A Distant Heart by Sonali Devi (Kensington)

Sonali Devi’s novel A Distant Heart is the fourth in her series of Bollywood stories. It is set in the bustling city of Mumbai. The main characters are a young girl named Kimaya and a boy named Rahul Savant. 

Kimaya Kirit Patil is the daughter of a wealthy politician and his wife. Everybody called her Kimi. Her name means “miracle” in Sanskrit and to her parents that’s exactly what she is. Her father had told her that her mother had given birth to seven other babies before she was born but only she, Kimi, survived. 

Rahul Surajrao was the son of a policeman. He was the oldest of three. His younger brother’s name is Mohit and his sister's name is Mona. Along with his Aie which means “mother” in the Marathi language, they live in a chawl, a residential building similar to a tenement. 

The story is mostly told in the first person by the two main characters. However, Devi has the novel jumping from the present and past. Once you understand the development of the story, it gets easier to follow. 

Rahul’s father died in the line of duty. He was shot while protecting a high level politician. Rahul was only fourteen years old when his father died in his lap. The other officers around him told him, “He will be okay. Keep courage”. However, Rahul knew only terror. How could he “keep courage” knowing his father was not coming back after being shot a couple of times in the chest. At fourteen-years-old, it was now up to Rahul to take care of his family.

When Kimaya was eleven, it was discovered that she had a rare disease. Her body lacked the immunity to protect her from various pathogens and she was confined to living in a sterile room with a view of the ocean. She spent most of her days alone…until one day she spots a boy cleaning the windows on the outside. That boy would be Rahul and they would become good friends. In fact, for each of them, the other was their only friend.

Switching back to the present, Kimi was the recipient of a heart transplant two years ago. She became interested in knowing who her donor was. Her father explained to her a number of times that the donor wished to remain anonymous. The day Kimi received her heart was the same day, Rahul lost one of his closest friends. A woman named Jen Joshi who worked in a clinic in one of the slums. 

Joshi had noticed that the names of organ donors on her list had been disappearing and it was Rahul who was helping her investigate it when she was killed by the leader of an organized crime boss - Asif Khan. The same man who had accosted Kimi earlier to show him her scar and asking, “Do you know where your heart came from?”. Rahul managed to shoot Asif who survived but was currently in a coma. 

Now, Asif has come out of his coma and he has escaped the hospital. He has also threatened Kimi’s father because Kimi’s father was unable to stop the police from investigating the illicit organ trading business. Ironically, Kimi’s father tried but the man heading the investigation was Rahul who refused to back down. ~Ernie Hoyt

Devi’s story has an exciting blend of action coupled with romance. The story asks the ultimate question of its readers - a question of ethics. How far would you go to protect the one you love? Would you be willing to sacrifice others just to save your own flesh and blood?

The Mantis by Kotaro Isaka, translated by Sam Malissa (Vintage)

Kotaro Isaka is one of Japan’s foremost mystery writers that also includes Keigo Higashino and Miyuki Miyabe. A number of their books have been adapted into feature length movies and many of their titles have been translated into English. 

The Mantis became available in English in paperback for the first time in 2024. It was published by Vintage Books and translated by Sam Malissa, a Yale scholar who holds a PhD in Japanese Literature. He has also translated Kotaro Isaka’s books 3 Assassins, Bullet Train, and most recently Hotel Lucky Seven. 

The Mantis was originally published in the Japanese language as AX in 2017 by Kadokawa. It was nominated for the Bookstore Award in 2018 which was won by Mizuki Tsujimura’s Lonely Castle in the Sky (Asia by the Book, April 27, 2023). The Mantis is the third book in Isaka’s Hitman series. 

The main character is Kabuto. An ordinary family man with a wife and a high-school aged son, Katsumi. He works at an office supplies company. He started the job in his mid-twenties when his son was born and has continued to work there. Kabuto has another job. A job he hasn’t mentioned to his wife or son. 

Kabuto is a contract killer. However, Kabuto has a strong desire to leave that particular profession behind. When he was talking to his son the other evening, he said to his son, “Do you know what the one thing I want to do most is?” Of course his son doesn’t know but he answers, “I want to worry about my son’s future. Whether it’s school, or anything. I want to rack my brains thinking about what path you should and shouldn’t take”. 

On his latest assignment, Kabuto teamed up with a couple of other contractors who were given the same target. After the job was done, the assassins joked around with each other. The other two admire Kabuto for being a married man who continues to do this job. Kabuto shares a story about his wife that the other two find quite amusing. They told him “The whole industry respects you” but adds, “There are a lot of people who would be disappointed if they knew you were this frightened of your wife”. 

Kabuto often goes to a hospital in another part of town away from his own house and his son’s school. The clinic may seem like an ordinary clinic on the outside but the doctor who runs the place is also Kabuto’s handler. He advises Kabuto “to undertake this surgery”. In their line of business, they use codes and phrases that may sound normal in a hospital setting but have totally different meanings. “Surgery” means “target”. “Emergency operation” means the deed has to be done as soon as possible. 

Kabuto had promised his wife that he would go with her to their son’s parent-teacher conference but the “emergency operation” is to be held on the same day. Kabuto wants to refuse the “operation” and tells the doctor, “No more risky procedures”. He tells the doctor he wants to get out of the game. The doctor answers “Retirement requires capital” which Kabuto knows to mean the doctor will never let him retire. 

He reluctantly takes the assignment but consistently refuses other “risky procedures”. He also learns that the Doctor has taken out a contract on him. Now Kabuto must do everything he can to save himself and his family. 

Kotaro Isaka’s Assassins series never disappoints. There is a lot of action, there are many plot twists and you never know what will happen next. If you’re unfamiliar with Japanese mystery, Kotaro Isaka books would be a good place to start. ~Ernie Hoyt

Kiki's Delivery Service (Volumes 1-4) by Hayao Miyazaki (Viz Media)

Studio Ghibli animation films have become popular worldwide and are loved by many people around the world. Although many of the films are original stories, there are a few that are based on other works. 

Kiki’s Delivery Service is a film that was based on a novel written by Japanese children’s book author and essayist Eiko Kadono. The original title is 魔女の宅急便 (Majo no Takkyubin) which translates to “The Witch’s Delivery Service”. it was originally published in 1985 by Fukuinkan Shoten. This four volume graphic novel adaptation of the book was written and drawn by Hayao Miyazaki. 

We are introduced to Kiki, a thirteen-year-old witch who is about to embark on a journey to become an independent witch. She is the daughter of the witch Kokiri and a mortal man, Okino, an anthropologist who studies witches and fairies. 

Kiki speaks in the first-person and tells us “I’m the witch Kiki. When a witch turns thirteen she has to take a journey to hone her craft!”. She has made her own broom and plans to leave on an evening when the skies are clear and the moon is full. Joining Kiki on her journey will be her pet and companion, Jiji, a black cat that can speak. 

Kiki’s mother offers Kiki her old and reliable broom but Kiki wants to use the one she made herself. Jiji also says that she should take her mother’s broom. An elderly woman says that Kiki can make a new broom once she gets settled into her new town. Then, her adventure begins. 

Kiki heads towards the ocean and finds a bustling coastal city. it’s the kind of place she’s always imagined. The first person she meets and talks to in the city is the town’s clock tower keeper who informs Kiki that nobody has seen a real witch in a long time. 

However, her first encounter with a citizen of the city is the local police who reprimands her for nearly causing an accident. She is saved from the police when someone shouts “Thief!!”. It was a young boy who loves flying. He tells Jiji it was him that helped save her and would she mind teaching him how to fly. Although she is thankful for being saved, she finds the boy's demeanor to be rude and walks away. 

Kiki tries to find a place to stay for the night but wherever she goes, she’s asked about her parents or if she has any identification on her. She begins to have doubts about living in this big city and Jiji suggests looking for a bigger city with friendlier people. But then she meets Osono, the proprietress of a local bakery who offers Kiki a room in return for helping out in the bakery. 

As a new witch in a new town, Kiki must now find a way to make a living. After helping Osono by delivering an item a customer forgot, she returns with a message telling Osono her new delivery girl is quite special. Kiki knows the one talent she has that others don’t is the ability to fly. So she asks Osono if she could start a delivery service at Osono’s Bakery. 

The story is about the trials and tribulations of fitting into a new environment, making friends and becoming a responsible witch after a year of training. However, even with humans, witches have their ups and downs. The most serious being losing her magical abilities. 

Kiki makes her amends with the young boy Tombo, a boy about the same age as Kiki named tombo who has a love of flying. He is a member of the Aviation Club at his school. Although she feels comfortable talking to Tombo, she feels his friends look at her differently. She can sense that they see she is different. It’s after this encounter that Kiki discovers her magic is weakening. 

Will Kiki’s magical powers return? Will she be able to talk to her cat Jiji? When danger threatens and Tombo’s life is hanging by a thread, it takes all of Kiki’s power to conjure up the courage to face her fears and help her new found friend. 

At its most basic, Kiki’s Delivery Service is a coming-of-age story. It is the story of becoming independent and finding the courage to face up to one’s fears in the face of danger. The story can be enjoyed by adults and children alike and perhaps will be able to teach the reader a lesson as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

Waiting to be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman (Penguin Press)

“No wall can stop the wind,” a Uyghur proverb says. Tahir Hamut Izgil knows this is true. In 1996, he is imprisoned for three years when Chinese authorities stop him as he leaves his home in Xinjiang to study in Turkey. Accused of “taking illegal and confidential materials out of the country,” this young poet has to rebuild his life when he‘s released just before the turn of the century.

He marries and makes a comfortable and secure living for his wife and two daughters as a film director for movies, television shows, and commercials. But his true vocation lies in writing poetry. Over the next twelve years, he nurtures this gift within a network of Uyghur writers.

Uyghur people have lived in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region for millennia, perhaps before the beginning of the Christian Era. Followers of Islam with presumably Turkish origins, most of them live in the capital city of Urumqi, as does Izgil. In recent years, the Chinese government has accused them of plotting separatism and when a spurt of violence erupted in Urumqi in 2009, the clampdown upon this ethnic group is swift and draconian. 

Mass arrests become routine, with Uyghurs accused of “fabricated crimes” and whisked away to re-education centers. Izgil is taken into police custody, extensively interrogated, and put under surveillance. 

In 2011, the government bans traditional Arabic greetings and orders people to change their names from those that have Islamic origins. The Chinese flag is raised over mosques and radios are confiscated and banned from sale. Inspections of mobile phones routinely ends in the arrest of the people who own them.

Izgil and his wife are called into police headquarters for fingerprinting, an ordeal that lasts three hours and includes taking blood samples, ‘voice prints,” and facial images. When asked about his religious faith, Izgil says he has none. When they’re finally released, Izgil’s wife, who has resisted any thought of immigration, says “We have to leave the country.”

They give away their copies of the Quran, they purge their phones and computers of anything that might be compromising, and they embark on a torturous, convoluted path that will lead them from their homeland. A Uyghur academic is given life imprisonment under accusations of separatism. Izgil keeps warm clothing and thick footwear by his bedside in case the police come to take him away in the middle of the night.

“I wish China would just conquer the world,” one of Izgil’s friends says bitterly, “Then we would all be the same…not alone in our suffering.” Another says in a poem, “We came from nowhere else and we will not leave for anywhere.” Not long after Izgil and his family emigrate to the United States, this man is sentenced to 16 years in prison.

Once they are safely in another country, Izgil calls his parents but not even this message of reassurance goes unpunished. Soon after this, his mother’s phone and ID card are both confiscated. 

As they make another home in a strange place, “we burn with guilt,” Izgil admits, “Our bodies might still be here but our souls are still back home.”

Although this memoir is eloquent and illuminating, its narrative is told under a different timescape, twisting with personal history, conversations that are scrupulously detailed, and a wealth of poems. Reading it gives not just another perspective but a whole new form of psychology, one that was constructed to survive a world that could well have been invented by Kafka, one that readers are privileged to experience at a comfortable distance.~Janet Brown

The Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai, translated by Sam Bett (New Directions)

Osamu Dazi is the pen name of Shuji Tsushima. A Japanese writer who was born in the rural town of Kanagi, currently a part of Goshogawara City, in Aomori Prefecture. His most famous novel is 人間失格 (Ningen Shikkaku), translated into English as No Longer Human. 

The Flowers of Buffoonery is a prequel to No Longer Human and has become available for the first time in English in 2023. It was first published as 道化の華 (Douke no Hana) in the literary journal Japanese Romanticism Vol.1 No.3 in 1935. It was published in book form as 晩年 (Ban’nen) in 1936 by Sunagoya Shobo. 

The story features Yozo Oba, the protagonist of No Longer Human, convalescing in a seaside sanatorium in Kanagawa Prefecture after an attempted double suicide with a young woman. The woman perished but Yozo was saved by a passing fisherman. 

Yozo Oba is staying at a place called Blue PInes Manor. He is recuperating from his failed suicide attempt. The story takes place over four days with Yozo’s friends and family coming to visit him. They try to keep Yozo in good spirits and avoid talking about Sono, the woman he was planning on dying with. 

The director of the sanatorium and the nurse that works there also drifts in and out of Yozo’s room to see how well he is doing and to check his mental stability. While staying at the sanatorium, Yozo decides to write a book with Yozo Oba as the main character. 

The story opens with Yozo reading his own lines from his book he is trying to write. It starts off with “Welcome to Sadness. Population one.” He tries to tell the story about how and why he survived. He continues to write in the first person, “It was me - these are the hands that pulled Sono underwater. In my insolence, I prayed for my salvation in the same breath that I prayed Sono would die”. 

Yozo Oba isn’t the only patient at Blue Pines Manor. When he was brought in, there were thirty-six tuberculosis patients. Two of them were in critical condition, eleven had mild cases, and the rest were in remission. 

Yozo was staying in Room 4 of the Eastern Wing of the sanatorium. A place reserved for “special cases” such as himself. There are six rooms in the Eastern Wing, two of which are currently vacant. In Room One was a male college student. In Rooms Five and Six were a couple of young women. All three were recovering patients. 

Although the story is rather short at just shy of one hundred pages, the emotions that are displayed by Yozo and his friends and family shows Dazai’s understanding of the human condition. 

Yozo Oba is of course based on Dazai’s own life experiences and he often makes fun of how people react to different situations. He makes Yozo act lighthearted when he is around his friends who can joke about a serious subject like suicide and yet, Yozo’s innermost thoughts are quite the opposite of how he acts. 

It’s difficult to sympathize with Yozo Oba. You cannot know if he’s being serious or if he just has a chip on his shoulder and is a bitter person at heart. If you have also read No Longer Human, you will know what becomes of him. 

Reading Dazai’s stories can be quite depressing at times and yet he manages to add a bit of humor so the reader won’t give up in disgust. Even if you cannot sympathize with Yozo Oba or Osamu Dazai, you can’t help but to continue reading to find out what happens in the end. ~Ernie Hoyt

Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang (Random House)

In 1978 a Taiwan manufacturer set up the Taiwan Handbag Factory in an isolated corner of Guangdong Province. It was the only foreign factory to have come to the small town of Dongguan, a place that had no railway connections and no roads. It hired local labor but soon needed to augment that supply with migrant labor from rural China. Two years later Deng Xaoping established the first  of China’s Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen, fifty miles from Dongguan. 

By the 1990s, Dongguan became a manufacturing hub, with factories for electronics and computer parts taking their place with the ones that made toys, clothing and shoes. It became famous for its “factories and prostitution,” a city “built for machines, not people.” Instead of streets, it boasted ten-lane highways.

In 2004, Leslie T. Chang, a bilingual reporter for the Wall Street Journal, came to Dongguan. Her goal was to report on migrant labor in that city, a tsunami of workers who had been streaming to its factories for two decades. She stayed in Dongguan for 1-2 weeks every month for two years.

A young woman herself, with a fluency in Chinese, Chang found it easy to gain the confidence of young women who worked in the factories, who at that time made up 70% of the labor force and one-third of the migratory flow. Homeless until marriage, by virtue of their gender, these girls were never considered permanent parts of their family households. When parents realized their daughters could become financial assets in factory towns, they encouraged the girls to take that leap.

Chang follows the lives of two girls, Min who left home at 16 and Chunming who came to Dongguan when she was just a year older. Through them she chronicles the progress that could be made by girls who have left their villages.

Although social pressure may have sent these girls to work in factories, what kept them there was freedom and mobility. If they disliked their workplace, they changed jobs, going to “talent markets,” places where job fairs met speed dating. Rapid-fire interviews were conducted to find workers who were “female, pretty, and single,” the younger and the taller the better. Lies and subterfuge were common, girls who lost their  identity cards and procured another went by a new name for as long as that was necessary. Men were less desirable job candidates in this fast-paced employment arena and were usually confined to maintenance positions, while young women found their way into office jobs.

Within a year, Chunming went from making 300 yuan a month to 1500. Min, after having her identity card, mobile phone, and her money stolen from her, went from living on the streets to “building a new life from scratch,” getting a job in a Hong Kong-owned handbag factory where her salary was high enough to make her the dominant figure in her rural family.

Factory girls were the leaders of a social revolution. The money they brought to their parents gave them a position of power. At the Lunar New Year, they were the ones who gave envelopes of money to their elders and household decisions rested with them. As they gained positions of status in the workplace, they often outranked the men they dated and used that power to their advantage. Chunming’s stock phrase when finding a man didn’t measure up to her standards was “Let’s just be friends, then,” which she often pronounced in a matter of minutes.

Pragmatic and ambitious, these girls set personal goals that dominated their time away from their jobs. Chunming kept a diary and studied Ben Franklin’s Thirteen Rules of Morality. When direct sales came to China, promising a route to prosperity, speaking skills were a path to success and young women flocked to classes that gave them that ability. English was so in demand that the Taiwan-owned Yue Yuen plant that manufactured Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, offered English classes onsite at their gated facility, a place that also had a kindergarten, a movie theater, and a hospital.

Girls who had come from small farms found they needed polish to achieve success and went to “academies” that told them how to dress, eat, smile, pour tea, use the telephone, and when it was necessary, how to drink. (“Do you know how to make cocktails?” one of Chunming’s friends asked Chang.)

Chang wrote Factory Girls twenty years ago. It prompts a deep curiosity about what became of these upwardly-mobile, ambitious young women and if their effect on society continues to hold its power. A sequel is screaming to be written, if only to continue the stories of those indomitable girls, Min and Chunming. ~Janet Brown

Other Rivers by Peter Hessler (Penguin Press)

Of all the books I’ve read about the Covid years, whether they are fiction or memoirs, there’s only one I would ever reread. This is one that was written in 2020, Wuhan Diary by the sixty-five-year-old author, Fang Fang (Asia By the Book, December 2020). First published online from January to March of 2020, then translated into more than twenty languages, including English, and published by HarperCollins, this journal showed the day-by-day progression of the virus and the means by which it was suppressed, described in deeply human terms. For me, nothing else has measured up to Fang Fang’s reportage, for which she has been almost erased. She is no longer published in China and her name can no longer appear in that country’s press, nor can she be interviewed by any outlet. Despite this silencing, she remains hopeful, telling another writer, “I believe it won’t be like this forever.”

In his latest book, Other Rivers, Peter Hessler fails to reach the standard set by Fang Fang, although he was also living in China at the time she published her writing. A man who first came to China in 1996, and has lived and worked in that country for over ten years, he returned in the autumn of 2019, with his wife (Leslie Chang, author of Factory Girls, who has matched her husband’s duration in China) and their nine-year-old twin daughters. 

Hired by Sichuan University in Chengdu, Hessler is greeted with a sardonic observation. Noting that he came to work in Cairo just as the 2011 Arab Spring with its subsequent massacres began and then returned to the US just in time to see Trump win the 2016 election, a writer at a dinner party predicts that with Hessler’s return to China, “something bad is probably going to happen.” Within three months, Covid erupts in Wuhan.

As a journalist, Hessler had a stunning opportunity to bring this time to life and at times he does that. His account of his daughters’ introduction to Chengdu Experimental Primary Elementary School where they were the only foreign students and the only ones who had no knowledge of the Chinese language, is fascinating, although given less attention than it might have received. The interruption that Covid imposed is perhaps partially to blame but the girls had a full year in the school after that. At the end of the book, Hessler admits his children’s time in a Chinese public school was the most challenging part of our time in Chengdu,” something a reader would never guess from his accounts of that “challenge.”

To be fair, he has a few challenges of his own, ones that are prompted by what seems a lot like naivete. Since English language classics are available in Chengdu, there are a wide assortment of books from which to choose, so it seems peculiar that Animal Farm is one of the two texts chosen for his class on English Composition. Instead of glossing over Orwell’s political satire, Hessler teaches it in tandem with 1984, a recipe for disaster.

In his nonfiction class, he decides to turn its center-point to journalism, sending his students out into the city to observe and report. When one of his students does a profile on her VPN dealer, Hessler identifies this as “edgy research,” but then has her read it out loud in front of the class. “I wasn’t sure if Yidi’s subject matter was too sensitive,” he says, “...by the time she was halfway finished, I was convinced that I had put her at risk.” Considering his “over ten years” in China, this seems negligent to the point of stupidity.

Later, when Wuhan is no longer under lockdown, Hessler visits and interviews Fang Fang, although this is forbidden. But why worry? By the time this is published, he’s back in the US. At the end of March, 2021, his request for a contract renewal is denied by Sichuan University and he and his family return to the peace of rural Colorado.

A writer without a selectivity index, Hessler has no ability to focus. Everything he has ever seen or experienced he tosses in a gigantic salad, recounted in a random fashion that is painfully staccato. His return to the city and the students that he depicted in his first book, River Town, is thrown into his time in Chengdu, no doubt in an effort to increase the page count in Other Rivers. Although he achieves over 400 pages, at least half of them could have been cut to make this a better book, presenting an inevitable question. Where was his editor? ~Janet Brown

Bangkok Babylon by Jerry Hopkins (Tuttle Publishing)

Among any of us who have spent time in Southeast Asia, a common observation is prevalent--that nobody is more tedious than an old white guy who’s rooted to a Bangkok barstool. Jerry Hopkins, a man who has occupied many a barstool in Bangkok (and other places), not only disputes that point of view, he refutes it. Telling the stories of men he has met on twenty-five different barstools in Thailand’s capital, he proves his point of view. At least during his lifetime, some of the most intriguing people on earth were sitting in some of the most notorious bars in Bangkok. In Bangkok Babylon, he tells their stories and there’s not a boring one in the entire book.

Only a few of these are ones Hopkins wasn’t told directly by the profile subjects. He never met the man who has been called the inspiration for the Marlon Brando figure in Apocalypse Now, Tony Poe, nor the pianist who played for years at the best hotel in Bangkok and who turned out to be a vicious pedophile. In the case of the pianist, Hopkins quotes the lengthy confession that Eric Rossner sent to a Thai newspaper and briefly describes a videotape Rossner had made of time he spent with a ten-year-old girl. Tony Poe’s story comes from Poe’s close friend and colleague, Jack Shirley, a man who had been a self-described “journeyman killer” employed by the DEA and who worked with Poe in at least one successful assassination. 

These stories are counterbalanced by twenty-two others that are much less lurid but equally fascinating. Hopkin’s best friend, whom he terms an “urban guerilla priest,” is a man who’s devoted his life to the largest Bangkok slum, a rebel who knows how to say the Mass in Hmong and knocks back bottles of Heinneken. Father Joe is a warrior who has battled the Thai power structure successfully enough that the slum he lives in now has a school, a 24-hour medical clinic, a credit union, and housing for orphans and abandoned children. His story is followed by interviews with the man who made Lonely Planet’s guide to Thailand a bible to travelers all around the world and the college drop-out who turned abused elephants into musicians with their own symphony orchestra.

A man who once made his living by dressing up as Friar Tuck and selling advice at Renaissance Faires before making a life for himself in Thailand tells Hopkins “If you’re going to get a story out of me, you’ll have to pull and twist, and then make it up, because it’s not there.” He was wrong. If Hopkins had one religious belief, it was “Thou shalt not make things up.” Disdaining Somerset Maugham as “a predatory gossip,” Hopkins had a thousand untold stories that he refused to write, because, he said, “they aren’t mine to tell.” Every living man whom he interviewed for Bangkok Babylon was given the right of refusal. They each read their profile before the book was published and all of them approved what had been written.

The result is an oral history told by a group of eccentric expats to a reporter who likens himself to Forrest Gump, a man in the right place at the right time, who decided when he was young that he’d “travel the world, meet interesting people, and write about them.” Fortunately, one of the “interesting people” whose story is included in this book is Hopkins himself, a journalist who wrote for Rolling Stone, booked “kooks” for Steve Allen’s television show, had the first headshop in Los Angeles, and was on the New York Times bestseller list for his biography of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, which is still in print since its debut in 1980.

Of Bangkok Babylon, Hopkins says somewhat wistfully, “ this book may be a celebration of a part of Southeast Asia that is sliding into the past…” Yes. It is—and a fine celebration at that.~Janet Brown

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