Here After by Amy Lin (Zibby Books)

When her husband goes off on a morning run, Amy Lin tells him, “Don’t go too hard. Love you.” Those are the last words she will ever say to him. An hour or so later, Kurtis Nakayama’s body is found on a trail, dead before he hit the ground. A prolonged autopsy finds no reason for his death.

Kurtis is 32. Amy is 31. They’ve been married for less than two years. They’ve been in love for seven. With his death, Amy “falls out of time.” Ten days afterward, she’s diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis with clots in one leg, her abdomen, and a lung. If she dies, she wonders, will Kurtis be waiting for her? She lives to cremate her husband and begins to wrestle with the longing to die herself.

When they first met, Amy told Kurtis she was a substitute teacher. He contradicted her after he found a blog she had kept in the past. “Why did you say that? You’re a writer.”

Writing emerges again as she enters a life without Kurtis. With scalding honesty she narrates the account of what it is to be a widow when the man with whom she planned a future is dead. Grief, she discovers, is an unexplored emotion in modern Western culture. Nobody wants to hear about it and even therapists are poorly equipped to deal with it. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, has an entry for “excessive grief disorder,” when mourning the death of someone close goes on beyond twelve months.

Amy is told otherwise by a counselor. Grief sharpens after the first year and then sometimes again around the third through fifth years. “Grief is a long journey, “ the counselor says and Amy thinks “I can’t do this for five years.”

“How are you doing, friends ask, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through. Take it a day at a time. Hey, doing well?” As time goes on, they tell Amy “It’s difficult to hear. It’s too heavy. It makes me too sad. I need a break.” One psychotherapist persistently refers to Kurtis’s death as “a stressful event.” Another asks “Do you feel as if you’ve been hit by a train?” “No,” Amy says, “You hear a train coming.”

For the first time in their lives together, Amy asks her father how long it was before he finally felt “space from his grief” when in his early twenties, he faced the death of his father. “Years,” he says, and then after a moment, “maybe never.” 

The widely accepted template of Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief is one Amy doesn’t fit within. She discovers that it was never intended for mourning. It was developed after studying the behavior of terminally ill patients as they faced their own deaths. There is no template for young widows, only statistics. They face the “widowhood effect,” with a heightened risk of suicide in the year after their husbands have died. They are 22% more likely than married women to die “of other causes…that may seem random but are, in fact, not.”

Amy heard the screams of Kurtis’s parents when she told them he was dead. She stays alive because she knows her death would cause her parents that same agony. When she’s given a residency at Yaddo, she goes because long before she promised Kurtis she would take him; she would show him “every single thing.” She transforms her anguish into art and leaves us all with an unyielding question.

“How can grief be so universal and yet still be so widely misunderstood?”~Janet Brown

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon, with Kim Green (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

Even when she was very small, Chantha Nguon knew the difference between noodles. Instant noodles came in packages and “tasted careless.” Kuy teav noodles, made from wheat flour mixed with eggs, were sold in the Battambang market every day, available to anyone who had the money to buy them. But best of all were her mother’s noodles, hand-rolled into perfect cylinders that took hours to prepare. Slow noodles, she learned as a little girl, are the best and will provide her with an enduring “philosophy for life.” Care and practice, with no shortcuts, make daily living rich and flavorful.

A child with a “puppy nose for food,” Chantha knows what happiness smells like: “cloves, cracked pepper, and pate de foie.” Her mother was a beauty who knew looks weren’t enough. She augmented the gift of her appearance with extravagant meals that took lots of money and time to prepare. Her cooking was a kind of magical theatre production that entranced her little daughter and the memories of that food would shape Chantha’s future.

Cambodia swiftly transforms from “a little girl’s heaven” into a place of turmoil and tragedy. The U.S.-backed government headed by Lon Nol turns against anyone with Vietnamese blood and Chantha’s mother is Vietnamese. She sends her children to Saigon to live in the safety of relatives there. But in that portion of Southeast Asia there is no safety. Cambodia becomes locked in the horror of “Pol Pot time” and Saigon becomes Ho Chi Minh City.

Poverty sweeps over both countries in terrible ways. Chantha’s mother escapes from Cambodia to be with her children, and then witnesses their deaths. Chantha is the only child to stay alive—and then her mother dies.

Chantha has never learned how to be frugal. At one point in her life when her mother made a living as a seamstress, wooden clogs in different colors became the girl’s obsession and she used her pocket money to buy forty or fifty pairs. “I should use those as firewood,” her mother teased her. Later, alone after her mother’s death, Chantha burns them all, one by one, as fuel for cooking rice.

As she struggles to stay alive, a fortune teller predicts she will become even more poverty-stricken in the future but “sewing and cooking will save you….You will take care of yourself.”

The story of her survival and her return to Cambodia with the man whom she would marry is an adventure that tears at the heart, but this isn’t the driving force of Slow Noodles. The theme that prevails is how a country was deprived of its history, with its future jeopardized by Pol Pot’s Communist Party of Kampuchea. Trying to blot out over a thousand years of culture, this government erased “education, medicine, cinema, books, money, cars and religion” by killing anyone “whose job it was to plan for tomorrow: doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists.” “Estimates range from 1.6 to 1 million dead, from one-fifth to more than a quarter of the population.” What was left in the aftermath was “a country with no idea of tomorrow.”

Slow Noodles is a metaphor as well as a cherished culinary memory. Time, patience, persistence, and care are essential for the cooking of this dish and for the recovery of a traumatized nation. Chantha Nguon shows how this is possible to accomplish in a book that celebrates the importance of food in rebuilding a culture and revitalizing a country, while generously offering traditional Khmer recipes to replicate in any kitchen.~Janet Brown

The Samurai and the Prisoner by Honobu Yonezawa, translated by Giuseppe di Martino (Yen On)

The Samurai and the Prisoner by Honobu Yonezawa is the English translate of [黒瘻城] (Kokurojo) which was originally published in the Japanese language in 2021 by Kadokawa Books. The translator, Giuseppe di Martino is an Assistant Language Teacher for the JET program (Japan Exchange and Teaching Program). 

Yonezawa is mostly known for writing his young adult mystery series Kotenbu which is also known as The Classic Literature Club series. The series would be adapted into a television animation program and the first book in the series, Hyokka would be adapted into a movie starring Kento Yamazaki and Alice Hirose. 

The Samurai and the Prisoner is a more adult-oriented story blending historical fact with fictitious mysteries occurring during the Siege of Itami. Araki Murashige, a samurai lord is defending his castle against the forces of Nobunaga Oda, a daimyo during the Sengoku Period or Warring States Era in Japan. The time is the winter of 1578. It is four years before the Honno-ji Incident resulting in the assassination of Oda. 

Murashige, who once was an ally of Oda, betrayed him and sided with the Mouri who were also fighting against the Oda forces. Oda had sent an envoy named Kanbei Kuroda, one of Oda’s chief strategists, to convince Murashige noto to defect; however, Murashige went against bushido protocol and instead of killing the envoy there and then and sending his head back to his master, he imprisoned Kuroda in the dungeons of the castle.

As Oda’s forces are closing in on Aroka Castle, Murashige continues to hold them off while waiting for reinforcements from the Mouri or Ishiyama Hongan-ji armies who never arrive. As Murashige’s men continue to protect the castle, a string of mysterious incidents occur and it appears the only one who can help Murashige solve them is the one man who’s wasting away in the dungeon - Kanbei Kuroda.

The first incident involves a young boy who is killed on the castle grounds. His death spurs rumors about “Divine Intervention”; however, Murashige is a warrior. Although he commanded his retainers to detain him and lock him in a room, he is mysteriously killed. Murashige recognized the wound as an arrow wound, there was no arrow to be found. 

Reluctantly, Murashige visits Kuroda in the dungeons to get his advice on how to solve the mystery. Murashige believes that Kuroda cannot resist showing off his deductive skills but speaks to Murashige in riddles. It is later that Murashige understands why Kuroda only gave him a hint because to help Murashige would mean to betray his own master. 

Three other mysterious deaths occur, one in each season of the year. Murashige finds himself consulting with Kuroda after every  incident since none of his men can answer his enquiries. But, does Kuroda really help Murashige? And if so…why? 

Yonezawa’s blend of historical fact and detective fiction will entertain its readers in highlighting the actions and thoughts that took place during the Warring States Era. The conflicts between the The only two flaws in the story being the translator’s assumption that the reader is familiar with Japanese history and the use of archaic words in English such as thee, thou, prithee which stem the flow of the story. The plot twists at the end of the book may surprise you as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson (Random House)

Alex Berenson was a reporter for New York Times and has extensively covered the occupation of Iraq. He uses his experience and has created a story for post-911 America. The Faithful Spy is his book and it has won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. 

It is about an undercover CIA agent named John Wells, who has successfully infiltrated Al Qaeda before the events of 9-11. “After years of fighting jihad in Afghanistan and Chechniya, he spoke perfect Arabic and Pashtun, his beard was long, his hands calloused”.  He rode horses as well as any native Afghan, enjoyed the sport buzkashi, an Afghan version of polo but instead of using a ball, the objective of the game is to place a dead calf or goat in a goal. He played as hard as any Afghan.  “He prayed with them. He had proven that he belonged here, with these men”. He had also become a Muslim. The Taliban and Al Qaeda members call him Jalal.

The story begins a few months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. The story opens with Wells and a few of his jihadist friends being in the middle of a battle in Afghanistan. Their small group is planning on attacking Marines who are stationed nearby. Wells plans to take out his comrades and to try to get a message to his CIA handler.  

Around the same time that Wells was doing battle, Jennifer Exley, She was asked by her superiors to go to the U.S.S. Starker, which was sitting out in the Atlantic Ocean in international waters, “so its precious cargo would remain outside the jurisdiction of American courts”. 

Onboard the naval ship is just one prisoner. A young man named Tim Kiefer who went by the name of Mohammad Faisal. He was a twenty-two year old American who was fighting for the Taliban “against the United States”. The American public was aware of the capture of John Walker Lindh, which the media dubbed the American Taliban. Keifer’s capture was kept quiet and President Bush had signed an order declaring Kiefer an “enemy combatant”. Exley was here to question him about one other American - John Wells who has been incommunicado for the last two years.

The story progresses at a fast pace. Wells does manage to take out the terrorists who were his buddies and was taken in by the U.S. military where he gave them as much information as he could about what he had learned. He also writes a note and asks Major Holmes to make sure Jennifer Exley at the CIA gets his handwritten message. “Will pursue UBL. No prior knowledge of 9/11. Still friendly, John ”. 

John Wells is caught between two worlds. It is similar to the real-life situation of Agent Storm : My Life in Al Qaeda (reviewed in Asia by the Book, April 7, 2023). Unlike Mortem Storm in the real story, Wells goes back to the terrorist fold because he knows that the upper leaders are planning on something bigger than 9-11. He is determined to find out what and when will it happen. But little does he know, he is part of the plan as well… ~Ernie Hoyt

世界の路地裏１００ (Sekai no Rojiura 100) by Nozomu Kato, pictures by P.I.E. Tsushinsha (PIE Books) Japanese text only

There was a time when I was hooked on picking up photography books. I enjoyed looking at pictures of mostly landscapes and beautiful scenery. I bought a series of books published by PIE Books titled 世界の名景・絶景 55 (Sekai no Meiki・Zekkei) which translates to “Famous and Spectacular Views of the World”. Each book had a theme -  waterside views, landscapes, sceneries with buildings, scenes seen in a movie, legendary scenes, and sceneries around unexplored areas and featured fifty-five different spots. There are more in the series but these were the titles I bought; however, when I purchased the books, my Japanese reading ability was still below par so I could only enjoy the pictures and could only guess at what might be written.

After living in Japan for nearly thirty years and studying Japanese on my own, my reading ability has improved to the point where I can read manga without furigana and have even managed to read some novels as well. It still takes me a long time to complete  a novel but I thought I would revisit a book my wife bought me for my birthday. 

The book I received was 世界の裏路地１００ (Sekai no Uraroji 100). This translates to “The Back Alleys of the World”. Various photographers working for PIE News Agency, a Japanese publisher, traveled the world and instead of taking photos of the most well known tourist attractions, they traveled through the back roads and alleys of ten countries around the world.

The majority of countries featured in the book are in Europe - France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Germany, Portugal, the Czech Republic, and England. The other two countries featured are Mexico and South Korea. The photos are both in color and in black and white. Text is provided for each country and was written by Nozomu Kato. 

A major portion of the photos were taken in different cities in Spain including Altea, Mijas, Sienna, Cordoba, Sevilla, Frigiliana and Barcelona. The second most featured country are the islands of Greece. Most forms of public transportation are forbidden. The book gives you a chance to armchair travel around the islands of Skyros, Rhodes, Mykonos and others. 

Featured cities of France include Lyon and Nice. In Italy, you will travel the canals of Venice and the backroads and alleys of Sienna. You will also enjoy the views of the island of Burano. 

There are a few pictures taken in Prague, the capital city of the Czech Republic, and a few views of old downtown Seoul in South Korea. In London, England, you won’t find any pictures of Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, or Windsor Castle but you will get to check out the facades of different English pubs. It will make you want to go in for a pint. 

Some readers might not consider photography books as a “real” book but most of them include texts to describe the places and things that are pictured. It may inspire you to take your own pictures while on vacation as well. It’s been a long time since I’ve traveled abroad but reading and looking through this beautiful photography book has reinstilled my interest in visiting new places I’ve never been to. It also makes me long to travel back to my hometown as well.　~Ernie Hoyt


Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China by Noo Saro-Wiwa (Canongate)

One of the more interesting and impenetrable aspects of traveling in Hong Kong and beyond are the enclaves of African men who show up and clearly know their way around. In Kowloon’s Chungking Mansions, some are asylum seekers and many more are undocumented, there for “business.” Gordon Mathews, anthropology professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and author of Ghetto at the Center of the World (Asia by the Book, June 2012) and Globalization from Below, has taught English classes in Chungking Mansions for years and has gained the confidence of many African residents of that community. Everyone else receives a polite greeting in passing, at best.

Mathews writes about the community of Africans who live in Guangzhou and when Noo Saro-Wiwa learns about them, she goes to that city in search of them. Nigerian by birth and brought up in England, she holds a British passport and has studied at both King’s College, London and Columbia University. She has a unique position of Western privilege and an African birthright which leads her to feel confident that she will be able to discover how Africans live in the south of China.

She’s mistaken. Her attempts to penetrate a male world of men who live by their wits and without documentation are met with the usual reply of “We’re here to do business.” A few take her to dinner and to nightclubs but although she’s introduced to their friends, she still hits a wall when asking about their lives in China.

Guangzhou has neighborhoods that are largely occupied by men from Africa and Saro-Wiwa spends most of her time within these areas. She makes contact with a Nigerian fabric merchant who comes to Guangzhou for a month at a time several times a year. “I jealous these people,” he tells her with a “clenched admiration,” “What this country has and we do not have in our country is quite enormous…Enormous wealth. The US don’t even have it.”

This wealth doesn’t trickle down to the area known as “Chocolate City,” a place dominated by a massive market that is a “bazaar of garishness.” There Africans and Chinese engage in a dance of commerce that is plagued by cross-cultural misunderstandings, acrimony, and racism. Saro-Wiwa encounters the racism quickly. Although she is clearly a visitor and a woman of means, vendors turn her away when she asks for a discount. 

Despite the Chinese aversion to dark skin, there are a number of Guangzhou women who have married and started families with African men. This has created a kind of settled community, with mixed-race children and a tentative form of security. Still, she’s told, that although “no sane person will stay in Nigeria,” these men whose Chinese wives and half-Chinese children allow them permanent residency status “Every day you are being reminded of where you come from. I don’t belong here.”

Although eventually Saro-Wiwa discovers the businesses that keep the African afloat, including drug-dealing, she’s forced to flesh out her book with stories of her travels in China and facts garnered from academic research. A seasoned travel writer who works for Conde Nast Traveller, she makes her solitary explorations enticing. She falls in love with Wuhan only months before covid shuts that city down and gives a splendid account of the northern town, Pingyao, whose antiquities escaped the depredations of the Cultural Revolution. She ends up taking refuge in the more hospitable area of Hong Kong where her research gains an increasingly intimate texture. Even so, Black Ghosts ends with the knowledge that her “journey into the lives of Africans in China” doesn’t live up to its subtitle. Saro-Wiwa hasn’t even illuminated the lives of Africans in Guangzhou.~Janet Brown

No Longer Human : Complete Edition by Usamaru Furuya (Kodansha)

Recently, I decided to revisit a Japanese classic. However, it is a graphic novel written by Usamaru Furuya but is based on the Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human (reviewed August 4, 2022). I was expecting the same bleak story in manga form but was in for quite a surprise. 

Although the main characters remain the same, the story is told through the eyes of the manga artist Usamaru Furuya and the story is updated to the present era. The story opens with Furuya talking to one of his employees saying he hasn’t come up with an idea for the next serial. As he surfs the Internet, he comes across something called “ouch diary”. An anonymous reader wrote, “I got depressed reading it. But I can’t stop reading it. Take a look!”. A URL was provided and the title was No Longer Human. 

An “ouch diary”? Curiosity piques the manga artist’s interest and he clicks the URL. What pops up is the title “Yozo Oba’s Albums” and there are three pictures of Yozo. One at age 6, another at age 17, and the last at age 25. 

The artist first clicks on the age 6 picture. His first impression is that Yozo must be from a wealthy family but he couldn’t help noticing that the smile on Yozo’s face seemed to be fake and all he could say was “What a creepy kid”. 

Usamaru then clicks on Yozo, age 25 and can’t believe his eyes. He says out loud, “He’s 25 in this one? He looks like an old man. His face is totally lifeless”. He also clicks on Yozo, age 17 and is taken for another loop. He inadvertently says, “Wha…What a handsome young man”. Usamaru thinks to himself, “What could have happened to him between these three photos. The guy’s name is Yozo Oba and his diary is titled No Longer Human. 

The book is divided into twelve entries and Usamaru clicks on the first one titled Yozo Oba and is greeted by the line - “I’ve lived a life full of shame.” The first section, Yozo Oba writes about his high school years playing the class clown because he wanted people to like him. He then writes about going to an art prep school where he meets Masao Horiki who becomes his friend and mentor in wining, dining, and general debauchery. 

As Usamaru continues to search the Internet for material for his next serial manga, he keeps going back to Yozo Oba’s diary, No Longer Human. What he says of Oba’s diary is “He revealed his actions and inner thoughts in surprisingly vivid detail…”

Usamaru reads through until the end of the diary he finds an afterward written by Yozo’s friend Masao Horiki. Horiki found out that Yozo was taken into custody by the police after they found him wandering the streets and coughing up blood. After an examination he was arrested and indicted for drug use and sentenced to probation and put in a rehabiliation facility. This is where Horiki rekindles his friendship and would visit Yozo quite often, but one day, Yozo just disappeared. 

Horiki explains why he posted Yozo’s diary without his friend’s consent and pleads with any readers that if they know his whereabouts to contact him. In the manga, Usamaru Furuya writes that he regretted reading the diary until the next morning, then went to bed. However, he could not get Yozo Oba out of his head. 

In the manga, Usamaru decides to go in search of Yozo Oba or to at least confirm if he really existed or not. He does discover that there really was a Yozo Oba and that he may still be alive somewhere…

Usamaru Furuya’s adaptation of Osamu Dazai’s novel may also seem to be a bit bleak but it is not quite as depressing as Dazai’s original. His drawings really draw the reader into the story of Yozo Oba’s life. At times, his diary reads like a desperate call for attention. Oba’s utter lack of self-esteem and self-worth are depressing and reading about his downward spiral will make you want to re-evaluate your own life to help you determine if as Yozo Oba says, “Human beings terrify me!” ~Ernie Hoyt



The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (Atlantic Monthly Press)

The Inheritance of Loss is a novel written by Kiran Desai. Desai was born in India in 1971 and got her education in India, the U.S. and in England. It is her second novel and was originally published in 2006. It won the Booker Prize the same year, a prize given to the best work written in the English language and published in either the U.K. or Ireland. 

The story is about two main characters - Biju and Sai. Biju is an illegal alien living in the United States and trying to get that one precious item many Indians long for…an American green card. He is the son of the cook who works for Sai’s grandfather. Sai lives in a mountainous region called Kalimpong in the state of West Bengal at a place called Cho Oyu. She is an orphan but lives with her maternal grandfather, the cook that works for him, and a dog named Mutt. 

Sai’s grandfather’s name is Jemubhai Patel. He is a retired judge who despises Indians and their way of life. He hated the lifestyle of Indians. The way they dress, the way they eat  so he would eat chapatis, an Indian-style flatbread, with a fork and knife. 

Away from the prying eyes of the international community, there was a small group of Maoists trying to make a country for themselves in Nepal. During the same era, a small group of rebels are fighting against the Indian goverment to create a nationl called Ghorkaland, an area in West Bengal, for the Nepali-speaking Indians.  The story opens with a couple of young Ghorkas entering Cho Oyu who demand that Sai’s grandfather give them his guns. They vanish as suddenly as they appear and the Judge calls the police the following day. 

The police interview both the Judge, his grand-daughter and the cook but seem to be as inept as the young Ghorkas. The three people who live at Cho Oyu just want to live happy, quiet lives. The Judge is a grumpy old man and reminds one of American sitcom icon Archie Bunker, although the Judge is not quite as bigoted as Archie. Sai is more interested in her flourishing relationship with her tutor Gyan and the judge is waiting for his son to become a success in the United States and perhaps invite him to live with him in the land of milk and honey.

The book might come off as a bit depressive but it does have its comic moments. Desai’s story is about the ever elusive effort of belonging to someone or somewhere. She shows the contrast between Indians who despise their own kind, such as Sai’s grandfather, and yet is not accepted by the British who he tries to mimic. It is also about the anger other Indians have for people like Sai’s grandfather, believing that they are not interested in keeping their traditions. In the end, in Desai’s story, nobody seems to be happy. Not Sai, not her grandfather, and certainly not Biju who has to move from one job to another to escape being caught by agents for the U.S. Immigration Department. 

It’s my belief that life is only as good as you make it, no matter the circumstances. As one of the old cliches goes, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day”. ~Ernie Hoyt


The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen by Gregory Cahill and Kat Baumann (Life Drawn by Humanoids)

As a person who’s been an enthusiastic reader for 71 years, it came as a shock when I recently discovered there were reading skills I’ve yet to acquire. I wasn’t allowed to read comic books when I was a child which means I’ve struggled with graphic novels as a (very) mature adult. Giving equal attention to the words and the pictures in each frame wasn’t easy and when I finally learned to do it, I felt quite proud.

Then I bought a copy of The Golden Voice, a biography of the Cambodian singer Ros Serey Sothea, that is written as a graphic narrative. The art is cinematic and the words, readers are told at the outset, are written in three different languages: Romanized Khmer, English, and French, along with a healthy smattering of military acronyms. But here’s what most intrigued me, and almost defeated me—this book comes with a playlist and a QR code that allows 47 songs to be played as the book is being read.

I’m a tremendous fan of the Khmer music stars of the 60s and 70s, especially Ros Serey Sothea and Sin Sisamouth, both of whom died during Pol Pot’s reign of terror. So I happily scanned the QR code and read the accompanying directions. The songs were chosen to complement the narrative and they were meant to be played in order. However there was a little glitch. Icons with the corresponding numbers of each song appeared in the frames, telling readers when to hit play and when to hit stop.

Once I became involved in the life of a girl who rose out of the rice fields in Battambang to become a star renowned and loved throughout the Kingdom of Cambodia, I often overlooked the tiny numbered icons that gave the appropriate background music. They are very small and easy to miss. I ended up backtracking to hit play--but since I’m a rapid reader, I was told to stop much too soon and so I heard only a few bars of each song. By the time I turned the final page, I had a mild headache and felt as if I’d just picked up a raging case of dyslexia.

Probably the ideal way to read this stunning piece of graphic art is to play the 47 songs without stopping--at least for readers like me who are unused to the magic of QR codes and instructions embedded in the text. When I approached the book that way, I wasn’t only immersed in the tragic life of a gifted singer, I felt as if I’d been transported to the radio stations, recording studios, nightclubs, and the American Embassy in Phnom Penh during the war. The art is that detailed, showing not just the city but the rapidly changing facial expressions of the characters that do much to tell the story. Reading The Golden Voice is like watching an animated film.

First published in Cambodia, this book gives a detailed look at the turbulent and tragic years that led up to the Khmer Rouge’s takeover of the country. Gregory Cahill met and interviewed surviving members of Ros Serey Sothea’s and Sin Sisamouth’s families. Unfortunately these relatives were unable to give a complete picture of events that took place after the Khmer Rouge came to power so Cahill cautions readers that not everything he’s written is factual and the tragic end of Ros Serey Sothea’s life may not have happened as he’s shown it in this biography. 

Still, through his text and Kat Baumann’s art, along with the songs they’ve provided, the life of this beautiful woman who died when she was only thirty, is movingly and carefully told.~Janet Brown





Where Rivers Part by Kao Kalia Yang (Simon & Schuster)

Kao Kalia Yang comes from a line of beautiful women who gave birth to beautiful daughters. All of them had a special closeness to their mothers and in this lovely history, Yang pays tribute to three generations of these strong and stunning Hmong women.

Beginning with her great-grandmother who was “unexpectedly beautiful…smart and able, though rumored to be promiscuous,” and moving on to the Bad Luck Woman, the grandmother whom Yang never knew except through the stories of her own mother, she then unfolds the story of Tswb, “Chew,” whose own bad luck is counteracted by her quick and determined mind, and who gives birth to daughters whose luck is shaped by the life their mother has made possible.

Chew’s beauty gives her an indulged childhood that ends with the death of her father and the war that takes her away from the village of fruit trees in blossom, where two rivers meet and diverge. In the midst of upheaval and death, Chew’s mother leads her children in a perilous and grueling flight through Laos’ jungles. 

This is where Chew first sees the man for whom she will leave her mother. Without hesitation, she marries Npis, “Bee,” a “song poet” whose lack of ambition is counterbalanced by his deep and unflagging love. He pulls her, their infant daughter, and his mother across the Mekong River into Thailand, and stands on the opposite bank with his skin torn into “pale ribbons of flesh,” shredded by the tubes of bamboo and the ropes that he clutched to bring his family to safety. 

But Bee had grown up in poverty. He lacked Chew’s background of comfort and education that drives her to seize all opportunities for a better life. After spending years of squalor in a refugee camp, she persuades him to seek repatriation in another country and two years later, Bee, Chew, and their two daughters are on a plane that will take them to Minnesota. 

In America, they “have been tossed through time.” Their daughters swiftly become fluent in English. Chew struggles through two years of night classes to attain a high school diploma while Bee fumes that she’s wasting time. She “should have just taken the GED test,” as he had. Now he studies through a community college to get a machine operating certificate. They all, parents and daughters, sit at the kitchen table every night, doing their homework.

 Chew is constantly pregnant and her children are predominately daughters. She is determined to break the cycle of “bad luck women” and through her efforts and example, her daughters go to Stanford, Columbia, Carleton College, the University of Minnesota. They live outside of what their mother had known when she “existed in a picture of need.”

Where Rivers Part is the third book in Yang’s trilogy that began with The Latehomecomer (Asia by the Book, April 2008) and The Song Poet (Asia by the Book, March 2021) . Each tells a different segment of Yang’s family history--her own memories of life in the refugee camp with her shaman grandmother and the story of Bee’s life as a child who had never known his father and who struggled to learn how to be a father himself after he and Chew were married. But the most tender and poetic of these three family histories is Yang’s story of her mother. 

The story of a girl who grew up in a gentle home, who loved to learn, who fell in love at first sight with a stranger and married him when she was still a child, who gave birth to fourteen children and lost half of them before they left her body, who returned to Laos after her seven surviving children were grown and realized her own mother was there, ready to welcome her home after she died, is told in words that give Chew’s life the luster of fiction and the blessings of truth.~Janet Brown

Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto, translated by Don Knotting (Hanover Square Press)

What does a person do when all their only ambition is to do nothing? For Shoji Morimoto, the solution is to do nothing as an occupation. Through Twitter, he makes it known that he is available for any situation where another person is needed, just so long as he is required to do nothing. He began this pursuit in 2018 and has done nothing for other people over 4000 times since then. For this, he charges only his travel expenses, asking that any food or drink required during the appointment be covered by the client. Later he puts the client’s request and a summary of his response to it on Twitter, which is his only form of advertising. At the time this book was written, he received three requests a day for his service. Within ten months of launching this enterprise his Twitter followers went from 300 to 100,000. Apparently he has found a Japanese need and is quite busily filling it.

Who asks for a person who will do nothing? Artists of all kinds--writers, manga illustrators, musicians--ask Morimoto to sit with them, silently, while they create. A marathon runner wanted him to stand at the finish line, waiting for the entrant to complete the race. Others ask that he attend court proceedings as an onlooker, meet them at an airport, wave them off as they leave on a train. One endearing request is that he join another man to have an ice cream soda, something the client is too embarrassed to do on his own. Another job results in a spectacular hangover when Morimoto is asked to sit in a park while the client drinks a can of chu-hai (a shochu highball). “Summer, nighttime, a park, alcohol…I got pretty drunk,” he confesses in a tweet.

Others have more complex requests. One woman wants to talk about her girlfriend, whom she hasn’t revealed to her family or friends. A patient in a hospital asks for a visit in the suicide risk intensive care unit she’s been placed in. A man divulges at the end of his time period that he used to be a member of the Aum Shinrikyo cult. Another wants Morimoto to spend a day with him in his home because he’s never shared it with another person. He confesses when the day is over that he had been released from prison where he served a sentence for murder.

This is an occupation that requires a lack of personality, evaluation, advice, or judgment. Morimoto is careful to keep his responses neutral, sticking with “Uh-huh” and “I see.” His role, as he sees it, is to fall between “friend” and “stranger” during his times with a client. He serves as a sort of quasi-friend to the person who’s engaged his services. Between the two of them there’s no emotional history and no demands of reciprocity--which is why one woman asks him to have dinner with her at a very expensive restaurant. If she asked a friend, that person would feel obligated to do the same for her.

Because Morimoto approaches his work as a blank slate that the client fills as they wish, the obvious question is will he eventually be replaced by a robot? Not in Japan, he says, where people suffer from “AI fatigue” and yearn for human contact, even for something as simple as receiving a reminder message. 

Since he charges nothing, how does he survive? From savings garnered from his brief foray into financial trading is what he claims, although a Reuters article quotes him as saying that when he first began as Rental Person, he charged 10,000 yen (about $71) per rental.

Although he initially depended heavily upon Twitter for exposure, Morimoto has been featured in manga, has inspired a TV series, and, according to the author information that appears on the final page, he’s written other books. Not too shabby for a man who claims he does nothing.~Janet Brown



 

The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai (G.P. Putnam's Sons, release date February 13, 2024)

Tucked away on a street near Kyoto’s Higashi Honganji Temple lies a hidden restaurant. No sign directs customers to it. A one-line advertisement in Gourmet Monthly gives no contact information, only two names: The Kamogawa Diner and The Kamogawa Detective Agency. For those who manage to find this place, they discover that it has no menu but the owner serves whatever food he has cooked for that day on the finest of lacquerware and Baccarat crystal plates. Clearly this is no ordinary diner.

Although the food is made from the best ingredients, what draws customers to search for this place is the  detective agency. Each one of them is haunted by a dish they had in the past, with flavors they’ve been unable to replicate or find in any other restaurant and with memories they hope to relive if they can only find the exact replica, faithful in every detail. 

This is what the Kamogawa Detective Agency promises its clients. After learning every piece of information that is remembered about where and when they had this food and any detail they recall about its taste and presentation, the owner scours Japan for it, tracking down every minute clue that has been given to him. If he succeeds, he charges nothing but what the client wants to give.

The stories told by the six customers in this book are charming and resonant. One man wants a simple meal that his dead wife used to make for him. A woman hopes to eat a dish she once left unfinished because her date unexpectedly proposed marriage to her as their meal was put on the table. Another hopes to restore her ex-husband’s vanished memory, stolen by dementia, if she can feed him the food that once only he was able to make. Since everyone in the world has a particular culinary memory that they would love to taste one more time, these people are ones readers can easily take to heart--but they aren’t the core of this novel.

Hisashi Kashiwai is a Kyoto dentist with a passion for food and the skills of a forensic kitchen detective. He is aware of every detail that makes a dish extraordinary and he divulges them all. Whether it’s the way water drawn from different regions can change flavors or how pouring tea over a helping of rice can enhance the taste, Kashiwai generously divulges these little secrets. His descriptions of the meals served in the diner or tracked down by an indefatigable expert dominate this book. If you aren’t a devotee of Japanese cuisine, you will be by the time you finish reading about all the dishes Kashiwai describes so well,

None of his choices are haute cuisine. They’re simple dishes that people eat as everyday meals but the ingredients used to make them turn them into unique culinary art. Hishashi makes the regional differences in Japanese cooking something to yearn for, along with the use of ingredients that are only available in their particular season. Slivers of taro in mackerel sushi, taro found only in a small village, elevates the flavor as nothing else can and canned meat, cooked cleverly, can rival the finest Kobe beef. 

Kashiwai is also a devoted lover of Kyoto. Sprinkled among the luscious descriptions of food are quick glimpses of the gingko trees that turn the city to gold in the fall, the mountains that loom white in the winter, the courtyards filled with spring cherry blossoms, and the mists and shadows that bring mystery to the streets in the rainy season. “There was nowhere like Kyoto to make you really notice the changing of the seasons,” one client observes as he approaches the diner, and Kashiwai reveals the magic of his hometown in a few quick sentences.

Although The Kamogawa Food Detectives is being compared to the series that was launched by Before the Coffee Gets Cold, (Asia by the Book, February 2023), Kashiwai published this two years before the Coffee series began. He’s followed it with The Restaurant of Lost Recipes, a sequel that’s not yet available in the U.S. which gives promise of a series in the offing.

More dishes? More intriguing ingredients? Sign me up for a Kyoto food tour, please, Mr. Kashiwai!~Janet Brown



Songs on Endless Repeat by Anthony Veasna So (HarperCollins)

“I have less in common with mainstream Asians, like Chinese, Japanese, the usual suspects, than say middle-aged Jewish people because…both older Jewish folks and young Cambos have parents who either survived or died in a genocide!”

Here is the voice of Anthony Veasna So, who died when he was 28, just months before his book of short stories, Afterparties, (asiabythebook.com 8/2021) was published and acclaimed by everyone from the New Yorker to popsugar.com. This offhand line from one of the characters in the recently published posthumous collection of work by So, Songs on Endless Repeat, echoes with absolute truth. The person who would most appreciate and envy that line would now be one of those “older Jewish folks” if he hadn’t, like So, died from a drug overdose--Lenny Bruce.  

So himself took the microphone as a stand-up comedian. He also was a scathing cartoonist, an artist who painted enigmatic self portraits, and a writer whose fiction was published in the New Yorker and Granta and who signed a two-book deal with HarperCollins when he was in his mid-twenties. At the time of his death, he was immersed in writing that second book, “a first novel draft [that] will definitely push the limits of digestible length.” 

HarperCollins paid $300,000 for Afterparties and for the novel that would follow. Determined to get their money’s worth, they scraped together pieces of fiction and nonfiction, tossing it all into the crazy salad that’s become So’s second—and last—published book. They should never have done this. They looted a grave.

Songs on Endless Repeat is an incoherent mixture of five previously published essays, both in print and online, one lengthy and unpublished piece that delves into reality television, and eight chapters of the first draft that was meant to become his novel, Straight thru Cambotown. 

With a stunning lack of respect for this novel that will never be finished, HarperCollins sprinkled those chapters with haphazard abandon among the pieces of nonfiction, as though each portion of what was intended to begin a novel were random short stories. When read as they’re presented on the page, these chapters become staccato. They jangle and chafe. The characters float in a disembodied context, smoking weed, exchanging obscene wisecracks, presided over by a ghostly figure whose funeral is in the offing. They deserve a better showcase than this scattershot presentation, but the only way they’re going to get it is if their readers ignore the nonfiction that gets in their way and encounter each chapter in order, one after the other, as one would when reading a novel. When this way of reading takes place, then the mourning begins. So’s unpolished rush of fiction, his nascent sketches of characters, his tumbled flood of thoughts give promise of a book that would have stunned the literary world.

Vinny, Darren, and Molly, cousins whose childless aunt just died in a fiery car crash, are the dead woman’s prospective heirs. Their aunt was the Counter, a leading figure of her Cambodian community. She headed an improvised bank, with members who contributed to, borrowed from, and earned interest from the communal funds. The Counter was the one who collected and distributed the money, while taking her cut, and it’s rumored that she possessed a fortune. 

An inheritance from her would be welcomed by the cousins. Molly is back home after an unsuccessful stint as an artist in Manhattan, reluctant to sacrifice her dreams to a lucrative career. Vinny is the lead of the Khmai Khmong Rappers, who spits out rhymes in a mixture of Khmer and English in rhythms that hold his memories of the cadence voiced by Cambodian monks. Darren is making his way through the academic morass of graduate student stipends and applications for fellowships, while his thoughts are still influenced by his days as a stand-up comic, terse and cynical, with a vicious bite. 

His is the voice that dominates in these early chapters and his words are the ones that resonate. Describing Cambodian men at family gatherings, he classifies them by what they drink, “Heineken for the humble, Hennessey for the ballers.” A deeper class difference emerges among the men’s children when they reach middle school--are they going to become yellow or brown, choosing academic success or gangster rhythms, “Asian” or “Cambo”? Or will they sink into the mushy definition of Asian American, which Darren derides with his usual scathing insight, “Seriously, we don’t even eat the same grain of rice.”

While Afterparties examined the legacy inherited by the children of those who survived genocide, what’s offered in the opening chapters of So’s unfinished novel is the unwieldy balance between how to succeed in America without jettisoning the cultural roots of the Cambodian community. His final sentences give hints as to how this might have happened for the three cousins, who are forced to immerse themselves in their dead aunt’s livelihood before receiving the inheritance she’s left them. The sketches of Cambotown and its inhabitants give glimpses of a rich and devastating plot that will never come into being, and the sadness of So’s death becomes a matter of literary grief.

But he buries his conclusion among his torrent of words, where it emerges like a polished knife blade flashing in sunlight: “Some things are just lost. So don’t waste your life thinking about it.”~Janet Brown



The Boy and the Dog by Seishu Hase, translated by Alison Watts (Scribner)

There have been a number of confirmed cases of animals saving their owners or becoming so loyal that they wait for them even if their owners have died. The most famous being the story of Hachiko, an Akita dog that waited for its owner, Hidesaburo Ueno, at Shibuya station for over nine years after Ueno’s death. 

Although Seishu Hase is known in Japan for mostly writing Yakuza crime novels, in his book The Boy and the Dog, he has written a story about a dog named Tamon that makes a five-year journey across Japan to find his beloved owner. 

The book was originally published in the Japanese language as 少年と犬 (Shonen to Inu) in 2020 by Bungeishunju Limited. It won the Naoki Award in 2020. This edition, translated by Alsion Watts, was published in English in 2023 by Scribner. 

It’s six months after the massive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that hit the Tohoku area of Japan on March 11, 2011. At a convenience store in Sendai, a man named Kazumasu, sees  a ragged looking dog standing on the corner of the parking lot. The dog is still there after he makes his purchase. The dog was sitting there just staring at him. 

The dog looks like a German shepherd mix and since there seemed to be no owner, Kazumasa decides to take him home. He notices the dog’s collar with only the dog’s name on it - Tamon, named after Tamoten, a guardian deity. Kazumasa lives with his sister and their mother who suffers from dementia. She sometimes forgets the name of their children. When Kazumasa visits his mother with Tamon, she immediately calls the dog Kaito. 

Although their mother seemed to be happy and in good spirits whenever “Kaito” was with her, Kazumasa knew he needed to make more money so he could help out his sister and be able to put their mother in a home. He accepts a job as driver for a couple of foreign criminals and brings Tamon with him on the job. The job goes without a hitch and the foreign thieves believes that Tamon is their good luck charm. 

Kazumasa’s lucky streak came to an abrupt end. Kazumasa and the three foreign thieves were being chased by a group of Yakuza and Kazumasa crashes the getaway van into a wall. Tamon and only one of the thieves survives. A man named Miguel.  

This is only the start of Tamon’s journey. Tamon will travel with the thief to Niigata who plans on stowing on a boat to leave Japan. He can’t take Tamon with him and Tamon is then brought home by a man who was training in the Japanese Alps when Tamon chased a bear away from him. The runner found Tamon continues his journey and is taken in by a prostitute named Miwa who finds him in the mountains of Shiga Prefecture. 

The day Miwa found Tamon was the day she killed her boyfriend. She decides to turn herself in and lets the dog go. Tamon is then taken in by a man who lives alone on the mountain but continues his journey south. 

In Kagoshima Prefecture, a small boy named Hikaru lives there with his parents. The family moved after the devastating quake. The experience was such a shock to him as he lost his friend Tamon. Since then, the boy has been unable to speak. 

Will Tamon and Hikaru ever be reunited? Can an animal and human be soulmates? Seishu Hase makes you think so. The story will make you believe in miracles. ~Ernie Hoyt

Tezcatlipoca by Kiwamu Sato, translated by Stephen Paul (Yen On)

Tezcatlipoca was originally published in the Japanese language in 2021 by Kadokawa Corporation. It won the Naoki Prize, a prestigious Japanese literary award and was heralded as one of the best mysteries to read by a number of other publications. It was translated into English and published in February of 2023 by Yen On Books. 

It is one of the most astonishing and disturbing novels you will ever read. It blends Aztec mythology and culture with a dose of the mystical and supernatural along with drug cartels, the Yakuza, organized crime syndicates, and illegal activities of the present. The story will take you from the drug cartel war zones in Mexico to the bustling city of Jakarta, Indonesia and ending up in the Kanto area of Japan. 

In order to truly understand the story, it may help to study up on the gods of Aztec culture. Tezcatlipoca is the God of Providence and is considered one of the four sons of  Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, two major deities known as the “Dual Gods”. The name Tezcatlipoca is usually translated as “smoking mirror” from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The festival celebrating Tezcatlipoca is called Toxcatl and involves a human sacrifice.

The story centers are three very different individuals. A Mexican drug lord on the run whose empire is taken over by another cartel, a neglected child who grows up to commit a terrible crime and is locked away for an extended period of time, and a Japanese heart surgeon who loses his license and becomes an illegal organ broker. 

Koshimo, the child of a Mexican mother and Yakuza father grows into a big strong teenager and when he finds his drunken father beating his mother, he easily overpowers him and breaks his neck with his bare hands. His mother was having a flashback of her brother being killed by a narco so she also attacked but Koshimo hit her with one hard slap and she was dead. He casually walked down the stairs to the first floor hardware store and asked the owner to call the police. Koshimo was only thirteen-years-old. 

September 2015, a newspaper article reports that the latest drug war is reaching its final stage after two years of fighting. As with the hometown of Koshimo’s mother, Sinaloa is now the battleground between old Los Casasola and replacing them will be the Dogo Cartel. “The amount of cocaine that crosses the border won’t change. And neither will the United States’ status as the biggest market place”. 

Valmira Casasola is the only surviving member of Los Casasolas. They’ve been ousted by the Dogo Cartel and Valmira has been fleeing for his life. However, he plans to start from scratch to build a new empire and vows to take down the Dogo Cartel as well. He has been in on the fun for quite a while but ends up in Indonesia working at a food cart that sells cobra satays. 

After their Catholic father died, Valmero and his three brothers were indoctrinated into the belief of their abuela, Libertad, who was a firm believer in all of the Aztec gods. As an adult, Valmiro also became more enamored with his indigenous heritage. His food cart in the market was just a cover for selling illicit drugs on the side so he can make contacts to build up his empire again. It is here that he meets a Japanese man who calls himself Tanaka. 

Tanaka or Suenaga as we find out later is an organ broker for a Chinese gang and a militant Islamic organization. However, his main desire was to go back to the operating room in a clean environment. He didn’t want to become just any back alley doctor. He believes his skills could be used in a more productive way.

The two men, former drug kingpin and disgraced heart surgeon, form a plan to corner the market on illegal heart transpants. They presented their plan to the Chinese gang and to an officer of the militant group and a nefarious web of evil was about to be loosed upon the world. What evil will befall the world? Only the God Tezcatlipoca might know the answer. ~Ernie Hoyt


君たちはどう生きるか (Kimitachi wa Dou Ikiruka?) by Genzaburo Yoshino, manga by Shoichi Haga (Magazine House) Japanese text only

The latest Studio Ghibli animation film borrows its Japanese title from a 1938 novel of the same name by Genzaburo Yoshino. However, the film is totally unrelated to the story. I read an updated version of the book in manga form in its original language. The title 君たちはどう生きるか (Kimitachi wa Dou Ikiruka) translates to ”How Will You Live”. The manga was drawn by Shoichi Haga and was published by Magazine House in 2017.

Although it is written in the manga format, about a third of the book is text only with no pictures. The story is set in 1937 in Tokyo. The main character is a fifteen-year old junior high school boy named Shoichi Honda, whom everybody calls Koper (short for Copernicus in Japanese). 

The story opens with Shoichi lying in bed with a fever. He wishes his fever would get worse. He can’t forgive himself for his cowardly action. He tells his uncle, a former editor who has recently moved into his neighborhood, everything that happened and is wondering why he is suffering so much.

Shoichi tells his uncle that he saw his friends being bullied by upperclassmen but he did nothing to help. He feels he betrayed his friends. The following day, his uncle hands him a single notebook. 

Shoichi’s uncle explained to him in the notebook the reason for his suffering is because Shoichi is trying to follow the right path. Shoichi knows what he did was wrong and believes his friends would be unforgiving and yet he knows he must do something to make things right with them. This is just a prelude to what his uncle writes to him in the notebook. 

The story then goes back to the beginning when Shoichi’s uncle moved into town. After helping his uncle move, they take a tram and go to the roof of a department building. Shoichi looks down on all the people and says to his uncle that they all look like molecules. After they get back home and part ways, his uncle says his great discovery today that people are like molecules was similar to Copernicus and thus he was given the nickname Koper. 

The book is mostly a coming of age story as Shoichi, or Coperu, makes new discoveries and learns more about human nature. His uncle continues to write him messages in the notebook about each and every discovery that Shoichi makes. Shoichi tries his best to understand what his uncle is trying to convey and in the end he writes his own response to his uncle’s words. He made a resolution as to how he will live his life in the future.

After reading the book, the thought that crossed my mind the most was what would I do if one of my uncles gave me a notebook with philosophical meanderings that are more than two pages long. I think I would set the notebook aside and not read it. I even asked one of my junior high students if they read the book in its entirety. The response - “Only the manga parts”. 

The manga form does make it a lot easier to understand and the book itself asks the readers at the end, “How will you live?” It is only up to you to decide.~Ernie Hoyt

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova (Graywolf Press)

Borders are mysterious and often troublesome divisions that shift according to political whims and military actions. Only continents, surrounded by oceans,  seem to have borders that resist argument--except for the blurred and amorphous line that separates Europe from Asia. According to the National Geographic Society, this is “an imaginary line, running from the northern Ural Mountains in Russia south to the Caspian and Black Seas.” But to Kapka Kassabova the border between the two continents is found where “Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey converge and diverge…where something like Europe begins and something else ends that is not quite Asia.”

If this definition has a tinge of magic to it, it’s because that’s what Kassabova found along that hidden border. She grew up within its periphery and it calls to her from her home in Scotland. Alone, she returns to the part of Bulgaria that shaped her early life and begins an exploration that’s both spiritual and geographic. She wants to “see the forbidden places of my childhood…that had been out of bounds for two generations.” What she finds is Stranja, an unimaginable wilderness of forest and mountains,scantily inhabited, filled with legends, impermanence, and death.

The history of this part of the world goes beyond the years of the Iron Curtain, when Russian rule turned the region into a “forested Berlin Wall.” Stranja is where people ignore dangers to find a new life in other countries, running from the Soviet bloc, from the Balkan Wars, from Syria. If they’re lucky, they find guides who will lead them along the treacherous paths of The Road to Freedom--or they may end up in unmarked graves.

Kassabova begins her journey by staying still, in one place, in a village of 200 people where women are rumored to have the power of the evil eye, and firewalkers converge upon a sacred spring in an annual ritual that unites Christians and Muslims, Greeks and Bulgarians. “Beware,” she’s told as she becomes a fixture in the village. Stranja is a place that’s hard to enter and is even more difficult to  leave. 

Yet Kassabova lingers there, learning the stories of residents, rediscovering myths, and finding details of lost history that may never have been true. As she delves into the past, the present becomes darker and she realizes “some things are beyond repair.” When she moves on, she’s haunted by the irreparable. “We are not Europe and we are not Asia,” an Eastern Orthodox priest tells her and his words are echoed in other ways by everyone she meets. Every village in Stranja is its own nation state, created by its unique and repetitive history and filled with “ a grieving sensation difficult to describe.”

In a village where people are famous for their longevity, Kassabova is accompanied by dogs that look like “shag-pile carpets on long legs” and as she eats a cup of sheep’s yogurt by the side of a road, a bear comes into view and vanishes into the undergrowth. Everyone she meets is given full voice in unforgettable character sketches, from the human-smuggler whom she flees from on a deserted mountain road to the beautiful woman who walked for a week to reach the Greek border and now lives on the Street of Widows, growing the roses that once were her dead husband’s favorite flower. 

Border is a trip back into the past, a foray into the future, a quest for home. In this undefined part of the world, it doesn’t matter which continent the region is claimed by. It’s a place that people pass through in search of safety and they have done so throughout recorded time. Because she was born into it, Kapka Kassabova was almost reclaimed by it. What she found there the rest of us can only discover through her words in her strange, illuminating, and seductive book.~Janet Brown



Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel by Shahnaz Habib (Catapult)

“I am basically the opposite of Anthony Bourdain. Not cool, not adventurous,” Shahnaz Habib confesses as she begins Airplane Mode. When she travels to a new place, she approaches it cautiously, venturing into it a few steps at a time and gradually increasing her explorations. Although she compares herself to a young, white, American female traveler whom she meets in Istanbul,  a girl propelled by ticking off sights she’s seen from a list of guidebook recommendations and who easily encapsulates what she was exposed to in a single sentence, Habib is brown, Muslim, who grew up in what is dismissed as the Third World. She’s  unaccompanied by this other girl’s sense of racial confidence and while she thinks of this as a deficiency, it’s truthfully an asset. Habib grew up outside of the Western bubble, in Southern India and she knows the world isn’t “neatly packaged” as it is presented in a guidebook. That viewpoint is a privileged one and its privilege is a barrier. “I didn’t want a veil between me and the world,” she says and does her best to ignore Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, and the rest of the books that offer packaged experiences. 

While she ponders the differences in travel that separate her from the woman she encountered in Istanbul, she begins to explore the history of travel, which began in the Western world as an aristocratic--and white male-- pursuit. Young noblemen were expected to make the Grand Tour of European capitals before they settled into their comfortable lives at home, while their female counterparts contented themselves with strolls down country lanes and visits to other people’s manor houses. 

Even those strolls were a recent embellishment. “Walking for pleasure” and savoring the beauties of the natural world became popular through the poems of Wordsworth and the heroines in Jane Austen novels in the late 17th century. Continental travel for the untitled inhabitants of the West sprang into being in the early 1800s with the first Baedeker guidebook published in 1827. Slowly the mass tourism industry, that now contributes eight trillion dollars to the global economy, was born.

In its nascent stages, travel for pleasure was reserved for white tourists who wanted trips that showed them the wonders of the world while embarking upon no adventures in achieving this goal. Comfort was paramount, as well as a carefully maintained distance between the observer and the observed. Baedeker was consulted as frequently as the Bible and perhaps with even greater fervor.

Although 19th century travelers couldn’t achieve the glamor of those who made the Grand Tour, they were still people of means. Using a passport became a status symbol and a class delineator, an ironic development when considering that this document used to be a way to keep people at home. Originally a passport served as a proof of residency, not as an invitation to explore. 

This was the underpinning of today’s “passportism” where scholars are denied entry to a country that welcomes them professionally because as one man put it, “the color of my passport was wrong.” As peasants in the 18th century were kept at home because of what was written on their passports, so are others three hundred years later if they fail to produce the required documents. 

Going back to the earliest travelers, Habib compares Marco Polo, an Italian merchant who had commercial reasons for his adventures with the North African, Ibn Battuta, who began his odyssey with a trip to Mecca. Each man spent twenty-four years away from home, but while Polo had a financial impetus. Battuta expanded his sacred pilgrimage into a journey prompted solely by curiosity, one that left “a legacy of wonder” as opposed to the “amused knowingness” conveyed by white Western travelers.

Habib continues her exploration and careful dissection of travel in essays that look beyond the stereotypical journey. She shows how motherhood turned her into a connoisseur of New York city bus routes, exploring different boroughs that make up the city by staring out of windows with a baby in her arms. She admits that her favorite form of public transportation is a carousel, which keeps passengers in perpetual motion while always seeing the same things as they ride. Cleverly and plausibly she links that activity to modern tourism, where “we are not moving from place to place” but “from one moment in time to another.”

Looking at the consumerist nature of travel, where we succumb to wanderlust because of its marketing schemes, Habib claims everyone--”travelers and nomads and vagrants” are tourists “who have bought into the ultimate tourist myth, that we can escape tourism and simply travel.” 

Early in her first essay, Habib compares her solo trip to Istanbul with the experience she had in that city years later when she moved there with her husband and daughter. Without “the confusion and loneliness of traveling,” the city that had baffled her no longer contained a shopping list of sites to see but opened up, “blooming out of the rich soil of daily life.”

This is what changes a tourist into a traveler, as Habib illustrates in her delightful essay on bougainvillea. It’s not enough to come and stare. The painful process of transplanting, renaming, relearning, and putting down fresh roots is the only way to learn a new place as it turns a newcomer into one of its own. How else to escape falling prey to what Habib terms “the colonial knowledge sandwich?” ~Janet Brown

The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura, translated by Lucy North (Faber & Faber)

Natsuko Imamura is a Japanese writer who has been nominated three times for the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. She won the award in 2019 for novel むらさきのスカートの女 (Murasaki no Skirt no Onna). 

The Woman in the Purple Skirt is the English translation of her Akutagawa Prize winner. It was published in English in 2022 by Lucy North, a British translator of Japanese fiction and nonfiction who also has a PhD in modern Japanese literature from Harvard University. 

The narrator of the story lives near the woman in a purple skirt. The woman being watched always wears a purple skirt which is how she got her name. The narrator has already found out where the woman in the purple skirt lives. She has also kept a diary of the woman in the purple skirt’s schedule; when she works, when she doesn’t work. Where she goes, where she sits in the local park. The woman tells herself she wants to get to know the woman in the purple skirt. She wants to become friends with her. 

Why the woman in the yellow cardigan wants to get to know the woman in the purple skirt is a mystery. It’s a mystery to herself as well. She thinks it would be strange to just go up to the woman and say, “I want to be friends with you”. She just wants to talk to her and tells herself, “it’s not as if I’m trying to make a pass at her”. 

The woman in the purple skirt doesn’t know she’s being watched. Even if she did, it appears that she does not give a care in the world. The narrator calls herself the woman in the yellow cardigan. As the woman in the yellow cardigan realizes that the woman in the purple skirt has been out of a job for a few months, she leaves a job offer magazine where the woman in the purple skirt will surely find it. 

A few days later, the woman in the purple skirt is hired by a company. lt happens to be the same hotel where the woman in the yellow cardigan works. The narrator continues to watch the woman in the purple skirt throughout her entire training period but has yet to introduce herself. 


The narrator almost didn’t recognize the woman in the purple skirt because she came to work wearing different clothes. At first the new employee was very timid and her voice wasn’t loud enough to satisfy the Hotel Manager. However, as the months pass, she becomes quite adept at her job. Her co-workers start talking to her more frequently and she is often invited out for lunch or for drinks after work.

The narrator has yet to introduce herself so she could become friends with the woman she formerly called the woman in the purple skirt. The woman was really good at her job and she was also very friendly with the Hotel Manager. Soon, rumors spread that she is seeing the Hotel Manager who is a married man. The other workers are also surprised at the speed of her promotion and also find out she is getting paid more than they are. 

Her co-workers who were formerly kind to her now began to ignore her and when the head of the Housekeeping Department suggested that some of the hotel’s employees were taking towels and other amenities from the rooms, the first one to be blamed was the former the newest employee. After being accused of stealing by the others, she left the hotel in tears.

The narrator goes to the woman’s apartment to see if she is okay. She notices a familiar car in front of the apartment as well. It is the Hotel Manager. The woman lives on the second floor of a pretty dilapidated building and when she and the Hotel Manager have a scuffle, the Hotel Manager falls down the stairs and looks to be dead. 

The narrator finally rushes to the woman and tells her she will take care of everything. She believes it was fate that she can help the woman leave this town. She would quit the hotel herself and they could become traveling companions. The narrator plans everything out very carefully, leaves a note and some money for the woman to leave first, saying she would meet her later. But not everything turns out as planned.

Imamura’s story reads like a thriller but the protagonist doesn’t seem to want to hurt the person she’s been stalking. It is one of the creepiest horror stories without any blood that you may ever read. It is up to the reader to decide what happened to the woman in the purple skirt. It’s also hard to consider the narrator as a villain as she doesn’t want to harm her obsession. She only wants to become friends with her. Yes, you should beware of strangers who want to become your friend. ~Ernie Hoyt