The Ainu and the Bear : The Gift of the Cycle of Life by Ryo Michico, illustrated by Kobayashi Toshiya, translated by Deborah Davidson and Owaki Noriyoshi (R.I.C. Publications)

The R.I.C. Story Chest series published by R.I.C. Publications is a publisher that focuses on releasing Japanese picture books in English. The Ainu and the Bear is one of those books. It introduces young people to a story by northern Japan’s indigenous people - the Ainu. 

The Ainu and the Bear was originally published in the Japanese language as Iomante in 2005 by Parol-sha. The English version became available in 2010 and includes a CD which narrates the story. Also on the CD is a song titled “Iomante Upopo” by Umeko Ando, an Ainu of the Tokashi region in Hokkaido. 

The original title of the book, Iomante, is the name of the “sending” ceremony performed by the Ainu. The sub-title [The Gift of the Cycle of Life] will give the reader an idea of what the story is about. The Ainu believe that “every grain of millet, and every piece of meat and fish, contains the life of another”. As narrated in the story, “We feed on the life of others. We are a part of a cycle of fleshly and spiritual life. We all partake in the blessing of the cycle of life. We all partake in the blessing of the cycle of life”. 

The Ainu believe that the animals they kill and eat are all provided by the Kimun kamuy, mountain gods who take the form of bears when in the human world. They believe that kamuy are gods who live in both the human and non-human things in the human world but their true home is the land of the gods.  This story is told from two perspectives, a newborn bear and an Ainu boy. The climax of the story being the Iomante. 

The Iomante or bear “sending” ceremony is an Ainu tradition in which a bear cub is raised by the village and then killed in a ceremony “to relieve it of its flesh so that it may return to the land of the kamuy”. 

The story opens with the killing of a mother bear and how a newborn bear smells humans for the first time. We then listen to an Ainu boy talking about his father going on a hunt. When the boy’s father returns, he says to his son, “Look what Kimun kamuy has given us” and shows the boy a small bear cub. The boy is a little scared as it’s his first time smelling the scent of a bear. The father tells his son, “But as tiny as she is, she’s still a true Kimun kamuy. She’s an honored guiest who comes to us from the land of the gods”. 

The village celebrates by eating ohaw, a type of stew filled with meat and vegetables. The boy and the people of his village raise the bear cub as if it is a child of their own. The bear grows and becomes quite strong. It can no longer stay in the house and must be raised in a cage. 

The bear becomes increasingly wild and makes the boy scared to get close to her. The father tells him, “She’s starting to get homesick for the land of the kamuy, that’s all”. The boy still doesn’t understand until his father says, “Where her mother is”.  The boy realizes the bear is lonely for her mother which is why she is howling. 

The father then reminds the son of when he first brought the bear cub home and how the village feasted on ohaw. The boy thinks back to the huge chunk of meat, the beautiful bear fur. Only now does the boy understand that the meat of the ohaw was the meat of the mother bear. Then the father tells his son that they must send the grown bear back to the land of the kamuy. 

The story is a fascinating look into the rituals and traditions of the Ainu people. The Japanese government abolished the Iomante in 1955. However, the law was rescinded in 2007, “because the Ministry of Environment of Japan announced that animal ceremonies were generally regarded as an exception to the animal rights of Japan in October 2006”. I’m sure the decision was a blow to animal rights activists, but in my opinion, I don’t see the difference between raising a bear cub for food as being any different from raising cattle for beef or raising pigs for pork. 

The moral of the story is about having respect for the animals whose lives are taken, so that we can eat and be nourished by them. It is my belief that governments should respect indigenous people as the indigenous people respect animals and life. ~Ernie Hoyt

Coming Home Crazy by Bill Holm (Milkweed Editions)

With ten rooms of books and over 3,500 sections, Powell’s City of Books has filled a city block in Portland, Oregon for the past fifty-three years, and  claims to be the largest new-and-used bookstore in the world. It certainly is one of the most enticing, with its shelves filled with surprises and its cavernous rooms somehow managing to feel cozy. A trip to Powell’s is always a treasure hunt and it’s impossible to stick to a book budget when browsing in that place. 

On a recent expedition, I made it to only two sections--Travel Literature and Asian History--and left with a book bag that strained at its seams. Among my purchases was a book whose title had always intrigued me but that I’d never read, Coming Home Crazy by Bill Holm. 

Anyone who has lived anywhere in Asia, with the possible exception of Singapore, is going to come back to the West feeling a wild disorientation that verges on insanity. Holm cites The Crackup, where Scott Fitzgerald said he knew he was crazy when he couldn’t look at two opposing ideas at the same time. China, Holm says, has the opposite effect, as a place that makes it impossible to ever “see again singly.” People who return from the Middle Kingdom come home with a “bifurcated consciousness.” The antithesis to “every idea in your life and culture looks as sane and reasonable as the idea itself--” and sometimes even more so.

Although this beginning hints at a work of comparisons and contrasts, what follows is a collection of essays that follow a strange sort of alphabetical order, with a scrambled sense of time. After living with a language that can’t be alphabetized, Holm is delighted to point out the random nature of the A to Z classification. By beginning with an essay on AIDS and ending with a piece that explains the Chinese custom of zou houmen, (“going through the back door” to get a desired result), he creates a crazy quilt of unrelated patchwork pieces.

The only way to read this book is to ignore the alphabet. Holm offers suggestions that might give his readers a narrative thread but his choices are as idiosyncratic as his structure. After floundering in attempts to find a beginning, middle, and end, readers may find themselves wishing that Holms had simply published the journals that these pieces seemed to have emerged from.

Nevertheless, within the chaotic tumble of anecdotes and impressions there’s some very good writing and a Picassoesque portrait of what one city in China, Xi’an, felt like to a displaced Midwesterner from 1986-1987. 

As a “waiguoren,” a Western foreigner, Holm was an object of curiosity, one that was inexplicable and fascinating. Reluctant to learn Chinese because it would strip him of his adult authority and take him back into childhood, he salutes his Chinese students in their study of English because they “exhibit a kind of courage” that he lacks himself. Swiftly he falls in love with the idea of teaching people who value books and are delighted to encounter English literature--”Whitman, Thoreau, Yeats…It was all candy, all delight.”

Holm is less than delighted with the frugal and Spartan comforts of his life in China but  he finds an essential dimension in how the people find “celebration in their daily lives.” The ritual of making dumplings is one he explains step-by-step, from buying pork and vegetables in the market, to chopping, stuffing, and shaping in the company of friends in a home kitchen. Eating them is “a mountain, a dinner party, close to gluttony” and a sacrament of pure pleasure.

Pleasure is the hallmark of Holm’s essays. According to him, Nixon wasn’t the one who opened China to the West. Walt Disney did. Sunday evening was when people clustered around TV sets to watch Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and the gang cavort in an hour of cartoons.

And under a government of rigid control with a bloody history that would re-erupt on June 4 in 1989, Chinese people, Holm claims, are “anarchically free” so long as they avoid actions that are overt. The small regulations of daily living are freely and happily ignored in a society that he sees as operatic, “the Asian Italy.”

It would be interesting to go to Xi’an in 2024, decades after Holm spent his year there, to see how many of his observations still ring true. Carried as an anti-guidebook, his collection of impressions and opinions could launch explorations that may prompt surprise, delight, and a whole new attack of “coming home crazy.”~Janet Brown

Knife by Salman Rushdie (Random House)

In 1988, Salman Rushdie became a symbol. His fifth novel, The Satanic Verses, enraged the Muslim world and led the Ayatolla Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, to call for his assassination. 

A fatwah was issued, a legal decree that is irrevocable. It guarantees that as long as Rushdie draws breath, he can be murdered with impunity, under Shia Islamic law.  It also guaranteed that to millions of people, Rushdie was a target while to millions more he was an icon of free speech. 

A target? An icon? When Rushdie decided to live without fear and with pleasure, then he was derided as a “party animal.” It took him almost thirty years to find a place where he could be happy and escape the different narratives that tried to put him in an assortment of pigeonholes. He was, he said, “famous not so much for my books as for the mishaps of my life.”

Then, six years later,  soon before his twenty-first novel was released, he went to speak at the Chautauqua Institution. An idyllic spot in rural New York, this is a place that, for 150 years, has dedicated itself to ideas, thoughts, and discussion that would foster the growth of a civil society. It’s a sanctuary that has never seen violence. So when a man burst out of the audience as Rushdie began to speak, nobody moved in the minute or two that it took the assailant to reach the stage. Until he pulled out a knife and began to stab, 27 seconds passed before someone realized this was not performance art.

In under half a minute, Rushdie is almost mortally wounded in an attack that would change his life once again, trying to pin him to a fate that was prompted by somebody else’s actions. He’s 75 years old. It will  take him six weeks to leave his hospital bed and far longer than that to undergo agonizing therapy. “You’re lucky,” a doctor told him, “that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.”

But the flawed attack puts Rushdie in “a one-eyed, one-handed world.” The simple act of tooth-brushing becomes an ordeal and before his left hand is mobile again, a therapist has to chip away at a thick layer of dried blood. His right eye is gone forever. The knife had reached the optic nerve.

But even when he was comatose, Rushdie’s creativity was brilliantly alive. Unconscious, he envisioned palaces whose building blocks were the alphabet and when he finally opened his surviving eye, he saw golden letters floating between his bed and the people who stood beside it. From the very beginning of this, he knew that although “the knife had severed me…language was my knife.” 

Unable to return home for security reasons once he’s released from the hospital, he still has his “home in literature and the imagination.” He claims his story and reclaims his life. He writes Knife.

Reading this book is a humbling and inspiring experience. Rushdie’s language is playful and discursive, thoughtful and creative. Being given an entrance to his mind and trying to keep up with him is dizzying and sometimes vexing, and his story, told without a softening filter, is often harrowing. But it never lapses into self-pity. A man who was brutally forced out of the life he had created takes full possession of where he has been put by someone who attacked him as a symbol that was “disingenuous.” In his mid-seventies, Rushdie seizes his “second chance” at being alive without clinging to “ an irretrievably lost past.” In his old age, this ageless artist continues to “sing the truth and name the liars.” ~Janet Brown

Reading the Room by Paul Yamazaki (Ode Books)

There are only a few legendary bookstores in the world--Foyles of London, Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and San Francisco’s City Lights, Booksellers and Publishers. Foyles is famous for having thirty miles of books, Shakespeare and Company for being a magnet for 20th Century literary giants--Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein. City Lights was co-founded by one of the most famous Beat poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and then became well-known for publishing Allan Ginsberg’s Howl, when nobody else dared to put it into print.

Its luster has been quietly enhanced over the past fifty years by a man who is famous only to writers, publishers, and other booksellers. Paul Yamazaki has shaped and sharpened the collection of books that fill the shelves at City Light since 1970, only now emerging into a book of his own. Appropriately, this is a series of conversations with other booksellers, in a book that has been published by another bookstore, Chicago’s Seminary Co-op.

Yamazaki came to San Francisco in 1967, walking the streets of Haight-Ashbury in a pair of wing-tip shoes, dressed in a London Fog jacket and brown slacks. He arrived to go to college at his parents’ insistence and the college he chose was a hotbed of dissent, San Francisco State. Not an academically-minded student and admittedly “more conservative than my parents,” this former high school football player immersed himself in the politics of the time, becoming a member of the Asian American Political Alliance. Thrown in jail for “inciting a riot,” a young poet who worked at City Lights convinced Ferlinghetti to get Yamazaki an early prison release by hiring him to work at the bookstore. He’s been there ever since.

“Yamazaki, you work in a bookstore--this bookstore?” his high school English teacher demanded when he encountered his former “memorably bad” student in the aisles of City Lights. Yamazaki doesn’t say what his job was by that time but he went from packing boxes of books to selecting the 30,000 titles that are placed on the bookstore’s shelves. He was instrumental in the decision to go from a store that sold only paperbacks to one that included new release hardcovers, a decision that saved the store from closing its doors forever. It’s now celebrating its 70th anniversary.

“We average 1.3 copies per title,” Yamazaki says, on shelves so tightly packed that booksellers have to move a small library in order to make room for a new volume. And shelving is not a casual activity--Yamazaki wants the shelves to create “a shimmering conversation between the books. When they’re placed side by side, they talk to one another.” 

His goal is to fill the store with books that offer “possibility and resistance,” and the joy that comes with “happiness through knowledge.” “We’ve never been looking for comfort,” he says, “Curiosity is a fundamental tool of a bookseller.” 

“At a great store, you can look through twelve well-selected serendipitous linear inches to find a universe.” In City Lights, a bookstore that’s on the site of a former church and a topless barber shop, Paul Yamazaki has shaped a multitude of challenging, joyful universes. ~Janet Brown

Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide by Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt, illustrated by Tatsuya Morino (Kodansha)

Ghost stories have been around for a long time. They are told around campfires or at slumber parties. A number of movies have featured a wide array of ghosts as well. Ghost stories are not always horror stories as some may believe. In Japan, ghost stories and other stories of the supernatural are called kaidan. They became popular with the publication of Lafcadio Hearn’s book Kwaidan which is a play on the words “kowai” which means scary and “dan” which means “stories”, published in 1904. 

Many books in English have translated the term “yokai” from demon to ghost to spectre. However, none of these translations are fitting to the Japanese term. For Japanese, “yokai” are “yokai”. The kanji is written as 妖怪 which more closely translates to “other worldly”. 

In this book, the term yokai refers to “mythical, supernatural creatures that have populated generations of Japanese fairy tales and folk stories”. They are the things that “go bump in the night, the faces behind inexplicable phenomena, the personalities that fate often deals us”.

The authors have done extensive research into the history of yokai. One of their references they often use and has the most comprehensive illustrations of yokai are from Sekien Toriyama’s Gazu Hyakki Yakko, translated into English as The Illustrated Demons’ Night Parade which he drew in 1776. 

Another major reference the authors used was Tono Monogatari (Tales of Tono) which was written by Kunio Yanagita. It is a collection of folktales and yokai stories from the Tohoku region of Japan and was originally published in 1912 and remains in print today. 

In the 1960s, it was due to the comic series Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro by Shigeru Mizuki that sparked another fad in all things yokai. The mang would be adapted into a popular and successful anime series as well. 

In Yokai Attack! The reader is not only introduced to a number of different types of yokai but also gives you information on what to do in case you encounter one. The Japanese yokai have been around for centuries. They can be seen “in museums worldwide on scrolls, screens, woodblock prints, and other traditional forms of Japanese art”. 

The authors remind readers that this book is not a comprehensive encyclopedia of yokai and is not a scholarly work. It is a collection of conventional wisdom concerning the yokai. It is about what the average Japanese already knows about them. it’s more of an introduction to yokai culture for the novice. 

The authors group the yokai into five specific categories - Ferocious Fiends, “the sorts of creatures you wouldn’t want to encounter in a dark alley (or a bright one, for that matter); Gruesome Gourmets feature yokai with “peculiar eating habits). Annoying Neightbors are the types of yokai you hope never move in next door; The Sexy and Slimy which are yokai that enchant their prey, and finally there are The Wimps which are rather self-explanatory. The kind of yokai that are more afraid of you than you are of them. 

The book includes full color illustrations of all the yokai featured. The authors also provide the names of yokai in English, their gender, height, weight, and distinctive personalities. And as the authors state at the beginning of the book, “So forget Godzilla. Forge the giant beasties karate-chopped into oblivion by endless incarnations of Ultram, Kamen Rider,and the Power Rangers. Forget the Pocket Monsters. Forget Sadako from The Ring and that creepy all-white kid from The Grudge. Forget everything you know about Japanese tales of terror”. 

“If you want to survive an encounter with a member of Japan’s most fearsome and fascinating bunch of monsters, you’ve got some reading to do”. ~Ernie Hoyt

Foreigners Who Loved Japan by Makoto Naito and Ken Naito (Kodansha)

I am a foreigner who loves Japan. I’ve made it my adopted home for the last thirty years and plan to live here until my days are over. So when I came across a book titled Foreigners Who Loved Japan, I knew I had to read it. I was under the assumption that I would be familiar with all the individuals whose stories are told. Imagine my surprise when I knew less than half of the twenty foreign nationals featured. 

The twenty individuals featured in this book not only loved Japan but they also contributed to the country in some way. Japan has a long history of being a “closed” country and every Japanese student learns who the first foreigner was that was granted access to the country and also given permission to spread his message of Christianity.

The first person to be featured is Portuguese Jesuit priest Francisco Xavier. He reached the shores of Kagoshima in present day Kyushu in 1549. He was taken to see Shimazu Takahisa, lord of Kagoshima. When Xavier showed Takahisa a picture of Mary holding the baby Jesus, “Takahisa was struck by its holy aura and fell to his knee in a display of reverence”. Takahisa would give permission to Xavier to build a church and spread the Gospel of God. Xavier is still honored as the man who brought the Christian God to the country. 

Luis Frois was another Christian missionary and was also one of the first of the Portuguese Jesuit priests to come to Japan. He is known for writing reports about Japan and penned the book The History of Japan in 1585. He would gain the trust of one of Japan’s most famous bushi (samurai warriors), Oda Nobunaga. A man known for being one of the unifiers of Japan at the end of the Sengoku or Warring States era.

It wasn’t just Portuguese Jesuit priests who fell in love with what was still a mysterious country. Englishman William Adams joined a Dutch trading fleet traveling to the Far East but there was trouble at sea and after drifting in the ocean, they reached the shores at Usuki in Bungo which is now present-day Oita Prefecture. Adams would become an advisor to Japan’s first Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. Novelist James Clavell’s main protagonist in Shogun, William Blackthorne is based on William Adams who would later take a Japanese wife and also take the name Miura Anjin. He would also teach the Japanese to be better shipbuilders.

One of the most popular foreigners who really loved Japan and that almost every Japanese citizen knows is Lafcadio Hearn who is also known as Koizumi Yakumo. He wrote a number of books and essays on Japan. He is mostly responsible for introducing Japanese horror to English speaking readers with his book Kaidan, also known as Kwaidan. 

Other prominent foreigners who loved Japan that are featured in this book are Phiipp Franz von Siebold who taught the latest medical techniques to the Japanese, American James Curtis Hepburn who created the Hepburn system of romanization of the Japanese language, Henry James Black, Japan’s first foreign performer who took the stage name Kairakutei. 

Not all of the featured foreigners remained in Japan but their contributions to Japanese society remains. Their stories and why they came to Japan and fell in love with it will also make you want to visit this country and to see firsthand what they experienced. 

I’m making a minor contribution to the Japanese by teaching Japanese students English at an English Conversation School. Perhaps one day I will also be featured in a book such as this. One can only hope. ~Ernie Hoyt

Strange Foods: Bush Meat, Bats, and Butterflies by Jerry Hopkins, photographs by Michael Freeman (Tuttle)

What we think is delicious and what we recoil from as disgusting is determined by our geography, history, and sheer good luck. Nothing points that out like one of the first photographs in the opening pages of Strange Foods. If you think the image of a baby calf on a plate, still in fetal form, is revolting, ask yourself how is that more quelling than a dish made with veal? Would you rather eat a calf that isn’t yet alive or one that’s knocked on the head when it’s a living, breathing, cute little baby? What’s the difference?

This question is posed again and again throughout this provocative book and Jerry Hopkins is the right man to pose it. When his youngest child was born at home, Hopkins refrigerated the expelled placenta, later turning it into a paté for guests at the christening party. Nobody died.

“No one is sure what the first humans ate,” Hopkins says, but it’s a sure thing that they wouldn’t have turned down a dish made of little pink baby mole rats that’s eaten in modern India. Probably the French during the Franco-Prussian War’s Siege of Paris wouldn’t have spurned that either back in 1871, when people flocked to stalls that sold dog and cat meat. Starvation breeds exotic tastes.

Horse meat has been a staple throughout human history, with U.S entrepreneurs in our present day buying wild horses to slaughter and sending their meat to Europe and Japan. Thirty years ago, Seattle’s famous public market had a stall selling steaks, roasts, and ground meat that came from mustangs in Montana.

Cows or horses? Both are livestock but only one is commonly raised for food. However in Mexico, when Columbus first showed up, the only domestic livestock raised for human consumption were turkeys and dogs. In the northeast of Thailand, in a distant province where life is rough, dog meat is a staple and, Hopkins reports, in the civilized modern city of Guangzhou dogs and cats wait to be bought, killed, and butchered on the spot—along with deer, pigeons, rabbits, and guinea pigs—”a take-away zoo.”

When mad cow disease emerged in Europe, suddenly kangaroo, ostrich, and zebra appeared on supermarket meat counters as “exotic meat.” Beefalo was a popular meat during a period of soaring U.S beef prices and in Alaska, consumers happily chow down on reindeer sausage, swallowing Rudolph and his colleagues without a qualm. Still, the thought of elephant meat on the menus of African restaurants makes many a Westerner turn pallid.

In the 1970s, muktuk was sold as a snack at an Alaskan state fair. Bits of the skin and blubber from a beluga whale, it was chewy and flavorless, clearly an acquired taste and to the Inuit of Alaska, almost sacramental. The Arctic offers little in the way of food and whale hunting is still one of the chief means of subsistence. This isn’t necessarily true of Japan, a highly developed country that consumes large amounts of whale meat. It’s indubitably more healthy than more conventional options. “Richer in protein, whale meat has fewer calories than beef or pork, and it is substantially lower in cholesterol.” Whales are rapidly increasing in number around the world, Hopkins reports, and opposition to whaling is decreasing. Who knows? If we can order shark steak in fine dining establishments, will whale be on the menu soon?

Hopkins made his home in Thailand where he lived until his death in 2018. Michael Freeman has spent most of his career in Southeast Asia. The two of them have encountered—and eaten— insects, silk worm larvae, bats, scorpions, and partially-formed chicken embryos still in the shell. They are proponents of a truth that prevails in their book: Anything can be delicious if it meets a kitchen with a clever cook. To back this up, recipes appear in almost every chapter to challenge the squeamish and entice gastronomic adventurers. Rootworm Beetle Dip, anyone? (I don’t know about you, but I’d rather eat that than the classic Scottish meal made from sheep’s stomach and lungs—haggis? No, thanks!)—Janet Brown

Osamu Dazai's The Setting Sun : The Manga Edition by Osamu Dazai, translated by Makiko Itoh (Tuttle)

Osamu Dazai whose real name is Shuji Tsushima is a Japanese writer who was born in Kanagi in Aomori Prefecture. His most well known work is 人間失格 (Ningen Shikaku) which was later translated into English with the title No Longer Human. 

His novel, The Setting Sun, was first serialized in a literary magazine titled Shincho between July and October of 1947. The original title was 斜陽 (Shayo) and was published in book form in later that year. 

Now in 2024 Tuttle has published Osamu Dazai’s The Setting Sun : The Manga Edition and is retold and illustrated by Cocco Kashiwaya. A manga artist who debuted in 1990 in Booquet Comics, a sister comic to the Shojo Manga (Girls Comic) Margaret. It was translated into English by Makiko Itoh. 

The story begins at the end of World War 2. An aristocratic family now find themselves impoverished and are forced to sell their home in order to survive.  Kazuko, a young and divorced woman who lives with her mother is told by her uncle that since Japan has surrendered, their life of luxury is no longer possible. 

Kazuko’s father died ten years prior and it was her Uncle Wada who has been supporting them since the war ended. He tells the two that they have no choice but to sell the house and that the two should move to the countryside. Her younger brother who was an aspiring writer was sent off to war and has not been heard from since. 

The night before the two were going to move to Izu, Kazuko’s mother was trying to sleep but kept murmuring, “Because Kazuko is here. I’m going to Izu. Because of Kazuko… Because Kazuko…Because Kazuko is here with me”. 

But then she heard her mother say, “And what if…Kazuko wasn’t here. I’d prefer to die!”. Her mother was having a complete mental meltdown shouting, “I WISH I COULD DIE!”. Kazuko’s mother has always been a pillar of strength so Kazuko was shocked to see her mother in this state of hysteria. 

Even after the death of Kazuko’s father, after Kazukogot married then divorced, when Kazuko came home with a baby in her belly, when the baby was stillborn, when Kazuko was taken ill, and when her younger brother did bad things, during the ten years after Father died, Kazuko’s mother was the same as she always been - easy-going and gentle. 

It was at night when Kazuko thought that as children, she and her brother were spoiled. She had not realized what a great life she had. She thought, “Oh, to have no money! What a horrible, irredeemable hell this is”. 

The next day, her mother acted if nothing happened and they moved to Izu without incident. However, due to Kazuko’s carelessness, she almost burned down the house. After that, she was determined to become a rugged country woman.

Then one day, her younger brother appeared. He goes back to his old ways, drinking and hanging out with his mentor, a writer he admires named Uehara who also has love for the bottle and women. Kazuko had met him while she was still married.

After the death of Kazuko’s mother, she finds herself thinking more and more about Uehara and how much she loves him and how she wants to have his baby even though she knows he’s an alcoholic. She is determined to live her life for love even if it means breaking with traditional conventions. She thinks of herself as a revolutionary - a revolutionary for love. But…will she find true happiness?

Most of Osamu Dazai’s novels are semi-autobiographical and they can be very bleak and depressing. In this story, Kazuko’s character was based on a woman named after the writer and poet Shizuka Ota who Dazai had an affair with while he was still married. Kazuko’s actions may seem mild by today’s standard but if you keep in mind the timeframe of when the story took place. Kazuko may be considered a true revolutionary. ~Ernie Hoyt

Getting Closer to Japan : Getting Along with the Japanese by Kate Elwood (ASK Co., Ltd.)

As of January 13 next year (2025), I will have been living in Japan for thirty years. Although my mother is Japanese and I lived in Tokyo, Japan during my elementary school years, albeit, at a family annex for military families called Grant Heights, I may have found Kate Elwood’s Getting Along with the Japanese an excellent reference for living and working in Japan before my move. 

According to the publisher, Getting Closer to Japan series is a series of books for those who:

• would like to get accustomed to the life in Japan quickly

• feel communicating with the Japanese is difficult

• want to learn the Japanese way of thinking

• want to enjoy life in Japan

There are five books in the series. Aside from Getting Along with the Japanese, other titles in the series include Living in Japan by Andy D. Para, Working in Japan by Bruce Rutledge, Japanese Industry by William Carter, and Japanese Culture by Naoki Takei.

All the books give useful information one needs to know if they plan to have an extended stay in Japan. The books are written by business people sharing their own experiences of the trouble, in living, working, and understanding Japanese people and Japanese culture. At the end of each chapter are useful words and phrases related to the subject being discussed. 

Getting Along with the Japanese is broken down into three sections. The first section is Twelve Key Words Useful in Understanding the Japanese. It focuses on words such as gaijin (outsider / foreigner), wa (group harmony), tatemae and honne (surface feelings vs real feelings), gaman (endurance) and how the words are related to business culture. 

The first chapter is an example of what it’s like to be a gaijin in a Japanese company. Steve Wilson started working in Japan three years ago. He enjoys his job and has a good relationship with his co-workers. However, it’s been three years and Steve wonders why his colleagues seem to keep him at a distance. He notices that Japanese employees who joined the company after him seem to blend in quickly and become more relaxed in a short span of time. 

Even non-business people may find this a little hard to understand. Even if they were born and raised in Japan but have foreign parents, they will always be treated like gaijin. It doesn’t matter how long you have been living in Japan. If you are a foreigner, or like me, have one foreign parent, you will still be treated like a gaijin. 

The second section focuses on direct contact with Japanese people. Nancy Evans met a Japanese client who said to her in English, “My name is Hori”. So, throughout the evening, she called the man Hori, only to find out that Hori was the man’s family name. It is rare and may even be considered rude to call someone by their first name. It would be more proper to add the honorific -san after the family name. So Ms Evans should have called Hori, Hori-san. 

The final section deals with life events such as weddings and funerals. If you’ve never been to a Japanese wedding or a Japanese funeral, there are many things you need to know before you attend such an event. Getting Along with the Japanese will help you answer questions you may have without having to rely on anyone else. 

As a longtime resident of Japan, I always enjoy reading other people’s experience of living and working in Japan and what kinds of situations they find confusing, amusing, or even irritating. It’s also interesting to read about the types of culture shock they may have had as well. 

If you plan on working and living in Japan, or if you are just interested in Japanese culture, the Getting Closer to Japan series may be the series for you. ~Ernie Hoyt

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (Knopf)

When two little girls disappear after playing on a deserted stretch of beach one summer’s day, the small city of Zavoyko on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula is besieged with tinges of fear. Children are confined to their homes, young women are flooded with memories of an older girl who vanished years before and was never seen again. A woman who claims she saw the two children entering a black car driven by a man on the afternoon of their disappearance has no details that could help the local police in the search for the girls and her story is disregarded. Eleven months later the mother of the two missing children meets the mother of the lost teenager and is given a clue that might allow her to know what became of all three girls.

A novel with the basic plot of a conventional mystery becomes far more than that. Zavoyko is a divided community, with white residents, “real Russians,” on one side and indigenous people, grouped together as “natives,” on the other. And yet the city is small enough that lives within it intertwine and intermingle when they are brought together by tragedies. When Marina, the mother of the little girls, finally meets Alla, the mother of the teenager, their racial differences are transcended by their shared pain.

In chapters that function almost as linked short stories, Julia Phillips gives voice to eleven different women, white and native, who live in Zavoyko. All of them are displaced.

The indigenous women have lost their identities, with five separate tribes stripped of their cultures by the former Soviet Union and homogenized as a monolithic group. Living far from the communities that had nurtured them, they’ve come to Zavoyko for an education and for jobs. When the little girls go missing, they watch the search that takes place, angered that the vanished teenager was ignored and quickly forgotten. The little girls are Russian, the teenager was native, and the different reactions to the two disappearances point out the supremacy of one group over the other. This is “a deep common knowledge, an ache that was native.”

The Russian women came to Zavoya when the Kamchatka Peninsula was an integral part of the Soviet Union’s military system, “so tightly defended that even other Russians needed government permission to enter.” Military funding made this outpost a comfortable place to live but when the Soviet rule disintegrated, “Kamchatka went down with it.” Now they live in a region surrounded on three sides by water, linked to the mainland only by roads made from dirt and ice, a spot where 32 degrees is considered to be warm.

The division is sharply revealed when Alla, one of the Even tribe, confronts the Russian, Marina about the police search for the two little girls while her daughter was given scant attention. “You must have paid them, I think…They didn’t listen to me.” Yet when Marina is given a shred of information that may conclude her search, it’s given to her by a man who is Even.

There are no easy answers to the questions that pervade Disappearing Earth. There is no conclusively happy ending. But Phillips, in her debut novel, has depicted a haunting and compelling narrative of bleakness, beauty, and the powerful strength of telling a story.~Janet Brown

Ocean’s Godori by Elaine U. Cho (Hillman Grad Books)

Ocean Yoon ought to be on the fast track to stardom. She can outrun any other space pilot in the solar system, she’s a graduate of the world’s best flight program, and she’s Korean. 

Korea rules the solar system with its space agency, the Alliance, and Seoul is a glittering metropolis filled with galactic hotshots. Ocean would be one of them except for two fatal obstacles. She was sent to a boarding school on Neptune where she grew up without the cultural influences that would make her truly Korean and she’s developed a mind of her own that doesn’t submit well to authority. Early in her space career she made a decision that’s branded her as a liability on any spaceship. Nobody wants the woman with the grisly nickname, Headshot, who never misses her target--except for a captain with a shaky code of ethics and a ship that needs Ocean’s unmatched speed and skill.

Captain Song pretends that she “could put this ship on auto-pilot and it would do the job,” but when things get rough, she turns to the woman whom she tries to ignore. She has to rely on Ocean, who has gained the respect of the crew in a way that Song has not. Even the newest recruit, a man from a planet where the inhabitants learn to become Masters of the Death Arts, is fascinated by Ocean from the moment he joins the crew. 

When Ocean’s best friend Teo, the son of a man who has made his fortune by devastating the environments of other planets, shows up in an escape pod, wounded and unconscious, mutiny begins to simmer beneath the surface of Song’s crew. It bubbles over when the most notorious raider in space comes aboard and places a wedge between Song and her crew. Phoenix wants Teo’s money and Ocean’s skills and he’s smart enough to exploit the situation to get what he wants.

Elaine U. Cho is adept at creating a multifaceted plot that takes a new twist on every page but her ability to bring life to her characters through smart and snappy dialogue is what powers this novel into new territory. Ocean’s Godori soars far beyond conventional science fiction. Its roots are in the Saturday morning serials that once made radio stations popular, where dialogue and cliffhangers ruled the airwaves. Cho has resurrected that form and made it her own, ending her debut novel with a teasing conversation that sets the stage for the next episode.

“A thief, a hacker, an accountant, and now a pilot. My ultimate party is almost complete.” Because Cho has provided a multitude of characters who almost threaten to topple Ocean’s Godori, Phoenix has quite a few candidates who might complete his party. The question is will Cho be able to sustain this wild pace and devious plot in a follow-up novel? What she’s done in this one sets a high bar. She’s written a space fantasy that will ensnare even those readers who despise science fiction.~Janet Brown

The Moon Represents My Heart by Pim Wangtechawat (Blackstone Publishing)

Imagine being born into a family of time travelers and having that gift unfold before you when you’re still a child. Tommy and Eva are lucky. Unlike their parents, they aren’t made aware of this talent alone, with parents who have no idea that this ability exists outside of storybooks. Joshua and Lily learned to use their unusual travel skills in secret, until they met each other and slowly divulged their shared truth. When they discover their children can whisk themselves back in time, they’re delighted and eager to make this a family affair.

Each of them have their own territories. Joshua returns to his childhood home in the Kowloon Walled City. Lily finds herself in England while Tommy is limited to London before 1950. Eva is pulled into the lives of her distant relatives, both dead and living. All of them would agree that time travel carries “a loss waiting to happen.” When that loss comes, their family dissolves forever, leaving Tommy and Eva to carry the weight of their gift alone and unguided.

A scientist and a mathematician, Joshua is reluctant to accept the limitations of time travel that constrain him and his family. Although they can explore the 20th Century from its very beginning, a boundary line separates them from other eras. When he and Lily have fleeting moments in 1899, he embarks upon The Experiment that will take them into the 19th Century.

Tommy and Eva wait for their parents on the day of The Experiment, reassuring themselves that an hour’s delay is nothing to fret over. When days have passed and they are still alone, they call Lily’s mother.

Their grandmother never acknowledges the probable death of her daughter and son-in-law, just as she has never welcomed the idea of time travel. To her the vanished parents are simply “gone” and the reason for this is one that she refuses to think about. She forbids her grandchildren to follow the example set by Lily and Joshua and when they do, it becomes a clandestine and shameful activity.

Eva uses her gifts to find a home with the relatives she meets on her secretive excursions into time. Tommy learns his talent carries a way to break hearts, especially his own. Steeped in darkness, he loses his ability to love.

Pim Wangtechawat chose her cumbersome title from the name of a song once made famous by a Hong Kong singer, Teresa Teng. This choice has little to do with her novel other than a fleeting cameo appearance in the final chapter. Sadly, its amorphous quality is reflected in Wangtechawat’s writing. She frequently lapses into pages of sentences she’s broken into spacing that’s usually found only in poetry. However any poetic touches found here are based in cliches: “soft, golden light,” “a maze of twinkling lights,” “a cold, hardened look in her eyes.”

The Moon Represents My Heart is based on a promising idea that quickly becomes scattered and shapeless. It’s slated to become a series on Netflix, where visual details will supplant the hackneyed images and what seems vague may be sharpened into an intriguing mystery. For now, its story has dissolved as completely as the vanished parents, making it as irksome to read as it is to care about.~Janet Brown

Arcade Mania! The Turbo-Charged World of Japan's Game Centers by Brian Ashcroft (Kodansha)

I grew up in the late seventies and early eighties and one of my favorite pastimes was playing video games at an arcade. I remember the first time my friend and I saw our first video game - “Pong” at a neighborhood pizza restaurant. Although a very simple game, we must have played that game for over an hour. When I was a university student at the University of Washington, I worked part-time at a place called the College Inn Cafe and located diagonally from the cafe was a 24-hour video arcade called [Arnold’s] which I also frequented. However, with the advent of home systems, the video arcade soon became a thing of the past. 

Imagine my surprise when I spent the summer of 1980 in Japan and discovered there were video arcade cafes. These shops didn’t have arcade games where you stood and played. They were built into the tables themselves. You could order coffee or soda, have a sandwich and while eating and drinking, you could play video games at the table. I thought that was so cool. Another fad was also just beginning in Japan at that time. Something called karaoke. Who knew then that that would become a worldwide phenomena.

In 1995, I moved to Japan and wasn’t surprised to not find any video cafes but taking its place were game centers. These were not one building video arcades like there were in the States but some of them could be two, three, or even four story tall buildings filled with a whole range of games to play.

Now Brian Ashcroft did his own research and wrote the book Arcade Mania : The Turbo-Charged World of Japan’s Game Centers. Turbo-charged might be an understatement. Ashcroft’s detailed account of the rise and popularity of the Japanese game centers will make you want to experience the sensation yourself. Unlike the pachinko parlors with its noise and smoky atmosphere, the game centers in Japan are more family-friendly. 

The game centers in Japan are well-organized. if it’s a multi-story building, on the first floor you would usually find an assortment of crane games. In Japan, these crane games are called “UFO Catchers”, although the term has been discontinued sometime in the mid-2000s. What draws people to these games are the different types of prizes they could get. Many of the prizes are limited editions of popular characters. Other prizes may include snack foods. A national crane game championship is held every year as well. 

In the nineties, another craze started at the game center. Sticker picture machines. In 1995, a twenty-nine year old woman named Miho Sasaki, who was working for a Japanese arcade game developer called Atlus saw that home-video editing machines could superimpose titles on pictures and print them out. This gave her an idea. She recalled “her own love of cute stickers when she was younger and how she’d put them all over her notebooks”. Her idea was to mix girls’ love of stickers and their love of taking pictures of themselves. Blending them together, she thought up the idea of the sticker pictures, but her bosses initially rejected her idea.

At the time, fighting games were all the rage at game centers and her bosses were salarymen in suits and they thought the risk was too large and that a sticker picture machine in a game center would look out of place. However, three months later when Atlus had a new boss, Naoya Harano, he saw the potential of such a concept and thus the Print Club was born. Or as they say in Japan puri kura and by 1996, puri kura was all the rage, especially among high school girls. 

The crane games and sticker picture machines are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Japan’s game centers. Ashcroft fills in the reader with the introduction of shooting games, rhythm games, fighting games, and games of chance. He further explores the game center world by talking about dedicated cabinets - “games that are housed in a specific casing and are built especially for the arcade experience”. 

It's been nearly thirty years since the introduction of the sticker picture machines but they are still as popular as ever. Crane games continue to draw in children and adults alike. Now, there are game centers full of retro games that you can still play. These places appeal to adults who find them nostalgic and remind them of their childhood. For kids, there are now card-based games - “a mash-up of playing arcade games and collecting cards”. 

The video arcade may be a dinosaur of the past in the U.S. but the game centers in Japan are still thriving and will probably be here to stay for another twenty or thirty years. If you ever make it to Japan, aside from seeing temples and shrines, you should set foot in a game center to see what it’s all about. ~Ernie Hoyt

Japan : The Toothless Tiger by Declan Hayes (Tuttle)

Currently, with the weakness of the yen against the dollar and with North Korea continuing to test their missiles over Japanese terrain, Japan’s future is looking pretty bleak. Back at the beginning of the 21st century, author Declan Hayes had already made a number of predictions about Japan’s future. I decided to read his book Japan : The Toothless Tiger, which was originally published in 2001 to see if any of his predictions had come to fruition. 

Now that it is already 2024, you would think a lot of the material would be dated but what he said back in 2001 may still hold true today. “There is a specter haunting Japan and Asia: the specter of Chinese communism”. Hayes mentons two main points concerning his argument. “The overt, military one that her vast defense forces pose and the covert diplomatic one undermining America’s key alliance with Japan”. 

Hayes argues that it is in Japan’s best interest to rearm itself in order to defend its territories. While in theory, it may sound reasonable but it goes against the principles of Japan’s constitution. Throughout the book, Hayes says that Japan needs to build up its military. He argues under the assumption that the U.S. 7th Fleet which is headquartered in Yokosuka, Japan, will eventually sail home to Hawaii and without the protection of the U.S. Japan would easily fall into the hands of China. However, his assumption is not supported by any facts.

China has always been a threat to Asia and the world at large. Hayes says once the 7th Fleet leaves the vicinity, “China will eventually incorporate Taiwan and the islands of the South China Sea into her vast kingdom”. He further argues, “China’s resulting hegemony will put severe strain on the weakest link in America’s Asia defense strategy - Japan, the toothless tiger”. 

Hayes claims that because Japan has become a “toothless tiger”, North Korea often tests its missiles which enter Japanese terrirtory and China’s navy often enters Japan’s waters without compunction and because Japan is a toothless tiger that country can only “toothlessly grin and bear it and hope that things do not get worse”. 

Hayes' main focus seems to be the threat of China but he says it isn’t only China that Japan needs to be wary of. Japan must also build better relations with its neighbor South Korea. Japan’s history of military abuse in both China and South Korea cannot be forgotten or forgiven. Hayes also mentions that until the current government of Japan officially recognizes its crimes committed during the second world war, the relationship between the nations will continue to stand on thin ice. 

His suggestion is a very slippery slope. Although it was the Occupied Forces that wrote up the Japanese constituion, it emphatically states that Japan renounces war and will not build up its military might so that it would repeat history. Japan is the only country in the world to be attacked by two atomic bombs and the country saw what devestation it could cause, not to mention its after effects of the radiation fallout. 

It is now 2024 and the U.S. Fleet has not retired to Hawaii. Japan has also renewed its alliance with the U.S. that will continue to protect Japan and Asia and will also curb the threat that China poses. The U.S. government has also officially announced to China that if it tries to take Taiwan by force, the U.S. will protect Taiwan and will attack China in its defense.

The threat of a world dominating China continues, as does the threat of North Korea. However, to insist that Japan rearm itself and build up its military goes against everything the Japanese government stands for. As long as relations between Japan and the U.S. continue, Japan will continue to be a toothless tiger but one that has power and assertive ally on its side. ~Ernie Hoyt

Searching for Billie by Ian Gill (Blacksmith Books)

Louise Mary Newman, Marylou Newman,  Louise Gill, Billie Lee—with so many different personas for one woman, no wonder her son found it a challenge to find who she really was. Since his mother handed Ian Gill in his infancy to a baby nurse in Shanghai, proclaiming “That was the end of my mothering days,” the eventual reunion between Billie and Ian was undoubtedly a bit difficult for both.

The enigmatic and dazzling figure whom Ian struggled to understand began life in true fairy tale fashion. A stranger left her at the front door of an Englishman and his Chinese wife, a couple living in Changsha. Pretty and smart, Louise Mary, called Mary Lou throughout her girlhood, was destined for great things, her father told her, right up until the moment that he left his family for another that he had established

At sixteen, in a household that was now close to destitution, Mary Lou left her expensive school in Shanghai that her mother could no longer afford and began a career that would eventually take her to the greatness her father had predicted. In time the infant of unknown parentage would be given an MBE by Queen Elizabeth, becoming a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Gill painstakingly recreates his mother’s eighty-nine years of life in almost agonizing detail. Beginning with her father’s parents emigration from England to Hong Kong and following the bureaucratic career of Billie’s adoptive father far more diligently than is necessary, at last he begins to unfold the meteoric rise of his mother’s colorful life. A woman who was friends with Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s closest adviser, the American adventuress Emily Hahn, and the Chinese author Lin Yutang, Billie’s brilliance caused her to rise from secretary to a position of international importance and kept her alive through imprisonment in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation of that city.

Gill’s family history flares into a fascinating narrative when he describes the circumstances that led to his birth. In the harsh conditions of Hong Kong’s Stanley prison camp, Billie, now the wife of a British soldier, went through a living hell when her young son died. As she began to recover, she was certain her mental health depended on having another child.

An affair with a handsome journalist brought about a pregnancy. Billie, despite severe malnutrition, carried her baby to full term, throughout her time at Stanley, onto a ship that would carry her to New Zealand after the Japanese surrender, and into a Wellington hospital. There she gave birth to the baby she had longed for, an event she never would have survived if she had still been within the confines of the prison camp.

Billie’s astounding luck pervaded her entire life and coupled with her brains, brought her to an impressive career at the United Nations. However intimate relationships weren’t her specialty. Although she had several long and devoted love affairs, none of them were permanent. And although Ian was a byproduct of her stunning ambition and determination, their bond only becomes close after Billie’s son grows to adulthood.

Searching for Billie is a book that demands persistence. It sinks under unnecessary details and lingers far too long upon family members who are extraneous. However through the slog, Billie shines like a submerged diamond, irresistible and worth all the effort it takes to rediscover her life.~Janet Brown

Under the Naga Tail by Mae Bunseng Taing, with James Taing (Greenleaf Book Group Press)

Mae is eleven when Apollo 11 puts men on the moon, a feat that captures his imagination and makes him feel he’s living in a new era when anything is possible—even for a boy living in rural Cambodia. But as he nears the end of his adolescence, another era closes in upon him, his family,  and his country, one that begins with Year Zero.

Cambodia has been in turmoil for several years, with “freedom fighters” battling the puppet government of the U.S.-backed Lon Nol. Popular opinion sides with the insurgents because they purportedly will restore King Sihanouk to his throne. Mae’s father is a firm believer in this theory, even when a woman emerges from the jungle, fleeing in terror for the nearby Thai border. 

“Monsters…barbaric monsters…that’s what they are,” she tells Mae’s family as she recounts the atrocities committed by the rebel forces, “You must leave.” But Mae’s father is positive that “the freedom fighters were defending the honor of the king.” He had already fled one country, leaving China to find peace and prosperity in Cambodia, and he was certain it was unnecessary to do this again. He and his eight children are staying put, even though it’s a short journey from their home to Thailand.

Within the first twenty pages of Under the Naga Tail, his decision becomes engulfed in horror that becomes impossibly and dreadfully more intense with every passing chapter. Although the rebel forces prevail and are greeted with cheers and hope, they immediately close the border and kill three “Thai thieves” in a public execution that the entire community is forced to watch. Then they evacuate the area, claiming it’s a temporary measure to avoid American bombs. Mae and his family would never live in their former home again and many more wouldn’t survive to return to what once belonged to them.

The savagery that engulfs Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 is unmitigated by liberating troops from Vietnam who have no room for compassion. Across the border, where Mae and his family seek the safety of Thailand after barely surviving four years of starvation and forced labor, there’s no sanctuary waiting for them. According to C.I.A. reports, forty-two thousand Cambodians, Mae and his family among them, were removed from refugee camps by Thai troops and were taken to the sacred mountain of Preah Vihear. From there they were forced to climb down the other side of the mountain, back into Cambodia. Ten thousand of them were never seen again.

Scant mercy is given to the Cambodians who are displaced and subjected in the years between 1975 and 1979—not offered by the liberators nor by the country that could shelter them. The atrocities of the Pol Pot Time and the cruelties of its aftermath are revealed in excruciating detail, disclosed as Mae and his family live them. His account is appalling and soul-wrenching and guaranteed to enter your dreams.

The miracle of his survival, with almost all of his family, only occurred because of strength and courage that goes beyond all human limits. If this book is painfully difficult to read, only imagine the agony that came as a son wrote the words his father used to resurrect a hell on earth for the world to see and remember. Under the Naga Tail shows the bare bones of history that are all too often veiled in statistics and sanitized by bureaucratic reports. It turns readers into witnesses who just might help to change present-day crimes against humanity.~Janet Brown

Where Strange Gods Call: Harry Hervey's 1920s Hong Kong, Macau and Canton Sojourns (Blacksmith Books)

Before Fu Manchu, the Dragon Lady, the Yellow Peril, and the benign cliche of Charlie Chan, there was Harry Hervey. A young prodigy who published his first piece of pulp fiction when he was sixteen and whose stories were frequently found in Black Mask magazine after his early debut, Hervey published his first novel at the age of 22. Caravans by Night: A Romance of India was followed a year later by The Black Parrot: A Tale of the Golden Chersonese and apparently gave Hervey a financial windfall that took him to the part of the world that he had profitably imagined.

In 1923, Hervey voyages to Hong Kong where he immediately begins his search for corners of that city that would be “rich in the atmosphere of Cathay.” Fortunately for him, he has a local contact, a wealthy, cultured Hong Kong resident whom he had met in New York. Chang Yuan becomes Hervey’s guide and mentor, giving him an introduction to “a race that had always seemed inscrutable to me.” Together the two explore the “nauseous effluvia” and “fetid gloom” of Chinese opera theaters, the “gorgeous wickedness” of Macau’s gambling halls, and make the acquaintance of the “queer, impassive little dolls” who sing in restaurants as wealthy gentlemen have their suppers. “It was inevitable,” Hervey says, “that we should visit an opium house,” a place he finds “as colorless as naked lust.”

In between these forays into the parts of Hong Kong that Hervey finds “very wicked and very pleasant,” Chang Yuan delivers interminable lectures on Chinese history and politics. These are so meticulously recorded that it becomes impossible to believe they’re not the puerile thoughts of Hervey himself. This theory is almost confirmed when Hervey describes Chang as “uncommunicative,” which would preclude his monologues that take up many of the pages in his Hong Kong chapters.

Without Chang Yuan’s companionship, Hervey seems daunted by Canton, which he describes as “too stupendous and too indefinite to be sheathed in words.” He certainly doesn’t explore it with the enthralled energy shown by Constance Gordon-Cumming, forty-four years earlier. However he has a focus for this visit. Fascinated by Sun Yat Sen from childhood, he manages to gain an audience with his hero, whom he terms the Doctor of Canton, a man whose “personality submerged words.” The words recorded by Hervey speak of the threats posed by Europe and Japan and of the “militarists of the North (who) wish to Prussianize China.” The interview ends with Sun Yat Sen declaring the necessities of having only one currency and one language shared by all Chinese, which Hervey later dismisses as “splendid dreams.”

This reprint of two chapters from Hervey’s Where Strange Gods Call: Pages Out of the East seems a peculiar choice for Blacksmith Book’s new series, China Revisited. Hervey’s writing can barely qualify as travel writing, steeped as it is in his fictional fantasies and thinly veiled racism. “How pleasant I was (sic) to see soldiers who were not yellow,” he gushes when passing a group of British troopers and Chang Yuan is described as “astonishingly well educated…faintly grandiose.” Not even his childhood idol escapes the snobbery of this high school-educated product of Texas, who charitably reports Sun Yat Sen’s perfect enunciation “was not surprising, as he is a college graduate.” It escapes Hervey that even the sing-song girl who entertained him with a song in Pidgin English is bilingual, which he himself, in true American fashion, probably is not.

Perhaps when all of the choices for this series of attractive little books are published, Harry Hervey, who later became a Hollywood screenwriter largely because of his presumed knowledge of Asia, will take his place among them without making readers wondering why. Let’s hope so.~Janet Brown

Wanderings in China: Hong Kong and Canton, Christmas and New Year 1878-1879 by Constance Gordon-Cumming (Blacksmith Books)

Constance Gordon-Cumming was in her fifties when she first came to Hong Kong on Christmas Day in 1878 but her reactions to this city, and later to Canton, had the enthusiasm of a young girl who had just left home for the first time.

This was far from the case. Gordon-Cumming had been a devoted traveler for twenty years, making her first overseas voyage when she entered her thirties and sailed to visit her sister in India. From there she had gone to Ceylon, Fiji, New Zealand, and Japan before she had set her sights upon China. Although at this point she had seen enough of the world to view it with a jaded vision, this wasn’t her style. An artist who had the goal of ending “never a day without at least one careful-colored sketch,” she looked at the world with hungry eyes that took note of everything she saw.

Gordon-Cumming fell in love with Hong Kong’s “steep streets of stairs” that led past “luxurious houses encircled by “camellias and roses and scarlet poinsettias.” Bamboo groves and banyan trees, the intertwining of the city’s Chinese and Portuguese areas, the piercing blue water of the surrounding harbor—”Only think what a paradise for an artist!”

Paradise went up in flames that night when Christmas festivities were interrupted by an act of arson that threatened to consume the city. Perched above the conflagration in a Mid-Level home, Gordon-Cumming watched the fire as it destroyed Chinatown and advanced upon the affluent homes of Hong Kong’s expatriates. Ten acres of the city were devastated with 400 houses gone in a single night, an unimaginable spectacle with “a horrible sort of attraction…so awful and yet so wonderfully beautiful.”

By New Year’s Day, Hong Kong’s “social treadmill” had resumed and by January 9th a short voyage takes Gordon-Cumming to Canton. There she’s met by a “resplendent palanquin” that was fit for a mandarin but lay in wait to take her to her hostess on the Western enclave of Shamian Island. Delighted by the English social life that held sway in this community, she refuses to succumb to its charms that keeps many foreign residents of Shamian from going into the heart of Canton.

Instead Gordon-Cumming submerses herself in the city’s shops and markets, on streets with names that are “touchingly allegorical”—The Street of Refreshing Breezes, The Street of One Thousand Grandsons. She’s overwhelmed by the commerce that she finds there—flowering branches for Chinese New Year, oranges that have been peeled because the peels, used for medicine, are more valuable than the fruit, ivory carvers, tallow-chandlers, vendors that sell drinking water next to porters that transport raw sewage. (Tea drinking is the pervasive custom because the water for it has been boiled, she observes.)

From there she is taken to Canton’s riverine world where a separate city exists. Families live in domestic comfort on boats, with order preserved by “water police” who are notoriously corrupt. Crafts that hold barbershops and medical clinics serve this community, along with market boats and river-borne kitchens. Floating biers carry corpses to their final destination while other vessels hold leper colonies. Gordon-Cumming, with aplomb befitting the daughter of a British baronet, finds her way to the “flower boats” that she euphemistically describes as places where dinner parties are attended by wealthy citizens who are entertained by “singing-women.”

From Canton she travels to Macau, a place she finds “most fascinating” but so “essentially un-Chinese that I have decided to omit the letters referring to it.” This decision does quite a bit to illuminate Gordon-Cumming’s character and helps to explain the decision that ended her life of travel. A year after her time in Canton, she remained aboard a ship that evacuated its passengers when it ran aground. Refusing to leave the watercolors she had painted on the voyage, she stayed with the captain until the two of them were finally brought to safety.

Did her explorations come to an end because she was unnerved by this disaster or was she blacklisted by shipping companies because she refused to take to the lifeboats when that command was given? Somehow I doubt that this conclusion to her travels was Gordon-Cumming’s idea and I’m sure she fumed over it for the rest of her life.~Janet Brown

Doraemon : Gadget Cat from the Future (Selection 6) by Fujiko F. Fujio (Shogakukan)

If you love Japanese anime or have lived in Japan, then you would be familiar with the blue robot cat named Doraemon and you would know the robot cat’s most famous gadget is its dokodemo door or “4 D (fourth dimension) pocket”. The manga was first serialized in 1969. The chapters were then collected in forty-five tankobon volumes, tankobon being a Japanese word now used in English to refer to cartoons collected in one volume from the weekly and monthly manga magazines. 

The manga was adapted into an anime three times. The first time in 1973, then again in 1979, and finally in 2005. There are over forty anime films as well including two computer generated full-length features as well. The merchandise spawned from the manga and anime series is still a multi-billion industry that continues to appeal to children and adults alike. 

I did not realize at first that Doraemon : Gadget Cat from the Future was part of a series published by Shogakukan English Comics. I would have started with the first volume but as these stories are not collected in chronological order, it doesn’t matter which volume to start with. Also available in English are ten volumes of the story originally published by Tento Mushi books which includes the Japanese text outside the picture frames. The Tento Mushi series follows the same order as the Japanese manga. 

There’s a bit of history concerning Doraemon as well. As mentioned, Doraemon is a robot gadget cat from the future and was born on September 3, 2112. Hard core Doraemon fans will know that the blue robot cat was originally yellow and also had ears even though the backstory was written long after the manga debuted. 

In the storyline as Doraemon was napping, a mouse nibbled off his ears. When Doraemon saw himself in the mirror, he turned blue from the shock. As to why Doraemon travels back in time from the future? It was to help Nobita, a ten-year-old Japanese school boy who at heart is a good boy but is very lazy, gets bad grades at school and is terrible at sports. His future grandchild, Sewashi Nobi, sends the cat to take care of Nobita so future generations will have a better life. 

Surrounding Nobita are his classmates Shizuka, the main female character and also the love interest of Nobita. Gian, a big bully who often steals toys or other items from Nobita and his friends. He often gets his own comeuppance for his actions though. Then there is Suneo, a spoiled rich boy who likes to show off how rich he and his family are. 

In this collection of Doraemon stories, Nobita is once again bullied by Gian who steals his ice cream cone, gives it a lick, then says Nobita can have it back. But as it was licked by Gian, Nobita doesn’t want it. He cries to Doraemon to do something about it. 

In another episode, Suneo brags that his family is going to ride on a steam locomotive. When Nobita finds a ticket for the Milky Way Express that Doraemon drops. Nobita invites his friends who at first don’t believe him, but they all get into a little trouble when they discover there is no way to get back home.

There are a total of fifteen stories in this collection and its main aim is to help Japanese learners of English by providing them with a one point English lesson. Doraemon remains as popular today as it was after its debut and there is even a Fuji F. Fujio museum in Kawasaki where you can see Doraemon’s development along with other works by the manga artist. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Dragon's Pearl by Sirin Phathanothai (Simon & Schuster)

In 1956, as the Cold War took on lethal proportions, Thai politician Sang Phathanothai sent two of his children to China. This was a clandestine and potentially dangerous move for everyone concerned, one that was inspired by the ancient custom of tribute paid by one nation to a greater power. Phathanothai saw the Korean War as a Chinese victory against the United States and although Thailand had fought as a US ally in that war, he felt it was essential to establish ties with the People’s Republic. In the sort of byzantine politics that Thailand specializes in, he convinced Thailand’s prime minister that if by giving his children to China under extreme secrecy, an act that would go against US interests if it were ever disclosed, he would create an indissoluble bridge between the two countries.

When they leave for China, Warnwai is a twelve-year-old boy and his sister Sirin is only eight. Wai is old enough to carry the responsibility that he takes on when he is designated as a representative of Thailand’s Prime Minister, a task that gives him a connection to his homeland and fosters his ability to keep careful records of his meetings with Chinese officials. Sirin, an indulged and pretty little girl, has no such weight placed upon her. For her this is a bizarre vacation in a country where she has no maids to wait upon her and where the house they were to live in compares sadly with their Thai home that had twenty rooms on three floors and four gardeners to tend a profusion of orchids.

The two children are placed under the guardianship of Zhou Enlai, China’s premier who’s second only to Mao Zedong, a decision that Wai understands and records as fully as he’s able in careful notes and a daily journal. Sirin quickly succumbs to Zhou’s legendary charm and swiftly begins to think of him and his wife as her new parents. Equally delightful and much more accessible is Liao Chengzhi, a high-ranking official whose father was American-born and who has an informality that brightens Sirin’s new life.

Although she lacks the diplomatic skills that her brother had been schooled in, Sirin learned early in life that to gain the attention she wanted, she needed to be attentive as well as beguiling. By the time she went to China, she had absorbed a rudimentary political understanding that she brings to bear in conversations with Zhou and Liao. But while Wai absorbs these conversations as an observer, Sirin takes them to heart. The advice she receives from her Chinese “fathers” lets her adjust to the sacrifices of The Great Leap Forward and the precursor to the Cultural Revolution that flourishes briefly in 1957. When she learns that her father has been arrested in Thailand, she clings even more tightly to the relationships she’s forged with the men who are now her protectors.

Their Chinese lives aren’t easy to relinquish because of the secretive nature that has pervaded them from the beginning. in 1967 Mao’s wife Jiang Ching begins to strengthen her power by nurturing the seeds of the Cultural Revolution. Her Red Guards ransack Liao’s home and issue thinly veiled threats against Zhao. It’s the wrong time for Sang Phathanothai to come to China at last, bearing a conciliatory message from the US government. His children know the danger this action carries. Their father does not. When he makes the message public and then departs, he leaves Wai and Surin unprotected, their contact with Zhou Enlai cut off.

Wai defends his father and is expelled from China. Surin, alone and defenseless, says “Wai’s world was not disintegrating. Mine was.” Officials tell her “You have to choose your own destiny. Denounce your brother.”

To survive in a country that is going mad, Surin publicly denounces her family on a radio broadcast, an action that does little to soften her life in the years to come. Her life is caught in the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, where her brains and charm just barely keep her safe.

Her story is a devastating account of a time that China has done its best to erase from its history, an era that has inescapably shaped Surin’s life. Despite an escape that is close to miraculous, she has never been able to leave China completely, a country that is more her home than the one she was born in. The Dragon’s Pearl, told with the acumen and objectivity that kept her alive in a perilous time, is a balanced look at a country few understand and many fear.~Janet Brown