The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan (Simon & Schuster)

Cecily Alcantara knows precisely what the blessings of colonization are. In British-ruled Malaya she chafes under them every day. She’s Eurasian, “nearly  white, like them,” her mother often told Cecily when she was growing up. Cecily knows better. She comes in contact with “them” frequently and none of “them” see her as nearly white. 

Married to Gordon Alcantara, a Malay bureaucrat who has a low-ranking position with the local British administrator, Cecily frequently and reluctantly accompanies her husband to government social functions where she’s snubbed by Englishwomen. She’s an easy target for a Japanese spy who has come to their town under the guise of a Hong Kong businessman.

Bingley Tan is actually Shigeru Fujiwara, a man who will eventually become a general in the Japanese Army,  the Tiger of Malaya. He insinuates himself into Cecily’s household by befriending Gordon, visiting his house, plying him with whisky, and helping Cecily put her husband to bed after Gordon passes out. 

Quickly discovering Cecily’s resentment of the British overlords, Fujiwara lures her with thoughts of Malya governed by Malyans after the colonial powers vanquished by the Japanese Imperial Army. Japan, he tells her, will bring this about but for this to happen he needs the help of patriots like herself. 

And help is what Cecily provides. Her life shimmers with new excitement as she purloins official papers from her husband’s study, eavesdrops on conversations he has with his superiors, has clandestine meetings with Fujiwara, and tucks information in secret hiding places for her spymaster to recover later. 

When the Japanese Army invades Malaya and routs the British troops who had expected them to launch a naval attack, not a march overland from Thailand, Cecily is overjoyed. But then matters go badly awry. The occupying Japanese aren’t eager to relinquish Malaya to the Malays. Instead they exert a brutal form of control that becomes terrorism.

Families hide their young daughters when Japanese soldiers enter their homes. Then the young boys begin to disappear. One of them is Cecily’s son. What she first thought was an act of heroism performed for the good of her country, Cecily realizes was a betrayal that demands her children as sacrifices.

Little is known in the West about the effects of the Japanese occupation of Southeast and much of the fraction that’s told focuses on the plight of British prisoners of war. Vanessa Chan turns a scathing lens upon the Asian prisoners who were slave laborers and were forced to build the Burma Railway that was immortalized by the movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai. She vividly and terribly reveals the conditions of the “comfort stations,” put into place so Japanese soldiers wouldn’t reenact the horrors that took place in Nanjing, a collection of shacks where the “comforters” were barely out of childhood. She reveals what it was to live under a military occupation, in a state of constant fear and hunger.

Chan grew up in Malaysia with grandparents who had lived through the years between 1941-1945. “In Malaysia,” she says, “our grandparents love us by not speaking,” specifically not speaking about life under the Japanese Imperial Army. When Chan asked her grandmother, who had been a teenager in those days, what her life was like at that time, she received the reply “Normal. Same as anyone.”

Slowly Chan’s questions received answers, fragmented details of her grandmother’s life during World War II. From these fragments, Chan began to construct her novel, one that is emotionally difficult to read but is so skillfully told that it’s impossible to set aside. The Storm We Made is her first novel. Let’s hope that it won’t be her last.~Janet Brown

Two Blankets, Three Sheets by Rodaan Al Galidi (World Editions)

According to the UNHCR (United Nations High Commision for Refugees), at the end of 2022, there are currently over 108.4 forcibly displaced people worldwide. 62.5 million are internally displaced, 35.3 million are refugees, 5.4 million are asylum seekers, and another 5.2 million people are in need of international protection. (www.unhc.org)

Rodaan Al Galidi was an asylum seeker. He left his family, his job, his native homeland of Iraq to escape joing Saddam Hussein’s army. He is currently a Dutch national. Two Blankets, Three Sheets is a fictional account of a man named Samir Karim whose story is based on Galadi’s life. Galadi states in his introduction that “the narrator is not me”. In this way, he says he “can still be the writer and not the main character”. 

Galadi introduces us to a world that most of us have probably never heard of or experienced. He spent nine years in an ASC (Asylum Seeker’s Center) and before he made the decision to apply for asylum in a European country, he had spent seven years wandering the world. Before buying his way to Amsterdam he spent three years in Southeast Asia just scraping by. His alter-ego, Samir Karim then takes up the story. 

Samir describes his three years of living in Southeast Asia “was like searching through the wall of your cell only to find another cell on the other side, and then scratching through the next wall and ending up in yet another cell”. He would save up enough money to buy nearly expired passports of various different nationalities. He was Dutch, German, Czech, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, British, French, and Swedish. 

He was on his second Dutch passport and wanted to end his odyssey without official documents. He was living in Thailand at that time. He also bought a fake driver’s license with the same name as the passport for fifty dollars on Soi San Road, and then bought a Dutch student I.D. for another fifty dollars. He had decided to request asylum once he reached Amsterdam. 

I think it would be hard for any one of us to imagine what it must have been like to cross borders using a forged passport. Samir Karim’s biggest fear (and Galidi’s as well) was being deported back to his home country of Iraq. With Saddam Hussein as president, he would surely be punished severely or worse yet, put to death, for not joining Saddam’s army. 

Once Samir reached Amsterdam, the first thing he did was tear up his fake passport and anything that would leave a trail to show where he came from. He still did not know how he was going to get out of the airport. He looked so anxious that when a policeman approached him and asked if he needed any assistance, to which he replied, “I am Iraqi”.

Thus, starts his nine year odyssey of living in the ASC. His story is not only Galidi’s story, it is also the story of the hundreds, if not thousands, of people also seeking asylum away from their home country. In Samir Karim’s words, Galidi is able to convey how the asylum seeker system works and how long the process can take. For some people, it may take a few weeks or months, for others, it may take years. 

It is much to the reader’s relief when Samir Karim receives his residence permit to live in the Netherlands. We can only imagine what went through Galidi’s mind when he was living in the asylum center. Galidi writes with humor and passion as he explains his plight and of those others he came in contact with during his confinement. 

I think it would be difficult for anyone to imagine what Galidi or the hundreds of thousands of other asylum seekers go through. All they want is to live a normal life. One safe from persecution and war. This book sheds light on an ongoing problem that most of the world may not even be aware of. 

Galidi also states in his introduction, “This book is fiction for the reader who cannot believe it. But for anyone open to it, it is nonfiction. Or no: let this book be nonfiction, so that the world I had to inhabit for all those years will be transformed from fiction into fact”. ~Ernie Hoyt

Beijing Sprawl by Xie Zechen, translated by Jeremy Tiang and Eric Abrahamsen (Two Lines Press)

To country boys in China’s distant provinces, the ones who drop out of school and have no skills, Beijing is where the money is.  Opportunities in the capital are “like bird shit--it would spatter on your head while you weren’t looking and make you rich.”

Four boys have come from the same village to Beijing, where they live together in a room that holds only four bunk beds and a desk.  The rooftop is their living room, where they meet at the end of their work day. Sitting on stools, they drink beer, eat donkey burgers, and play cards, surrounded by a city that “spreads quick, like a tropical jungle.”

They all have the same job, pasting ads on empty walls night after night, making just enough to pay the rent for their room and to buy food for their rooftop meals. They’re young enough that this seems like fun--the oldest is twenty and the youngest only seventeen. But they know that life in Beijing for people like them is a “young person’s game.” While they can still be romantic, falling in love with girls whom they see at a distance and dreaming of forming a rock band, they’re well aware that their city life has an expiration date. They see it as it claims older people who came from their village to find wealth but watched their dreams die instead. 

One of these men works on construction sites, “wiping out everything that isn’t a skyscraper,” while back in his village his little son calls every man “father,” since he has never known the man who deserves that name. Another patches a car together, building it from scrap that is discarded in the garage where he works. It looks ridiculous but it runs and when he drives it to work, it draws customers to the shop and eventually leads to vehicular homicide. 

Occasionally Beijing succumbs to an attack of “urban psoriasis” when street vendors and the boys who paste ads become the itch that the cops are told to scratch. The cleanup brings an enforced leisure that turns into gang fights where different factions arm themselves with whatever they can find. “Sticks, iron coal shovels, furnace tongs,” all become weapons and one boy dies from tripping over the sharpened blade of a hoe and cutting his own throat. 

Boredom is a dangerous occupation. From their rooftop, the boys become enraged by the barking of a neighbor’s dog that is chained up nearby. First they tease it and then become more purposeful. What begins as a game turns into cruelty and then death. 

Even good intentions turn into tragedies. A young man who lets himself worry about a little girl who begs on the street is lost forever in his attempts to take her to safety. Another who falls in love with a girl whom he only sees when he peers through the window of a tavern ends up back in his village, a drooling idiot. 

“I’d sell blood twice for that,” one boy says after treating his friends to a restaurant meal. But in fact, all of these lost boys sell their blood every day in a different form, as they scrabble to keep their expiration dates at bay. They know that, for lives like theirs, there are no happy endings. Their stories are bleak and beautiful, stark and laced with humor, interlocking to form a novella that just might break your heart.~Janet Brown




Shutting Out the Sun : How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger (Vintage)

Michael Zielenziger is an American journalist who spent seven years as the Bureau Chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers based in Tokyo. Before he moved to Tokyo, he worked as the Pacific Rim correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News. As Zielenziger moved to Japan in 1995, a few short years after the bubble economy burst, he was witness to disturbing social trends that may affect the future of Japan. 

Shutting Out the Sun is the story of the social trends and how Japan got to be the way it is. He argues that “Japan’s tradition-steeped society, its aversion to change, and its distrust of individuality are stifling economic revival, political reform, and social evolution”. Some of the trends he focuses on are the “hikikomori” and the “parasite singles”. 

Zielenziger says the purpose of this book is not to focus on politics or economics but “to unravel the unusual social, cultural, and psychological constraints that have stifled the people of this proud, primordial nation and prevented change from bubbling up from within”. 

He first focuses on the hikikomori, “young men who lock themselves in their rooms and find little solace in the larger society”. The other social trend he explores are the parasite singles, women who continue to live with their parents, refuse to get married, and choose not to have any children. 

Zielenziger starts off his book on Japan’s lost generation by sharing the story of Princess Masako who in 2004, eleven years after her marriage, disappeared from public view. The Imperial Household Agency acknowledged that the Crown Princess was currently suffering from an “adjustment disorder” whose symptoms are described as sleeplessness and anxiety. Although she is a woman, you could argue that she was the first person to become a hikikomori.

The hikikomori, mostly males who have chosen to withdraw from society, lock themselves in their rooms,  sometimes for months or years, and never come out. Zielenziger says they cannot be diagnosed as schizophrenics or mental defectives. “They are not depressives or psychotics; nor are they classic agoraphobics, who fear public spaces but welcome friends into their own home”. 

What leads these men to become recluses who seem to be afraid of their own shadows. The majority of the hikikomori that Zeienziger was able to interview all mentioned feeling alienated or different. Many of them were bullied in school or at work because they did not conform to the majority way of thinking. As Japan stifles individuality and creative thinking, those who do are usually ostracized, ignored or bullied. 

The other social disorder which became prominent after the bubble economy burst are the parasite singles. A term coined by a sociologist named Masahiro Yamada which he used in 1999 to describe “women who shop avidly, travel abroad on fancy vacations, and prefer to ‘live for the moment’ rather than marry or start a family. 

The reasons the women gave Zielenziger for adamant refusal to marry and have children is the fact that the “Japanese system is not fully prepared for both men and women to work while having children. It’s the woman who raises the child”. She tells Zeilenziger she would have to choose between her baby and her job and she is not ready to give up her career. 

Another reason why many women refuse to marry and have children is because of the “feudal attitudes that still govern marriiage and family life, the crippling economic costs of child-rearing, and a pervasive pessessism endemic to the nation ''. 

This attitude still holds true today. Japanese men want their wives to quite their jobs so they can keep house and raise children. It’s the same attitude of American males in the fifties when men believed that women should be barefoot and pregnant.

Until the nation as a whole changes its way of thinking, the social disorders of hikikomori and parasite singles are not likely to fade away. It’s currently 2023 and Japan doesn’t seem to have made any progress to keep up with the trend of globalization.

I’ve been living in this nation for almost thirty years but even I know I will always remain an “outsider” in this “closed society”, no matter how well I can speak the language and understand the country’s customs. 

As sad as it may be, I tend to agree with the author who concludes that “a nation unwilling to acknowledge - or adapt to - its internal dislocations ends up closing like a clam shell to preserve what it has”. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Woman Back from Moscow by Ha Jin (Other Press)

Yan’an, 1938: Two young women study the dramatic arts in the place where Mao Zedong brews the ideas that will lead to China’s liberation in ten more years. Both women have recently appeared on stage, with Yomei in the starring role and Jiang Ching taking a secondary part. The older of the two by seven years, Jiang Ching, is ambitious and competitive. Yomei at seventeen is an incandescent beauty, glowing with life and in love with the theater.

The older woman’s jealousy is apparent but Yomei is under Zhou Enlai’s guardianship and knows she has nothing to fear. The daughter of a dead revolutionary, Yomei became Zhou’s adopted daughter when she and her mother moved to Yan’an. Already powerful, Zhou’s cloak of invulnerability shelters the girl he has taken into his family, leading people to call Yomei The Red Princess.

The community of rebels in Yan’an is small and closely knit. While Mao is a man that Yomei is familiar with, Jiang Chang has to work to gain his attention. Yomei receives Mao’s permission to study drama in Moscow for seven years and Jiang Chang uses every advantage she possesses to become Mao’s indispensable helper and eventually his wife. 

When Yomei returns to Yan’an after struggling to survive in Russia during World War II, she has turned from being an actress to becoming a director. Steeped in seven years of theater arts training in Russia, where Stanislavsky has transformed the way plays are interpreted, Yomei has soaked up everything that her teachers could give her. Her intelligence allows her to enter into the heart of every play she directs and her enthusiasm and generous way of teaching others makes her a charismatic figure. Combining that with her fluency in Russian, her sophistication from her years in another country, her relationship with Zhao Enlai and his wife, and her glowing beauty, she is irresistible.

Jiang Chang, on the other hand, has become Madame Mao, China’s First Lady. She’s eager to use Yomei to her own advantage but Yomei has learned to be wary of politics. Seeing that Jiang Chang plans to use culture and the arts to increase her own power, Yomei keeps her distance.

Ha Jin has taken the life of Sun Weishi while giving her the name she called herself when she wrote letters to close friends and family, Yomei. “Reality,” he says, “is often more fantastic than fiction.” His research to uncover the truth in Yomei’s story carried him only so far, There were gaps in her life that he was forced to create, rather than recreate, so he calls this work a novel instead of a biography. 

As he carries Yomei through seven hundred pages, he brings her to life as an artist who had the power to enchant everyone she met, except for the woman whose goal was to “crush her spirit and destroy her beauty.” Slowly Ha Jin uncovers the politics that led to the horror of the Cultural Revolution and the insane power of the woman who brought it into being. What was at first the story of art and beauty becomes an inexorable tragedy of power and twisted political decisions that darkens the second half of this novel, as it does Yomei’s life.

Born In China in 1956, Ha Jin was a child during the Cultural Revolution and its tragic consequences. He came to the U.S. as a student of American literature in 1985 and made his decision to stay after the Tiananmen Massacre. A poet and a novelist, he writes his poems in Chinese and his novels in English.

In a book as lengthy as The Woman Back from Moscow, this is both an advantage and a handicap, especially when he writes dialogue, where the language becomes stilted. However, this slight lapse in facility simply accentuates the Chinese reality of the thoughts and words and actions that spawn terrible forces and engulf the life of a brilliant and beautiful artist.~Janet Brown

Monkey Brain Sushi : New Tastes in Japanese Fiction edited by Alfred Birbaum (Kodansha International)

Monkey Brain Sushi is a collection of short stories by Japan’s up and coming talent of writers. It was first published in 1991 and is a great introduction to contemporary Japanese fiction. Some of the writers have gone on to become successful worldwide, the most notable being Haruki Murakami.

American translator Alfred Birnbaum had this to say about the new crop of writers, “Starting from the early ‘80s, a new generation of Japanese writers has emerged to capture the electric, electric spirit of contemporary life in Japan’s mega-cities. Choosing to speak through the medium of popular magazines - rather than literary journals”. 

He further states that the new writers are more influenced by Western culture than their native land. The writers featured in this collection were all “born and raised in an Americanized postwar Japan. Their Japanese lifestyle they know has as much to do with jeans and hamburgers as tatami mats and miso soup.

Monkey Brain Sushi includes eleven stories in all that are as diverse as they are entertaining. A wide range of genres are featured in this collection. Some have an element of fantasy while others may be hard to stomach for the weak of heart. There are stories that are mundane and ordinary and stories that may have you tilting your head as you wonder what the writer was trying to convey.

The book leads off with a story by Haruki Murakami titled TV People. This story is rather surreal as three TV People arrive unannounced at a man’s house on a Sunday evening. The narrator says the TV People are slightly smaller than normal, about twenty to thirty percent smaller. The TV People never knock or ring the doorbell. They don’t say hello. They just walk right in. One opens the door and the other two bring in an ordinary size Tv. They also leave as quietly as they came.

Sproing by Eri Makino is written as one long monologue with a woman talking to one of her friends who drops by her house. Not once does the woman give her friend a chance to speak. It’s one long story of her talking about different episodes in her life. It sounded as if she just needed someone to complain to about her less than extraordinary life. 

In Mazelife, Kyoji Kobayashi writes a story about a man named K creating his own God. In order to create his God, he comes up with six requirements. A God needs devotees who will worship it with their entire being. The God needs a priest to conduct its ceremonies, a God needs a place where it can be worshiped, a God needs commandments for its devotees to follow, a God needs a myth to give it divine authority and finally a God needs enough power to satisfy its devotees. Can K really create a God?

One of the most disturbing stories included in this book is Amy Yamada’s excerpt from her novel Kneel Down and Lick My Feet which was based on her two month experience of working at an S&M club in Tokyo.

Shinobu, who works at an S&M club called the Queen’s Palace, is teaching her younger sister, Chika, the ins and outs of working in such a place. She tells her sister, “it behooves us to use words that elevate our actions”, spouting off a phrase like, “Beseech the queen that you might grovel before her honorable legs and receive the venerated punishment”. 

Michio Hisauchi’s The Junglest Day is written in manga form and the main characters, Lieutenant Onada and Sergeant Yokoi are based on real Japanese soldiers who were discovered on a remote island in the seventies, almost thirty years after the war ended. 

Back in the early nineties, it was hard to find hard-edged fiction by Japanese writers. Most of the books available in English were Japanese literary giants such as Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe and Yukinari Kawabata. There were a few others but they pretty much followed in the same vein as Mishima and company. 

Now, there are many young Japanese writers for the Western world to explore. Murakami has written quite a few novels. The mysteries of Keigo Higashino and Miyuki Miyabe are also now available in English. If you thought Japanese fiction was dry and serious, it’s time for you to pick up a book by any one of these new generations of writers. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Apology by Jimin Han (Little, Brown and Company)

Jeonga Cha is an unlikely heroine.  Not only is she a sprightly 105, within the first few pages of The Apology, she’s dead. But neither of those factors get in her way. Immediately she launches into the story of her life, one that’s both charming and duplicitous.

Jeonga has secrets, ones that she’s never disclosed to her sisters, Mina,the oldest at 110, and Aera who’s 108 but boasts the most beautiful hair in the family. These women have learned to coexist through their “territorial intuition and quest for harmony.” These traits show up primarily in the colors they choose for their clothes, which never clash. Otherwise the sisters often do, with Jeonga usually being the one who prevails.

“An epilogue is what I wanted in my own life,” she tells herself but when one turns up, it isn’t particularly welcome. A letter arrives from the U.S., addressed to Mina. Since Jeonga is the only sister who’s fluent in English, the language used by the letter’s writer, she’s the one who’s given the task of reading it and then relating its contents to her sisters.

As she makes her way through the English words, she uncovers a bombshell, the kind that works well in a Shakespearean comedy but much less so in ordinary life. Two separate branches of the Cha family had emigrated to America several generations ago, branches so separate that they were unaware of each other’s existences. Now through an annoying twist of fate, the great-grandniece of Jeonga’s vanished sister, who had long ago defected from the family home in Seoul to North Korea, and Jeonga’s own great-grandnephew both have chosen to attend Oberlin where they meet, fall in love, and are happily planning their wedding. This, Jeonga decides, is a scandal and she must prevent these cousins from marrying.

The backstory of this problem is rooted in Jeonga’s secrets and she’s damned if she’s going to let her sisters in on any of those hidden details. Still Mina and Aera are as determined as their baby sister. Even with the falsified details of why Jeonga is taking an unexpected flight to the United States., the other two insist on going with her.

The comedy becomes convoluted but quite delicious as the old women bicker their way across the Pacific and into a luxurious hotel in San Francisco. Jeonga’s hidden past unfolds as she casts her memory back upon it and the suspense of how she will solve the family dilemma without involving her sisters heightens and then swiftly dissolves when she has a fatal encounter with a moving bus. 

Now what? 

At this point, the author switches gears so thoroughly that The Apology becomes two separate narratives. Jeonga in a murky version of the bardo state roams through the afterlife, unsure that she will ever be able to forestall the catastrophe that continues to simmer in the world of the living. Unfortunately anyone who’s still reading this novel begins to feel unsure as well and gradually begins not to give a hoot.

A delightful beginning turns into a mass of tangled storylines and none of them lead to a satisfying conclusion. “All’s well that ends well,” Shakespeare insisted but a felicitous ending needs a better underpinning than what’s served up in The Apology. 

With luck, Jimin Han’s next novel will concentrate on these three centenarian sisters because they steal the story when they stand together. They’re far too marvelous to leave stranded as they have been in what becomes an annoying and unsatisfying attempt at fiction.~Janet Brown

In Search of Amrit Kaur by Livia Manera Sambuy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

When Livia Manera Sambuy wanders into a Mumbai museum, she has no idea that this random excursion will lead to an obsession that would dominate her life for years. Among the photographs of India’s past royalty is a portrait of a stunningly beautiful young woman, Amrit Kaur. Information posted nearby identifies her as the Rani of Mandi, born a Punjabi princess, who lived in Paris during World War II. She sold her jewelry to help Jews escape from the Nazis, was arrested by the Nazis, and, the placard claimed, died in a German prison camp.

Stunned by this brief biography, Sambuy wonders why she had never heard this story before. She remains haunted by it and by the strong and beautiful face that had lived this life--or had she?

When a friend puts Sambuy in touch with Amrit’s daughter, who’s now an old woman of 78, a portion of what would prove to be an elusive truth is revealed. Amrit didn’t die in prison. She was freed within a few months, but her health was weakened, and she died seven years later in London.

“Come and see me,” the daughter says and when Sambuy makes the visit, she’s shocked to discover that “Bubbles,” as the old woman called herself, knows nothing more about her mother. Amrit had abandoned her children when Bubbles was only four years old, and never returned. The Raja of Mandi’s second wife became the woman the little girl thought of as her mother.

Even more intrigued by a woman who left her children and never looked back and by the rewritten history provided by the museum placard, Sambuy begins to delve into Amrit’s history. The daughter of a maharajah, the ruler of the Princely State of Kapurthala, Amrit was born into a world of luxury and hedonism. When the British stripped all responsibilities from the Indian princes, they allowed them to keep their wealth and titles, thereby creating what Gandhi termed “a gigantic autocracy” and the Viceroy Lord Curzon reviled as “frivolous and sometimes vicious spendthrifts and idlers.”

Amrit’s father spoke six different languages, including French, and developed a strong affinity for Paris, where he maintained a residence. Bringing elements of French architecture back to his Indian domain, he dazzled the more than 100 Europeans whom he invited to his oldest son’s wedding. Placing 240 tents in the palace gardens, he created a luxurious community for his guests, complete with a post office and a bank created for the occasion, and hosted a lunch for 800 in the midst of “bejeweled splendor.” When his only daughter was married, Amrit’s wedding was equally drenched in lavish excess.

But the maharajah had made a mistake. He had given Amrit an English education at a British boarding school and she had returned to India with revolutionary thoughts. When she was twenty-three, the beautiful and articulate rani was interviewed by the New York Herald Tribune where she championed the right for women to be educated and changing the minimum marriageable age for Indian girls. (Her own daughter would enter an arranged marriage at the age of seventeen, without complaint. But then Bubble’s father had refused to make his father-in-law’s mistake. Amrit’s daughter received her education in India, not in the West.)

A year after the interview, Amrit led a delegation of women to demand that the Indian Viceroy abolish child marriage altogether. Three years later her husband married his second wife and Amrit left him soon after.

The Raja class was reluctant to give up any of their power. Bubbles, herself the wife of the Raja of Bilkha, told Sambuy, “We printed our own money…We could hang anyone.” And their wealth was devoted to pleasure, in the same manner that once allowed the emperor who had erected the Taj Mahal to have two pairs of eyeglasses made, one with diamond lenses and the other with emerald.

Bubbles was the last of her kind to experience this extravagant life. When Indira Gandhi imposed taxes upon India’s royalty, they melted down their gold and silver furniture to meet the government’s demands. One of Amrit’s grandsons is now an auto mechanic who lives happily in Chicago.

When Sambuy tries to follow Amrit’s life in Paris, she finds it stunningly undocumented, until one day she receives a letter from a burlesque entertainer in the U.S. The woman has come into possession of a monogrammed briefcase filled with letters that were written by an Indian princess. With this some of the questions are answered--and rather shockingly--but not all. The follow-the-dots puzzle of an enigmatic life will never be fully connected.

This book is a history, not a biography, and its details are revealed in piecemeal fashion, in the way that the author discovered them. This adds to the quality of mystery that pervaded the life of Amrit Kaur but also creates a muddled narrative. Blithely skipping from Jacques Cartier learning Hindi so he could sell jewels to Indian potentates to the grisly details of life in a German concentration camp, Sambuy could have used a much more rigorous editor. 

Even so her book is a treasure trove of colorful details that will enchant future historians and enthrall anyone who has a penchant for the days of the Raj. As for Amrit, she undoubtedly rests easy, knowing that many of her secrets remain completely her own.~Janet Brown

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Bloomsbury Publishing)

W. Somerset Maugham was a writer with a talent that verged on the vampiric. Taking advantage of the human “urge to confess,” he kept a travel notebook filled with “anecdotes and character sketches [that can be] smelted and hammered into stories.” In the early part of the 20th century, he journeyed through the Straits Settlements of Malaya and Singapore, having adventures, sucking up stories, and feasting upon secrets. The book that resulted from this journey, The Casuarina Tree, made him a pariah among the British community of the Straits but Maugham was unlikely to care. He was obsessed with keeping his own secret, hiding behind an unhappy marriage to conceal his homosexuality. 

The House of Doors fictionalizes his time on the island of Penang, placing him as a houseguest in the home of a friend from his youth. Cassowary House is named after a casuarina tree in the garden, a corruption of the Malay word, kasuari. The tree, Maugham’s hostess, Lesley,  tells him, is believed to be a “whispering tree” that can tell the future if it’s approached in respectful silence. Maugham can relate to that, although the whispers he yearns to hear are ones that tell stories from the past or, even better, the present..

He’s not the first famous visitor to Penang. Herman Hesse beat him to it by thirteen years and more recently the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, came to garner financial support from the local Hokkein Chinese. Dr. Sun spent a great deal of time at Cassowary House and when Lesley speaks of him, she does with a mixture of reserve and suppressed emotion that intrigues Maugham. Convinced that she betrayed her husband with the charismatic doctor, Maugham divulges a secret of his own and embarks on a series of late night conversations with his hostess, after her husband has gone to bed. What he is told provides a generous portion of his next book, with one startling omission--startling only because he chooses to maintain silence, out of respect for his old friend and the woman with whom he’s developed a deeper friendship.

In The House of Doors, Tan Twan Eng matches the master of literary larceny. Within the framework of a doomed clandestine love affair, Eng inserts some of the tales told in The Casuarina Tree into his own novel. Some are fragments of the stories Maugham purloined: the wife who runs away from her wealthy husband without leaving an explanatory note, the uncovered affair that demolishes a marriage, and the tidal bore that sweeps its way up a river and sends the occupants of a boat into deadly water. But the story that carries a substantial part of Eng’s novel is one of Maugham’s most famous, The Letter, that later became a movie of the same name. It recounts the true-life tale of  a notorious Singapore scandal in which an English wife killed a man whom she said had tried to attack her in a nocturnal encounter. She was put on trial, was found guilty., and served time in a Singapore prison.

Eng takes that piece of history and embroiders upon it, turning it into a surprising subplot to the stories Maugham discovers about his hosts in Penang, upon whom Eng has bestowed the first names of the ill-fated husband and wife in The Letter. As Lesley divulges the intricate details of the victimized woman who once was her friend, her own revelations receive a kind of dispensation from a man who finds no shame in his violation of other confidences. 

Although Eng takes Maugham’s stories and folds them into his own, there’s nothing predatory about this hijacking. It’s done with the spirit of homage while Maugham is given a full measure of respect and tenderness, with at least one unforgettable moment of humanity and communion in a sea gleaming with phosphorescence. 

But it’s Lesley who dominates this novel, a woman who has known no other home but the island on which she was born. Through her eyes, we see Penang in its full beauty, its “trees gauzed in mist,” a seaport where “seabirds dipped and wheeled above the swamp of riggings and swaying masts,” where “labrynthine streets sold a bewildering variety of goods”and where at sundown “the world faded to monochrome.” 

As he did in his debut of The Gift of Rain ( reviewed in Asia by the Book in April, 2008), Eng makes Penang and its colorful, tumultuous history irresistible. He overlaps his first novel with this most recent one, with the father of Philip Hutton, the boy whose story is told in the first, making memorable cameo appearances in The House of Doors. Both of these novels have been longlisted for the Booker Prize, an honor that Eng would well deserve--and I’m certain that Somerset Maugham would agree with me.~Janet Brown






The Beast Warrior by Nahoko Uehashi, translated by Cathy Hirano (Pushkin)

The Beast Warrior is the sequel and conclusion to Nahoko Uehashi’s The Beast Player (reviewed on May 4, 2023). The story centers around the main character of Elin. As with the previous book, this was originally released in Japan in 2012 with the title 獣の奏者 III 探求編 (Kemono no Souja III Tankyu-hen) and 獣の奏者 IV 完結編 (Kemono no Souja IV Kanketsu-hen) by Kodansha. The English translation became available in 2020 from Pushkin and was translated by Cathy Hirano who also translated the previous volume. 

The story picks up ten years after the end of The Beast Player. Elin is now married to Ialu and they have a son named Jesse. They are living a quiet and peaceful life until Elin is called away to investigate the sudden deaths of the kiba, the most fearsome todas which are dragon-like beasts that the Aluhan have trained. Elin also has a special relationship with Royal Beasts which are the natural enemy of the toda.

Elin had become a beast doctor but it’s her wish that the wild animals, both toda and Royal Beasts alike, would not be used to fight for humans. She is constantly struggling with her conscience as the toda continues to be used as a defense against enemy forces. 

In the previous volume, Elin’s mother, Sohyon, was accused of dereliction of duty, and was sentenced to death after the todas she was entrusted with all died at the same time. Now, a similar incident has occurred in another toda village.

Elin was also shown documents that showed there were other mass kiba deaths in the past and they occurred in several villages at once. It proved that her mother was not at fault for the death of the todas she was in charge of. Now, it is Elin’s task was to find out the cause of the mass kiba deaths.

To make matters worse, a foreign country that raised a toda army of its own is now invading Elin’s homeland. Semiya, the Yojeh, a title given to the Ruler of the Kingdom of Lyoza, is commanding Elin to raise an army of Royal Beasts to counter the attack. Yet, it is still Elin’s wish to let the animals live in peace in the wild.

Elin had also found out that her mother and her people, the Ahlyo, kept many secrets concerning the toda and Royal Beasts to avoid a calamity that could affect the entire world. Elin questions the wisdom of the Ahlyo in suppressing the truth about the tragedy that happened many, many years ago.

She is determined to find out for herself why it is that the Ahlyo refused to divulge information concerning the animals, even if it means repeating a catastrophe from the past. Can Elin stop that tragedy from happening?

Although Uehashi’s Beast series is considered a children’s book, it can be enjoyed by both kids and adults alike. The Beast Player is more of a coming of age story, whereas the sequel, The Beast Warrior is more of a cautionary tale about the horrors of war and how people are forced to do things against their better judgement. In the end, it is up to us, the people, to strive for world peace and end all wars. Unfortunately, that day seems to be a long way from ever happening. ~Ernie Hoyt

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goosen (Knopf)

It could be easy for readers of Novelist as a Vocation, all of them presumably either writers or people who want to write, to hate Haruki Murakami. He’s a man who decided, while he was at a baseball game, that he could write a novel and then immediately proceeded to do that, again and again over the next thirty-five years.  He has never suffered through a case of writer’s block because “I don’t make promises, so I have no deadlines,” and claims “I never write unless I really want to.” (When he doesn’t want to, he translates English writers into Japanese. Raymond Carver is a particular favorite.)

Obviously he’s wanted to do this every day of his life since that fateful baseball game because he’s published twenty-two books with America’s most prestigious imprint, Alfred A. Knopf.  The bulk of them are novels, with five short story collections, and four works of nonfiction: Underground, a collection of interviews with survivors of the Aum Shinrikyo bombing in Tokyo’s subway system; What I Talk About When I Talk about Running (reviewed on Asia By the Book by Ernie Hoyt on June 8, 2023); Absolutely on Music, his conversations with the famed symphony conductor Seiji Ozawa; and Murakami T, a slender volume that’s an annotated catalog of his impressive t-shirt collection, with photographs of each shirt.

“The thing that makes novels different is practically anybody can write one if they put their mind to it,” Murakami says generously. He then proceeds to explain why many writers produce only a few, warning that writing a novel is “time-consuming and tedious work,” an “inefficient undertaking.” 

It’s also a demanding job that requires a high degree of physical fitness. “Once a writer puts on fat, it’s all over,” Murakami once proclaimed in an interview and although he admits that was a trifle harsh, he believes that it’s true. Aerobic physical activity leads to an increase of neurons firing in the brain, which is why he himself has taken a run every day for the past thirty years.

A believer in schedules, his own is strict and modeled after the sort followed by an assembly-line worker. “I punch in, write my ten pages, and then punch out.” Those ten pages are written in Japanese and amount to the “equivalent of sixteen hundred English words,” every day. If he finds himself wanting to write more, he makes himself stop;  when he doesn’t feel like writing, he still produces his ten pages. Although he’s been told that’s not how artists work, he counters with “Why must a novelist be an artist?” 

A passionate reader, Murakami began to read novels written in English when he was in high school and when he began writing his first novel, he wrote it in English. When he translated it back into Japanese, he found he had hit upon a new style of writing, not conventionally literary but completely his own. He’s coupled this with his decision to “omit all explanations,” and to ignore “conventional logic and literary cliches,” using these principles to create novels that are unlike any others.

“Read,” he tells prospective writers, “Observe. Remember.” Quoting James Joyce, Murakami says “Imagination is memory…fragments of memory that lack any clear connection with one another.”

More than once, Murakami insists that he is a very ordinary person, “the type who’s always shown to the worst table in restaurants.” He may have that facade. In fact, as a man who treasures his privacy, he probably works hard to maintain it. But his extraordinary writing has taken him far beyond the ordinary--his agent, his editor, the men who have been his publishers, both at Knopf and the New Yorker, have all been glittering literary stars among whom Murakami does more than hold his own. Choosing to move from Japan to the East Coast, insisting on choosing his own translators and working with them to create a manuscript in English that he then presents to his agent, regarding literary prizes with an aristocratic disdain, the man may be ordinary. The writer is not.

Although he may never write his autobiography, Murakami has given abundant glimpses of himself and his opinions in this collection of essays. He reveals a man who rebelled against Japan’s educational system and chose his own way of learning, who turns his back on Japan’s aversion to those who “go against the flow” and praises originality instead, who submits his writing first of all to his wife for her opinion and then chafes against her constructive criticism. Anyone who reads this book is going to come away with a yearning to have a beer and listen to jazz with Haruki Murakami, that “ordinary guy” with a far from ordinary mind.~Janet Brown

The River by Rumer Godden (out of print)

In a family of four children that will soon expand to five, Harriet is alone. Her father is consumed with managing a jute mill, her mother is in the final stages of pregnancy. Bea, the eldest, is lost in a haze of beauty and the admiration that this gift has bestowed upon her. The only son, Bogie, is immersed in the natural world and the youngest daughter, Victoria, is reveling in her final moments as the baby of the family. 

Harriet has learned to find companionship within her thoughts and the words that emerge from them. An ardent observer of the life that swirls about her, she does her best to understand what she sees by chronicling it all in her journal and in her poetry.

What she sees is the extraordinary beauty of India, which is the only home she’s ever known. Growing up on the banks of Bengal’s Lakya river, behind the walls encircling a house that’s fashioned after an English manor and is surrounded by an English garden, Harriet goes beyond that sheltering enclosure to watch the river. 

The river contains “ life in and over its flowing,” crocodiles, porpoises, steamships, barges, fishing boats, under “a blue weight of sky.” In its depths are sunset river pearls, brought up by divers and wafting over it are the smells of incense, ghee, and honey. With the changes that are washing over her family, the river’s constancy comforts Harriet and gives substance to her racing thoughts. As she watches the moving water, ideas take shape and emerge in coherency as poems and stories.

Harriet is enraged at the thought of giving up her childhood and it puzzles her that Bea has relinquished it so thoroughly. At the same time, she feels pangs of jealousy that a young soldier, crippled by the war, ignores her in favor of Bea and she finds she’s unable to quell these feelings by playing with Bogie. In fact, she has unfamiliar feelings of responsibility toward the brother who has been her playmate. When he tells her he’s discovered a snake deep within the garden and is obsessed with watching it, Harriet is torn between telling her parents and keeping Bogie’s secret. Her decision will change her life forever.

A slender novella of less than 200 pages, The River is an extraordinary love letter to India during the final days of the Raj, as seen through the eyes of a thoughtful child. Harriet’s world is “not entirely European…not entirely Indian,” but “a mixture of both.” She lives in a conventionally English house but when Christmas comes, it arrives with the weather of “a cool fresh summer day.” Equally special to the family is Diwali when the river comes alive with thousands of floating lamps and the sky blazes with fireworks.

And yet when Harriet goes beyond the walls of the house, what she sees is a postcard. Walking through neighboring villages after dark, she passes through “a still life of figures and things, lit and quiet.” In love with what surrounds her, Harriet is a tourist, here for a while, then moving on.

Her life is patterned after Rumer Godden’s own Indian childhood. Forced to leave the country where she had lived since she was six months old, Godden returned when she was eighteen after going to school for five years in England. She remained in India until she was forty and her best novels are ones that reflect her life in that country: The River, Kingfishers Catch Fire, Black Narcissus. 

The most poignant of these is The River, steeped in the fresh and untarnished viewpoint of a child. Beauty and tragedy, perception and naivete, all combine to give a picture of the vanished lives of the English, yet Indian, children, like Godden and Kipling before her, who will always be torn between two cultures, two worlds.~Janet Brown



Salamander and Other Stories by Masuji Ibuse, translated by John Bester (Kodansha International)

Salamander and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by the author of the acclaimed novel Black Rain which was about the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (reviewed on March 20, 2020). Salamander and Other Stories was first published as 山椒魚 (Sanshouuo) in the Japanese language in 1948 by Shinchosha. The first English publication became available in 1971 and was released with the title Lieutenant Lookeast and Other Stories, also published by Kodansha International in hardcover. The paperback edition was published in 1981 with a change in the title. Both versions were translated by John Bester. 

This book includes nine stories that were written between the years of 1923-1955. Ibuse uses a wide range of themes. Some are semi-autobiographical while others can be considered satire. The setting usually takes place in rural Japan where Ibuse writes about ordinary, everyday life and is often filled with subtle humor. 

Plum Blossom by Night is about a man who decides to go out drinking one night. It was February 20 around two in the morning. The man was looking for an oden restaurant or some other cheap eating joint when he was accosted by a man who shouted, “Is there blood on my face?” After ascertaining that he was indeed hurt, the man helped the drunkard concoct a story to tell his boss the following day. The drunk was so greatful, that he pressed a five-yen note into the other man’s cloak. The five-yen note began to bother him. He decided he would return the note to the drunkard the following day, but days, then months, then years would pass before he called about the drunk man’s home only to find that the man had disappeared ages ago. 

Lieutenant Lookeast is a satire on Japan’s militarism era. The story takes place after the end of World War 2. Lieutenant Yuichi Okazaki (Lieutenant Lookeast) suffers from the delusion that the war is still going on and will often shout out military orders to people who pass by his house. We later find out from a local how Lietenant Okazaki got his name and why he behaves the way he does. It was when Lieutenant Lookeast was in Malaysia and overheard one of his soldiers saying something about war. The soldier said, “the enemy was dropping bombs as though they’dgot them to spare. So I said war was an extravagant business”. The lieutenant slapped the soldier but at the same time, the truck hit a bump, the tailgate flipped open and both Lieutenant Lookeast and the soldier fell out and rolled down into the river. The soldier fell on his head and rolled off in the river. The lieutenant hit his head and hasn’t been the same since. 

The title story, Salamander, is about a small amphibian that lived in a cave. But as its body grew, so did its head and whenever it tried to leave, the salamander’s head would get stuck and it would only have enough room to move its feet to and fro and from side to side. 

Old Ushitora focuses on a man’s grandchild who doesn’t approve of his grandfather’s job. Carp is about a man who is given a gift of a carp, but has a hard time taking care of it. Savan on the Roof is about a man who finds a wounded goose on the roof, nurses it back to health, but then finds that he doesn’t want to set it free. There are three other stories that are just as enjoyable as the ones already mentioned - Pilgrim’s Inn, Life at Mr. Tange’s, and Yosaku the Settler.

Ibuse’s stories are fun to read adn give light as to what life might have been like in a small town in old Japan. It is a great introduction to one of the lesser known Japanese writers and the stories give you a feeling of nostalgia when you read them. ~Ernie Hoyt


Banyan Moon by Thao Thai (Mariner Books, HarperCollins)

Although Tolstoy may have been wrong when he said “Happy families are all alike,” he was definitely amiss when he decided unhappy families were all different. Unhappy families universally share a crucial similarity that defines their status; they all conceal secrets.

Secrets fill every corner of the Banyan House, a crumbling mansion in Florida that Minh purchased long ago as a family home. There her daughter Huong took refuge from a dangerous husband, raising her daughter Ann in tandem with Minh, who quickly supplants Huong in Ann’s affections. From her earliest childhood, Ann has an adversarial relationship with her mother, much as Huong does with Minh. Only when Huong tells her daughter that her grandmother has died, does Ann leave her established adult life and return to the Banyan House, a place that no longer holds the woman whom she has always loved and trusted above anyone else.

She returns carrying a secret, one that she has yet to tell the man she thought she would marry, the one who has recently confessed to an act of infidelity. As her mother once did, Ann looks for a sanctuary in the Banyan House, but the child she brings with her is months away from being born. 

This secret is swiftly uncovered by Huong, who’s determined to repair the prickly, damaged relationship that connects her with her daughter. United in the task of cleaning the Banyan House that Minh has filled with unused and unnecessary objects, the two women work under the oversight of an invisible observer, the restless spirit of the family matriarch. Slowly Minh discloses her secret, one that her family has never known. Huong and Ann are not descendants of the man they were taught to revere as their father and grandfather.

As a flood of secrets gradually comes to light, what begins as a run-of-the-mill beach book takes on a depth that’s surprising and puzzling. Although the subjects of greed, sibling rivalry, domestic violence, and the return to a hometown that no longer seems to fit have all been covered again and again in a multitude of novels, Banyan Moon carries an eerie magic that makes this all seem fresh, new, and riveting. 

How does Thao Thai manage to pull this off? From the very beginning, with its cliched friction between the privileged wasp background of Ann’s fiance clashing against her own artistic and “exotic” life, this story carries a luster that pushes readers into its many different layers of story. Although Thai is a writer who doesn’t shy from well-worn descriptions that are perilously close to being threadbare, she has the gift of creating irresistible characters--and it’s Minh, Huong, and Ann who carry this novel. Each of their voices is distinctly different and they coexist without the slightest trace of unease. Their stories flow and interweave together, never feeling intrusive or inauthentic. Their lives flare into being, making the supporting characters seem almost nonessential and certainly pallid. The strength and complexity of their different personalities gives an edge to the end of this novel. Will these women be able to move beyond their history and their secrets, taking secure possession of what seems to be a happy ending?~Janet Brown

A Walk in the Darkness by Jon Land (Tor)

Jon Land is an American thriller writer. He has written two detective series - The Caitlin Strong novels about a fifth generation Texas ranger and the Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea series featuring a Palestinian Detective and an Inspector of Israel’s National Police. 

A Walk in the Darkness is the third book in the Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea series. The story opens with an incident that took place in Jerusalem in around 33 A.D. This relates to another incident which took place in Ephesus, Turkey almost 2000 years later.

“1948:  An archeological team in Turkey is slaughtered after making an earth-shattering discovery. More than fifty years later, a group of American archaeologists is murdered in the Judean desert”. 

Inspector Barnea is investigating a crime scene in the desert. A member of the Israeli Defense Force said he wasn’t expecting some from the National Police Force as the Judean desert falls under military jurisdiction. The Inspector informed the sergeant that it would be true if there were a security issue but the murder of foreign nationals is a civilian issue, unless terrorism is involved. However, the victims were part of an American archeological team who were invited at the request by the government of Israel. 

Fourteen people had been killed, shot at point blank range, in the back of the head. Twelve Americans and two others. She was given a list of the victims and was shocked to see the name at the bottom. It was a name she recognized, the nephew of Palestinain detective Ben Kamal. 

Detective Kamal was headed out to the Judean desert but was told by an Israeli army sergeant that he had entered a restricted area. Although he showed his ID and informed the Israelin army sergeant that he was there at the request of Pakad Barnea of the Israeli National Police Force. The sergeant refused to budge, insisting that his orders were to deny access to the area to all but those who have the proper authorization. Inspector Barnea intervened and Ben was allowed to pass.

Although Inspector Barnea told Ben that he was not there in an investigatory capacity, the death of Kama’s nephew sparked in him a need to find out more. There was one witness but nobody could understand what he was saying as he spoke in a dialect the Israeli’s were unfamiliar with, but it was a dialect that Ben’s father taught him when he was young. 

From what Ben could gather, the archeologists found something of great historic value. Barnea reluctantly recruits Kamal’s help in the investigation in which they discover more than just the discovery of an item that could change the world as we know it. But they discover a conspiracy that is an even greater threat to the Palestinain people and the entire West Bank. 

The Middle East remains one of the most volatile regions in the world. Tha Arab-Israeli issue remains at the heart of the conflict. Land’s depiction of both the Israelis and Palestinians put you in the heart of the region. Land’s latest story blends a bit of Dan Brown-like history as in The Da Vinci Code with current day politics in the Middle East. A fascinating blend of fact and fiction which will keep you on the edge of your seat. We can only hope that one day peace will come to the Middle East. ~Ernie Hoyt

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City by Jane Wong (Tin House)

Jane Wong is in college when she learns about the Great Famine, also known as the Great Leap Forward. When she looks at the dates of this tragic era in Chinese history, she realizes that when her grandfather said his family had “disappeared,” and told her how he was adopted by a man whose family had also “disappeared,” that in truth the “disappeared” had starved to death. Wong, who has never gone hungry, races from the classroom in the grip of a panic attack, “heaving tears as thick as wheat.” 

Too respectful to breach her grandparents’ “chosen silence,” Wong pieces together bits of information as it falls in conversational crumbs. “What happens,” she asks, “when your archive is a ghost?” Her reply to herself is “I have no choice but to let food haunt me.”

During the pandemic, she learns to make jook, that supreme comfort food, and dreams of the day when she’ll be able to make it for her grandmother. Later she learns that on the day she made jook for the first time, her brother has done the same thing. A dish that “at its simplest core” is only rice and water holds the secret and power of a sacrament, comforting and connecting.

Wong needs comfort and connection. Although her mother and her grandparents feed, nurture, and love her, her father truly has “disappeared.” A man who gambles away the restaurant he owned and leaves his wife to support two children, the father gives his children only a collection of memories—the trips to the casinos of Atlantic City. There he parks his family in a squalid hotel room for days while he plays all night “in that red-velvet world of his.” After he loses everything he has, he buys a ping-pong table that’s meant to keep him at home but he and his friends eventually begin betting extravagantly on the matches. And then he vanishes.

Wong’s mother was the “village beauty,” who came to America for an arranged marriage with the wrong man. When she gave birth to her daughter a year after the wedding, she looked at the baby and said “She knows too much.” But even as she works two jobs in the wake of her husband’s abandonment, she fosters her daughter’s intelligence and takes pride in her beauty. 

Although this book has “A Memoir” emblazoned on its cover, it’s a collection of essays, deeply personal and fluid, not linear. Wong is a poet  and her poetic art burnishes the  language of her narrative. She discloses the rage that filled her childhood home and that still burns within her when she thinks about her father. Her stories of the other men who have left her are told with agonizing honesty and she illuminates her mother with a love that’s almost blinding in its clarity, empathy, and truth.

She tells how it was to leave Hong Kong after living there for a year as a Fulbright Scholar, flying to Iowa, where she’s accepted in the legendary Writer’s Workshop. Trading the smells of soy sauce eggs and sweet egg waffles for the odors that waft toward her in a Midwestern airport, reeking of “old carpet and recycled air,” Wong realizes that she’s no longer surrounded by Asian people. In fact she is “the only Asian person” to be seen and she “immediately felt unmoored.”

Now the author of two volumes of poetry and a university associate professor, she asks “How did I get here, glistening with all this nourishment?” These brilliant, shining essays show every step of Jane Wong’s emotional odyssey, and “memoir” will never be the same again.~Janet Brown

Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga (Knopf)

Aravind Adiga, author of the Booker Prize winning novel, White Tiger (and reviewed by Janet Brown in 2008) third book, Last Man in Tower, was published in 2011. It tells the story of a real estate developer who has his eyes on buying out Vishram Society, an apartment complex which consists of Tower A and Tower B. The buildings are located in the city of Mumbai, in India. 

If you were to ask about Vishram Society, “you will be told it is pucca - absolutely, unimpeachably pucca. It is important for the reader to know because “something is not quite pucca about the neighborhood - the toenail of Santa Cruz called Vakola”. You will infer from the context of the passage that pucca means something solid or permanent. 

Tower B is the newer and younger of the two buildings. It is a seven-story building that was built in the seventies. It houses many young executives who work in the financial district which is located nearby. It is the more desirable building of the two to buy or rent. 

Tower A is what most people think when people talk about Vishram Society. It is a six-story building which was founded in 1959. Many of the residents of Tower A have been living in the same building for thirty years or more. 

Real estate developer Dharmen Shah has made a very generous offer to the residents of Vishram Society, both Tower A and Tower B. Most of the people living there had never seen or held the amount that the wealthy builder is offering. He believes that all the residents will agree to the offer and will move out as soon as possible so he can build his latest and best luxury apartment complex which he has already named Shanghai. 

Shah had the Secretary of Vishram Society post his offer on the complex’s notice board. There was only one stipulation written at the very bottom - “The last date for the acceptance of the offer is the day after Gandhi Jayanti: 3 October. (Non-negotiable.) The offer will not be extended one minute beyond this date”. All residents must agree to the offer. If only one person refuses, then the offer will be withdrawn.

It is a dream-come true for most of the residents, but one man, Yogesh A. Murthy, a 61-year-old retired teacher, known to all as Masterji, is not interested in moving. The apartment is a reminder of the life he shared with his recently deceased wife. The rooms are also full of memories of not only his his daughter as well, who met a tragic end when she was pushed out of the train when she was on her way to school. 

As the deadline approaches, the residents' true colors begin to show. Friends become enemies, rumors are spread, and threats are made. However, Masteri does not budge from his refusal to accept the offer. 

In short, Adiga’s story is how greed and yearning can corrupt even the best of people. When the builder’s left-hand man, the person that does the dirty jobs fails to change Masterji’s mind, the builder relies on the residents’ greed to do what must be done? If you lived in a similar complex, how far would you be willing to get what you want? ~Ernie Hoyt

Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang (Flatiron Books)

“Practice erasing and overturning and re-creating the self until all I have to do is disappear.”

Daiyu has been doing this all of her life. Born to parents who named her after a doomed woman in an ancient story, she is a loved and cherished little girl until the day her parents disappear. Her beloved grandmother tells the twelve-year-old girl that she too must vanish, so the captors of her parents won’t come back to take her away. Cutting Daiyu’s hair and dressing her in the clothing of a boy, her grandmother gives her a boy’s name, Feng, and sends her off to a distant city. 

As Feng, Daiyu becomes a boy, finds work as a calligraphy master’s servant, and begins to learn the characters on her own. The Four Treasures of the Study become her implements: the inkbrush, inkstone, inkstick, and paper, and she’s taken on as an after-hours student at the master’s school. One day, while exploring the city streets alone, she falls into the hands of a stranger who drugs her, puts her in a dark room, and holds her prisoner for almost a year. During that time, an old woman comes every day to teach her English and when she has learned enough, her abductor covers her body with tar and stuffs her into a basket filled with coal. “You’re going to America, to a place called San Francisco. If anyone asks, tell them you came from New York.”

But nobody asks. Instead the girl is taken from the ship as soon as it docks, is stripped naked, put into a barracoon, and is quickly purchased by a Chinese brothel owner. She’s given a new name, Peony, and eventually is assigned her first customer, a young boy who helps her to escape.

Once again her hair is cut, she’s dressed in men’s clothing, and is given papers that declare she is Jacob Li. Taken to Idaho where Chinese labor is needed, Jacob Li lives there for three years, never once betraying his true identity. Working for two Chinese shopkeepers,  Jacob struggles with his attraction to a young Chinese man who teaches the violin. The only feminine part of Jacob is the ghost of the woman with whom the girl he once was allowed to be shares a name. Lin Daiyu’s spirit is sheltered within the body of Jacob Li, as hidden as Daiyu herself.

Then the violence begins, with the white townspeople united against the Chinese residents, and suddenly “being Chinese is something like a disease.” When the Rock Springs Massacre is reported in the Idaho newspapers, a tragedy begins to unfold and a story that has the tinges of a romance novel becomes an account of terrible history.

In 2014, Zhang says in an author’s note, her father was driving through a town in Idaho where he saw a sign that said a “Chinese Hanging” once took place there. Five Chinese men accused of murdering a white store owner had been strung up by a mob of vigilantes. Later Zhang began to research the facts behind this brief account. The more she learned, the more she “wanted to tell the story, not just of the five Chinese who were hanged, but of everything--the laws, tactics, and complicity that enabled this event and so many others.”

Through Daiyu, Zhang tells this story in the form of a fable anchored in history. Through her different names and selves, Daiyu embodies the Chinese women who were forced into American brothels, the Chinese men who looked for work under identities that were not their own, the Chinese business owners who were forced to leave everything they had painstakingly built, the Chinese who faced death at the hands of white mobs. 

Four Treasures of the Sky is a smart and compelling novel that’s almost impossible to put down. Once it’s finished, it clings on, with sorrow and a terrible unveiling of whitewashed truths.~Janet Brown



Bangkok Shophouses by Louis Sketcher

There are travelers who are perfectly satisfied with big fat guidebooks that tell them exactly where to go, where to eat, where to sleep, and where they will always be securely in the company of other travelers. This book is not for them. Bangkok Shophouses is slender, idiosyncratic, and fits on a coffee table as nicely as it does within a backpack. It’s a book for people who want to wander through the older streets of Thailand’s capital city, while being given an understanding of what they’re looking at. Since these are the sort of people who like to roam around on their own, unhindered by a guide or a big fat guidebook, Louis Sketcher, aka Suppachai Vongnoppadongdacha, is the man for them. 

“Because each shophouse has a story to tell…” he has taken his sketchbook, pencils, brushes, and watercolors to two of Bangkok’s oldest neighborhoods. The first is an area that almost every traveler will have on their itineraries, the historic area of Phra Nakhon that holds the Grand Palace, the city’s most revered temples, and the raucous jollity of that tourist paradise, Khao San Road. The second is less renowned, Thonburi, the Brooklyn of Bangkok, that lies across the river and has just recently attracted the attention of developers. 

Both of these areas are filled with streets that hold architectural gems and other secrets, which are beautifully divulged in this book.

Sketcher’s drawings are delicate and bright with soft colors and meticulous details. He shows the carvings and elaborate sculpted designs on pediments and balustrades, the lattice work on veranda railings, the creative use of stucco and concrete. He identifies the styles of architecture and the reign in which the buildings were constructed.  Strolling through the labyrinth of streets, he finds the diversity that exists in this part of the city--the Indian section, the lane that has been the Chinese trading center from the earliest days of Bangkok, and Talat Noi, a thriving urban village which has housed Chinese, Portuguese, and Vietnamese throughout its history. He shows where to find the three shophouses that contain Bobae Market, a wholesale clothing market that’s been bustling since before World War Two began. His drawings reveal the shuttered Palladian windows that lie above Pak Klong Talad, Thailand’s biggest flower market. And he tackles the overwhelming drama that’s found in Yaowarat, Bangkok’s sprawling Chinatown, plunging beneath its neon glory to point out quieter beauties, including an elegant colonial-style gem that’s been refashioned into a hotel.

Across the Chao Phraya river,  Sketcher goes to a wooden house with an ornately peaked roof and latticed walls that’s now a riverbank cafe and to a shophouse with a concrete facade that looks like a giant honeycomb, within a corner of the city that’s famous for its desserts. In the neighborhood known as Kudi Chin which was once Portuguese, he finds Windsor House, owned by an English family long ago, a wooden house in the style known as gingerbread with a profusion of carved ornaments and “exquisite wooden fretworks above the windows, eaves, and canopy.” And he shows all the reasons why readers should brave the “long and narrow lane” that twists through the riverside Wang Lang Market.

The primary delight of this book lies in the illustrations that are scattered in the margins--sketches of the people who live and work in these shophouses, the food that can be found and eaten there, the treasures that are sold within their walls. A double-page spread of delectable specialties and where to find them, along with an index of some of the shophouses with addresses in English and in Thai, add to the usefulness of this information. Yes, you can stay in the baroque splendor of the heritage hotel, buy sarees in a 100-year-old shophouse in the Indian section of Phahurat, view the river traffic in all its chaotic splendor from the comfort of a cafe in the Wang Lang Market.

Because the text is bilingual, readers have a good chance of finding everything that’s pictured—and because there’s an illustrated list of shophouse styles and examples of architectural vocabulary, they’ll be able to understand what they see. Just in case they might want to fill their own sketchbooks, there’s a list of supplies and paints that were used in making Sketcher’s drawings. A small bibliography may not be helpful to everyone since it’s largely written in Thai.

I lived in Bangkok for eight years and have lost count of how many times I’ve visited Thailand. Bangkok Shophouses has made me realize how much I missed as I walked and stared through the areas that Louis Sketcher has illuminated. I can’t wait to go back--and when I do, this book is going with me, every step of the way.~Janet Brown