Five Point Someone: What Not To Do at ITT by Chetan Bhagat (Rupa Books)

Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone is his first novel which was published in 2004. It follows the life of three university students studying at IIT, the India Institute of Technology, the author’s alma mater. The book was also adapted into a major motion picture and released as [Three Idiots] in 2009. 

The story is mostly narrated by Hari Kumar. He tells the reader from the beginning “what this book is not”. He says with a little mirth that “it is probably an example of how screwed up your college years can get if you don’t think straight”. He also reinforces the fact that “the book will not help you get into IIT”. 

On his first day at IIT, Hari meets his housemates from Kumaon hostel, Alok Gupta and Ryan Oberoi. Alok had dreams of becoming an artist to follow in his father’s footsteps, but his father had an accident when painting a ceiling mural so was half-paralyzed and could no longer work. Alok also has an older sister that the family must marry off eventually, so they need money for her dowry. As Alok is the male of the family, he gave up his dream and decided to become an engineer so he could support his family. 

Ryan on the other hand has rich parents. They have their own business but Ryan is not close with them. Although they send him letters weekly, he has not answered any one of them. He also despises the university’s rules and thinks of many different ways to beat the system. 

The three first met on the roof of the hostel. As freshmen, they were being hazed by a couple of seniors. They were made to take off all their clothes. Hari and Alok were made to get on all fours, while Ryan was made to flex his muscles and make warrior poses. When a senior brings back a couple of empty coke bottles for nefarious purposes, Ryan takes quick action against his upper-level classmen and saves Hari and Alok from total embarrassment and the three become fast friends. 

The three students are overloaded with work and need to be prepared for pop quizzes but Ryan talked his friends into seeing a movie instead of studying. The following day, their fears were realized as one of their teachers gave a pop quiz. All three scored below average, Ryan having the lowest score. To get themselves motivated again, Ryan suggests going jogging. Hari and Alok are not in the best of conditions to go running but Ryan has a way of getting them to agree to whatever he thinks up.

While they’re out jogging, a young girl learning how to drive actually hits Hari. Instead of reprimanding her, Hari instantly falls in love with the woman. It is only later that he finds out she is the daughter of the head of the engineering program. 

If you’ve been a college student, you can guess where this is going. Yes, Hari can’t get her out of his mind and Ryan helps think of ways to not only beat the system but tries to help Hari win the girl of his dreams. 

And then it was time to check their grades. From the results, students could determine their grade point average, or GPA, on a 10 point scale, 10 being the highest and the average would be around 6.5. Hari scored 5.46, Ryan was at 5.01, and Alok at 5.88. These less than average GPAs can affect their future and the grades are posted for all the students to see.

Five-pointers are not only looked down upon by other students but by the professors as well. Will these three underperformers be able to graduate? And what will become of Hari’s relationship with the daughter of the head of the Mechanical Engineering Department. 

The book is sad and funny at the same time. The attitudes of people in regards to degrees from prestigious universities compared with no name or not so famous colleges and universities persist to this day. It’s still prevalent in Japan where I lcurrently ive where many women’s condition for marriagable material consists of the three 高 (ko) - 高学歴・高身長・高収入 kogakureki (graduated from prestigious university), koshincho (tall), and koshunyu (high salary). 

Higher education isn’t for everyone and if you were able to get into a name brand university, then the student should be proud of that accomplishment and not worry about their GPAs so much. Unlike IIT, graduating from a prestigious university in this day and age doesn’t guarantee a good-paying job either.

That’s just my opinion though as I barely made it through my university years and ended up working in a bookstore for twenty-five years! ~Ernie Hoyt

Mistapim in Cambodia by Christopher Pym (Hodder & Stoughton)

Not many people traveled to Angkor Wat in 1954. The French War in Vietnam, which had spilled into Cambodia, had just ended. Although it was still a French colony until the end of the year, Cambodia was too absorbed with preparing itself as a new independent nation to concern itself with tourism.

It was a Thai prince who organized a sightseeing expedition to Angkor and a member of this group was a young Englishman who was working in what was at that time called Malaya. At 25, Christopher Pym was still young enough to swerve from secure employment into charting his own adventure and when he fell in love with the glories of the ancient Khmer empire, this is what he did.

He began an intensive study of Cambodian history and the Khmer language, moving to Phnom Penh in 1956 without a safety net, determined to “carve one’s own set of circumstances,”

In Malaya, his life had been comfortable. The business firm Pym had worked for in that country had provided everything--”car, house,cook, gardener, cocktails, and so on.” This isn’t the way he wants to live in Cambodia; he finds a wooden house on stilts on the outskirts of Phnom Penh and almost immediately comes down with dengue fever. Moving back to the city, he rents a small room that is next to a shrine for a Chinese deity. His domestic comforts are limited to a bed, a table, and a wooden crate, but unlike his first home, this place has electricity and a rudimentary bathroom.

Learning Khmer and teaching English gives Pym the life he wants, with freedom to travel in search of “the heart of the Khmer people.” After an evening of opium-smoking at the home of a French acquaintance, he decides he isn’t going to find the heart of Cambodia in the company of Europeans in Phnom Penh and he begins to explore village life.

While urban Cambodians are jaded when it comes to foreigners, Pym is a delightful novelty to rural communities who are more than willing to let him witness and chronicle their ways of life. Although he has fleeting contacts with Cambodia’s royal family, Pym becomes close to people of less exalted lineage and he much prefers to spend his time with them.

Perhaps his favorite brush with royalty is when he’s a spectator at the funeral of one of the many princes of the realm. The royal tomb has gone unused for many years and “a combined attack of blunt pickaxes and old crowbars” fail to open the entrance--until a member of the King’s family grabs a pickaxe, throws his jacket aside and leads “a continuing onslaught,” royal privilege be damned.

But any prince of the realm pales beside Pym’s friendship with Om, “a kind of Khmer teddy-boy.” Westernized but “not a delinquent,” Om opens village life and its daily life in a way no prince could ever have done. Because of him, Pym is given free access to Buddhist ordinations, engagement ceremonies, and “ a positively Aristophanic marriage-feast.”. He describes all of these events in photographic detail and with deep respect, without a trace of condescension or British snark.

Even in Phnom Penh, which clearly isn’t his favorite place in Cambodia, he only allows himself a tiny tinge of bitterness when he comes across “a milkbar neon-lit,” and thinks, “Well done, Cambodia, the same as everywhere else at last.”

Pym was lucky--he took up residence in Cambodia when ceremonies and rituals and village life still mirrored what was carved in bas-relief on the walls of the Bayon and Angkor Wat. He journeyed to the distant reaches of the kingdom by oxcart during the rainy season to view the citadel of Bantei Chmar, before looters dismantled it “stone by stone.” And he was invited to see a performance of the Royal Khmer Ballet within the royal palace, watching “the eloquent hands of the Khmer dancers” as they performed The Abduction of Sita from the Ream Ker, the Khmer Ramayana.

There are hints of change in Pym’s accounts--electric lights replacing the gigantic candle that illuminates the months when monks retreat to their temples, an American education center being built in the countryside, and rebel insurgents preventing a journey to a village near the Thai border. As the “temptation to go to Samrong just for fun increased in proportion as the police insisted upon my not going there,” Pym, respectful as always, doesn’t break his word.

The only facetious part of this book is its title, which Pym at the outset assures readers “was chosen by the publishers.” Although he can’t resist flashes of humor, he writes with a scrupulous lack of judgment that an anthropologist would envy and gives meticulous glimpses of Cambodian life that are worthy of Zhao Daguan, back in the days of the Angkor Empire. Thank you, Mistapim.~Janet Brown

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei by Sachaverell Sitwell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

Take one well-born aging Englishman, with a classical education that has centered around Europe, throw him into Asia, and watch him flounder when he’s not in places that were once part of the British Empire. The intellectual consternation that engulfs this sort of gentleman should be amusing but his excellent education keeps that from happening. Instead pomposity takes over, with rare moments of enchantment that veer on the naive. 

For a prime example of this, try to read Sachaverell Sitwell’s The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei.  A member of England’s hereditary peerage and the grandson of an Earl, Sitwell went to Eton and Oxford and was first published when he was twenty-five. This volume of poetry launched a career of writing over fifty more books, almost all devoted to European art, music, and architecture. When he began to age, he turned his attention to other continents, venturing to Japan and Peru, but never deviating from his Eurocentric point of view.

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei is a misleading title which desperately needed a follow-up subtitle along the lines of And Other Travels in Asia, since only one brief chapter is devoted to what is now spelled “Banteay Srei.” This is probably a mercy because Sitwell was ill at ease in that lovely place or anywhere else in the Angkor complex. That he devotes only five chapters to Cambodia is a relief but that’s almost enough to sink this book.

Sitwell starts off in a sprightly fashion by falling in love with Bangkok. His time there is brief and comfortable, with a room in the Oriental Hotel and trips to places that aren’t yet tourist cliches--The Temple of the Emerald Buddha, floating markets which are still plentiful and utilitarian in the early 1960s, a night at a Thai boxing match. There he concludes that muay thai is “more serious and less amusing than the Sumo wrestling in Japan” and worries that an injured boxer may never be able to fight again. He’s delighted by the broken crockery that ornaments temple chedis and is impressed by the air-con in a Chinese restaurant that had his wife begging for a towel to use as a shawl during dinner. It’s sweet to see him fall in love with Thailand’s capital, which he explores without comparisons or judgements. Those he saves for Cambodia, where he seems determined to denigrate the glories of Angkor.

Although Sitwell confesses he came to Angkor “after half a lifetime of anticipation,” the heat, “of a kind and degree never experienced before,” and the humidity which “was something excessive,” appears to have flattened his enthusiasm. Although he immediately claims “the approach to Angkor Wat is on a grander scale than anything in the living world” and is later awed by the Bayon’s face-towers, he swiftly begins to describe the “sham buildings” constructed by people who had no conception of how to build a room that offered space. He lapses into memories of blitzed London during World War I and begins to long for the “cooing of doves” and a “wood of bluebells.” If it weren’t for his frequent quotes of Zhou Daguan’s eyewitness accounts of Angkor, there would be no substance to his observations, which conclude with “this is a whole dead city…too big even for poetry.”

Things don’t improve vastly in Nepal, where Sitwell becomes obsessed with the sexual nature of temple paintings. He tears himself away from erotic art long enough to write a detailed description of “a living goddess in Katmandu,” a heavily made-up child of twelve, the sight of whom made him decide she was “wonderfully, and a little pruriently exciting.” Once again he wallows in comparisons to Greece, Italy, and Spain and it’s impossible not to wish for the ability to slap him.

India, since the Empire had left it twenty years before, is a sad disappointment to Sitwell, who mourns that hotel dining rooms no longer serve proper English meals and that Delhi’s “houses with pillared porticos and nice gardens” are no longer inhabited by British families. Except for the brilliant colors of women’s clothing, Delhi is a disappointment but he consoles himself with a visit to the Taj Mahal and the Pearl Mosque, which he manages to view without his customary litany of European comparisons. Jaipur’s gardens, however, “did credit to English seedsmen,” and the Italian lakes immediately come into play when he goes to Udaipur. At Bombay he’s thrilled to find streets with English names and statues of British luminaries which might prove to console him when he discovers the Caves of Ajanta “are now too far gone with age to give pleasure.”

At this point anyone who’s persisted in reading Sitwell’s observations would be justified in saying the same of him. It’s a vast relief when he goes to Ceylon and becomes enthralled with its beauty. Perhaps his lack of jaundiced criticisms are because in Columbo he’s able to have a cocktail. “After a sojourn in India the inventor of Singapore Slings deserves commendation.”

Sitwell, sadly, does not--in fact the only way that his book should be read is in the company of several Singapore Slings as anesthesia against pomposity. The reader is warned, as Sitwell’s Victorian forbears used to say--stock up on gin and limes before entering his realm of boring ethnocentricism.~Janet Brown

Forgotten Country by Cathernine Chung (Riverhead Books)

Forgotten Country is Catherine Chung’s debut novel. It is a story about family bonds, secrets and betrayals. It is about a family that drifts apart and comes together. It is a highly emotional roller-coaster that will take you on the ups and downs of life. The book received an Honorable Mention for the 2013 PEN/Hemingway Award.

The story centers around a South Korean family who emigrated to the United States and made a life for themselves in a city in Michigan. The father was fleeing political persecution and brought with him, his wife and two young daughters, Jeehyun and Haejin. The girls were given American names at their school to blend in more with American culture and they became Janie and Hannah. 

Before the family moved and the night before Hannah was born, while Janie’s mother was in the hospital, along with her father, Janie was left alone with her grandmother. It was the first time she was away from her own home without her mother. The room her grandmother put her in was large and scared her. When her grandmother checked in on her, Janie was crying. She cried so hard, she had a fever. Janie still wouldn’t stop crying until her grandmother shook her and said, “Jungshin chalyuh” which meant pull yourself together.

Her grandmother said she was too old to be crying. “You’re an elder sister now, and you have new responsibilities”. The grandmother then tells her about how she also became an elder sister. The day Hannah was born, her grandmother also told her, “In our family, a sister always dies.”.

Now, years later, in the U.S., Hannah has disappeared without a trace. She cut all ties to her family. Her father has told Hannah that he and her mother are planning to move back to South Korea and that Janie needs to find Hannah before they leave.

Janie’s father told her that he has cancer and that a doctor recommended a specialist in his home country who handles his type of cancer. The doctor said there was nothing more he could do. The father and mother plead with Janie to find Hannah before they leave. Thus starts Janie’s journey in which she will learn more about her family and herself. 

Janie does track down Hannah in California. They have an awkward reunion but Janie did her duty and informed her sister that their father was dying of cancer and that their parents sold the house in Michigan and would be landing in Korea right about the time they were having this discussion. 

Their argument and Hannah’s attitude brings out the worst in Janie, who tells her, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to come.” Hannah of course doesn’t believe her but Janie can’t stop herself from saying, “Seriously. They just wanted me to tell you they sold the house and they’re gone. They’re done with you.”. 

Forgotten Country is definitely an emotional roller-coaster, not only for the characters in the book, but for the reader as well. It makes you question what is love and what is loyalty? It makes you think about what you would do if confronted with family secrets and how you would deal with it. A poignant and very strong story about family ties. ~Ernie Hoyt

Feasting, Fasting by Anita Desai (Vintage)

Feasting, Fasting is a novel by Indian writer Anita Desai. It is the story of complex family relations. The story is told in two parts. The first part deals with the family living in a rural town in India. The second part of the book is about the son of the family trying to make his way through life as a university student in Boston, Massachusetts. 

The first part focuses on the eldest daughter, referred to as Uma throughout the book. Her father has sent her to a convent school and although she tries as hard as she can, she has been held back for two years already. Uma also has a younger sister named Aruna. Then, the mother gives birth to a son.

Suddenly, the family’s focus is on the first son. Uma’s mother tells her there is no need for her to go to school anymore. She needs to stay home and help care for her younger brother, Arun. 

Arun is treated like a king. He gets the best meals, the largest portion, the best cuts of meat which he would rather not eat. He gets the attention of his parents wno continue to treat their eldest daughter more as a servant than a family member. The father is determined to have his son study at a university in the United States. However, it wasn’t the parents who did all the things for Arun, they made all their demands on the eldest daughter. 

After the father retires from work, Uma’s parents are very demanding of her. Uma thinks of them as MamandPapa, MamaPapa, PapaMama. For her, “it was hard to believe they had ever had separate exsitences”. Before she could finish one chore, she was always asked to do another. 

The parents try to marry off Uma on three different occasions. The first man told the family he was more interested in Uma’s younger sister. The second time, the father accepts a proposal from a family for Uma only to learn that the family has spent the dowry given to them but has also canceled the engagement. The third, Uma is married but the father finds out that the man was already married and had a family in another town and used the dowry to help his ailing business. 

It may be a big cultural difference but Uma’s family and those who live in her village have old-fashioned ideas and believe in tradition. Girls are raised to be married off and boys are to be given the best education possible. 

Instead of blaming themselves for their short-sightedness, everything seems to be Uma’s fault. They become even more demanding of her. As some with Western ideals, the parent’s treatment of their eldest daughter borders on child abuse or negligence. Uma comes off very timid and doesn’t seem to have a mind of her own. We know she does but she is not assertive enough to defy her parents. 

For the latter half of the book, we travel to the U.S. Arun is studying in Massachusetts but he is having as much difficulty as Uma had at home. He wants to spend his time in the U.S. in anonymity. Coming to the U.S., he “at last experienced total freedom of anonymity, the total absence of relations, of demands, of requests, ties, responsibilities, committments”. He was just Arun, “he had no past, no family, no country”. And he prefers to keep it that way. 

Desai’s prose does make for easy reading and the book is beautifully written. However, there really seems to be no coherent plot. The story consists of a series of events depicting ordinary life in a fictional Indian family.  However, I found the family to be the epitome of a stereotypical Indian family that seems to verge on the comical. It would be laughable if the parents weren’t so despicable to their eldest daughter. To be honest, I was exhausted after reading this novel. I wanted to smack Uma’s parents into the twenty-first century, but that just may be my American upbringing. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Road to Angkor by Christopher Pym (John Beaufoy Publishing)

There’s a certain kind of British male who confirms Noel Coward’s linkage of mad dogs and Englishmen and Christopher Pym is a fine example of this. Like many travelers, he was enchanted by Angkor Wat in 1954. However he, in his early twenties, acted upon that enchantment by spending the next three years studying Cambodian history and learning the Khmer language, in London, Paris, and Cambodia. In 1957, armed with a knowledge of that country’s culture, past and present, and with French and Khmer language fluency, the 27-year-old academic set off on an adventure that verged on insanity. He intended to walk from the part of South Vietnam that had once been the empire of Champa to Angkor Wat, in search of evidence of the ancient road that had supposedly once connected these two strongholds, with 57 resthouses sprinkled along the way. If Pym could find evidence of these resthouses close to his starting point, he’d know the road had actually existed. As it was at the time he began this trek, traces of the road had only been found between Angkor and the citadel of Prah Khan in northern Cambodia, with nothing proving a route between Prah Khan and what was once Champa. Ten weeks, he decides, will be enough time for this walk, one that he’s making on foot because he can’t afford horses or elephants as transportation.

But this isn’t complicated enough for Pym. Neolithic tools had been found in the Vietnamese city of Pleiku and he hoped to find more along his route, confirming that a Neolithic culture had spread across the region. He also had a whimsical goal in mind. He’d read about a tribal hillside chieftain, described by an early French explorer as being “young, handsome, brave, quick, eloquent and confident in the future.” This paragon of manly virtues was named Pim and this was enough to prompt his English namesake to look for him, as “an entertaining sidetrack.”

Pym discovers the most arduous part of this enterprise is getting the necessary permits from bureaucrats, which is a prevailing theme throughout the book. But in the freewheeling spirit that never leaves him, he uses that hurdle to observe the differences between Vietnamese in Saigon, Cambodian monks in a temple near his starting point, and the Chinese in Cholon--”the way they talked, the way they washed, the way they spat.” Pym, unlike many of his countrymen, makes no value judgements nor traces of racism, but it becomes clear that he prefers the company of Cambodians, probably because he’s able to speak their language. One of his few moments of petulance surfaces when a Khmer official insists on conversing with him exclusively in French.

Carrying a rucksack that weighs over thirty pounds and is filled with 1000 cigarettes and four pounds of candy to give as gifts along the way, as well as a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and wearing “car-tyre sandals,” Pym travels less than 14 miles on his first day and fails to reach his initial goal, Pim’s village. On the following day he meets a man who claims he’s related to Pim, “the son of his brother.”

“It was a recognition worthy of a Greek play.” Although Pim died years earlier, his relatives are delighted that a foreigner has come in search of him and the next few days are spent drinking rice wine and existing in an “alcoholic stupor.” 

Drunk or sober, Pym never loses his talent of observation that he cloaks in understatement, delighted by the sight of a Vietnamese woman garbed in a Norwegian sweater, taken aback by nights when the air becomes “quite nippy,” and politely eating “several kinds of unsavory vegetable soup.” When he’s presented with a grilled tiger steak, he overcomes his initial qualms and finds that it’s “most delicious.”

Having found traces of Pim, his next goal is discovering Neolithic tools. Given an axehead that falls into that category, Pym is satisfied, although his prized possession is a much more modern one--a sabre that he’s seen tribesmen carry and has longed to own. “There were none on sale at the market” but when he meets a man who owns two, he’s able to purchase the extra one. Armed against tigers, Pym is able to disregard his bleeding feet and makes his way through “the sugar palm curtain” that marks the Cambodian border. 

Here he finds a flourishing industry of zirconia pit-mining as well as a Khmer Gold Rush near an “unsavory village.” Peasant life, he decides, is “like an antique pitcher with myriad cracks” that’s held together by Buddhism.

Pym turns out to be one of those delightful explorers for whom the journey is more important than the goal and this makes him a fantastic armchair travel companion. His inability to find traces of the road that led from Prah Khan to Champa is thoroughly eclipsed by the stories he gathers on his 450-mile, 7-week odyssey, ones that make The Road to Angkor a diverting travel narrative--and make me eager to find the book that followed this one, Mistapim in Cambodia.  Christopher Pym, where have you been all my life?~Janet Brown 

Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami, translated by Stephen Snyder (Kodansha)

Trying to categorize Ryu Murakami’s novel Coin Locker Babies is an exercise in futility. it doesn’t follow any known patterns. Is it science-fiction, is it horror, is it a love story. It’s actually all those things and more. 

This book was originally published in the Japanese language in 1980 by Kodansha. It won the Noma Literary New Face Prize in 1981. A prize established by Seiji Noma, the first president and founder of Kodansha Publishing. 

The book centers on two main characters - Kikuyuki Sekiguchi and Hashio Mizouchi. The only thing these two boys have in common is that they were abandoned by their mothers and left in a coin locker in an unnamed station in Tokyo in the summer of 1972. They were the only two babies to survive the ordeal. They were usually called by their nicknames - Kiku and Hashi.

The two boys became wards of an orphanage in Yokohama and became friends as Kiku always came to the aid of Hashi, who was often bullied. Most of the other kids avoided both boys. They also behaved in unusual ways so the nuns finally took them to see a psychiatrist. Their treatment consisted of having the boys listen to an in utero heartbeat without their knowledge. The therapy was supposed to help calm them down. 

The boys were eventually adopted by a couple named the Kuwayamas before they were to begin school. They grew up on a small island off of Kyushu. On the island they discover an abandoned mining town. Their foster parents have always told them to avoid that place but they were young and full of mischief. There, they meet a man they called Gazelle. One of the last words Gazelle says to Kiku is DATURA. He tells him not to forget it. That it will come in handy one day. 

In junior high, Kiku found that he was adept at pole-vaulting and soon that became the focus of his life. Hashi was proud of him and would tell others that Kiku was his big brother. In high school, Kiku becomes even more serious about pole-vaulting but on the day of an important competition Hashi is nowhere to be seen. Kiku’s foster mother shows him a note that Hashi left. Hashi went to Tokyo.

As the story progresses, Kiku and his foster mother go to Tokyo to look for Hashi but do not succeed at first. During their search, they are accosted by some unruly characters. One knocks his mother over who falls and hits her head. She later dies in the hotel they’re staying at. 

Kiku finds Hashi in a fictional area of Tokyo called Toxitown. An area that is surrounded by barbed wire and the outskirts are partrolled by some military types who are ordered to shoot anything that moves if they try to get in. 

Kiku finds Hashi in Toxitown. He also meets a woman named Anemone who becomes his girlfriend. Hashi is now a bisexual singer discovered by a man named D who decides to become Hashi’s manager. He markets Hashi by making public that Hashi’s origins was being an abandoned baby in a coin locker.

As Hashi’s music begins to sell, Mr D has a promotional stunt set up where Hashi will meet his mother who abandoned him on live television. When Kiku sees Hashi break down on TV, he goes to Hashi’s rescue and ends up shooting the woman who turns out to be his own mother. 

Kiku is sent to a Juvenile Detention Center for five years and during that time, Hashi’s music becomes even more popular. However, Hashi is slowly losing his mind while Kiku thinks of escaping and finding DATURA, a lethal substance he plans to use on the city of Tokyo to get his revenge against everybody. 

This book certainly isn’t for the weak of heart. It’s also very difficult to be sympathetic to either Kiku or Hashi even if the reader is aware of their unfortunate beginnings. If you’re in the mood for a dystopic vision of Tokyo, then Coin Locker Babies might be the right book for you. ~Ernie Hoyt

Lords of the Rim by Sterling Seagrave (Corgi Books, out of print)

If you want to grasp the vertiginous changes that have swirled into being since the final decade of  the last century, Lords of the Rim could have been a fine place to start. A political analysis of the power and influence of the Overseas Chinese, heavily balanced upon the past history of China with fleeting glimpses of the present, author and historian Sterling Seagrave launches this with statistics that were doubtless cutting-edge in the early 1990s but are threadbare now. An empire of 55 million Chinese who live and work in the countries of the Pacific Rim with a GNP of $450 billion and liquid assets “as much as $2 trillion” are an economic force in the development of China underpin this book but readers are tossed into a dubious frame of mind when they are confronted with these facts thirty years after Seagrave put them on his pages. How can these still be valid after the Asian financial meltdown of 1997, the handover of Hong Kong and its subsequent political upheavals, the booming world of high tech that has made smartphones a necessity all over the world, and the effects of SARS and Covid-19? 

Because his thesis is a shaky one at this point  in time, Lords of the Rim is only worth reading now if it’s approached as a work of history. Since Asian history is Seagrave’s area of expertise, and his bibliography at the back of this book shows a stunning amount of research, this could be enough to justify reading a book in 2024 that was published in 1995. Unfortunately, it’s not.

Beginning his narrative long before the birth of Christ, Seagrave swiftly moves through Chinese dynasties to show why the North and the South of China have traditionally been in opposition, with the North holding the rulers and the South being a hotbed of entrepreneurism. With merchants being on a low rung of the Confucian hierarchy, it was an easy matter to expel them from the reaches of power, banishing them to live below the Yangtze. Southern China became a sort of prison colony, far from official regulations and near the sea. Maritime trade was a logical step for the exiled merchants.  They found routes to Southeast Asia that became lucrative and later made their way to Arabia and parts of Africa. Long before the advent of the Silk Road, southerners had become wealthy from spices and silks and as dynastic upheavals racked the North, the South became a refuge and an opportunity for the merchant class of China, not a punishment.

Although they weren’t scholars, these businessmen were far from illiterate--and their choice of reading material wasn’t the Analects of Confucius. It was Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Realizing that “business is warfare,” they adapted Sun Tzu’ s classic instruction manual to serve as “The Art of Wealth,” with gratifying results.

As their voyages became an integral part of the Southern Chinese economy, they established trading centers in the countries with which they did business, and since these new expatriates had no interest in local politics and no desire to colonize, they met little opposition from their host countries. But through business, these new residents gained secure toeholds as pawnbrokers, making loans to the locals with property as the collateral. As dynasties rose and fell, with accompanying turmoil, the overseas outposts became attractive places to live and by the 17th Century, there were significant communities of Chinese living in Japan, the islands of Indonesia, the Malay peninsula, and Siam. When the merchant pirate Coxinga, half Chinese, half Japanese, chased the Dutch from Taiwan, that became another alluring alternative to dynastic uproar and gradually the Overseas Chinese became an “invisible empire.”

Seagrave is masterful in recreating the history of China but that only takes up one-third of his book. He then plunges into the 20th Century history of the Chinese in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Thailand in a kind of intellectual Cliff Notes. Overstuffed with too many names, too many cataclysms, and too many business enterprises, his book becomes a tiresome slog and sinks under an excess of information. Ending with the death of Deng Xiaoping, he hints at a backlash against “commercial corruption” and a threat of “economic collapse.” “Where it will stop, nobody knows,” he concludes.

Sterling Seagrave knew. He lived until 2017. It’s a pity--and quite annoying-- that he didn’t care enough to publish an updated version of Lords of the Rim, with fresh insights provided by a new century.~Janet Brown

Honeybees and Distant Thunder by Riku Onda, translated by Philip Gabriel (Doubleday)

Riku Onda is the pen name of Nanae Kumagai who was born in Aomori Prefecture in 1964. She came to prominence as a writer when she wrote 六番目の小夜子 (Rokubanme no Sayoko), The Sixth Sayoko which was published in 1992 and was adapted into an NHK drama in 2000. Her first novel to be translated into English was ユージニア (Eugenia). The international English title is The Aosawa Murders (Asia by the Book, January 12, 2023). 

Riku Onda’s latest novel to be translated into English is Honeybees and Distant Thunder.  It was originally published in the Japanese language as 蜜蜂と遠雷 (Mitsubachi to Enrai) and published by Gentosha in 2016. It won the Naoki Prize in 2016 and the Japan Booksellers Award in 2017. The book was also adapted into the full length feature film Listen to the Universe in 2019. 

The book centers around a prestigious and highly classical piano competition being held in a small town located just outside of Tokyo. Auditions for the fictional Yoshigae International Piano Competition were being held in five cities around the world - Moscow, Paris, Milan, New York, and the town of Yoshigae. The competition is held every three years and this year marks the sixth time it would be taking place. 

There is Jin Kazama, a sixteen-year-old prodigy who isn’t enrolled in any music school and doesn’t have a piano of his own and travels with his father who is an itinerant beekeeper. He is also the protege and student of a world-reknowned figure in the classical world, the recently deceased Yuji Von Hoffmann. 

Aya Eiden was also considered a piano genius but fled the stage during a competition and seemed to have vanished without a trace since her mother’s death. She is now trying to make a comeback but still lacks the confidence needed to participate in an international competition.

Another participant is Masaru Carlos Levi Anatole, also known as “The Prince of Julliard”. He was also befriended by Aya when they were still high school students. He is favored to take the top prize at this year’s competition. 

Finally, there is Akashi Takashima. He is the oldest entrant. He is married and has a steady job. However, he wants to make one last attempt to have a career in music. If he is able to win this competition, the dream he gave up may be rekindled. 

Onda’s book is a story of love and courage, friendship and rivalry and what it means to be a genius. The four main protagonists' interactions with other minor characters such as a piano tuner, a documentary filmmaker, and a stage manager shows the human side of each individual. Onda leaves it up to the reader to determine what makes a person a genius. If you’ve never been a fan of classical music, reading this book might spark your interest. 

The Japanese edition of the book included a CD of different selections mentioned in the story. Although the English edition doesn’t include a CD, readers can check Spotify or other streaming services to hear the actual works of Chopin, Mozart, Bach, and others. You may even become a fan of classical music while doing so as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

Evergreen by Naomi Hirahara (Soho)

When Aki Nakasone and her parents return to Los Angeles after years in an internment camp and an involuntary relocation to Chicago, their hometown feels unwelcoming and unfamiliar. “Ban the Jap” committees prevent them from moving into many areas in the city, Little Tokyo is filled with Black transplants from the South, and Aki feels lucky to find a house in the Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Many others who have returned from the camps can only find temporary housing in trailers and old army barracks.

She’s also fortunate to find a job in the Japanese Hospital as a nurse’s aid because California is mulling over propositions that will limit the livelihoods open to Japanese Americans. There are rumors that the state intends to confiscate property owned by Japanese Americans under an act of escheat, and the Ku Klux Klan is a legal entity under California law. 

When one of Aki’s elderly patients turns out to be covered with bruises, she’s surprised to find that the old man is the father of one of her husband’s best friends, who was best man at her wedding. His dismissive reaction to his father’s injuries shocks Aki and when the old man later dies in the hospital from a gunshot wound, her suspicions flare into life when the son is nowhere to be found.

As Aki searches for the missing son, she becomes drawn into the scattered community of  internment camp returnees and into the underworld that flourishes in post-war Los Angeles. Police corruption and rampant prejudice impede her efforts to find the dead man’s only relative, plunging her into a perilous and frightening mission. To complicate matters, the man Aki married in a whirlwind wartime romance has come home from the battlefield with memories that trouble his sleep and have turned him into a stranger.

In this sequel to Clark and Division (Asia by the Book, July 2022), Naomi Hirahara once again uses a compelling mystery to bring past history to light. Aki’s husband is one of the “Go for Broke Boys,” a member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, part of the 100th Infantry Battalion that fought in Europe while their own families were interned in U.S. camps. In less than two years these two units earned over 4000 Purple Hearts and 4000 Bronze Star medals, only to face discrimination when they returned to the United States. In a heartbreaking portion of Evergreen, a member of the 442nd is unable to marry the woman he loves unless the couple elopes to another state--California’s anti-miscegenation law isn’t repealed until 1948, three years after the war ended.

Hirahara’s deep dive into history and her skill in creating intricate mystery plots are brightened by bursts of descriptions that are original and lovely. “Palm trees swaying against a bleed of pink,” and “windows spilled sun on tile floors” make readers understand why Aki and her family, along with so many other, returned to Los Angeles and fought against steep and daunting odds to make it their home once again. ~Janet Brown

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (Penguin)

I often enjoy revisiting modern classics as well as reading classics I’ve never got around to reading. E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India falls into the latter category for me. I already knew that some of the content would irritate me as the story is set in British India and the Brits were not kind to the native people. 

The book was originally published in 1924 and was adapted into a movie in 1984. I had neither read the book nor watched the film, so the story was very fresh to me. It is set around the 1920s and is based on the experiences of the author. The title is taken from a Walt Whtman poem A Passage to India which can be found in his book of poetry titled Leaves of Grass.

The story revolves around four main characters - Dr. Aziz, his friend, Mr. Cyril Fielding, an elderly woman named Mrs. Moore and a young and soon to be engaged British woman named Miss Adela Quest. 

Dr. Aziz is a young muslim physician who works at the British Hospital in the fictional city of Chandrapore. His boss and head doctor at the hospital is Maj. Callendar, a bigoted Brit that is unlikable from the very beginning of the story. 

Dr. Aziz first meets Mrs. Moore at a local mosque. He yells at her, telling her she does not belong here, but after exchanging a few words and clearing up their misunderstanding, it becomes the start of a new friendship. 

Ms. Adela Quested is a British school mistress who came to Chandrapore to meet and talk with Ronnie Heaslop, the British Magistrate in Chandrapore to see if she really wants to marry him or not. She was accompanied by Mrs. Moore, Ronnie Heaslop’s mother. The two women say they would like to meet some real Indians so Mr. Turton, the city tax collector, arranges a party and invites several Indians as well. 

However, the party doesn’t turn out to be a bit awkward because of the Indian lack of self-assurance and fear of offending the host and other British citizens but is also due to the Brit’s bigotry. It is here that Dr. Aziz meets Mr. Fielding, a middle-aged British man who is the principal of a small government-run college for Indians. 

At the party hosted by Mr. Fielding, Mrs. Moore and Ms. Quested say they would like to see more of the “real” India and Dr. Aziz says he would arrange an outing to the nearby Marabar Caves, another ficitional area that was modeled after Barabar Caves in Bihar. Mr. Fielding and his Hindu friend Nawab Bahadur. 

However, Mr. Fielding and Mr. Bahadur missed the train to the caves leaving Dr. Aziz in charge with no British officials present to watch over the women. At the caves Mrs. Moore decides to take a rest while Dr. Aziz and Ms. Quest continues through some of the other caves. The two become separated and the next Dr. Aziz sees is Ms. Quested climbing down the mountain to meet Miss Derek who frequently makes use of a car owned by a Hindu Royal Family she works for. 

When Dr. Aziz returns, he is immediately arrested and charged with sexually assaulting Ms. Quested in one of the caves. The British police, the Magistrate, all believe that Dr. Aziz is guilty because no Englishwoman would lie or make up a story.

Dr. Aziz’s trial then becomes the focus point of the story. The Brits have already condemned him and for them, the trial is but a farce to prove that the government is also fair to the natives. The verdict all lies with Ms. Quested’s testimony. As to the outcome, I would not spoil it for any other readers who may be interested in revisiting this novel.

I think many reader would find this story reminiscent of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which also focuses on the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. The attitudes of white Americans are similar to those of Forster’s British colonizers. The underlying theme being the fragile balance of race relations. One word from a white person is all that’s needed to condemn someone who is not of the same race.

Although the British Empire isn’t as strong as it was and the U.S. did abolish slavery, it hasn’t stopped prejudice against people who are perceived to be different. As cynical as it sounds, until a time when people are really treated equally, prejudice and injustice will continue. ~Ernie Hoyt

Written on Water by Eileen Chang (New York Review of Books)

There are some books that wait for the right moment to be opened, bought with good intentions, only to sit on a shelf for months. Last winter I brought home a collection of essays, realized I wasn’t in the mood for any of them, and almost forgot about this purchase. When I picked it up this week, I fell into a conversation with a twenty-something who was born over a hundred years ago, a writer whose fiction had always intimidated me but whose essays were pure enjoyment.

Author of Love in a Fallen City and Lust, Caution, Eileen Chang admits that her novels are “rather diverting but also more unsettling than they should be…I like tragedy and, even better, desolation.” She approaches her characters with an analytical distance that’s scaldingly honest and devoid of tenderness. Although I’ve always been stunned by her talent, I’ve never read her work with pleasure--until I opened Written on Water and was immersed in delight, envy, and agreement. 

Chang had me hooked with her essay,  Peking Opera through Foreign Eyes, where she asserts that ignorance of its subtleties only increases the enjoyment. If the audience isn’t aware of how it should be performed, then it’s free from niggling criticisms and can simply be caught up by the pageantry and spectacle. As an ignorant and passionate devotee of Chinese opera who has sat on a sidewalk for hours to enjoy outdoor performances of this artform, thrilling to the “sharp, anxious tattoo of percussion” that punctuate the “kicks and jousts and feints,” I began to love the mind of Eileen Chang. When she went on to say “Chinese people like the law, and they like breaking the law too…by way of trivial violations of the rules,” I remembered the times I saw this happen in Beijing and embarked upon a silent conversation with Chang as I read. And when she discusses “the chamber pot strategem,” when the soul of a dead man is imprisoned in a chamber pot, I knew this was a plot device that could only be created by people who had intimate knowledge of an outdoor privy (or as we called this in Alaska, an outhouse).

At this point I was ensnared by Chang’s wit, frankness, and her unflinching curiosity. She wrote these pieces before she turned 25, after the publication of her first novel, and they’re filled with the viewpoint of someone who’s still in love with discovery. She describes street scenes with the same relish that she does women’s fashions and confesses that her love of city sounds means “I can’t fall asleep until I hear the sound of trams.” She gives a vivid character sketch of her best friend with an intimacy that she denies her fictional subjects and she brings a poignant dimension to the fall of Hong Kong with the memory of “how we scoured the streets in search of ice cream and lip balm” in the midst of “chaos and destruction.”

The bleakness and distance of Chang’s fiction becomes understandable when she writes about her father, a man surrounded by “clouds of opium smoke.” “When he was lonely,” she says, “he liked me.” In a luxurious setting, Chang’s childhood is Dickensian in its privations, which she recounts in the spirit of “There’s very little to remember so nothing is forgotten.” She’s far too ironic--and much too cerebral-- to lapse into drama.

Chang skillfully reveals her love of China, as she writes about its daily life, its art, its music. “I am Chinese,” she says, “so I know how to appreciate noise and clatter…If I were to choose, I could not bear to leave China: I’m “homesick even before I leave home.”…” Ten years after these words were published, she left. In 1955, Chang moved to the U.S. and five years later she took U.S. citizenship. She died alone, in Los Angeles, a death that makes Written on Water all the more precious and deeply sad.~Janet Brown

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