. 

Rie’s father could have brought in the son of a geisha but with the merchants of the Kansai area, they preferred a mukoyoshi which means to adopt a husband for the daughter. Rie’s mother, Hana, had found a good match with Jihei, the son of another brewing family. 

Unfortunately, Jihei had no head for business. He spent most of his time either drinking or hanging out with geishas. Although Rie was repulsed by the man, she knew it was in the family’s interest to get pregnant and bear an heir. 

Rie does get pregnant but has a miscarriage. She has also learned that her husband, Jihei, has had a child with a geisha and bore him a son. Her parents tell her that she has no choice but to bring the child into the Omura house so he will become the heir to the dynasty. So now Rie has to raise a child that isn’t her own. 

For Rie, it’s one tragedy after another but she has a plan of her own. She secretly meets with a man she fancies, who also fancies her, they have a tryst, and she times everything so that Jihei will think it is his child she is carrying when she gets pregnant again, but she has a girl. 

Everything Rie does, she does for the House. She took her mother’s advice to heart and has to “kill the self” in order to survive. She refuses to relinquish the power to her husband or to his son. The family stamp remains in her possession, even after her parents die, it is Rie who holds the real power in the House of Omura. 

Joyce Lebra weaves a story that could be adapted into a taiga drama on NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Company. Taiga dramas are a series that focuses on a historical figure and based on historical facts. She thoroughly researched the history of sake making, speaking with different brewers from Akita and Niigata in the north to Kyushu in the south. The story is enough to make you want to imbibe yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt

Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Shek Yeung is a girl who has been drawn to the sea from her earliest years and her determination to sail with her father and brother leads to an unforeseen destiny. When their boat is captured by pirates, Shek Yeung is sold into prostitution. Her brains as much as her beauty attracts a man who has united the pirates of the South China Sea into a fleet that defies the Emperor’s navy. She becomes Cheng Yat’s wife, his partner in battle, and his chief advisor. With his death, she pragmatically assesses the situation and allies herself with her husband’s adopted son, whom she soon marries. Together Shek Yeung and Cheung Po outwit the ships of the English, Portuguese, and the Dutch, as well as any warships sent by the Emperor. 

A bodice-ripping romance novel? Not at all. Any torn bodices have been ripped in the distant past and are quickly glossed over. Sex, for all that it is instrumental in Shek Yeung’s destiny, is not a major player in her story. Nor is romance. She’s not a woman who has time for that. She has a unified fleet of pirate ships to manage. 

Shek Yeung has one entity in her life to whom she pays respect, the deity Ma-Zou, who protects and offers counsel to those who spend their lives on the sea. Ma-Zou takes many different forms and is enshrined in different legends, some of them providing a counterpoint to Shek Yeung’s own story. But while Ma-Zou is a supernatural being who lives in myth and religion, Shek Yeung is rooted in Chinese history, a dominant figure who ruled China’s seas from 1801 to 1810 and who died under unusual circumstances for a pirate--peacefully, of old age.

She and her second husband controlled a naval empire of five different fleets, each bearing a different colored banner. She and Cheung Po sailed on the Red Banner fleet of 300 ships that scourged the sea from Vietnam to Canton. The Black Banner fleet with 200 ships controlled the waters near the Pearl River Delta, while the Green and Red Banner fleets, with 100 and 50 ships respectively, held sway over the Yangtze River Delta. Taiwan’s seacoast was the province of the Blue Banner Fleet with 150 ships.  Aboard these vessels were 40,000-60,000 pirates, all owing allegiance to Shek Yeung and Cheung Po.

Each pirate carried the weapon of their native regions and all of these were developed for hand-to-hand combat: cutlasses, double-edged swords, axes, crossbows that fired three arrows at a time, maces, and the multi-pointed tiger-head hook swords. Gunpowder got the pirates onto the ships that were their prey, but once they were aboard, courage and skill were the tools of their blood-soaked trade. 

Rita Chang-Eppig’s research is a primary strength of her novel. Although she has given Shek Yeung details that weren’t part of her history, she places her firmly as a redoubtable strategist and warrior. Poor Cheung Po turns ashen in contrast--somewhat henpecked and quite unloved. And although Chang-Eppig pays homage to Ma-Zou in her acknowledgments, as well she should, she never mentions that Shek Yeung existed outside of the author’s creative imagination. 

This is perhaps a deficiency of the advance reader’s edition. When Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea comes to bookstores in its finished form, it will garner more readers if it acknowledges that Shek Yeung once lived, breathed and ruled as a compelling and factual figure in Chinese history.~Janet Brown

Life Ceremony : Stories by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Granta)

Sayaka Murata, author of Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings is back. Life Ceremony is her latest book to be published in English and is a collection of short stories, thirteen stories total. First published in Japan in 2019 with the titled 生命式 (Semei Shiki) by Kawade Shobo Shinsha. The English version was translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori who has also translated books by Ryu Murakami, Miyuki Miyabe, and Kyoka Nakajima.

The lead story A First Rate Material centers on a woman named Nana who is about to be married. She was meeting with a couple of girlfriends when one of them noticed the sweater and asked her if it was made of human hair. Nana was delighted that her girlfriend noticed. Yes, in today’s society, items made from human materials are the norm, a form of status - wedding rings made from front teeth, furniture made from human bones. But her fiance is adverse to anything made from human materials. How can she convince him that is all the fashion now?

A Magnificent Spread focuses on the eating habits of different families. Kumi’s older sister and her husband only eat food they buy online from Happy Future Foods. When Kumi was in junior high school, she told her sister that she was a warrior in a previous life in the magical city of Dundilas and only ate the magical food from that magical kingdom. But now her fiance Keiichi wants her to make her own food for him and his parents. Keiichi only wanted to prove his point, he says to everyone, “Everyone thinks the food other people eat are disgusting, and they refuse to eat it. And that’s the way it should be, as far as I’m concerned”. 

The story and namesake of the book Life Ceremony is another fascinating look into what the future holds when someone passes away. When Maho was little, it was forbidden to eat human flesh. She was even reprimanded for making a joke about eating a human. But since then, “the human race has changed little by little”. The population sharply shrank and people feared that the human race would become extinct. This had the “effect  of procreation morphing into a form of social justice”. Sex became known as insemination with the goal being to create new life. When people died, it was the custom to have a “life ceremony” instead of a funeral. “Guests at a life ceremony would eat the deceased’s body, and also seek an insemination partner”. It is based on the idea of “birthing life from death”. 

Sayaka Murata is definitely a rising star in Japan’s literary world. Her first novel Jyunyu (Breastfeeding) won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 2003. She has also won the Yukio Mishima Prize in 2013 for her novel Shiro-iro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, Of Body Heat, Of Whitening City) and in 2016,  her tenth novel, Konbini Ningen (Convenience Store Woman) won the prestigious Akutagawa Award. 

She continues to write about subjects considered taboo in Japanese society such as sexuality, incest, cannibalism, and LGBTQ issues. It is no easy task to sum up the stories in Life Ceremony. Some of the words I would use to describe the stories are quirky and bizarre. You will laugh, you will cry, you may even become a little nauseated at times. However, every story will make you think about it long after you have finished reading them. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Loyal Character Dancer by Qiu Xiaolong (Soho Crime)

Inspector Chen Cao is a member of the Shanghai Police Bureau. He likes to spend his mornings reading Chinese poetry there. However, on this occasion, he was approached by a senior park security officer. The park officer led him to a dead and mutilated body, dressed in his pajamas. 

So begins Qiu Xiaolong’s novel A Loyal Character Dancer. It is a sequel to Xiaolong’s debut novel, Death of a Red Heroine and features a rising star in China’s politically complicated government - Chief Inspector Chen Cao. 

Inspector Chen is soon joined by his assistant, Detective Yu Guangming who took pictures of the victim and told his boss that it was Triad killing, the Triads being a secret society originating in China and is usually involved in organized crime. 

Forensics determined the man was killed by eighteen blows from axes. Chen and Yu also determined that the body was left in the park so it would easily be found. The only question is why. Detective Yu suggests that it may be a warning. But to who and why remains a mystery.

Inspector Chen is then summoned to his superior’s office, Party Secretary Li Guohua. Guohua is not only Chen’s superior but his mentor as well. The Party Secretary was speaking to Chen, telling him, “The Party has always thought highly of you, so this is a job for you, Chief Inspector Chen, for you alone”. 

Chen was surprised that Party Secretary Li was already informed about the murder victim found in the Bund Park.  But then, Party Secretary Li shows Inspector Chen a picture of an American woman and tells him, she is Inspector Catherine Rohn, a representative of the U.S. Marshals Service. Inspector Rohn is in China to escort a woman named Wen Liping back to the United States. Inspector Chen’s job is to help her accomplish this mission. 

Inspector Chen has no idea who Wen Liping is or who her husband, Feng Dexiang is. A major triad leader named Jia Xinzhi, has been arrested in New York. He is allegedly involved in a number of criminal activities, including people smuggling. The only one who can testify against him is Feng Dexiang. However, he will only do so if his wife is brought to the U.S. from China. 

Chen believes this assignment is more of a show to the U.S. Government and is not really interested in babysitting a U.S. Marshall, although Catherine Rohn will be a guest of the nation of China. It appears to be a simple job which Inspector Chen hopes to finish before focusing on the murder victim found in the Bund Park. 

Unfortunately for Chen, things go awry even before Inspector Rohn comes to China. Wen Liping has gone missing and nobody knows her whereabouts. The only information the police received was that she received a phone call from Feng who told her that her life is in danger and she should escape while she still has a chance. 

Qiu Xiaolong weaves an intricate tale of organized crime, political corruption, and international cooperation between Communist China and the democracy of the United States. Inspector Chen is a key figure as he must find a balance to help an American and still remain a loyal Party member. 

Will Inspector Chen find Wen Liping before Inspector Rohn gets to China? Will he enlist her help if he doesn’t? And what is the mystery of the dead man in the park? All these questions will be answered and will make the reader look forward to the next Inspector Chen adventure. ~Ernie Hoyt

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric Ozawa (Harper Perennial)

Takako is in love, a blissful state that lasts for a year, until the day her boyfriend tells her he’s getting married. Worse yet, he’s been with his fiancee for twice as long as he’s been dating Takako. Making this scenario completely disastrous is the fact that Takako works with the man who’s just dumped her--but not completely. “You know, we can still see each other sometimes,” he tells her magnanimously.

Engulfed in grief, Takako leaves her job and goes into hibernation, “drifting all alone through outer space.” After a month of misery, she gets a phone call from an uncle she hasn’t seen in years, a man who owns a small used bookstore and needs an assistant. The offer comes with a place to live, a room above the shop.

Takako is running out of money. Faced with living in a Tokyo bookshop or returning home where her mother will speedily arrange a marriage for her, she accepts her uncle’s offer. 

Immediately struck by the musty smell of old paper and the staggering number of old books that have even encroached upon the room that’s meant to be hers, Takako is less than charmed with this new living arrangement. She’s never been a reader and the smell of the shop is overwhelming. “Try to imagine it as the dampness after a morning rain,” her uncle suggests but the mustiness even pervades her futon while the looming presence of books disturbs her sleep. One night she picks up a volume, hoping it will bore her into somnolence. Instead she stays up almost until dawn, ensnared by Until the Death of the Girl by Sasei Muro. From that point on, the bookshop becomes a paradise of possibility and Takako turns into an ardent reader.

Quickly Satoshi Yagisawa throws his readers into four different love stories: Takako’s heartbreak, her uncle’s devotion to the wife who has deserted him, the young server at a coffee shop who is desperately besotted with his coworker, and Takako’s gradual attraction to a bookshop customer who chats with her over coffee. The most irresistible love, however, is the one Takako develops for books, the bookshop, and the street where it makes its home. Yasukuni Street is an avenue filled with bookshops that have been selling secondhand books since the end of the nineteenth century. Since each shop specializes in a different field of interest, they coexist in a friendly manner in what Takako’s uncle claims is “the largest concentration of secondhand bookshops in the world.”

This, translator Eric Ozawa says in his Translator’s Note, isn’t fiction. Yagisawa has set his Morisaki Bookshop in central Tokyo’s Jimbocho District, a neighborhood that holds anywhere from 150 to 180 bookshops, each with its own specialty. 

No wonder Takako becomes a bibliophile. She lives in an area where books are the reason for its existence, with everyone on its streets browsing, buying, and discussing books, breathing in their odor that her uncle likens to petrichor. “The whole place,” Takako comes to realize, “felt like the setting for an adventure.”

Within this setting, the different love stories are burnished with a sweetness that never becomes cloying. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is both comforting and restorative, in a world of overstuffed novels and gloomy appraisals of the current condition.  This slender little novella has been translated into fifteen different languages since  its Japanese debut in 2010. Charming without being overly whimsical and firmly rooted in fact, not fantasy, this is a book that book lovers will buy for their friends while being sure to keep one for themselves.~Janet Brown

Agent Storm : My Life Inside Al Qaeda by Mortem Storm (Penguin Viking)

Agent Storm is the fascinating story of the double life that Mortem Storm led until breaking his silence with the news media after one too many broken promises by the various agencies. Mortem Storm writes an eloquent story of how he went from becoming a radical islamist, then becomes disillusioned with their ideology, and finally finds himself working as a double agent for PET (the Danish Secret Service) as Storm is a Danish citizen, MI5, Mi6, and also the CIA. It comes as no surprise that not one of the Western intelligence was willing to go on record to confirm or deny their participation in the events Storm talks about. 

Many people may doubt the truth of his story but Storm includes copies of E-mails he exchanged with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-Yemini imam who also had ties to Al Qaeda, videos of a Croatian woman who wanted to marry the cleric, a number of encrypted mails from jihadists in Yemen and Somalia, records of money transfers to Somalia, text messages to the Danish secret police, and secret recordings he made with the various government agencies.

Storm takes us back to his beginnings in a town called Korsor in Denmark. His father was an alcoholic and deserted the family when Storm was still a child. He was abused by his step-father, became friends with his Arab neighbors in his apartment complex, and committed his first robbery when he was only thirteen. 

As he grew older, he became a member of the Bandidos, a notorious biker gang known for committing acts of violence, hardcore partying, drining, using and selling drugs, and other illegal activities. However, after beating a man with a baseball bat, he couldn’t get the moans of the man out of his head. He began to wonder what purpose his life had. It was around this time that he found himself in a library and began to read the story of the life of the Prophet Mohammad. This would change his life.

Storm was still partying even after officially converting to islam at the age of nineteen, even changing his name from Morten to Murad. After being arrested for the umpteenth time, he met a Danish muslim convert named Sulaiman while in custody. After his release, he moved to England with Sulaiman, and began to pray five times a day and grew a beard. He went to the Regent’s Park Mosque and was offered a scholarship to study Arabic and Islam at a school in Yemen. He marries a muslim woman and even names his son Osama, after the top leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden. 

He returned to Britain more radicalized than ever. In London, he meets Anwar al-Awlaki, who at one time was considered the number two man in Al Qaeda, after Osama bin Laden. His friendship with al-Awlaki leads him to befriend other like-minded jihadists. Over a ten year period, Storm would be involved in a network with jihadists in Britain, Denmark, Yemen, and Somalia. Storm was so impassioned to fight for the cause of Islam, he was willing to go to Somalia and help the Somali jihadists to fight the mostly Chrstian Ethiopian army. He had bought a one-way ticket to Mogadishu but before leaving, he was told by one of his comrades not to come. 

The defeatism of some of his muslim brothers began to make him question the Koran. The more doubts that crept into his mind, the more he felt he wasted ten years of his life. He began to think that perhaps his belief in Islam was flawed or was being distorted by men like al-Awlaki. After a lot of soul-searching, Storm makes another life-changing decision - he contacts a man who once gave him his business card after becoming “a citizen of interest”, the man being a member of the Danish secret police. 

And so begins his life as an informant. The intelligence Storm provides for the various agencies eventually leads to the involvement of the U.S. government-sanctioned assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki which was approved by President Barack Obama. In most news pieces, the U.S. took credit for dispatching one of the world’s most dangerous men from this earth but according to Storm, it was his intelligence and sources that helped the U.S. government. Of course the U.S. continues to remain silent on this particular point. 

If you are intrigued by international espionage, counter-terrorism, and making this world a safer place, forget James Bond and Modesty Blaise. You will be happy to know there was someone like Agent Storm to keep the world safe from terrorists. ~Ernie Hoyt

Chinese Prodigal by David Shih (Atlantic Monthly Press)

David Shih’s Chinese Prodigal extends an open invitation to rummage through a well-furnished mind, in the same way  readers might root through their grandmother’s attic. Moving from one essay to the next is like opening a box, heavy, intriguing and filled with valuable items that seem to have little to do with what was unearthed earlier.

“After years of sharing my ideas with students,” Professor Shih says in a lengthy introduction, “I wanted to try to write them down to see if I could do it.” That he does, presenting many ideas with James Baldwin’s goal in mind; “...to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”  

His sentences are clean bones searching for their skeleton. Shih is a good writer whose words frequently have the clear ring of aphorism, and his ideas are provocative and mind-expanding. What they lack is a solid frame to bring them into a cohesive whole. 

Shih echoes the quest of Cheuk Kwan (Have You Eaten Yet?) in separating race from ethnicity. Unlike Kwan, he has lived almost all of his life in a country where race is poorly delineated and ethnicities shift positions, depending on what the dominant race wants them to represent. “Asian” as the name of a race in America simply means not black and not white, a liquid category that swings between “model minority” and “yellow peril” with scant reason for either stereotype. Within that racial construct, individual ethnicities also rocket between class markers, with Chinese and Japanese vying for top of the list and Southeast Asians working their way up from the bottom. 

Shih’s father has no illusions about the U.S. A man who worked hard to achieve “an honest lifetime,” he has accepted racism as an established American truth, telling his children : “Chinese people will always be second-class citizens in this country.” He refuses to let his children learn Chinese, wanting them to speak English without any trace of an accent and chooses the name “Frederick” as his own English name because he’s able to  pronounce it correctly. His offspring’s  achievements give them a place in the white world that they gained through  the mastery of English that he had insisted upon, although, Shih says, “language, like blood, can make a family. The gift of fluency  has given them a tool that is superior to their father’s  command of the language and this weakens the power of his patriarchy.

Shih’s portrait of his father is the  highlight of his book. Through uncovering this man, he lets his own private thoughts escape. When he tells how his father’s favorite grandchild was Shih’s son, a boy who strongly resembles his white mother, this leads him into an examination of being a Chinese father to a biracial child. He examines the “ethical dimension to the decision to have mixed-race children in the United States,” and then explores the historical truths and the current events that led to this train of thought. How will America view his son? What social world will he inherit?

The term Asian American, he reminds readers, is a recent one that supplanted “Oriental” or Asiatic. It came into being after the death of Vincent Chin in 1982, a man killed by unemployed auto workers in Detroit who attacked him because they assumed he was Japanese. The murderers were acquitted at a trial that brought people of Asian descent together in a united protest. 

“A word better than Oriental wouldn’t have made a difference in my father’s life,” Shih says, while later telling how “a burgeoning sense of myself as a person of color” helped to weaken the idea of hierarchy among America’s races. “People of color” outnumbered the white race and blurred the lines of the social construct that white men had created to protect and preserve their power.

The eight essays in Chinese Prodigal are excoriating, flaying the cruelties of U.S history toward immigrants of color as well as those that exist in the present, brought out from the shadows by politicians who condone and elevate racism. Shih’s mingling of the personal with the historical and the political at times becomes a tangle of confusion but his academic expertise wins out. He has things to teach and his country has a lot to learn.~Janet Brown

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