The Border by Erika Fatland, translated by Kari Dickson (Pegasus Books)

Erika Fatland begins her 584-page tome in a spritely fashion that’s as alluring as it is deceptive. Starting at the end of her 259-day journey around the edges of Russia, one that she spread out over the course of three years, she’s at the edge of Eurasia, where Alaska is only about 50 miles away. She’s concluding a mammoth odyssey along Russia’s border, the longest in the world, extending for almost 38,000 miles along the edge of fourteen countries. 

Propelled by the question of what does it mean to have the world’s largest country as your neighbor, Fatland’s concluding journey is on an old Soviet research vessel that will take her through the Northeast Passage. For four weeks she is in the company of 47 other passengers, “a bevy of wrinkly stooped men and women,” all of whom have paid $20,000 to notch up yet another exotic destination on their bucket lists. Their conversations consist of travel talk and Fatlander soon learns she’s the only one who hasn’t been to Antarctica. When she tells an 85-year-old Dutchwoman that she’s excited to make a trip in a Zodiac (a rigid, inflatable boat used in rough seas), the response she receives is “Why?’ Her aged companion has been on hundreds of Zodiac excursions and this is a matter of routine for her.

Tracing the journey of the fur trade that gave Russia a firm toehold on the Western part of the US, Fatland vividly recreates the history of explorers and Cossacks while experiencing dismay at the condition of the islands she visits--”so much rubbish” creating environmental catastrophes. In a hut on one of their ports of call, an abandoned cabin bears evidence of a recent occupation. “Mammoth tusk collectors,” she’s told by her guide, “There is a lot of money to be made--we’re talking millions.”

This is the last portion of The Border to reveal humor or any form of delight. Moving swiftly into her time in North Korea, Fatland finds obfuscation, bleakness, and eerie contradictions. In Pyongyang, apartment buildings routinely soar to 20 storeys or more but their elevators are so flawed that residents clamor for spots near the ground floor. A hotel that’s over 1000 feet high dominates the city skyline but has never been opened. Her guides all carry expensive Chinese mobile phones in a place where coverage to other countries is only available on mountain tops. The DMZ at the division line between North and South Korea holds no human residents while providing “a haven for threatened species.” The beaches in the North are “as beautiful as Vietnam’s” but remain untouristed.

On a tour of Chernobyl at one point of her journey, Flatland is disconcerted that it feels “like a package holiday.” Thirty years after the disaster, people still come to a local hospital with dire after-effects. “It takes time for the isotopes to break down,” a senior staff member says.

Fatland is a historian and this is the focus of The Border. As she makes her way through Asia, the Caucasus, and Europe, there are only vague hints of the current relationship between Russia and its fourteen neighbors. It feels as if this is two separate books, a skimpy travel narrative and an overwhelming torrent of history from past centuries. When she ends her book with time in Ukraine, Poland, Finland, and her native country, Norway, history has fully taken over. Not even a camping trip to the final borderline with her father cuts through Erika’s daunting knowledge of the past.

Does she find the answer to her question of what effects come with being a neighbor to Russia? Perhaps, but if she did, it’s lost in translation.~Janet Brown

Lost Cities of Asia by Wim Swaan (Elek London, out of print)

Once upon a time, travel was a luxury and Asia was an unexplored continent for many Westerners. The very wealthy might go to Tokyo or Hong Kong but Beijing was still Peking, with the entire city forbidden to tourists. Southeast Asia teetered in and out of being a war zone and Korea was a bad memory to most of the Western world. In those days, even European travel was still beyond the reach of many unless they submitted to package tours--”If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium.” It wasn’t until the late 1960s that Iceland Air introduced the concept of budget flights to the masses and Lonely Planet launched the era of the backpacker.

It seems vaguely ludicrous now to open a book called Lost Cities of Asia and find one of its topics is Angkor Wat, which is now one of the heavily visited sites on our planet. But the age of this book is obvious when readers find another “lost” region is called Ceylon, not Sri Lanka. Of the three corners of the world that are explored by the South African writer, Wim Swaan, the only one which now might be considered “lost” is Pagan, which still remains off the tourist circuit.

Although Swaan was also known as a photographer, the more than a hundred plates that fill this coffee-table book seem almost crude by 21st Century standards. Most of them are black and white, while the ones that are in color lack depth and look like antique postcards.Many of the black and white photographs are marred by heavy shadows, taken by a man who was unused to working in tropical sunlight. However since there were few glimpses of Ceylon, Pagan, and Angkor Wat in 1966, when this book was published, few people would criticize Swaan’s technique. They would have been fascinated by the flawed images that showed places few people had ever seen.

It’s Swaan’s scholarship that makes this book a valuable resource half a century after it was first published. The man was not a travel writer and there are no lyrical descriptions or charming anecdotes. The most diverting passages are ones he quotes from travelers who viewed these places in distant centuries. Swaan instead employs his academic expertise as an architect and a historian which makes this book heavy going for the casual reader. It’s unfortunate that it’s literally too heavy to accompany the casual traveler as they explore the sites upon which he elucidates, because Swaan’s knowledge would expand what they see.

Since Swaan’s early background was far from Europe or America, this may have given him a perspective unshared by writers from these continents who were his contemporaries. While most accounts of Southeast Asian sites that were written in the mid-20th Century compare them to “the glory that was Greece and the splendor that was Rome,” Swaan immediately pinpoints India as the primary influence upon Southeast Asia, one that influenced its architecture, its irrigation techniques that enabled the existence of its legendary cities, and its religion. Long before China exacted tribute from this part of the world, India shaped it.

However the process of “Hinduization” often clashed heavily with the indigenous cultures of the region. In the kingdom of Angkor, “both descent and inheritance were in the female line…so deeply ingrained that the subjugation of women prescribed by Hindu custom was flatly rejected.” At Pagan, the ancient gods, the Nats, were joined by the Buddha, not supplanted by him. 

Although India has placed its stamp firmly upon Southeast Asia, (to the point that Pico Iyer took his mother to visit Angkor Wat, she viewed it as an ancient Indian colony) its past history has been written by Chinese monks and merchants, whose quoted accounts bring life to Lost Cities of Asia. Perhaps one of the most invaluable portions of Swaan’s book is its bibliography which provides a springboard for future exploration. Yet even so, he offers a time capsule that evokes not only Asian history, but our own.~Janet Brown

Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda, translated by Alison Watts (Bitter Lemon Press)

Riku Onda is the pen name for Nanae Kumagai, a Japanese writer whose novels The Aosawa Murders (Asia by the Book, January 12, 2023) and Honeybees and Distant Thunder (Asia by the Book, July 4, 2024) have been published in English in 2020 and 2023, respectively. 

Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight was originally published in the Japanese language with the title 木漏れ日に泳ぐ魚 (Komorebi ni Oyagu Sakana) in 2007 by Chuo-Koron Shinsha. It is a psychological thriller. The book was translated by Alison Watts who also translated her novel The Aosawa Murders. Watts has also translated Spark (Asia by the Book, April 15, 2021) by Naoki Matayoshi and The Boy and the Dog (Asia by the Book, January 22, 2024) by Seishu Hase. 

Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight is set in a small apartment in Tokyo over the course of one night. The main characters, Aki and Hiro, have decided to spend one last night together before going their separate ways. Their relationship had been going on a downhill slide since an incident that happened one year ago. They talk about it as if there is someone else listening to their thoughts and worries, as if they’re telling their stories directly to the reader. 

Aki and Hiro went on a hiking trip in the Japanese Alps in Nagano Prefecture along with an experienced mountain guide. However, on that trip, the guide mysteriously died. Aki believes that it was Hiro who killed him. Hiro believes that it was Aki who killed him. They are both going to try to get a confession before the night is over. Who is the murderer and why was he killed? 

Each chapter is told in the first person by Aki and Hiro and begins with Hiro talking about a photograph. What he’s about to share “is the story of a photo”. He says it’s also about “the mystery surrounding the death of a certain man, and a mountain tale as well. Plus, there’s the relationship aspect : the break-up of a couple. But the photo is at the heart of it”. 

Aki is also nervous about this evening. Ever since the incident happened, things haven’t been the same with either one of them. As Aki looks back on their life together in this apartment, she says, “That trip, and the death of that man, changed things forever for us”. Aki feels that for the past year, both of them had been walking on eggshells. She shares her thoughts about the two of them. 

“We were so close until that point, but those few days tore us apart”. It’s still hard to decipher why they drifted apart so much. Is it because they both suspect the other of having a hand in killing that man. Or was it something about the man that led them to the predicament they’re in. 

What really keeps the reader interested is the way Onda has Aki and Hiro taking turns talking about the incident. We learn when and where they met, and then we discover something much more surprising than the death of the mountain guide and why the man’s death had led to this evening. ~Ernie Hoyt

Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien (W.W. Norton & Company)

Within the devastation that swept over Cambodia during the Pol Pot years, names become irrelevant, hazardous, and disposable. Who cares what name was given at birth when nobody is left alive to remember what it once was? “Names were empty syllables, lost as easily as an entire world.” 

A Red Cross physician becomes Kwan instead of James when that name gives him the only chance to stay alive and find his child. A young boy whose brothers are blown apart by landmines as they draw close to a border of safety only knows his nickname, Nuong, which he will keep for the rest of his life. Another little boy tells his captors he is Rithy, not Sopham, and survives to learn which parts of the human body will yield a confession under interrogation, becoming a killer by the time he’s nine. His sister never tells what her name used to be; she becomes Mei in one of Angkar’s labor camps and then Janie when she’s sent by a refugee organization to the safety of a home in Canada. 

“If you want to be strong,” a boy says in the labor camp, “you have to become someone else. You have to take a new name.” 

“Inside us,” Janie’s mother tells her back in the days when the family lived in peace, “from the beginning, we were entrusted with many lives…we try to carry them until the end.” But thirty years later, Janie discovers she “knows too much” and has “too many selves.” Laden with memories that shadow her present life, she’s haunted by her little brother, Sopham. Not able to maintain her grip on him in the middle of an empty sea, she watched as “the ocean breathed him in.” 

Now her memories endanger her son. She no longer can trust herself to live with her husband and child because when remembered violence engulfs her, she strikes out. When her colleague and mentor disappears in search of his lost brother, James, who vanished in the horror of Cambodia in 1975, Janie seizes a chance that will let her find the man who has become the only parent left to her. She returns to the country where she was born, where people who once were told to rid themselves of “memory sickness” and to forget their past history, live with ghosts who will “never be put to rest.”

“The soul is a slippery thing,” Janie’s mother told her, “but in darkness it can be returned to you.” In the darkness of what remains in Cambodia, Janie’s soul remembers the love and the beauty she once knew, in a time when that was as profuse and ordinary as air or water. She learns the necessity of guarding what’s precious and vital by placing dogs at the perimeter to safeguard what’s essential to keep. When she makes a phone call to her Canadian family, her son begs her, “Promise me. Don’t disappear,” and Janie makes that promise.

“The Khmer Rouge had taught us how to survive, walking alone, carrying nothing in our hands.” Piece by piece, Madeleine Thien shows how the Khmer people lost their names, lost their families, but survived to learn other names, other lives, other ways to love. Her novel recreates terrible damage and the agonizing process of recovery, with images that are unforgettable: ”tiny sequins of snow,” “light [that] spins over us like quiet laughter,” two children adrift at sea who are “caught on broken glass,” a prisoner feeling “his heart solidify in mute fear.” Normalcy and madness, the destruction of war and the confusion of peace, people who have the privilege of longing to keep their memories and those who wish they could lose their own--in an astounding act of literary alchemy, Thien makes these juxtapositions alive and agonizing and ultimately steeped in hope.~Janet Brown

Cannibals by Shinya Tanaka, translated by Kalau Almony (Honford Star)

Shinya Tanaka is a Japanese writer who won Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Award for his novel 共食い (Tomogui), which has been translated into English as Cannibals. The story is set in 1989 and the main character, Toma Shinogaki, just turned seventeen. 

He lives with his father Madoka and his father’s partner Kotoko-san. His father is a philanderer, an alcoholic, and often beats the women he has sex with. Toma’s birth mother, Jinko-san, lives close by and runs a fish shop. 

They all live in a community called the Riverside, a place where not much happens and where people down on their luck seemed to have converged. The place also smells of raw sewage as the sewer system has not yet been completed. 

Jinko-san, the fishmonger was almost sixty and her right arm from the wrist down was gone. It was during the war when she lost it. She got pinned under her burning and collapsed house during an air raid. The riverside was an ocean of fire. “I traded one hand to keep my life,” she once told Toma.

The riverside was one of the places that didn’t get developed after the war “and the people who gathered there, intending only to temporarily avoid dire poverty, ended up stuck”. Toma’s father, Madoka, was one of those people.

His father met Kotoko-san at a bar where she worked and she came to live with the Shinogaki’s about a year earlier. It wasn’t until Kotoko-san started living with them that Madoka would start to hit her. 

Toma once asked, “Why don’t you break up with him? You scared of him?”. He was shocked and surprised at her response. She said to him, “He tells me I got a great body, and when he hits me he says it gets even more better. To Toma, she looked like “an incredibly stupid woman”. 

Toma had a girlfriend named Chigusa. At this point in the story, it’s actually hard to tell if Chigusa is really his girlfriend or just some girl that he has sex with. They have known each other since childhood as Chigusa also grew up in the Riverside. 

Lately, Toma has been thinking how much he is like his Dad. She tells him he’s not like his Dad, that he doesn’t hit her. However, Toma responds by saying, “It’s too late if I realize I’m like him after I hit you”. 

Recently, Toma’s father has been searching for a young man as he believes Kotoko-san is being unfaithful to him. The double standard of if’s okay for men to play around but a woman must stand by his man is alive and well in Japan in 1989. 

One day, Kotoko-san tells Toma that she’s pregnant with his father’s baby. This gets Toma thinking about his future. Will his father kick him out so Madoka can live with Kotoko-san and their baby? But Kotoko-san tells Toma that she plans to leave the Riverside. Toma has never thought about leaving and wonders if his father will try to find Kotoko-san if she really does leave. He also wonders if his father will come back. 

Chigusa and Toma also have a falling out after a sex bout where Toma starts choking her before he climaxes. He really believes he’s becoming like his father. Then one day, something happens that changes everything on the Riverside. 

Kotoko-san is gone. Chigusa has been waiting for Toma at the local shrine. And the children run to tell Toma that he must go see her. His father comes home and tells Toma that he’s sorry, that he couldn’t help himself, that he couldn’t find Kotoko-san and Chigusa just happen to be close by and he couldn’t control his urges…

Tanaka brings to life the gritty reality of living near poverty. His characters are far from likable, especially the father and son. The women are all treated as objects to have sex with and hurt. It’s a very disturbing reality but one that’s hard to ignore.

Thank God that this story is fiction. People like Madoka and Toma are the worst breed of humans. How some women can stay with abusive men is still a problem that plagues society today. In the end, Madoka gets what he deserves and Toma…well, that would be up to the reader to decide. ~Ernie Hoyt

Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum, translated by Shanna Tan (Bloomsbury)

South Korean writer Hwang Bo-Reum’s Welcome to the Hynam-dong Bookshop is  a book for booklovers and for anybody who has ever had a dream of opening and running their own bookshop. This is her first novel which was originally released in 2023 in her home country. 

The book became an instant bestseller and was translated into several languages the following year, including English. The Japanese translation won the Japan Bookseller’s Award in 2024. 

The main character, Yeongju, did everything she was supposed to do. She went to university, married a nice man, and had a decent paying and well-respected job. She adhered to the principle that if she were to do her best, things would go well for her. 

At her job, she was a contract worker. However, her manager promised her that if she did well before her next evaluation, she would eventually become a permanent employee. She was given an important assignment that she put her blood and guts into, thinking this time, the company will recognize my worth and make me a permanent full-time employee. How shocked she was to find that her manager not only took her name off the project and added an inept co-worker who was then promoted over her. 

So, Yeongju did what only most people dream about doing. She quit her job, she divorced her husband and decided to open a bookshop which was a dream of hers since she was a child. However, she has no experience on how to run a bookshop or how to run a business, but that does not deter her from following her dream. 

She finds a spot in a suburban area of Seoul that she just fell in love with. She thought that if she fills the store with books, people will come. But the reality of the matter was far from what she imagined. After opening the shop, she would ask herself, “if this her first visit, would she have faith in the staff’s recommendations? How does a bookshop earn trust? What makes a good bookshop?”

For the first few months after opening, Yeongju started writing to do lists, prioritizing what needed to be done first. Before opening the shop, her old life was tearing away at her soul. The only thought in her mind was, “I must open a bookshop”. 

The bookshop had a few early regulars but was still nowhere near to being called successful. Even Yeongju herself said, “I must do better than this”. She starts an Instagram account for the shop, decides to hire a barista so people could enjoy coffee while browsing and perhaps buying a book or two. 

The first employee she hires is Minjun, a young man who also seems to have no direction in life as yet. In the beginning Yeongju tells him that the shop will probably be open for two years or so. She still did not have the confidence that she could run a successful and busy independent bookshop. 

But as the years pass, she begins to think differently from when she began. She now wants her bookshop to be more than just a bookshop, she wants it to be a place where people can come and forget about their everyday, stressful lives, and enjoy a cup of coffee and read books they might enjoy. 

As a longtime bookseller myself, I couldn’t help but admire the change in Yeongu’s attitude when starting the shop and how she gains more confidence in believing herself and her small group of friends and employees who make the Hyunamh-dong Bookshop a place I want to go to as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks by Natsuko Imamura, translated by Lucy North (Faber & Faber)

Natsuko Imamura is a Japanese writer who won the 2019 Akugatagawa Prize for her novel The Woman in the Purple Skirt (Asia by the Book, December 2023) and has also won a number of other literary awards as well. Her latest book to be published in English is Asa : The Girl Who Turned Into a Pair of Chopsticks. Originally published in the Japanese language as 木になった亜沙 (Ki ni Natta Asa) which literally translates to “Asa who turned into a tree”. 

The book is a collection of three short stories. Asa : The Girl Who Turned Into a Pair of Chopsticks is the lead story. It is about a girl named Asa. When she was little she lived with her mother in a small apartment. One day Asa’s mother brought home a bag of sunflower seeds, tossed them in a frying pan and added a little salt. Asa tasted them for the first time and thought they were really delicious so she wanted to take some to share with her friends at daycare.

Asa called over her best friend Rumi and showed her what was in the paper bag she brought. She told Rumi they were sunflower seeds and that you could eat them. She also said they were really delicious. She offered some to Rumi and said to try them, but Rumi refused. Rumi was confused and asked why but Rumi just told her she didn’t want them, then pushed Asa’s hand away and went outside to jump rope. 

Even as Asa grew older, not one person would accept or eat anything that Asa made or offered. Her classmates began to shun her and she went from being totally ignored to becoming a bully. She was sent to a juvenile correctional center when she was still in middle school. She became a model inmate and before being released some of the other inmates talked her into going snowboarding with them. However, the other inmates left her alone at the top of the mountain and since she was a beginner she went off course and hit a tree. 

When she came to, she saw a small raccoon dog and offered it a bit of chocolate that she had in her pocket. The raccoon dog sniffed the morsel but then turned and left. She started laughing at the top of her head and shouted, Nobody has ever accepted my food. Why? Somebody tell me! Why?”. Then she tasted something sweet from the tree. Some kind of fruit. Her last thought before giving out her final breath was “I want to become a tree. Let me become a tree”. If she were a tree that bears fruit, people would eat it. Although Asa did become a tree, she didn’t become a fruit tree, she became a cedar tree and cedar trees don’t bear fruit…

The second story is Nami, Who Wanted to Get Hit (and Eventually Succeeded). The final story is A Night to Remember. As with the first story, they start off quite normally but in Imamura’s world, normal doesn’t last long. Nami was a girl like any other but whenever someone tried to throw something at her - acorns, water balloons, a ball while playing dodgeball, she would never get hit. A Night to Remember centers on a girl who refuses to get up and walk. She thought that being bipedal was a waste of time and was determined to spend as much time as possible not standing up. 

Bizarre, weird, or strange doesn’t come close to explaining any one of these three stories. Imamura has created a world where you may have a hard time distinguishing between reality and fantasy. By the end of the book, you may even question your own reality. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston (Knopf)

When Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior was published in 1976, it was a literary phenomenon on several levels. Memoir was a nascent genre, just beginning to be seen as separate from autobiography. Folklore belonged to scholars, not blended into literary works. Most of all, young Chinese Americans had yet to find a footing in the world of best-sellers. Long before Amy Tan became famous for The Joy Luck Club or Jung Chang electrified readers with Wild Swans, Hong Kingston’s first book soared to the top of national best-seller lists and won the National Critics Circle Award. Almost fifty years after it first appeared in bookstores, it’s still selected by book clubs for discussions. It’s become a classic, praised, criticized, and loved.

Cover of the first edition of The Woman Warrior

Although its subtitle proclaims it’s a memoir, Hong Kingston mingles family history with folk tales and enigmatic glimpses of her own life. This isn’t a linear narrative as much as it is a collection of personal essays that range over space and time. 

An ancestor who strayed from her marital vows in a small Chinese village, throwing herself and her newborn illegitimate child into a well, is used by Hong Kingston’s mother as a cautionary example of the need for chastity. Hong Kingston turns the disgraced woman into the leading figure in a vivid piece of fiction and concludes that her suicide was an act of rebellion and warfare, since she drowned herself in the village’s source of drinking water.

An extended folk tale follows the life of a mythic swordswoman whose bravery rivals Mu Lan’s. Much later, the “woman warrior’s” name is given to Hong Kingston’s mother, herself a redoubtable and unvanquished opponent in her daughter’s eyes. Brave Orchid buried two children in China and was trained as a village doctor, a respected professional before she joined her husband to begin a new family and run a laundry business in America. When her sister, Moon Orchid, comes to the U.S., Brave Orchid drives the new arrival into madness by hurling her into the deep end of a new culture. Raising her American-born children in the Chinese fashion, she creates barriers and confusion as her offspring grow up. Not until her most rebellious daughter is near adulthood does Brave Orchid explain that the girl has misunderstood why she had always been called ugly, to confuse predatory spirits who might seize the child if she was acknowledged as beautiful. “My American life,” Hong Kingston says, “ has been such a disappointment…I’m not a bad girl, I would scream." She is being raised to do battle and prevail as a victor.

For Brave Orchid, America is filled with ghosts--Taxi Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Newsboy Ghosts. In China, she knew how to battle specters. In America, she uses her children to combat these new ghostly figures. Aging in a country that she’s never accepted as her own, she insists “I would still be young if we lived in China,” ignoring her daughter’s insistence that “Time is the same from place to place.” And yet when Moon Orchid arrives, steeped in the behavior of a Chinese lady, Brave Orchid reveals how American she herself has become in her years away from China, shocking her sister as she pushes her into a new world. 

Living in a household dominated by contradictions and traditions that exist only within the walls of their home, Hong Kingston and her siblings learn early on which behaviors to choose. “I want to be a lumberjack,” Hong Kingston says when she’s a little girl. To make sense of the world Brave Orchid lives in, Hong Kingston turns history into fiction and finds answers in folklore.

She writes with the evocative language of a poet, blending it with the unflinching harshness of a child who has been raised to fight, to protect her parents, as a woman warrior.~Janet Brown

Ordinary Disasters by Anne Anlin Cheng (Pantheon Books)

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.” This piece of wisdom,, originally spoken by Aristotle,  has been claimed by St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of those rigorous Catholic educators, the Jesuit order, and by Valdimir Lenin, founder of the Russian Communist Party. This unlikely triumvirate recognized a basic truth: children are irrevocably shaped by their first seven years of life. 

Anne Anlin Cheng lived in Taiwan until she was ten years old. Although she outwardly assimilated within the United States to the point that when her grandparents came from Taiwan for a six-month stay when she was twelve, she had little to say to them. English had outstripped the languages she had spoken with them only two years before, putting “a language barrier between my grandparents and me.”

And yet assimilation, Cheng says, is a matter of covering over differences to fit within another culture, “a shell game.” The “forces of family, of race and culture” that shaped her are Taiwanese, which she realizes most often in her marriage to a white native-born American. Their racial differences are alive “in the pockets of everyday intimacies.” 

America lumps these differences into the category of “Asian. ” Quoting another writer, David Xu Borgonjon, Cheng points out “You can only be Asian outside of Asia.” A “scholar of race and gender,” Cheng attends a meeting at her university that’s held for Asian and Asian American staff “in response to the rise in violence against people of Asian descent.” Within a matter of minutes “ethnic and national differences” take over, showing the artificiality of the “Asian” label.

The common thread uniting people from the continent of Asia is the racism and stereotype that’s been fostered by three centuries of America’s “cultural and legal discrimination.” When this resurfaces during Covid, as virulent as the physical virus, Cheng begins to explore the elements of racism that fill her life.

Shortly before Covid struck, Cheng was diagnosed with cancer.  Slowed by her fight against this disease and by the enforced isolation of the pandemic, she’s confronted with “unabashed racism sweeping our country,” which leads her to examine what she calls “ordinary disasters” and others call microaggressions. She finds them in her everyday life, in her profession, and in her history, exploring what they are and their relentless effects in this collection of personal essays, all of them blazingly smart and mercifully free of academic language. Scathing, tender, funny, and wide-ranging, these pieces turn a harsh magnifying glass on the ways U.S. culture and behavior chips away at what it calls “a model minority.”

An article in the New Yorker entitled Where the Future is Asian and the Asians are Robots leads Cheng to observe the close similarity between the stereotypical “China Doll” and the female cyborgs portrayed in contemporary cinema. When a relative gives her daughter an American Girl doll who is fashioned after a child in colonial Williamsburg, Cheng examines the role that dolls play in reinforcing white supremacy. She links Joan Didion’s essays with their “exquisite study of whiteness” to the Modernist Orientalism of Marie Kondo, pointing out that Didion’s obsession with self-control is closely related to Kondo’s rigid rules of orderliness. Both, she says, elevate efficiency and organization to “the status of Virtue.”

Cheng grew up in Georgia where Atlanta had the aura of “a multiracial heaven.” Her parents made the six-hour drive from Savannah frequently to buy ingredients at a Japanese grocery, eat at a “decent” Chinese restaurant, and browse at a Chinese bookstore. Then in 2021, “that Atlanta happened.” A white man killed six women “of Asian descent” who worked in “Asian-owned spas.” The killer was characterized as a man who “was having a bad day.” The murdered women were commonly and immediately assumed to be sex workers. “Let me name the victims,” Cheng says, and gives their ages. The youngest was 33, the oldest 74, all of them dead because of “racialized misogyny.”

Cheng ends her book with the universality of old age and death. “Aging is itself an incurable illness,” she says, pointing out the irony of “that even as you own more and more of yourself, your body is becoming less and less yours.” Her voice that’s explored the “ordinary disasters” underlying America’s undying racism illuminates the end that comes to us all, with the same strength and clarity that’s identified cancer and racism as “diseases of the most cellular level,” malignant and deadly.~Janet Brown

We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth, Random House, release date 1/21/2025)

Kyungha is a writer who’s dominated by nightmares of black human forms standing in the snow as the tide surges toward them, of massacres that send women and their children down the steep side of a well to escape death, of holding a single flaming match that  could reveal the face of a mass murderer. Engulfed by these phantoms, she struggles to overcome them and to regain her life. 

When a friend summons her to a hospital room, she finds the photographer and filmmaker whom she’s worked with for years, immobilized and crippled by an accident that took place when working in a rural studio. Inseon is from the island of Jeju, where she has lived alone in the company of a caged bird. Pleading with Kyungha to go to her home and give the bird food and water before it’s too late, Inseon persuades her to leave Seoul and travel to Jeju, in spite of an approaching snowstorm that threatens to make the journey impossible. 

Arriving on the last flight before the storm hits, waiting beside a lonely road for the bus that will take her close to Inseon’s house, Kyungha at last begins a walk to safety that instead plummets her into a deep pit. When she emerges, she’s lost her phone and when she enters Inseon’s dark, cold house, she finds the bird is dead.

Suddenly this story slips into the hallucinatory quality of Kyungha’s nightmares. The bird that she buries returns to life. The friend whom she had left in the confinement of a hospital ward suddenly appears in the unheated house and begins to reveal the history that Inseon’s mother lived through and archived, in notebooks, letters, and newspaper articles. The massacres that have haunted Kyungha’s sleep unfold as a tragedy of death and horror, one that was covered up the minute after it took place. Bodies were buried under the runway of Jeju Airport; shot as they waded out to sea where the waves carried off their corpses; dumped into pits where the snow covered and erased them, staying invisible for thirty-four years and remaining forever anonymous.

The dead dominate in this eerie novel. But who is dead? Who’s alive? Perhaps the most vivid character is Inseon’s dead mother, forcing her history upon her daughter and Kyungha, telling her terrible stories in a voice that lives through pieces of saved paper. “Extermination was the goal.”

Extermination is what fills the history and the nightmares, wrapped in the surrealism of snowfall: Snowflakes land on the fronds of palm trees and freezing bright blossoms; snow crystals “swirl wildly as if inside a giant popcorn machine;” snow clouds emerging“like tens of thousands of white-feathered birds flying right along the horizon.” Snow extinguishes the light of a final candle and threatens the life of the one remaining match, held by a woman who may already be a ghost.

We Do Not Part is an unsettling work of art, with each sentence holding a new masterpiece of beautiful and bone-chilling words. It should be read slowly, like poetry, because the narrative is unbearably painful if approached in the way novels are usually consumed. Han Kang combines the supernatural with the inhuman, history with its denial, the living with the dead, as she blurs every boundary line, with the finality of snow.~Janet Brown

Han Kang received the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature five days after this review was posted.

A Perfect Day to Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama, translated by Jesse Kirkwood (MacLehose Press)

Nanae Aoyama was born in Saitama Prefecture in 1983 and began writing career while working full-time as a travel agent. Her first novel, 窓の灯 (Mado no Akari) was published in 2005 and won the 42nd Bungei Prize. 

A Perfect Day to Be Alone is her first novel to be translated into English. It was originally published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha as ひとり日和 (Hitori Biyori) in 2007. The book won Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, the 136th Akutagawa Prize in 2007. It is the story of a young woman who is a freeter, a Japanese term used to describe someone between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four who is “unemployed, underemployed, or otherwise lacks full-time paid employment”. 

Chizu is a twenty-year old woman living with her mother in Saitama Prefecture who decides to move to Tokyo to make her way in life. Her parents got divorced when she was five. Her father had moved to Fukuoka two years ago and she hasn’t spoken to him since he left. Her mother was a teacher who taught at a private secondary school and was going to China as part of a teacher-exchange program. 

Although her mother invited Chizu to come with her to China, Chizu refused and said she was going to make a go of it in Tokyo. After exchanging a few words, her mother told her, “Well, if you aren’t coming with me, then I’m sorry, but you’ll have to earn your own keep. That, or go to university. There’s only so long I can keep supporting you”. 

Chizu told her mother, “Guess I’ll earn my own keep then” because she really didn’t want to return to being a student. Her mother relented but said she does know someone with a house in Tokyo that she might be able to live with. 

So, Chizu finds herself moving into the house of a distant relative. The only thing she knows is that the relative has let others stay with her before until they found places of their own. It was a rainy spring day when Chizu arrived at the house which is located near Sasazuka station on the Keio Line. 

The first thing Chizu noticed about the house were the walls of her room. They were lined with cat photos. That’s when she meets the owner of the house. A woman in her seventies. Chizu remembers when she first came to the house and saw her, she was thinking, “she looks like she’s barely got a week to live”. 

It wasn’t until the woman got Chizu settled in her room and showed her around the house that the two properly introduced themselves. The old lady’s name was Ginko Ogino. Chizu couldn’t help but ask about the pictures of the cats in her room - there were twenty-three of them. 

Ginko tells Chihiro that she calls the room with the cat photos, the “Cherokee” room. When Chizu asks why, Ginko tells her she calls all the cats Cherokee because she can never remember all their names. Chizu thinks perhaps Ginko is a little senile and has some reservations of her own, living with this woman she barely knows. 

A Perfect Day to Be Alone is a coming-of-age novel. It follows a year in the life of twenty-year-old Chizu Mita as she finds herself living with a seventy-year-old woman she barely knows. At first, Chizu comes off as cold-hearted, selfish, and entitled. She was very difficult to like. However, as the story progresses, we see her mature into a responsible adult. I’m sure many young people will relate to Chizu. She reminded me of when I was in my twenties and I thought I owned the world and knew everything, but as many people have said, “Live and learn!”. ~Ernie Hoyt

Mata Tabi (またたび) by Sakura Momoko (Shinchosha) Japanese text only

Momoko Sakura was a Japanese manga artist, essayist, lyricist, and screenwriter who grew up in the town of Shimizu in Shizuoka Prefecture. She is best known as being the creator of one of Japan’s longest running anime series - Chibi Maruko-chan, which was based on her own childhood. 

Chibi Maruko-chan was serialized in the magazine Ribon from 1986 to 1999 and continued in serialization until 2022. The first anime series began in 1990 and continued until 1992. The second anime series began in 1995 and continues today, even though Sakura passed away from breast cancer in 2018. She was fifty-three at the time. 

Her first collection of essays, もものかんづめ (Momo no Kanzume) was published in 1991 and became a million seller in Japan. Although the title translates in English to “Canned Peaches”, Momo is short for Momoko and she describes being stuck in a hotel room to write her essays. Her follow up collection of essays - さるのこしかけ (Saru no Koshi Kake, trans. Monkey Trick) and たいのおかしら (Tai no Okashira, trans. Seabream Head) were also million sellers. 

In January of 2000, Sakura Momoko became the editor-in-chief of a magazine called 富士山 (Fujisan). Although the title imitated the look of a magazine, its distribution was handled as a book. All five volumes include an ISBN number. またたび (Mata Tabi) is a collection of Sakura’s travel essays taken from all five volumes of Fujisan. The majority of the essays are her stories about her travels in various parts of Asia. The title translates to “Travel Again”. The only two essays outside of Asia she wrote about were her trip to London and her visit to Venice. 

One of her first projects for an article was visiting foreign countries close to Japan. One of the first destinations she chose was Khabarovsuk in Russia. All the times she traveled to Europe, she would hear an announcement saying, “We are now flying over Khabarovsk. However, when Sakura looked out the window, all she could see were mountains, plains, and rivers. She thought, if it’s popular enough to be announced then there must be something special about the place. 

When Sakuro told some of friends, “I’m going to Khabarovsk”, she was usually met with, “Huh? Khabarovsk?” One of the staff members of the magazine said they had been there before and told Sakura, “Don’t expect the food to be any good”. Another staff member who had been there informed Sakura that canned crab and caviar are cheap. Still, Sakura was determined to go and see for herself. 

Another destination, a foreign country close to Japan, was Guam. Guam is only a three hour flight from Tokyo but Sakura had never been there. She thought the only thing to do in Guam is swim in the ocean, go golfing and maybe do a little bit of shopping. She talked to a few of her friends who had been there and when she asked what did you do in Guam, almost all of them answered, “swam in the ocean, played a bit of golf, and did a bit of shopping”. 

Khabarovsk and Guam may not have seemed like interesting places to visit but Sakura’s writing and experience makes it a joy to imagine. In this collection, she also writes about her adventures in South Korea, gem mining in Sri Lanka, eating unusual foods in Guangzhou and  buying large quantities of tea in Yunnan Province in China, suffering from atlitude sickness in Tibet, checking out one of Japan’s World Heritage Sites - Toshogu in Tochigi Prefecture, cruising to a small resort island near the hot spring resort town of Atami, and ending the book with a trip to Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture to thank the people of the town for being the biggest supporters of her work. 

Every essay is a joy to read. They are filled with humor and you can feel the joy and pain of all her experiences abroad. Reading the book may inspire your wanderlust. I’m ready to pack my bags and go! ~Ernie Hoyt

The Foreign Student by Susan Choi (HarperCollins)

It begins like a fairy tale. The lonely traveler walks through the night to a place he’s never been before, where a kind old woman gives him a place to sleep. In the morning a beautiful young woman takes the foreign stranger to his new home and tells him about an older man who will help him as he learns to live and study in a rural paradise.

But, as is true in fairy tales, nothing is as perfect as it first appears to be. Chang has survived years of war, sickness, and starvation that his Southern counterparts have never even thought of. On a Tennessee campus, he’s called Chuck by classmates who regard him with “a subtly unremitting scrutiny, disguised as politeness” and who mistake his “limited English for a limited knowledge of things.” Chang likes that; it gives him “a hidden advantage,” which he uses to his benefit, along with his “infinite patience for listening.” Seen as an object of charity, he hides secrets which emerge only in his half-remembered nightmares.

The young woman who first helped him has secrets of her own. From the time she was fourteen, she has had a sexual relationship with the older professor whom she advises Chang to take as a mentor. She has inherited her childhood home and is still enmeshed in her childhood liaison with the man who was her father’s college roommate and who has known her since she was a little girl. Although rumors swirl around her, Katherine has set herself apart in a cocoon of loneliness. 

“You’re the first new thing here in a while,” she tells Chang. As she slowly begins to form a friendship with this stranger, both of them peer at each other through their veils of secrets, each beginning to feel trust without knowing why.

Although a love story teases at the edges of this novel, the story belongs to Chang. Gradually bits of his history are revealed: his early friendship with a rebellious boy who joins the guerrilla movement against the government of South Korea, his English proficiency that gives him a job as a translator for the American presence in his country, his abandonment, survival, and betrayal. Scenes of torture lie in counterpoint to the tentative peace that he and Katherine find together, darkening Chang’s dreams and tarnishing the possibility of his finding happiness.

Susan Choi brilliantly unfolds Chang’s world as he leaves the safety of the Southern campus and goes to Chicago, a metropolis where he’s “surrounded and invisible,” where there are “so many ways he could slip into life.” After a summer of living in the city’s Japantown, Chang can “no longer imagine the lack of imagination he’d arrived with.” As he encounters new dreams, he begins to face his nightmares and dares to believe he might deserve at a life, one filled with love and without charitable condescension

As he and Katherine slowly release “the wariness they both turned toward the world,” they find new ways of living within it, bringing hope and joy to a novel that has been shrouded in the immobility of pain. Choi’s recreation of history, her skillful creation of characters who may never have appeared in fiction before, and her ability to paint unforgettable landscapes with precise and evocative words make her debut novel stunning and unforgettable.~Janet Brown

Mio The Beautiful by Kinota Braithwaite, translated by Setsuko Miura (Self-Published)

Kinota Braithwaite is a Canadian-African children’s book author and elementary school teacher. He is married to a Japanese citizen and they have a young daughter. Braithwaite wrote Mio The Beautiful for his child who experienced being bullied at school due to the color of her skin. He also illustrated the book. 

The book includes English and the original Japanese which was translated by Setsuko Miruo who is also a childhood educator and Montessori Teacher Trainer. She dreams of a world “where all children can find happiness, love, and acceptance”. 

It was Mio’s first day of school. She was starting the first grade but was feeling nervous. She was wondering what her new school would be like. Would she be able to make friends? Who was going to be her teacher? Questions all new students have when they’re starting a new school or going to elementary school for the first time. 

Mio enjoyed her first day of school. She liked her teacher, Momo-sensei. Momo-sensei made learning fun and all the students enjoyed her lessons. Mio really liked school. She enjoyed the school lunches, called kyushoku, which is common to all Japanese schools. Students help serve the food as well. 

Mio also liked learning new things about Japanese culture such as flower-arranging and wearing a kimono. But then one day everything changed. Some of the other students started making fun of her because of the color of her skin. Once she got home, she told her parents she didn’t want to go to school anymore. 

Prejudice against foreigners is nothing new to Japan. Even for those foreigners who were born and raised in Japan. Even if they can speak the language, often they are not accepted as Japanese. Mio’s father being African-Canadian means her skin color is different and being different in Japan makes you stand out. And if you stand out, you are almost sure to become a target of ridicule. 

In the book, Mio’s parents call Momo-sensei and express their concern. Momo-sensei says she will talk to all of the students about the power of words and how they can hurt people. In class the next day, Momoh-sensei asks the other students if they have ever had their feelings hurt because someone called them a name they didn’t like. Many of the students raised their hands. 

Momo-sensei explained to her students that Japan would be a boring place if everyone was the same. She goes on to tell them, “Mio has a different color than many of you but that does not mean she is not beautiful”. She continues by telling her students, “Mio was born in Japan, like us, and speaks Japanese, like us, and she loves Japan like we do”. 

If all teachers in Japan were like Momo-sensei, there wouldn’t be bullying of any sort in any of the schools. It would be an ideal world but bullying continues to be a problem. Not only for bi-racial children but even for Japanese kids as well. 

The story is very reminiscent of the children’s book Yoko by Rosemary Wells. In a plot similar to Mio The Beautiful, Yoko’s mother prepares her favorite dishes for lunch. At lunch time when everyone takes out their lunch box or brown paper bags, Yoko takes out her bento box. The kids then see that she’s eating sushi for lunch…and the teasing begins which leaves Yoko in tears. 

Finding acceptance in a foreign country can be a difficult thing, especially for kids, and Mio the Beautiful is a reminder to parents and teachers and others how everyone should be treated with respect. As my father used to say to me, “Treat people the way you want people to treat you.” I’ve always taken that advice to heart. ~Ernie Hoyt

Recitation by Bae Suah, translated by Deborah Smith (Deep Vellum)

There are some books you read and can’t put down and once you come to the last page, you’re saddened by the fact that the story has ended but you want more. Then there are books you read, re-read, and try to read but the more you read, the angrier you get as there’s no plot or point to the story. 

Bae Suah’s Recitation falls in the latter category. Perhaps there was something lost in translation from the original Korean. Suah is a South Korean writer and translator and made her literary debut in 1993 with A Dark Room in 1988. Bae had no formal training in writing nor did she have a literary mentor to help her and it shows. She started writing as a hobby but left her full-time job after getting her first story published. 

Recitation starts off with a woman named Kyung-hee talking to some people she met at a train station. We never know who she is talking to or why but she tells them she had the idea of visiting the houses she’s left behind. We do learn that the people listening to her were from the same city as Kyung-hee. She tells them in her hometown she was a theater actor specializing in recitation. 

The people who first talked to Kyung-hee met her at the train station. They offered to accompany her to her hotel or wherever she was staying, but she told them she didn’t have a reservation anywhere, that she was waiting for a man who was going to let her use his living room for a few days. 

She explains to the people who talked to her that she is a “part of a community of wanderers who let out their homes free of charge”. She continues by saying, “If someone comes to visit whichever city I’m living in, I give them somewhere to stay, and then when I go traveling, other people in other cities will let me use their living rooms, veranda, guest room, attic, or even in the off chance that they have one, a barn”. 

The people become intrigued with Kyung-hee’s story and listen to her story about why she started traveling, the people she’s met, the experiences she had which may sound like the beginning of an interesting tale but it becomes one long boring monologue and you discover that Kyung-hee doesn’t really have anything to say, or rather, she speaks a lot but doesn’t say anything that makes any sense. 

Anyone who is not familiar with Bae’s writing may become frustrated as they try to decide who is actually speaking. Bae switches from Kyung-hee to other characters, to the unnamed people who first started listening to her, and then to a daughter Kyung-hee doesn’t claim to know. Not only is the writing confusing, but I found it pretentious as well. In the end, I wonder why I even bothered to read this book at all. If you’re a glutton for literary punishment, you could challenge yourself to read this. As for me, I was just glad that I was able to finish it. ~Ernie Hoyt

Off the Books by Soma Mei Sheng Frazier (Henry Holt)

Every girl should have a grandfather like Mei’s. When she graduates from Dartmouth and faces a tight job market, it’s Laoye who buys her a sedan and persuades her to forgo the easy money of working as a rideshare driver. He’s the one who taught her to drive as soon as she was old enough to sit behind the wheel of a go-kart and he’s the one who sets her up with a woman who always needs a ride. So do her customer’s many female relatives, all of them with peculiar schedules and all of them turning out to be sex workers.

But then Laoye is no ordinary grandfather. He’s a devoted pothead with unconventional acquaintances who patronize his granddaughter’s ride service. Mei’s latest client is different--a conventional-looking handsome young Chinese guy with a Bulgari watch and the elegance of a GQ model. 

Henry Lee has hired her to drive him from San Francisco to Syracuse, all expenses paid. It would be the ideal gig except for one glitch. Her passenger carries a giant suitcase that he takes out of her field of vision at every rest stop and that he allows nobody else to touch. 

Mei stifles her curiosity and respects her customer’s privacy until the day he steps away from his burden to take a phone call, leaving his baggage halfway out of the car. When Mei pushes it securely onto the back seat, she feels something move inside it.

Is her passenger transporting smuggled wildlife? Is this something that could put an end to her livelihood and maybe even land her in jail as an accessory? Mei keeps her questions to herself until that night, when she hears voices coming from the hotel room next door--Henry and another person, both speaking Chinese.

At this point what seems to be turning into a standard rom-com novel takes a sharp twist into global politics and stays there. The person in the suitcase is a terrified child who has traveled out of China after her mother was imprisoned by the government. Her father is a professor who teaches at a university in upstate New York. His little daughter, traumatized, has begged for the safety of traveling in a gigantic suitcase. She and both of her parents are Uyghur, the oppressed minority of Northern China. 

If Laoye trusts Henry Lee, then Mei has no choice but to do the same. On the drive across the country, she, her customer, and Anna, the child who has chosen the safety of a suitcase, form a kind of family, with just enough potential danger and sexual tension to keep things interesting--but not interesting enough. 

Since many of the readers who pick up Off the Books may have no knowledge of what’s going on in Xinjiang, an autonomous territory of Northwest China where the Muslim Uyghurs are being forced to assimilate into mainstream Chinese culture, they have a lot of catching up to do. Soma Mei Sheng Frazier has done her homework and the information she ties into her novel eventually takes over and sinks the whole thing.

If you disdain the Crazy Rich Asians series for its frivolity and wish that romance novels would dabble in geo-political issues, this is the book you should take with you when you go to the beach. Otherwise pick up Tahir Hamut’s Waiting to be Arrested at Night (Asia by the Book, August 2024) along with the smart romance novel, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Asia by the Book, November 2023) and save yourself a bad case of literary indigestion.~Janet Brown

Shanghailanders by Juli Min (Spiegel and Grau)

Happy families are all alike, according to Tolstoy, but unhappy families are the ones who get all the attention. Starting with Cain and Abel and moving through millennia to the British Royal Family on Netflix in The Crown, dysfunctional parents and their children feed the imaginations of novelists and fill the shelves of libraries. 

But not every unhappy family is captured in fiction with the skill that Juli Min gives to the Yang family in her debut novel. Shanghailanders. Taking the threadbare formula of successful husband, unhappy wife, and three beautiful daughters, Min reveals these cliched figures  cleverly, in a series of interlinked short stories that move backward in time, from 2040 to 2014. 

While giving scant descriptions of Shanghai, Min provides a startling view of that city’s wealth, along with a capsule history of how swiftly this came into being. A man who was orphaned before he was in his teens, who grew up in a small, crowded apartment, sees an opportunity when he’s still at a university, borrows money from friends and buys several apartments. By the time he graduates, Shanghai’s rapid change has made real estate the arena where fortunes are made and Leo is a wealthy man.

His daughters are in good schools, with the two oldest in the U.S. His wife is an artist, Japanese by birth but with most of her life shaped by living in Paris. In addition to the home in Shanghai, the family has a country place, a house in Vancouver, a village house in Zhejiang, an apartment in Paris, an estate in Bordeaux. 

And yet as the years fly backwards, unhappiness settles in like a rot. Leo’s wife plans to leave him but her plans are set aside when she learns one of her daughters needs an abortion. His oldest daughter is a kleptomaniac who has made cruelty her second-favorite hobby. His youngest, at sixteen, has discovered a flair for sex work. His mother-on-law, teetering on the edge of dementia and living in a palatial assisted-living facility in France, has recently t been diagnosed with an STD. Leo “loved them, all of them,” but he has lost interest. Slipping into another life is a thought he occasionally entertains, but--”how tiring.”

Wrapping her novel in snatches of time, Min mercilessly dissects this family, through the eyes of people who work for them and through the moments that bring another crack in their perfection. When she finally takes her readers to where this family began, at Leo’s wedding, where he sees his bride as “the loveliest, most reckless person he knew,” what pervades this event is “Spirit, grief, memory, and that, too, edited and faded over time.” 

Min has created a joyless world, with characters who spend their  lives “dancing around the truth.” The elegance of her sentences, the precision of her descriptions, the way she gives life to even those characters who exist only in passing, all make Shanghailanders soar far above its soap opera possibilities, giving it the glitter and intricacy of a masterfully cut diamond set in bright platinum.~Janet Brown

Houses with a Story by Seiji Yoshida, translated by Jan Mitsuko Cash (Amulet Books)

Seiji Yoshida is a former employee of a PC game manufacturer who became a freelance Japanese illustrator and background graphic artist in 2003. He has worked on a number of video games and recently has designed the cover of books. He is also a lecturer at the Kyoto Univeristy of Arts and Kyoto Seika University. 

Houses with a Story is the English translation of his second book which was originally published in the Japanese language with the title [ものがたりの家 吉田誠治美術設定集] (Monogatari no Ie : Yoshida Seiji Bijutsu Settei-shu) by PIE Books in 2020. It is a collection of his illustrations of imaginary houses.

Yoshida mentions in the Foreword that he has always been impressed by the buildings in the books and stories he’s read. He mentions “the hideout in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the hut in the Alps from Heidi, the Nowhere Hose Of Master Hora in Momo, and so many others”. He would read the stories and look at the illustrations over and over and would imagine the details of those various worlds. 

In Houses with a Story, he says, “To re-create my childhood self’s delight, I introduce unique homes within this book, all of which could easily turn up in stories of their own”. He has drawn more than thirty houses and the people that live in them. He also gave a lot of thought as to the location and time period for each building. 

Some of the houses featured in the book include the Kaidan-do Bookstore, a World Weary Astronomer’s Residence, the Meticulour Clockmaker, the Reserved Mechanic’s Cottage, the Post Office of the Dragon Tamer, and The Library of Lost Books to name just a few. Many of the designs of the houses were meticulously researched while others were purely drawn from inspiration. 

One page is a full color illustration of the house from the outside. The other page shows a cut-away so you can look into the interior as well. He has imagined the type of person who lives in the house and gives a little background of the person and the story. 

The bookstore owner is a young man who “quit his steady job in the city and moved to this town, following his dream of owning a used bookstore”. The house is located on a hilly road that leads to the ocean. As the house is built on a slope, “its defining feature is the multiple levels that make up the interior”. 

Yoshida has also included a panel story about the Reserved Mechanic’s Cottage titled The End of the Day. There is absolutely no dialogue so he leaves it up to the reader’s imagination of what might be going on in the mechanic’s mind as he makes dinner and feeds his dog. 

Yoshida includes an illustration of his work studio and explains in detail where he makes his drawings. It is easy to visualize him at work as he includes the top of his work desk and the equipment he uses and also shows a top view of the layout of the room which he shares with his wife. 

Towards the end of the book, Yoshida provides concepts and commentary about each house included in this collection. For example, we learn that the house of the Meticulous Clockmaker is located in Japan and was built sometime around the nineteenth century. The interior of this house is based on a stationary store called Takei Sanshodo which can be seen at the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum in Koganei, Tokyo Prefecture.. Although it is an old building, he believes it’s appropriate for the present. Even today many old homes are renovated and given new life in the present. 

The final section of the book is a full chapter on how one of his illustrations comes into being. It is titled Making of a Minor’s Engine House. He writes in step-by-step detail of how a drawing comes into being starting with “Creating the Rough Drafts and Sketches”, followed by “Color the Model Sheet”, and ending with “Color the Illustration”. 

Houses with a Story is more than just an art book. It is more than just a collection of unique houses. It is a book that will help you expand your imagination. Yoshida says, “The tale you weave for each house is entirely up to you, and nothing would give me greater pleasure than you finding yourself immersed in a wonderful story”. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)

Michael Ondaatje is almost legendary, a prolific writer with so much creative energy and abundant talent that it’s hard to believe he’s reached the age of 83. Over the past fifty-nine years, he’s written twenty-two books: a book about film-making, a family memoir, seven novels and thirteen books of poetry, including the recently published The Last Year.

Although this title sounds elegiac, these poems are not. They draw upon a life that he’s steeped in literature and enriched by living on several different continents. They celebrate the precise beauty of words and use imagery from Ondaatje’s first home, Sri Lanka. They are tender and sensuous, capturing moments with lovers and friends. And yes, there are eulogies that honor the memories of household animals who died old.

Above all, they are fragments of autobiography, told at a slant, never confessional, always alluring.

In his evocation of his Sri Lankan roots, Running in the Family (Asia by the Book, October 2007), Ondaatje mentions the kabaragoya, a monitor lizard the size of a crocodile, which an early explorer described as having “a blew forked tongue, which he puts forth.” A smaller relative of this lizard is prized because eating its tongue gives eloquence.” Both of these creatures are blended into one and become part of Dante in the poem Last Things. In an Italian piazza, a statue of Dante falls and the shape of a lizard “crawls out of shattered plaster, a blue rough tongue slithering…a finished book in his mouth.”

A similar echo is found in the poem Dark Garden, where a woman Ondaatje has not yet met but will someday love steps on a nail at the time he imagines one of his characters having a splinter pulled from her foot, “That faraway echo and coincidence” mirrors the final chapter of The English Patient when Kirpal and Hannah, separated by time and space, each see a falling household object at the same moment.

A man enthralled by language, Ondaatje, in his poem Definition, says “All afternoon I stroll the plotless thirteen hundred pages of a Sanskrit dictionary,” where he finds the word ansa, and gives it to the woman he loves, for “the warmth of that word for your shoulder blade.” The English patient springs into life in that poem, searching for the word that will name “that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck.”

In a mixture of poems and small essays, lives unfold. “The dyers who steal color out of the bark of trees to paint temples,” unnamed lovers who exist in a realm that’s “still all coal and smoke,” the dog whose death is “courteous and beautiful,” They all evoke memories of other stories, while breathing on their own and lingering in a new corner of the mind. “Nothing remains still in a story,” Ondaatje says to those readers who recognize shadows from his previous work. 

A Year of Last Things begins and ends with rivers, “the wet dark rectangle,” “all those echoing rivers.” And suddenly there is Lalla, the glamorous, eccentric grandmother who often stopped her car to swim in a river, who stepped off her front porch one night and was swept into a flood that “was her last perfect journey.”

This is the gift that Michael Ondaatje always offers: each of his books brings new portions of beauty while taking us back into other wonders that he’s placed in our minds and hearts, sweeping us into an unending “perfect journey.”~Janet Brown

海峡の記憶：青函連絡船 (Kaikyo no Kioku : Seikan Rensakusen) by Asako Shirai (Kajisha) Japanese text only

Asako Shirai is a Japanese photographer. She was born in Hakodate, Hokkaido in 1951. Before the advent of the Seikan Tunnel that connects the islands of Honshu with Hokkaido, from Aomori City to Hakodate, the only way to travel to and from Aomori to Hakodate or Hakodate to Aomori was to take the Seikan ferry. 海峡の記憶：青函連絡船 (Kaikyo no Kiouku : Seikan Rensakusen) translates to Memories of the Straight : Seikan Ferry. The strait refers to the Kaikyu Strait that separates Honshu from Hokkaido. 

March 1988 marks the last day of the Seikan ferry service between Aomori and Hakodate. There were still seven ships in service at the time - the Hakkoda Maru, Mashu Maru, Yotei Maru, Towada Maru, Sorachi Maru, Hiyama Maru, and the Ishikari Maru. 

The Sorachi Maru was only a freight service ferry. The Hiyama Maru and Ishikari Maru were freight-only ferries but were converted into freight-passenger service. The other four ships were freight-passenger ferries from the beginning. 

A little history of the Seikan ferry service from 1960 onward is provided by Takashi Ishiguro. From 1946 to 1953, Ishiguro worked at the Ministry of Transport, General Bureau of Trade, Marine Division. From 1953, he was the Hakodate Railway Management Bureau Marine Affairs Division Manager. It was his job to design and oversee the safety aspects of the Seikan ferries. 

To understand the need for the safety of the ferries, Ishiguro says one must revisit the Toya Maru Disaster. On September 26, 1954, The Toya Maru sank during Typhoon No.15, also known as Typhoon Marie. Aside from the Toya Maru, four other ferries sank during the typhoon - the Dai Juichi Seikan Maru, the Kitami Maru, the Hidaka Maru, and the Tokachi Maru. 

From a total of 1,632 passenger and crew members, 1,430 people lost their lives, 112 people could not be found. Only 202 people survived.Out of the 1,089 passengers, 981 were lost, 108 survived. Of the 57 American servicemen, 50 died, 6 were unaccounted for, and only 1 survived. 

It was one of the worst ferry disasters in history. Ishiguro was assigned to design the new ferries and to make them safer so a similar accident would never happen again. Learning a bit of the history of how and why the new ferries were designed adds to the enjoyment of viewing the photographs taken by Shirai. 

As someone who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, one of the small pleasures of life was taking the ferry from Seattle to Bremerton. I had never given any thought to the people who work and run the ferries. However, with any form of public transportation - safey must always remain the top priority. 

Since 1990, the Seikan Ferry Memorial Ship [Hakkoda Maru] sits in Aomori Bay as a Maritime Museum. My mother-in-law worked there as a receptionist for about ten years so I have taken the tour on many occasions. You would be surprised that the freight was carried directly by trains, some of the trains are displayed inside the ferry.

There are displays on the ship portraying life in Aomori during the Showa era. It surprises some people because as you pass by some of the displays, the life-like figures start talking to you, in the Tsugaru dialect. Even if you understand Japanese but haven’t lived or worked in Aomori, it is very difficult to understand what is being said. You can also take a tour of the Mashu Maru which sits at the harbor in Hakodate. 

There is still a ferry service between Aomori and Hakodate and it is much more economical than traveling by shinkansen, also known as the bullet train. After reading and looking through this photography book, you will have a new appreciation for how the ferries run. ~Ernie Hoyt