Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Counterpoint)

“Shortly after Olivia went away with the Nawab,” her abandoned husband, an English bureaucrat who was “upright and just” met his second wife. She was from a family of “cheerful women with a sensible and modern outlook on life,” ones who became fascinated by Olivia only after they became elderly widows. They told the scandalous story to the second wife’s granddaughter, augmenting them with Olivia’s letters and journals that provided details of this shocking liaison with an Indian prince. The granddaughter, a woman with so little personality of her own that she narrates this novel without once vouchsafing her own name, takes Olivia’s private papers and follows in her footsteps to India forty years afterward.

She’s here to “do research,” she claims but instead she seems eager to lay claim to Olivia’s life. The Raj, however, is a crumbling memory. The Europeans who flock to India in the Sixties are a whole other species from the British who held sway over the country in the 1920’s. While Olivia was surrounded by solid and morally upright bastions of the Empire, her follower finds her fellow countrymen to be “a derelict lot” who congregate in the yard of the local guesthouse, looking like “souls in hell.” 

When she ventures to the palace that became Olivia’s home, she finds an empty shell with bits of discarded furniture. The Nawab’s descendants have abandoned it to live in London, disdaining its 19th Century discomforts in favor of 20th Century plumbing. However, through Olivia’s account of its romantic past, the narrator does her best to find those same influences in her own experience of India.

But Olivia was pretty and charming and silly, while the narrator is homely and passive and imitative. While Olivia was overwhelmed by a dashing aristocrat who was an “irresistible force of nature,” her follower drifts into satisfying the sexual needs of an Englishman who claims to be a holy man. She then becomes pregnant by her Indian landlord. There is no true parallel between Olivia and the woman who struggles to assume her adventurous life in a place where that sort of life no longer exists.

The only similarity is one that was presented by a Major who was a contemporary of Olivia’s. For those who love India, the dangers of the country’s many beauties makes them vulnerable. “India always finds the weak spot and presses on it,” he warned. Olivia would never have listened and her follower ignores them, eager for the immersion that she achieves in the cheapest way possible.

It’s a surprise to many that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was not in fact Indian by birth. The daughter of an affluent Jewish couple who fled to England from Hitler’s Germany, she married an Indian architect and made her home in New Delhi. She lived in India, raising her family and writing novels until 1975 when she and her husband made their home in New York. She is the only writer to receive both the Booker Prize and an Academy Award, earned when she joined the team of Merchant and Ivory as a screenwriter. 

Although her reputation was made by writing about the subcontinent, Jhabvala said her background as a British-educated German-born European made her “ill at ease with India.” That analytical separation is evident in Heat and Dust, making it a scathing examination of cultural appropriation and the people who profit from it.~Janet Brown

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Finger Bone by Hiroki Takahashi, translated by Takami Nieda (Honford Star)

Hiroki Takahashi is a Japanese writer who was born in Towada City in Aomori Prefecture. Finger Bone is his first novel. It was first published in Japan with the title 指の骨 (Yubi no Hone) in 2015 by Shinchosha Publishing and was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. Takahashi would win the Prize in 2018 for his book 送り火 (Okuribi).

Finger Bone is a war novel. Most war novels are often about battles or covert operations. The protagonist usually does something heroic and is rewarded for his efforts in helping to win the war. They are rarely told from the perspective of the losing country’s soldiers. This is a story told in the first person by an unnamed Japanese soldier. 

The soldier is stationed on the island of Papua New Guinea in 1942. The Imperial Japanese Army is on the retreat but since the soldier has no radio, he still believes that Japan is winning the war. In his pocket, he carries the finger bones of a dead comrade. However, on his march to his next destination he is wounded and sent to a field hospital. 

Before the soldier makes it to the field hospital, he was is to another facility built in a palm grove. There were men sleeping on stretchers suffering from the effects of malaria. Some of them might have been dead already. 

Once he makes it to the field hospital, he is witness to what he thought was kind of cruel. Whenever the medics did their rounds and one of the patients didn’t answer, the medic would slide a piece of wood under the dead soldier’s hand and cut off his finger.

Another soldier told him, “That’s a lucky man to have his finger taken for his family like that”. He was told, “Die in the jungle all alone, and all the family gets back home is three stones”. 

As the soldier recovered, he was able to walk around. Sometimes he and two other of his comrades would walk a little ways away from the hospital, always keeping an eye out for the enemy. They were confronted by a black man one time, but the man turned out to be a native and wasn’t hostile to the soldiers. One of his comrades was able to speak a bit of the native language and they were taken to the native’s village. 

However, the second time they saw one of the natives, they did not speak or exchange words. The unnamed soldier didn’t know why and shortly after that incident, the soldiers at the field hospital got their orders to move. That is when the unnamed soldier realized that Japan was losing the war and that most of the island was under Allied control.

The soldier wanted to keep his promise to his comrade and was determined to take the finger bone he had in his pocket to his friend’s home in Japan. Will the soldier survive the war? Will he be able to keep his promise? 

It’s often been said that “in war, no one wins”. This book illustrates that point. Those soldiers who died serving their country had families. Well, so does the enemy. It’s a sad fact that Japan’s militarism during World War 2 led to untold suffering for their soldiers, and for the soldiers fighting against them.

Unfortunately, as long as there are people with different values and ways of thinking, war seems to be inevitable. I wish it weren’t true but conflicts continue in places such as the Middle East and in Central Asia. North Korea testing their ICBM missiles is no light matter either. 

If only every country in the world could follow the message of John Lennon’s song “Imagine”, the world might be a better place. ~Ernie Hoyt

Idol, Burning by Rin Usami, translated by Asa Yoneda (Canongate)

Idol culture in Japan is a multi-billion dollar business. The Golden Age of idols is said to be the seventies with artists such as Momoe Yamaguchi and Akina Nakamori. The end of the seventies was the rise of idol groups such as Pink Lady, Candies, and Wink.

In the mid-eighties, an idol group with a large number of members was conceived by producer Yasushi Akimoto. He was the mastermind behind Onyanko Club, a group that consisted of fifty-two original members. Each member was assigned a number as well so fans could easily follow their favorites.

The nineties would see a revival of idol groups with a large number of members, the most popular being Morning Musume, produced by former lead singer of Sharan-Q, Tsunku. The group was formed on a television audition program called Asayan. The production company Hello! Project also produced groups such as Country Musume, Coconut Musume, Berryz Koubou, °C-ute, and Melon Kinenbi with most groups consisting four to eight members.

However, the 2000’s would see the rise of AKB48 and all its offshoots, once again produced by Yasushi Akimoto. The concept of the group was “Idols you can meet”. Their homebase was in Akihabara where the group had their own theater. Every year, an “election” would be held and fans would vote for their favorite members. The member with the most votes would be chosen for the center position for the next single. 

Fans continue to support their favorite members, not only in idol groups, but actors, voice actors, anime characters, sports figures, and a whole host of others. The current term being used is 推し (oshi), meaning your favorite. One of the most popular manga and anime series now is 推しの子 (Oshi no Ko) which roughly translates to "My Favorite”.

Idol, Burning takes the life of the superfan to a different level. Akari is a high school student who has only one passion in her life and that is her oshi, her idol. His name is Masaki Ueno and he’s a member of popular idol group Maza Maza. 

However, Akari’s world was being turned upside down. Her oshi was on fire. The news media said that Masaki punched a fan. Akari didn’t know if the news was true or just a rumor but the Internet was ablaze with people criticizing the star while others like Akari, continue to support him. 

In a news segment, Akari’s oshi admits to punching a fan but said it was a private matter between him and the victim. The Internet was soon inundated with comments about him after the interview.

Akari sees a number of negative comments on the Internet such as , “Who the f&*k does he think he is?” and “I’ve been going to his shows for years but I’m done. If you’re a brainwashed cult-follower victim-bashing the woman you’re not right in the head”. Of course there were some positive comments as well such as, “Learn your lesson and come back soon. We’re here for you Masaki”. 

Masaki Ueno had been Akari’s oshi for about a year. Everything centered around supporting him. She spent that time collecting as much information as she could so she felt she could predict most of his answers at a Q&A corner of his fan meetings.

She summed up her feelings by writing on her blog for other Masaki fans - “there is nothing you can really do about a fireball, is there?”, referring to the comments on the Internet after the incident. “The blaze gets fanned from all directions, and just when you think they’re starting to die down, someone tosses on more fuel, in the form of old tweets or photos, and sends the flame in a new direction”. 

Shortly after the incident, Maza Maza held a press conference to announce that the group would disband and that their upcoming concert would be their last. Masaki also announced that he would be retiring from the entertainment business.

Akari is now at her wits end as her life only held meaning because of her oshi. All the money she made from working part-time went to going to his concerts, buying his goods, and supporting him as any hardcore fan would. The support of her oshi borders on obsession. What will Akari do now that she has nothing to live for?

Rin Usami’s story is not only a coming-of-age story but also a parable about superfans and their oshi. Usami says in an interview, “To those who are not interested, the act of pursuing an idol can easily be dismissed as ‘only a hobby’ or ‘an unhealthy obsession’”. She further elaborates by saying, “But for some of those who do pursue an idol, it can become a reason to live or even be their salvation”. She wrote the book from the perspective of a superfan as she believes most people do not completely understand them and believes they are widely misunderstood. 

The main point of Usami’s story is for the reader to imagine what they would do, if the “meaning” or the “backbone” of their life were to disappear. How would they survive? What would they do? 

Imagine if you are a hardcore fan of former California Angels’ superstar Shohei Ohtani. What will do now that he is going to become a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers? Will the Internet go on fire because he decided to change teams?

In the age of SNS, there is no telling what people will say. However, if Shohei Ohtani was your oshi, even if he changed teams, wouldn’t he still be your oshi? It’s something to think about.~Ernie Hoyt

We Are Not Strangers by Josh Tuininga (Abrams Books)

Several years ago I was a guest in a Seattle house that was only a few years away from its one hundredth birthday. My host told me it had been built and owned by one family before he bought it. That family was Japanese and when they were sent to the internment camps, their neighbors made sure their house remained intact and in their legal possession until they were able to return home again.

When I told this story to other Seattle residents, they denied its plausibility. Japanese property was up for grabs after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the resulting incarceration in internment camps. The story I was told was a rosy little myth, designed to make Seattle feel less culpable in what was a national disgrace, according to people who were certain they knew the real facts.

And I believed them, until I was given a copy of We Are Not Strangers. Author Josh Tuininga is careful to note this is historical fiction that is based on oral history, written records, and an account told to him by his uncle, whose grandfather had helped his Japanese neighbors during their time in the camps. 

His story begins before 1942, when Executive Order 9066 imprisoned  over 120,000 Japanese Americans and those who had Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were native born U.S. citizens. The man who was the architect of this order spoke for President Roosevelt when he said “If they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp.”

In the city of Seattle, neighborhoods with racial covenants kept the most coveted parts of the city under white ownership. In an area known as the Central District, people who weren’t considered white made their homes. Sephardic Jews from Spain and the Middle East, known as “Oriental Jews” to many, lived side by side with Japanese families. Members of both ethnic groups who had recently immigrated to the U.S. were denied the right to naturalization by an immigration court and the state of Washington, which was a center of America’s pro-Nazi movement, made the position of Seattle’s Jews a precarious one.

The story of a friendship between two men who share a passion for fishing, a Sephardic Jew and an American-born Nisei Japanese, and the way one of them helped the other to keep his home is given depth and truth by the reproduction of headlines taken from newspapers of that time. Tuininga chose to put his book into the framework of a graphic novel so those headlines scream with the same force they held seventy years ago. Signs that greeted Japanese families when they were finally released from the camps a year after the end of World War II, “Japs Keep Out You Are Not Wanted” and “Japs Keep Moving This Is a White Man’s Neighborhood,” starkly illustrate the terrible hatred that Japanese Americans faced after living under internment for four years. (When the war ended, only 33% of Americans advocated the closing of the internment camps.)

Graphic novels are a robust and illuminating way to convey history. Blending words and art to show shades of emotion and the points of view revealed on the faces of every character makes this form of narrative cinematic and approachable in a way that a conventional novel can’t replicate. Tuininga created both the words and the art, frame by frame, in We Are Not Strangers, supplementing them with historical notes that will come as a revelation to many of his readers. Now more than ever, it’s crucial for us to know what happened in America’s past to keep it from recurring in the future.~Janet Brown
 

If an Elephant Loses Weight, It is Still an Elephant by Aftab Seth (Keio University Press)

Aftab Seth was the Indian ambassador to Japan from 2000 to 2003. He also spent a year as an exchange student at Keio University from 1962 to 1963 and also served in the Indian Embassy between the years 1970 to 1972. He once again returned to Japan in 2004 to become the director and professor of the Global Security Research Institute. 

After coming to Japan in 2000 as Ambassador to Japan, Seth was inundated with requests for interviews by different magazines and newspapers. He also met a number of editors from different newspapers as well. He was asked to summarize his discussions with various journalists by the Yomiuri Shimbun who later published the article. He was then approached by Shodensha (a publishing house) who asked him if he would consider writing about his experiences in Japan from the time he was an exchange student and to give his opinions on the current state of the nation. 

Seth had a series of interviews with the publisher starting in April or May of 2001 and was completed in October. The notes and manuscripts from those interviews became a book that would be published in the Japanese language in December of 2001. 

The English edition of If an Elephant Loses Weight, It is Still an Elephant was edited and revised as “there were several elements in it which would not be well known to non-Japanese readers and therefore would be of little relevance and even somewhat redundant”. Seth amended the text “keeping in mind a wider non-Japanese audience that may be interested in the English version”. 

Seth based the title of the book on a Hindi proverb - Agar Haathi dubla hoga to kitna dubla hoga to describe the Japan that he saw when he returned to the country as Ambassador. The proverb translates to “If the elephant is lean, how lean will it be?”. The author chose the title for this book because “despite 10 years of flat , or even negative growth in the economy, this is still a country with enormous reserves of wealth”. Seth further elaborates by saying that “while the Japanese elephant may be somewhat slimmer, it is still quite robust” He uses the elephant as a metaphor for Japan’s economy and says, “So while the Japanese elephant may have lost a little weight, it is still unmistakably healthy”. 

Seth arrived in Japan for the first time in 1962, a mere ten years after the Occupation of Japan ended. The country was having an economic boom as Tokyo was chosen as the site for the 1964 Summer Olympics. His second stay in the country was in the seventies when Japan was still experiencing economic growth. The World Exposition was held in Osaka in 1970. Plans for a new international airport were being discussed and Japan was on its way to its Bubble Economy. 

Seth’s third extended stay in Japan was in the 2000. The bubble economy had burst and the country was suffering a long period of recession. However, Seth believes that Japan will recover from any problems it may face. He has seen the change in the country by living here at different times and he always finds the spirit of the Japanese people to be positive for the most part. 

As a long time resident of Japan and someone who has lived here continuously for nearly thirty years, it’s more difficult to see the vast changes that Seth saw. Of course you would expect big changes in ten or twenty years time. For me, the economy seems to be taking another downturn as the yen has lost a lot of its value. There was a time when the exchange rate was 360 yen to the dollar. The current rate is now 147 yen to the dollar. At this rate, I may not be able to enjoy visiting my home country. I can only hope that as the Japanese people have prevailed through many hardships that the yen will become strong again so I won’t lose any money when going home! ~Ernie Hoyt

Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore (Archipelago Books)

More than a hundred men are crowded into a rail car on the Trans-Siberian Express. They’re conscripts, drafted into the Russian army, the unlucky ones who couldn’t bribe or trick their way out of this grim fate. They have no idea of where they’re headed, other than they’re in the middle of the “territory of banishment,” a place of “dead bodies under the permafrost,” a region of exile where few ever make their way back home. Siberia is “a world turned inside out like a glove.”

Aliocha was certain he would find a way that would keep him from conscription but he failed and at twenty, he’s certain his life is over. He’s heard of the unspeakable brutality that faces new troops under the guise of hazing; he’s already been beaten up by two of the other conscripts for no reason other than it amused his attackers. As he stares out the train window at the endless miles of forest, he becomes consumed with an urge that is far from a plan: “Run away, defect, jump.”

He has only a cell phone, a charger, and a hundred rubles, which has to be enough to let him vanish into a Siberian city. But when the train stops at the next urban station, Aliocha is surrounded by soldiers with no way to get past that barrier. Back on the train, watching the forest engulf the railway tracks as soon as the cars pass over them, he’s joined by a foreign woman who “smells of flowers and smoke,” and who provides another chance at escape. He grabs it.

Helene is escaping too, from a love affair that curdled when the Russian rebel whom she met in Paris chose to become part of his native country’s bureaucracy, “heir to the Soviet industrial epic.” Perhaps this is why she agrees to help Aliocha, a man she can communicate with only through pantomime and fragments of language. But what begins as a passing whim becomes deadly serious when the sergeant in charge of the conscripts realizes that one of them has vanished.

The search for Aliocha consumes the entire train, from the crowded third class cars that contain the conscripted men to the sanctuary of first class compartments. Everyone, whether they’re attendants or passengers, are drawn into the quest and are forced to choose sides.

Although Eastbound quickly becomes a thriller and  a psychological drama played out between two strangers who become so linked that eventually “they have the same faces,” the narrative is filled with moments of unforgettable beauty. Through the windows of a train that’s become a kind of prison, Lake Baikal stretches like “a liquid ribbon…immense and violet.” A lonely city is “two hoops of fire, thrown into a leather sky.” Log houses sprinkled through the dense and bleak forest are graced with carved wooden shutters and lace curtains, brightened with flowers and vegetable gardens, like something from a fairy tale.. The end of the rail line is announced by “a sparkling ethereal horizon,” and at one part of the journey when passengers are given time away from the train, “the silence is so great that each sound explodes.”

Eastbound is a tiny volume, the size that’s usually associated with an appliance’s user manual. It’s only 127 pages long, but it contains a mammoth journey, an adventure through cruelty, kindness, and the triumphs of soaring language on a legendary train that travels through the darkest edge of the world.~Janet Brown

Funaosa Nikki : A Captain's Diary by Hirochika Ikeda, translated by Richard F. Szippl (Chunichi Publishing)

In Edo Era Japan (1600 - 1868), there have been many tales of ships drifting away from the mainland. However, due to the isolationist policy of the Tokugawa government at the time, Japanese ships were only made for coastal trade. If the ships get caught in a storm, they are often blown off course or damaged beyond repair. The ships were not built for trans-ocean travel and many of the drifters have been rescued by Americans, Russian, and Englishmen as well. The survivors of these drifters often spent many years abroad before making it back to Japan. 

One of the best-known of these sea drifters was a man named Manjiro Nakahama who was rescued by an American whaling ship. Manjiro and four others were shipwrecked on the island of Torishima, one of the southernmost islands of the Izu Islands which are all part of Tokyo Prefecture. Only nine of the islands are inhabited. Torishima was one of the uninhabited islands. The five men were rescued by an American whaling ship and were taken to Honolulu.

Manjiro was only fourteen-years-old at the time. He wanted to stay with the ship so the captain of the whaling vessel, Captain William H. Whitfield took him back to the U.S. where Manjiro would study English. Manjiro would later return to Japan and become a translator and interpreter after the opening of Japan to the rest of the world

Funaosa Nikki : A Captain’s Diary is the story of a lesser known account of a ship drifting at sea. Led by a man named Jukichi, he and his crew of thirteen men were blown off course during a storm and drifted for seventeen months on the Pacific Ocean before being rescued by a British merchant vessel captained by Captain William J. Pigot. At the time of their rescue, the only remaining survivors were Jukichi and two of his crew.

As noted in the book’s subtitle, this is “Jukichi’s Four-year Odyssey across the Pacific, through California, Alaska, Kamchatka, and back to Japan, 1813-1817”. It was written by Hirochika Ikeda after he met Jukichi ten years after his ordeal. Many stories were already written about Jukichi’s experience but Ikeda was “more interested in the account of the year and five months he spent adrift than in the strange things in foreign countries”.

Ikeda listened to and made a record of Jukichi’s story which resulted in this book. He had intended to only share it with his family. He wanted them “to appreciate just how fortunate they were, being able to live without want, without starving or freezing, unlike people such as Jukichi, who have suffered such extreme and tragic hardships”. 

One must take into account that Ikeda wrote this forward to the book in the fall of 1822. The first English translation of Funaosa was done in 1984 by Katherin Plummer in the journal Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan.

Richard F. Szippl, a long time resident of Japan, was approached by Dr. Muramatsu Suzuki who asked for his cooperation in translating the book as one of former high school teachers discoverd the original manuscript in the year 2000. The new edition was to be published on the occasion of the 2005 World Exposition which was to be held in Aichi Prefecture, Jukichi being a native of the area.

Although the title translates to A Captain’s Diary, the book is not written in diary form. It is written in the style of a story “as told to” someone. It may seem like a tall tale as Jukichi relates to Ikeda how his ship’s rudder was damaged in a storm and then set adrift. He relates how his crew thought about taking their own lives and how he tried to remain positive in such a dire situation. 

Jukichi’s experience on the high seas is just as interesting as are his stories he tells of eating pork and beef for the first time, of meeting other foreigners, such as the Russians and Americans. His return to Japan seemed to be more tragic as the isolationist goverment held him under suspicion and often received the same treatment as a common criminal would. 

It is an inspiring story of surviving against all odds. One man who had to face the wrath of nature, the near mutiny of his crew, and of his own despair. And yet, something or some power pushed him to survive at all costs and make it back to his home and to his wife. It is a story that will make you appreciate what you already have. No matter how bad things may seem, there are always others who have suffered more than we can imagine, like Jukichi. ~Ernie Hoyt

Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong (Random House)

Linda Hammerick has been given a privileged upbringing in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina. She’s a Hammerick, following in the path set by past generations of her prominent family. As a Hammerick, she’s destined to become a “legacy” at Yale where she’ll be on her way to a career as a lawyer in emulation of the father she adores.

After reading To Kill a Mockingbird, Linda sees herself as Scout, although differences mar the similarity between Harper Lee’s heroine and the ambitious little girl in Boiling Springs. Linda has a condition that stands between her and the rest of the world. When she hears words, or speaks them herself, she tastes each one, something that breaks the concentration she needs to achieve academic success. To blunt the flavor of this strange sixth sense, she cuts its sharpness by anesthetizing her tastebuds with nicotine, hanging out with the school outcasts and puffing away at a cigarette before going to class.

In common with many Southern households as found in American literature, Linda’s home is laden with secrets and unspoken truths. Soon she learns to hide any experience of her own that might bring turmoil to her family. Even when she’s raped by a handyman when she’s eleven, she tells nobody except for her great-uncle, Baby Harper, a man who has undisclosed realities of his own.

“What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two,” Linda’s grandmother tells her just before the old woman dies,  taking any explanations with her. 

It’s only when Linda begins to practice law in Manhattan that she starts to reveal who she is and how her life was transformed when she was seven years old. Slowly memories that she had erased come back to her in “two sensations, one of my heart filling and one of it emptying.” The girl who has always seen herself as Scout begins to see herself as Boo Radley instead, a secretive hidden being disguised as the fortunate daughter of the Hammerick family.

Monique Truong has written a novel that’s stuffed with details of heartbreak and tragedy, love and survival. Linda Hammerick is an observer and what she sees and feel makes her life in Boiling Springs as evocative as Scout’s in Harper Lee’s classic or as Buddy’s in Truman Capote’s  A Christmas Memory.  Linda intertwines the story of her childhood with figures from Southern history: Virginia Dare, the Wright Brothers, a poet born into slavery, George Moses Horton--all of them people who were attached in some way to secrets. As she sees it, secrets are the legacy handed down to anyone who was born in the South.

This is a novel with very little dialogue. What Linda reports is as difficult to read as it is for her to hear, since every word is followed by the name of what carries its taste. “Don’t youcannnedgreenbeans wantsaltedbutter to stopcannedcorn by your mom’schocolatemilk placeroastturkey firstPeptobismol?”

Although this certainly conveys the difficulties faced by those with synesthesia, it makes the appearance of italics in a sentence something to dread and slows the progression of the narrative. It might have been easier if Truong had avoided dialogue altogether.

Still the characters and settings of Bitter in the Mouth are beautifully delineated by Truong’s gorgeous writing, putting her new narrator squarely beside the man in The Book of Salt  who also struggled with language and secrets or with Lafcadio Hearne in The Sweetest Fruits (Asia by the Book, May 2021) who lied and kept secrets in three different languages. Truong’s three novels interrelate in magical ways, making her readers wonder just what--and who-- she will bring to life next.~Janet Brown

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Simon & Schuster, release date May 2024)

You don’t like fantasy novels? You shy away from thrillers populated with members of His Majesty’s Secret Service? You’d rather be flogged than read a romance novel? Me too--which is why I almost didn’t pick up Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time. And that would have been a shame. This novel, based heavily upon time travelers who have been shanghaied from different periods of history and are placed, against their will, in the 21st Century, blends all three of the genres I despise and comes up with one of my favorite books of this year.

Graham Gore, an officer of the British Royal Navy who died during an ill-fated polar expedition in 1847, is only one of five “expats from history” who have been conveyed out of their own era into modern England. Each one of them is under intense scrutiny from the Ministry of Defense, who has chosen handlers who will live with them for their first year in another century. 

Gore’s handler is a young woman who has probably been selected for the job because her English father married a woman who had escaped Pol Pot’s Reign of Terror in Cambodia. A translator-consultant specializing in Southeast Asia and the Khmer language, she has lived with a displaced person all her life, a “mother who persistently carried her lost homeland jostling inside her like a basket of vegetables.”  

Gore, a thirty-seven-year-old military man who died as the Victorian era was just taking hold, is puzzled and frequently shocked by the young woman he will be confined with for a year. When she tells him that in their new residence, there’s “No maid. No cook either,” Gore turns pale. When his housemate utters “Damn,” within his hearing, he’s as horrified as he is when she tells him about the existence of germs. The two of them move through their living quarters like “clots in a lava lamp,” Very gradually, in ways that are both highly strained and very funny, they forge a friendship that begins to test the handler’s loyalty to the ministry that employs her.

Gore and the four other “expats” see themselves as “kidnap victims, mostly,” and as they learn about the time and place they’ve been forced to live in, they begin to question the motivation behind it. In rooms “designed to encourage bureaucracy,” they’re tested physically and mentally and come to realize they’re intended to serve a definite purpose, one that they and their handlers can’t fathom. Gore in particular resists this unknown result, “as if assimilation was a form of treachery to his past.” He, however, with his intelligence and charm, seems to be the most attractive candidate for the Ministry’s purposes, and his handler, against her better judgment, also finds she’s vulnerable to those same attractions.

When one of the handlers disappears and a mysterious Brigadier becomes part of the Ministry, both Gore and his handler become united in figuring out whatever plot is brewing, while at the same time they fall in love.

If this sounds hackneyed, guess again. Gore’s handler is the narrator of this convoluted story and she’s a woman with a sharp wit and a well furnished mind. Her observations are wide-ranging and piercing, acerbic and laugh-out-loud funny. Her Cambodian-English bloodline has given her a name that few people can pronounce so she goes without it throughout the entire novel. It also leads her to thoughts of inherited trauma and “how socially awkward it is live with.” “My face does a good impression of whiteness,” she says, grateful that her appearance isn’t “dragging a genocide around, which is good because that sort of thing makes people uncomfortable.” When her sister writes about her mixed-race background, the narrator wonders if the memoir is an act of “reclamation” or a way of leaving “all our wounds open to the dirty world.”

Her voice is interspersed with Gore’s memories of being trapped in the Arctic, on a ship immobilized by ice that “tilts queasily to one side,” and “bellows in agony.” Gore and his comrades are tortured by “the persistent grieving and shrieking of the wood…that robs them of sleep and silence.” “The northern seas are full of teeth,” and lead to terrible deaths.

 When Gore and the narrator fall in love, they hold each other “the way that poems hold clauses.” “He lives in me like trauma does,” the narrator says when the two of them are separated. Believe me, this is not the sort of romance found in the usual bodice-ripper.

British Cambodian author Kaliane Bradley has filled The Ministry of Time with writing that has devilish twists and carries a haunting depth, along with sentences that made me gasp one minute, laugh the next. Who else but this writer could resurrect a dim historical figure from the 19th century, use facts from his life and a single image of his face on a daguerreotype, and make him a figure unique in modern-day fiction? Bradley’s sharp, savage, and satirical voice is mingled with tenderness and brilliant flares of imagination. It’s addictive and I want more.~Janet Brown

Read Me a Story! : Magic Mango and Many Other Stories from Asia and the Pacific by Various authors (Asian Cultural Centre for UNESCO)

Read Me A Story! is a collection of short stories that should be read aloud to young children. The book was compiled by the Asian Cultural Centre for UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). Twenty countries contributed the stories and illustrations to this book which was first published in 1991. 

The contributing countries include Papua New Guinea, India, Japan, Iran, Nepal, Mongolia, Australia, Vietnam, Republic of Korea, Laos, Myanmar, New Zealand, China, Philippines, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Bangladesh. Some countries have contributed more than one story.

Magic Mango is the lead story which originated in Papua New Guinea. It’s about a mango that could think and talk. It lived at the top of a mango tree and could see many things. It could see the village by the river, it could see the mountains a long way away, and it could even see the sea. It was the mango’s wish to see all of these places but the mango couldn’t leave the tree. However, one day a very strong wind blew it off the tree. It found itself on the ground and decided to run off and see the world. During its travels, it was chased by a pig, a little boy, two women, and a hungry hunter. They all wanted to eat the mango but the mango ran and sang “I’m a magic mango, You can’t cat me. I’m off to look at the world, you see.” You will have to read the story yourself to see if the mango was eaten or not.

One of the stories contributed by the country of India is Matsya, the Beautiful Fish. This story is an Indian version of Noah’s Ark. Matsya was a small and beautiful fish that lived in the ocean. However, a bigger fish thought that Matsya might be delicious to eat. Matsya managed to run away. Another day, a fish with sharp, pointy teeth also wanted to eat Matsya but he managed to escape again. Matsya swam and swam until he came to the edge of the ocean where he met a kind fisherman named Manu. Manu and his wife watched over Matsya until he became a large fish. It was Matsya who warned the fisherman and his wife of a disaster that was going to happen. He said there would be a big flood and that Manu and his wife should build a boathouse where they will be safe. If you’re a Christian, doesn’t that sound familiar?

The story contributed by the Philippines is titled The City Mouse and The Barrio Mouse. It’s a Filipino version of the original Aesop’s Fable The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. Americans will know the story as The Country Mouse and the City Mouse. A thirteenth century priest, Odo of Cheriton, phrased the moral of the story as, “I’d rather gnaw a bean, than be gnawed by continual fear.”

The stories contributed by my adopted country of Japan include The Magic Drum and Topsy-Turvy Rabbit known in Japan as Fushigi na Taiko and Kenta Usagi. In the first story, a man named Gengoro had a magic drum. If he beat one side of the drum and chanted “Long be the nose, long be the nose!” the nose would grow. If he beat the other side of the drum and chanted, “Short be the nose, short be the nose!”, the nose would shorten. He used this magic to make people happy. However, one day he wanted to know how long a nose could grow. He beat his drum, saying, “Long be my nose, long be my nose!” until his nose reached the clouds. However, at the time in Heaven, carpenters were making a bridge over the Amanogawa (the Milky Way). His nose appeared right where a carpenter was fixing a railing on the bridge. Gengoro thought there was something wrong with his nose, so he beat the other side of the drum but instead of his nose shrinking, his body was going up into the heavens! What will happen to Gengoro.

Topsy-Turvy Rabbit was a little boy rabbit named Kenta who decided to play a game by doing and saying everything opposite of what he really means. I’m sure most children have played this game at home, annoying their parents and siblings. I know I have. Kenta’s father said that it looks like fun and said he’ll become a topsy-turvy rabbit too. He says, “Right, I’ll have Kenta Rabbit go to the office in my place. Father Rabbit will stay home and play all day.” So, with Father Rabbit’s reverse psychology, Kenta no longer decided to be a topsy-turvy rabbit. 

Every story will be sure to delight children and adults alike. Even if you have no children, all the stories should be read aloud. You may regain your sense of innocence from your childhood. ~Ernie Hoyt

Brick Lane by Monica Ali (Scribner)

Mymensingh District, East Pakistan, 1967. “Rupban screamed white heat, red blood”. Her husband rushed to her side to kill the man who was killing his wife. He knew it was her but when he got there, his sister-in-law, Mumtaz told him to fetch Banesa, a midwife who claimed to be one hundred and twenty years old. Since nobody can remember when she was born and as she was “more desiccated than an old coconut, no one cared to dispute it”.

So begins Monica Ali’s story of family, love, and tradition. Brick Lane is this and more. It is also about fitting into a new society and culture as an immigrant family. The main theme is the conflict between believing in Fate or being able to choose one’s own destiny.

Nazneen was stillborn, as she had been told all her life. Her mother thought she had a bad case of indigestion. Banesa said she would be happy to prepare for the burial, at an extra cost, but just then the baby let out a yowl. The old woman said it was a death rattle and Rupban could take two routes. Take the baby to the city, a hospital, where they “will put wires on her and give medicines” or “you can just see what Fate will do”. 

Mumtaz said of course they would take the baby to the city but Rupban refused, saying “No, we must not stand in the way of Fate. Whatever happens, I accept it. And my child must not waste any energy fighting against Fate. That way, she will be stronger.” Mumtaz had no choice but to accept what her sister said. As Nazneen grew up, she would often hear the story of “How You Were Left to Your Fate”. 

Nazneen’s sister, Hasina, was born three days after the death of the midwife. She grew up to be a beautiful girl. When she was sixteen she eloped with the nephew of a sawmill owner and left the family home. For two weeks, their father would sit and wait “cursing his whore-pig daughter whose head would be severed the moment she crawled back”. Needless to say, she never did come back.

Then one day, Nazneen’s father asked her if she would like to see the man she would marry the following month. She refused but out of the corner of her eyes, she saw the photo showing a man who was about forty years old and “had a face like a frog”. They would marry and he would take her back to England to live.

Tower Hamlets, London, 1985. Nazneen had been living in London for only six months. She still could not speak the language except for a few words. She and her husband lived in a neighborhood where a number of other Bengali people lived. Her husband had invited his friend, Dr. Azad, to his home for a nice dinner. Nazneen was nervous although “it was only dinner. One dinner. One guest.”

As Nazneen tries to settle into life in a new country, a new culture, she is at times overwhelmed. She would often recite passages from the Qu’ran to settle her nerves. She also receives letters from her sister Hasina whose lives a parallel life with Nazneen in trying to find balance and happiness in her own environment

The couple would eventually have a son Nazneen named Tariq although her husband always called him Ruku. Unfortunately, Tariq would not live into his adolescent years. The cause of his death remained unknown. 

Tower Hamlets, London, 2001. Nazneen and her husband Chanu are now the parents of two young girls. The older one is named Shahana. She is the more rebellious of the two. As she grows up in the U.K., she cannot stand it when her father teaches them or talks to them about the greatness of Bangladesh. She always retorts with, “I didn’t ask to be born here”.

Her younger sister, Bibi, is more acquiescent to her father’s demands and always tries to please him. Nazneen also questions her own values about being a good Muslim woman, “a nice village girl. Unspoilt”. She is having thoughts of a younger man while her husband is determined that the entire family will move back to Bangladesh. 

Monica Ali really brings to light about what it means to be Muslim in a mostly Christian country. However, I did find her male characters to be rather two-dimensional. As I am not a follower of Islam, I cannot say with confidence how true to life her depictions of the men in this story are. They all seem to be full of pride and believe that their word is law in the family. 

Ali also brings to light the plight of Muslim women. Many of their husbands forbid them to work even though the husband’s salaries are often not enough to feed the family. Yet, according to the men, if their wife is working, they will be looked down upon as a man who cannot provide for his family and their family would be shamed. 

In today’s world, it’s not enough to be “the man of the house”. Tradition is fine and all but must consider the time and circumstances to find true happiness. At least that it what I believe. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Liberators by E. J. Koh (Tin House)

“The fog drew rosefinches, like blooms in the low bush, whose cries I mistook for rainfall.” 

Yohan is a man obsessed with words, who can write them in six languages. During his lifetime, he has lived through the Japanese occupation of Korea, survived the horrors of World War Two, and “watched the country divided up as spoils of war.” What puts him into prison is a shadowed mystery with a partial disclosure: “To be a spy was to one day be known.”

Decades later, living in America, his daughter meets a man who draws a tiger on her bare back and tells her “It’s Korea,” “if the country had no stitches” and was reunified as a single nation. Although he knows “The South doesn’t want to rebuild the North. And the North doesn’t trust the South,” he is devoted to bringing the two divisions back together once more. His dream is rejected by the Korean men who come to his meetings in a local pool hall and when he returns to Korea, he’s imprisoned “for crimes of moral turpitude.”

Although politics is a hopeless quagmire that gobbles up idealism, Yohan’s daughter erases divisions in her own family by nurturing  her North Korean daughter-in-law. When she dresses the mother of her grandchild in the green hanbok that was once worn by her own mother, “the fabric folded smoothly..,the ribbon falling down the front, a new verdant path.”

Like Yohan, E.J. Koh is dominated by words. In her memoir, The Magical Language of Others (Asia by the Book, November 2020), she describes her life, lived in four languages, English, Korean, Japanese, and poetry. “Languages,” she says, “as they open you, can also allow you to close.” 

In her first novel, Koh lets the language of poetry open windows and then it slams them shut. Six characters are partially revealed in The Liberators but none of them are as fully realized as the images that surround them. In a gorgeous section entitled Animal Kingdom, Yohan’s grandson is given a dog, “a bright and curious joy,”  that’s “joined to the boy like a wish.” Later the boy is united with the woman he will marry in “the elaborate braid of our bodies.” Trapped in poetry, he and the other five characters that fill these pages remain “shadows that flew up and shattered across the ceiling.” Each of them is truncated by subtlety, as if they were created to convey Koh’s language rather than the reversal that would have given them life. They are pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, given just enough definition to merge into a whole pattern.

Mixed with Koh’s poetry is the harshness of political realities in which a country with millennia of history and tradition becomes sacrificed to global economic interests. When Koreans gather together in America to watch the TV coverage of the Olympic ceremony in Seoul, the doves that symbolize world peace perch on the flaming cauldron and are burned alive, “a memory that had to be erased…that had to be forgotten in our soft, closed palms.” 

“Why visit the past,  why go digging up its grave?” asks the man who dreams of Korea as a tiger, complete and undivided. Yohan’s daughter answers him by embracing the present in another country, unified with her North Korean daughter-in-law, a conclusion that escapes cliche because Koh has clothed it in poetry.~Janet Brown

Once the Shore by Paul Yoon (Sarabande Books)

Floating across the landscape of Solla, one of the many islands lying off the coast of Korea in the East China Sea, are eight enigmatic stories. The characters within them are as mysterious and evanescent as rain-drenched spiderwebs, each embodying a different part of the island’s history and each one of them abandoned in mid-moment. The ends of their stories are left for the reader to imagine, based upon the hints that were strewn through each of their narratives. 

An aging American widow comes to a resort on Solla, searching for traces of the man her husband once might have been. An elderly couple in 1947 take their ancient trawler to the site of U.S bomb tests that destroyed twenty Korean fishing boats, one of which held their only son. A woman who owns a shop in a Solla tourist town has her past return to confront and betray her. A sixty-year-old “sea woman” dives into the depths of the ocean as she has every day since she was thirteen, her only friend a boy who lost his arm to a shark and who longs for her to bring him a sea turtle. An American deserter upsets the peace of a Solla mountain village by overstaying his welcome and befriending a young crippled village girl. A farmer sells his land to a developer with “fingers clean as polished silver” and plans to turn it into a hotel that will overlook a golf course, while his young daughter, haunted by a ghost who wears the dress of her dead mother, furiously opposes his decision. An orphan girl who has been employed by an “American hospital” watches cargo trucks deliver men on stretchers, soldiers who have come from Australia, France, Greece, to fill a thousand beds in a place that had once been a vocational school run by the Japanese. A young married couple live in a highrise building among the tourist businesses of Solla City, making their living through tourism in a world of hotels and markets that sell souvenirs.

Through the kaleidoscope of these stories, the history of Solla island is made tangible and the island itself takes on a substance that eludes the lives of the people who pass over it like clouds. Solla, with its caves and forested hills and Tamra Mountain rising above it all, is described so meticulously that it comes as a shock when Yoon admits it has never existed at all. Its alluring beauty can be visited only in these pages.

The eerie shadow-lives of the characters in Once the Shore exist as faded silhouettes against an island whose history is being devoured by war and international businesses. The young couple in the final story exist in a different universe from the old woman who dove for fish. They visit parts of their island as tourists, divorced from what exists beneath the commercial facade. When they go to Tamra Mountain, they hire a guide. Solla no longer belongs to them, unlike the sea woman who took possession of the ocean every day. Within its depths “the world consisted of light towers, sunlit, and she swam among them,” every day for more than half a century, knowing she is one of the last to have “carried seawater within them.”

The young couple whose lives are consumed by tourism are unaware of how Solla’s “winds, like great birds, came in from the sea” or the majesty of its “trees, slow moving and wide as ships.”  They are unable to see the beauty of its twilight, with the sea’s “silver reflections folding over one another like the linking of fingers.” When they buy a platter of abalone from a sea woman in a tourist market, they have no idea they’re in the company of the island’s fading history.

Through Yoon’s stories, the glory of an imaginary place becomes real and its gradual loss becomes a sharp and bitter grief.~Janet Brown

Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong (Sceptre)

Qui Xiaolong was born in Shanghai, China and went to the United States in 1988 to write a book about T.S. Eliot. Then in 1989, The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened, so he decided to remain in the U.S. to avoid persecution back home. 

Death of a Red Heroine is the first book in his series of crime novels featuring Police Inspector Chen Cao who works for the Shanghai Police Department. Cao was a rising star in The Communist Party of the Republic of China and was on the road to become a diplomat. Unfortunately, one of his uncles was found to be a counter-revolutionary so he was assigned to his current position.

In Communist China, even if a distant relative is found to be a counter-revolutionary or if some relative had committed a crime, no matter how minor, it can affect one’s standing in getting a promotion or not. Chen was lucky. Although he was considered “an educated youth” who graduated from high school, he was not sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution “to be reeducated by poor and lower-middle peasants”.

Fortune seemed to smile down upon Chen as he was assigned his own apartment, which was another social problem of living in Shanghai. During Chen’s housewarming party, he received a call from his colleague, Detective Yu Guangming. The body of a young, naked woman was found in a remote area of a canal.

Chen is head of the “special case” department and does not usually deal with homicide cases. However, Detective Yu had informed there was nobody else to handle the case that particular day so he went out to investigate it. Normally, their squad didn’t have to take a case until it was declared “special” by the bureau, usually for an unstated political reason. 

It had been four days and still no one filed a missing persons report. Chen was still contemplating taking the case or not but decided to ask his friend who is also the medical examiner who did the autopsy to give him a detailed description of the victim. Once he got the information, he faxed it along with a picture of the deceased to various units and surprislingly got a response the following week. 

The picture was recognized by a security guard at the Shanghai First Deparment store. The woman said she was going on vacation but had not returned. He showed the picture to the people who worked with her and they all recognized her. Her name was Guan Hongying. “Guan for closing the door. Hong for the color red, and Ying for heroine”. “Red Heroine”. Chen remembered her name. She was a National Model Work and a Party member. 

However, this was the only information that Chen and Yu had but Chen decided that their branch would take the case. He informed his superior that he would treat it as any homicide case and because the victim was a well-known celebrity, he would keep her name out of the news and press. 

As their investigation progresses, it leads them to their number one suspect - Wu Xiaoming, a son of a powerful Communist Party official. People like Wu Xiaming are informally called H.C.C., High Cadre’s Children. They often behave as if they are above the law and that no one can touch them because their parents are in a position that puts fear into the lives of normal people. 

Once Chen Cao’s superior became aware of who their number one suspect was, a lot of pressure was put on them to deter them from continuing the investigation. Chen knows that it is best to tow the Party Line but he cannot in good conscience give up the investigation although he knows that he could be relieved of his duty or worse yet, be taken off the force. Will Chen Cao tow the Party’s line or will he continue the investigation knowing the results might put an end to his career?

It’s not hard to imagine the Republic of China putting the government and the Communist Party first and foremost above everything else. I also imagine the H.C.C. are quite similar in attitudes to children of diplomats, especially embassy kids, which I have had the misfortune of having to deal with when I worked retail. But if there are more people like Detective Chen Cao in China, then I do see hope for China’s future. ~Ernie Hoyt

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri (Vintage Books)

“I don’t share my life with anyone,” Jhumpa Lahiri’s unnamed narrator says at the beginning of Whereabouts. Although this refers to her lack of a domestic partner, the statement is true of her entire existence. She moves through the Italian city that she’s lived in all of her life as if she were a stranger, cherishing her solitude, “It’s become my trade,” she explains, blaming it on her mother, who had never left her alone, shrouding her in an “unhealthy amalgam” as she was growing up. Now as an adult, she approaches her mother as she would any aging stranger, twice a month, with respect and a box of cookies.

She has her familiar haunts in her city but she frequents them in the same way a tourist might, observing, eating, and making purchases without offering her presence to the people she sees there every day. This is a woman for whom intimacy is something to guard against. The men with whom she has had physical relationships are married; “We had a fling,” she says dismissively.

In her solitary life, she becomes painstakingly observant, like a camera, recording images without judgment, watching the people around her as though she’s conducting an anthropological study. Her distance is both fascinating and appalling. The city that has always been her home isn’t a place where she finds the comfort that usually comes to those who live in one spot forever.

And yet, when she accepts the offer of a fellowship that will put her in another country, “surrounded by another impenetrable tongue, she finds that the city she has never before left “doesn’t beckon or lend me a shoulder”  anymore. “I’m scared,” she admits, but realizes she knows “the guts and soul of this place a little too well.” 

Jhumpa Lahiri is a writer who has often given her characters that feeling of separation. She explains this within In Other Words, (Asia by the Book, July 2022), when she says that her parents’ language, Bengali, failed to connect her to a place she’d never known and English failed to give her a place of belonging in England or the U.S. When she found Italian, she found the “freedom to be imperfect,” and when she moved to Rome, she began to write only in Italian.

In Whereabouts, by giving voice to a woman who insists on maintaining her distance, Lahiri constructs a fine description of what it is to be an expatriate, living as a stranger, equipped with a language that is imperfectly acquired. Anyone who has gone to another country, living alone, existing as a “word hunter” and a careful observer of the world around them will fully understand the existence of the woman whose solitude is chosen but utterly complete.

Lahiri has written four books in Italian. Whereabouts is the third. (Roman Stories, which was published in the U.S this month, is the fourth.) By using Italian to write her books, she’s constructed even greater levels of distance. Conceived in English, written in Italian, and then translated back into English is a process that sets up a series of barriers between reader and writer, writer and character. It will be interesting to see how Lahiri’s style changes as her Italian becomes more of a creative language and less of a learning exercise. Will her trademark distance become warmed by a language that’s heated with emotion?~Janet Brown

Romaji Diary and Sad Toys by Takuboku Ichikawa, translated by Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda (Tuttle)

Takuboku Ichikawa was a Japanese poet born in 1886 in  Iwate Prefecture, near current day Morioka City at Joko Temple where his father was the head monk. He moved to Shibutami, also in Iwate Prefecture, a year later. He died at the young age of twenty-six from tuberculosis. 

He is mostly known for writing tanka, a genre of Japanese classical poetry. Unlike haiku which follows an on of 5-7-5, on being a phonetic unit, tanka follows a 5-7-5-7-7 on pattern. However, Ichikawa became famous for breaking with tradition as many of his tanka does not follow the standard pattern, nor does it deal with classical subjects. Ichikawa wrote his tanka to describe the mundane, the ordinary, he wrote them as a diary in poetry form.

Romaji Diary and Sad Toys is actually a collection of two books in one volume. The first half of the book, Romaji Diary, originally published as ロマジ日記 (Romanji Nikki) was a diary the Ichikawa wrote between the months April and June in 1909 before his death. 

The latter half of the the book, Sad Toys, which was originally published in the Japanese language as 悲しき玩具 (Kanashiki Gangu), is a collection 194 of Ichikawa’s tanka translated into English by Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda. 

Ichikawa had been living in Tokyo for a year when he started writing his diary. He had yet to send for his family because he didn’t feel he would be able to support them. It appears Ichikawa wrote his diary as a means to leave the stress he felt from what he thought were his own shortcomings. 

In one his earliest entries, he writes, “Why have I decided to write this diary in Roman letters? What’s the reason? I love my wife, and for the very reason I love her, I don’t want her to read it.” Many of his entries are full of contradictions. He goes on to write, “I love her is the truth, and that I don’t want her to read it is equally true, but these two statements aren’t necessarily connected. 

Ichikawa continued to write his diary until his wife and daughter came to Tokyo to live with him. Reading his diary, you can feel his frustration at not being able to achieve what he set out to do. He is often cynical and self-loathing. He often praises his wife but then in another entry, wonders why he even got married. 

The latter half of the book, Sad Toys, is a collection of Ichikawa’s tanka. In this edition, the publisher includes the Japanese original which were all written in three lines. The translators not only provide the English equivalent of each tanka but have also included their own interpretations and explanations of each to make it easier for the reader to understand them.

As with his Romaji Diary, his tanka are also little stories about himself, how he felt at a certain time, what his exact thoughts were. Some of the tanka are about his friends, others are about his family, and there are a few about a woman he became very infatuated with although their friendship remained platonic. 

As a recent resident of the Tohoku area of Japan, I have become quite interested in regional authors. Not as many of their works have been translated into English with the exception of Osaumu Dazai. If you want to expand your knowledge of Japanese literature and want to read more than just Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, or Soseki Natsumi, you may find the works of Takuboku Ichikawa to be an interesting alternative. You might even think of it as a breath of fresh air. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Girl with the White Flag by Tomiko Higa, translated by Dorothy Britton (Kodansha International)

The Girl with the White Flag was originally published as 白旗の少女 (Shirohata no Shojo) in 1989 by Kodansha. It is a memoir of Tomiko Higa’s experiences she had during the last days of World War 2. She was only seven-years-old when war came to her town. It is the story of how she and her siblings became refugees in their own country and how she became the focus of international attention when a photographer named John Hendrikson took her picture coming out of a cave carrying a white flag. 

Tomiko Higa was born and raised in Shuri, Okinawa which is now part of Naha City, the capital city of Okinawa Prefecture. She was born in 1938, the youngest of nine children. her mother died three weeks after she turned six years old. It was March 19, 1944. Her two eldest sisters were already married and had moved out of the house. Her two older brothers were serving in the Imperial Army, one in China, the other working on the mainland. That left Tomiko, her two older sisters Yoshiko and Hatsuko, and her older brother Chukuyo at the family home.

American soldiers landed on Okinawa on April 1, 1945. A month later, bombs and shells began to fall near Tomiko’s house. Their father gathered his children together and told them, “If by any chance there is an enemy attack in this immediate area while I am away and I can’t get back, you will each have to decide for yourself what to do”. He left it up to his oldest daughter to look after her younger brother and sisters. It would be the last time they would see their father. 

Yoshiko, the eldest of the five, said that they should follow their father’s instructions and head south. They managed to scrape by with a little food and spent their nights in caves which are abundant in Okinawa. Some of the places they stayed were already full of refugees and in some caves there were the remains of human bones.

As the children continued to walk south, they made a stop to rest. They dug holes in the ground to sleep in. Tomiko and her brother made more of a hollow, just big enough to hold their bottoms. They were awakened just a few hours later by soldiers who told them there would soon be fighting in the area. As Tomiko tried to wake up her brother, she noticed that he was sleeping with his eyes wide open. 

Yoshiko, the oldest sister, took the cloth that was wrapped around his head and “saw that his head had a hole in it and there was blood all over the back of his head and on his shoulders and down his back”. It was explained later to Tomiko that her brother was hit by a stray bullet and probably died instantly. 

As they fled Komesu, Tomiko, who had always held Chukuyo’s hand, clutched her sister’s dress as they continued to flee to the south. However, when she looked up, she was staring into a stranger’s face. She looked for her sister Yoshiko and Hatsuko but could not find either one of them. Now, she really was all alone. 

As Tomiko continued to head south, going from cave to cave, calling out for her sisters, people would either tell her to be quiet or leave. Some even threatened her with death. One of the final caves she came to was occupied by an elderly man and a blind woman. Tomiko also noticed something strange about the man. “Both his arms had been amputated at the elbows and both his legs at the knees”. 

It was these two invalids who probably saved Tomiko’s life. It was the two who made the white flag for Tomiko to hold high when coming out of the cave. She was led to a beach where there were other women and children and she was reunited with her sisters.

This is one of the saddest but most inspiring stories you will read about children surviving the horrors of war. Thanks to her father’s strict upbringing, her brother’s knowledge of edible plants, and the kindness of strangers, Tomiko was alive and well. She would also meet John Hendrickson, the man who took the picture forty-three years ago. If only all wars could end with such a happy ending. ~Ernie Hoyt

Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang (Riverhead Books)

A cook, an exile, “a hungry ghost, adrift,” a young Chinese American woman working in a London restaurant reads an advertisement for a “private chef in an elite research community.” Tempted by the thought of “one last taste of green” in a world that’s been overrun by grey--the pervasive smog that has killed crops all over the world and the grey mung bean flour that has become a nutritional staple--she lies about her experience and enters what’s known to its envious neighbors as the land of milk and honey.

Set on an Italian mountaintop that defies the smog with bright bursts of sunlight, this is a place where food crops are bioengineered. When the young cook enters her workplace for the first time, she walks into a kitchen that is a “vessel of light” and the first food she tastes are strawberries that turn her mouth into “an orchard in the sun.”

She finds a bounty of food to work with that’s vanished from every other part of the world, “a passage back through time.” With it she cooks elaborate menus that are only for practice. Her body rejects the richness of the meals she makes and, in a world that’s besieged by famine, every night she throws away all of the luscious food.

“I’d read the fairy tales,” she says, which means she recognizes the Bluebeard quality of her employer, a man who forbids her to leave the grounds of her workplace while promising her, “You may cook protected from the world’s distractions.” However a distraction finds her in her isolated state. Her employer’s daughter, Aida, brilliant, beautiful, and a cynic, becomes her companion, friend, and lover.

Presented with a role to play at banquets where her employer feeds potential investors, the cook takes on an eerie persona, a silent woman dressed in white, who understands no spoken languages and prays without words at the end of every meal. She’s a necessary component to her employer’s plans. He tells her, “They dislike me. Nor do they like Aida.” Posing as the employer’s former wife, the cook takes the vanished woman’s name, Eun-Young, and provides “an unimpeachable public image.” In return, her employer pays her a sum that will clear all of her considerable debt, so, she says, “I signed myself away.”

C. Pam Zhang has followed up her stunning debut novel, How Much of these Hills is Gold (Asia by the Book, March 8, 2021) with an equally breathtaking work of imagination. Blending an apocalyptic future with a fantastic culinary world that’s rich with poetry, Zhang’s sentences sing with unexpected lyricism, burnishing the world that we live in today with a glow of miraculous good fortune. 

Her unnamed central character tells her story with wit and bitter truth. “It’s always been easy to disappear as an Asian woman…The woman I was to become was…a hollow, a receptacle, a mirror held at a flattering angle.” She views her employer with an unsparing eye, describing him as a vulgarian who disguises himself with orange self-tanning cream, “a man who studied pleasure” but derives no enjoyment from anything but humiliating others with his wealth and power. On a dying planet, he milks other wealthy men for the money he needs to safeguard those who are on his list and the money’s forked over by those who want to be on it.

A love story, a dystopian nightmare, a celebration of the bounty we take for granted everyday along with a tribute to life in all its messy and chaotic creativity, Land of Milk and Honey pierces the present to unveil a dubious future, while never releasing its grip on hope. “In certain lights,” Zhang tells readers, “ the past and present are indistinguishable.” Perhaps the future is as well.~Janet Brown

Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore (UBS Publishers)

Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet, writer, and composer. He was born in Calcutta to a very prominent family and was the youngest of thirteen children The Tagores were known for the contributions to the Bengali Renaissance, a movement that took place in the Bengal region of the British Raj. 

Rabindranath Tagore is also the first non-European and the first Indian national to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his English translation of his book Gitanjali which translates to Song Offerings. He is also known for writing books, short stories, and essays. He wrote his first poem when he was only eight-years-old.

Gitanjali was first published in his native language of Bengali in 1910 and contained one hundred and fifty seven poems. Tagore translated his own poems into English and they were subsequently published by the India Society in England in 1912. The English collection only includes one-hundred and three of the original poems. The “songs” are based on the themes of love, devotion, and the quest to find spiritual enlightenment. 

The book has been translated into almost all the languages spoken in India and many other languages around the world. There is even an edition available in Braille. The new edition of these poems are transposed on beautiful pictures of India and its people.

USB Publishers in association with Visva Bharati University decided to create a special edition of the book including facsimiles of the original lyrics in Bengali and published the book in 2003. The book includes one hundred and three of his poems, plus a message from the Prime Minister of India, and introductions to the book by W.B. Yeats and excerpts from Andre Gide for the French translation, Ivo Stornilol’s prologue to his Portuguese translation and an excerpt from Suko Watanabe’s prologue to his Japanese translation of the book. 

Also included at the end of the book is Tagore’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech he gave on May 26, 1921 in Stockholm, Sweden. The gist of his speech is that not only literature, but education in general should be shared throughout the entire world. The East and West should continue to exchange ideas and learn from each other and should continue to do so in the future.

Even if one is not religious, it is easy to understand Tagore's devotion to a supreme being. The first poem begins: 

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.

This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again.

and fillest it ever with fresh life.

The poems ends with: 

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.

Ages pass, and still thou poorest, and still there is room to fill. 

The only thing a reader may have difficulty with is the English that Tagore uses. The poems are filled with words which sound obsolete today and are often associated with the Bible. Almost all the poems include the words thee, thou, thy, etc, but one has to take into consideration when the poems were written.

The book is also a great introduction to Indian literature. Aside from the biblical-like words, the language is easy to understand and it makes for a pleasurable reading experience. ~Ernie Hoyt

Elephant Company by Vicki Constantine Croke (Random House)

Teak logging was a big business for Great Britain at the start of the 20th Century, with Burma producing 75% of the teak that was demanded by ship builders. It was a prime location for the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation, who sent  young British men, “nomads of the forest” into the jungles to manage logging camps. 

This was a hazardous position. In 1920 41 Englishmen were hired to work in “Upper Burma.” By 1927, only 16 of them were still alive. One of the original 41 (and the most notable of the 16 survivors) was Billy Williams, a young veteran, fresh from the trenches of WWI. He came because he was intrigued by the idea of working with elephants, an interest that would dominate his life for the next 25 years, giving him the nickname “Elephant Bill.”

Williams loved animals and had an understanding rapport with them that served him well in his new career. He soon became fascinated by the elephants that were an essential part of the logging business, particularly one named Bandoola who had a preternatural understanding of human language. If asked to hand a worker a particular tool, this elephant unerringly selected what was needed and handed it over without hesitation.

There was a peculiarly strong bond between Williams and Bandoola, perhaps because they had been born in the same month of the same year, and that bond led to an improved relationship with the other elephants that Williams worked with. Unique among his cohort, Bandoola was unscarred. When Williams discovered that this phenomenon had lived all his life in the camp, not captured in the wilderness and cruelly trained as the other elephants in the camp had been, he decided it was kinder, cheaper, and more efficient to raise baby elephants in the camp, training them with rewards and bringing them up with young boys who would later become their handlers. This humane standard of care became the norm in logging camps, along with elephant hospitals to cure the wounds incurred in this hazardous line of work.

When World War II began, the jungles of Burma became battlegrounds and elephants were a highly prized labor resource for both the Japanese and the Allies. Suddenly Williams was on equal terms with generals and guerrilla fighters, as the elephant advisor for the Allied forces. The Japanese put a price upon his head because he spirited away the pachyderms that they wanted for themselves.

At the height of his wartime career, Williams had 1652 elephants under his command, with Bandoola as their leader. In spite of his expertise and efforts, Burma’s elephants were sacrifices to warfare. Many of the British soldiers mistreated them, they were wounded in bombing raids and by landmines, and those that were under Japanese control were burned terribly by the acid from batteries that they were forced to carry.

“The more I see of man, the more I love my elephants,” Williams paraphrased and his love becomes contagious. Vicki Constantine Croke has done an immense amount of research and her lively writing style makes her facts irresistible. Elephants take center stage in this history, most particularly the one that was Elephant Bill’s pachyderm twin. Both Elephant Bill and Bandoola become unforgettable heroes in a biography that they companionably and equitably share.~Janet Brown