Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton (4th Estate) ~Ernie Hoyt

Asako Yuzuki is a Japanese writer who was born in Tokyo in 1981. In her childhood she read books by foreign authors such as Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gable series, and Judy Blume’s young adult novels. It was after reading Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen which got her interested in Japanese literature. 

Her first book was a collection of three short stories and was released as 終点のあの子 (Shuten no Ano Ko). Her first novel was 嘆きの美女 (Nageki no Bijou) was published in 2011 and was later adapted into an NHK cable television series. 

Butter is her first novel to be published in English. It was originally released in the Japanese language with the same title by Shinchosha in 2017. The book is translated by Polly Barton who has also translated Where the Wild Women Are by Aoto Matsuda (Asia by the Book, May 2022) and Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (Asia by the Book, August 2025). 

The story was inspired by the real-life serial murder case in Japan by Kanae Kijima, whom the mass media dubbed as the konkatsu killer. Konkatsu means “marriage-hunting”. She was convicted of poisoning three of her victims who were planning on marrying her. She was also suspected of killing four others. She is currently on death row and has been in prison since 2019. 

Manako Kajii is sitting in the Tokyo Detention Center serving a life sentence for killing three lonely businessmen. The mass media says she seduced the men by her delicious home cooking. She claims her innocence but refuses to discuss her case with any journalists. 

Rika Machida is a young reporter at a weekly magazine. She is interested in writing an article about Manako Kajii or “Kajimana” as she was known in the mass media. The woman who was convicted of killing three men and extorted money from them as well. What made the Kajimana story interesting to so many people was because of how she looked. 

Rika tells her boyfriend she’s not interested in rehashing old stories told from the same perspective. She wants to find a new lead into the case. Machida is interested in the “social background to it all”. She feels the whole case “is steeped in intense misogyny”, that “Everyone in it, from Kajimana herself to her victims and all the men involved, seems to have a deep-seated hatred of women”. 

Manako Kajii isn’t what you would call beautiful. She is a bit overweight. Rika's on and off boyfriend said to her, “I bet Kajimana eats an absolute ton! That’s why she’s that huge. It’s a miracle that someone that fat could con so many people into wanting to marry her”. However, the men who fell under spell all had the same thing to say - they were lonely and didn’t care what she looked like. 

It was Rika’s friend Reiko who gave her the idea that the next time she writes to Manako Kajii, to ask for the recipe of the beef stew she served her last victim. Her friend tells her, “Women who love to cook are so delighted when someone asks them for a recipe that they’ll tell you all kinds of things you haven’t asked for along with it”. Amazingly, Kajii responds to Rika’s latest request for an interview. When Rika goes to see Manako Kajii at the Tokyo Detention Center, the first thing Kajimana asks Rika is what’s in her fridge at home. 

Rika is caught off guard but answers politely. After Rika tells her, Kajimana reponds with, “Did you just say margarine?” As Rika tries to defend why she has margarine in her refrigerator, Kajimana tells her, “Your problem is you’ve decided that butter is bad without even understanding what it tastes like”. Before Rika can respond, Kajimana continues with her diatribe saying, “I learned from my late father that women should show generosity to everyone. But there are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine”. 

The interview didn’t go as Rika planned. It was all at Kajimana’s pace. Rika even promised to eat hot white rice topped with real butter and a bit of soy sauce. But she had to use an expensive brand of butter called Echire.

So begins Rika Machida’s interviews with Manako Kajii. But the more she interviews Kajii, the more her way of thinking is turned towards Kajii’s. Her friend Reiko believes that Kajimana has been manipulating Rika into her way of thinking and is not going about her job objectively. 

Not only is this story a mystery about whether or not Manako Kajii killed her would-be husbands, but it is also a criticism of the different standards set by men for women. In the story, all of Kajimana’s victims say they don’t care what she looks like, however, whenever they’re speaking to their peers or colleagues, they denounce her and say terrible things about her. 

In modern day Japan, the posters and commercial ads still feature women who are slim and beautiful. In a line in the book that seems to have come right out of a feminist manifesto, Yuzuki writes, “From early childhood, everyone had it drummed into them that if a woman wasn’t slim, she wasn’t worth bothering with”. It appears to be a disturbing fact that this still holds true today.

Sukh's White Horse retold by Yuzo Otsuka, English text by Sarah Ann Nishie (Labo Teaching Information Center, Tokyo) ~Ernie Hoyt

Sukh’s White Horse is a Mongolian folktale. I believe one of the best ways to learn about another country’s culture is by reading or listening to their folktales. In this tale, the story focuses on the origin of a musical instrument called the morin khuur or horsehead fiddle. It is retold by Yuzo Otsuka and was translated into English by Sarah Ann Nishie. It is illustrated by Suekichi Akaba.

The morin khuur is a Mongolian stringed instrument. It is one of Mongolia’s most significant cultural heritage items. In 2001, UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) designated the morin khuur as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. 

The morin khuur or horsehead fiddle is so called because the upper part of the instrument is shaped like a horse’s head. This book tells the story of how the instrument was invented

As with  most fairytales and folk tales, the story starts long, long ago. On the plains of Mongolia lived a shepherd boy called Sukh. He lived with his grandmother. It was just the two of them. He worked as hard as any adult - he got up early in the morning and helped his grandmother cook breakfast, then he would take their more than twenty sheep out onto the plains. 

Sukh was known for his great singing voice. He was often asked by other shepherds to sing for them. “His beautiful singing voice would ring out across the plain and far into the distance”. 

One day, Sukh did not come home. It was already dark. His grandmother became very worried about him. Even the other shepherds started to wonder what happened to him. They were all distraught and wondering what they should do when Sukh came running home holding something white in his arms. It was a foal.

Sukh took care of the foal which grew into a beautiful white horse. Sukh loved this horse with all of his heart. One  night Sukh woke up to hear his horse in distress. When he went to check, he saw the horse trying to protect his herd of sheep from a big wolf. Sukh was so grateful to the horse for protecting his herd. 

During the spring of one year, the noyon, or local ruler, was having a horse race in town. He said the winner would get to marry his daughters. Sukh’s fellow shepherds told him he should join the race. Sukh decided to join the race and he won! 

However, when the noyon saw that the rider of the white horse was a poor shepherd, he reneged on his promise to give his daughter away in marriage and gave Sukh three pieces of silver and told him to leave the white horse as well. 

Sukh got angry and yelled back at the King, “I came to race, not to sell him”. This made the King angry. He ordered his men to attack and beat Sukh and also took Sukh’s white horse away. Sukh’s friends managed to get him home and with the help of his grandmother, he eventually recovered. Unfortunately, he was still suffering from the loss of his white horse. 

The noyon was so proud of the horse that he wanted to show it off to everyone. He had a party and was planning to ride the horse in front of everyone for the first time at the party. He had his men bring the horse and mounted the horse. 

Then it happened - “The white horse leaped up with fearsome energy. The ruler rolled off of him, down onto the ground. The white shore shook the reins out of his hands and began to run like the wind through the screeching crowd”.

The noyon was furious. He ordered his men to catch the horse. Or if they couldn’t catch him, then shoot him to death. The white horse had run back to Sukh with its body full of arrows. Sukh tried to save the horse but alas, it was to no avail. The next day the horse died. 

For many nights, Sukh couldn’t sleep. When he finally did fall asleep, he had a dream. In the dream the horse spoke to him softly. The horse said, “Don’t mourn so. It would be better to make a musical instrument out of my bones, hide, sinews and hair. That way, I can always be beside you. I can comfort you”. 

The next day Sukh  began to work on making the instrument, following the instructions from the horse in his dreams. When the musical instrument was finished - it was the birth of the morin khuur.

Once you finish reading the story, you can enjoy listening to the story again in English and Japanese on the CD that comes with the book. The CD also includes a bit of background music with sounds from the morin khuur. 

The story is sad but uplifting at the same time. It’s a story of love and trust between a boy and his horse. It always strikes me as rather strange why many folktales have tragic endings. I for one, would like to know what happened to the noyon after the horse threw him off.

Wanting by Claire Jia (Tin House) ~Janet Brown

Lian and Wenyu are unlikely friends. When they first met, Lian was the good girl, carefully dressed and diligently scholastic. Wenyu was the rebel, the one who shoplifted for kicks, rarely wore the school uniform, and chose the most dangerous guy in her class as her boyfriend. Lian read the Harry Potter books in English. Wenyu cut class and was frequently suspended from school. Lian’s goal was Harvard. Wenyu had no goals but her father had a friend in California whose guest room would soon be hers. When she left Beijing, the two girls lost touch. 

Now Wenyu is coming home, a glamorous social media influencer with a rich American fiance. Lian, who never made it to her dream schools in America, has a promising career that’s the result of going to one of Beijing’s top universities. She and her boyfriend are looking at high-rise apartments in the capitol’s finest neighborhoods. Her life is good. Wenyu’s is fabulous. 

As the women rekindle their friendship, Lian finds Wenyu is still the same predatory thrill-seeker she was as a teenager, with her wealth giving her the freedom to do whatever she likes. When she begins a clandestine flirtation with her old high school boyfriend, Lian develops an illicit diversion of her own. 

But this isn’t a Beijing version of Gossip Girl. Claire Jia changes her focus mid-novel by introducing the architect who’s supervising the building of Wenyu’s mansion. Song Chen lives a universe away from the Beijing that Lian and Wenyu have made their own. He and his wife are successful but their standard of living reflects the frugality of 20th Century China. Educated in the U.S., they never succumbed to its culture. Now their primary goal is to buy a luxurious apartment for their only child and his prospective bride.

The contrast between the life led by Chen and his wife as it’s juxtaposed against those of Lian and Wenyu is shocking. One of Lian’s friends, who returned to Beijing with her American degree and a Power Point presentation for the start-up that’s launched her wealth, recently purchased an apartment for 9 million renminbi (over a million U.S. dollars). Another friend stands at a party with her husband, who holds “her Chanel purse like it was a crying baby.” At Wenyu’s engagement party in a Beijing speakeasy, the banquet tables are brimming with hors d’oeuvres that are as chic and decadent as any in the most fashionable restaurants in Manhattan. “Romance was dead and replaced with a BMW and a lifetime membership to Space Cycle.”

Meanwhile Chen curries favor with a low-level bureaucrat by bringing a bottle of whiskey and a bag of dates to the man’s office. He drives a Mazda that’s far from new and his apartment is filled with cooking odors and traffic noises. His marriage is on the rocks and when his wife leaves on a trip to see old college friends in America, he falls into a guilt-ridden affair with a woman who works in the low-level bureaucrat’s office. 

The contrasts turn sharp and cruel as Wanting reaches its conclusion. While lies are pretty little soap bubbles to Wenyu and Lian, to Chen and his wife, they’re butcher knives, brutal and destructive. 

Claire Jia’s first book takes on the form of an old-fashioned novel, one that mingles a comedy of modern manners, a domestic tragedy, the perils of online fame, and more than a few almost improbable coincidences that come together in ways that evoke Dickens, if not Shakespeare. She’s cleverly and concisely revealed Beijing, with all of its glittering wealth and dark anomalies, and sets a high standard for future debut fiction.

The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani, translated by Sam Bett (Faber & Faber) ~Ernie Hoyt

Akira Otani is a Japanese writer who got her start by writing for video games. She is a self-proclaimed lesbian and her first literary work was a collection of short stories in a book titled Nobody Said We’re Perfect which was about relationships between women. 

The Night of Baba Yaga is her first book to be published in English. It was originally published in Japanese in 2020 by Kawade Shobo Shinsha with the title ババヤガの夜 (Baba Yaga no Yoru). The English version was translated by Sam Bett. He was the co-translator for three of Mieko Kawakami’s books - Breasts and Eggs (Asia by the Book, November 2021), Heaven (Asia by the Book, July 2022), and All the Lovers in the Night (Asia by the Book, December 2022).

Yoriko Shindo was just getting off work and thought she would catch a movie at the local cinema. As she was walking through Kabukicho in Shinjuku, she ran into a group of young guys who were obviously drunk and bumped into her on purpose. One guy slapped her backside. She turned around and grabbed the guy's lapels and kicked his feet from under him. 

The fallen guy’s buddy then took a swing at her. She took him down as well after she had taken a fist to the face. The second fighter may have been drunk or just didn’t know how to fight well. Shindo dislocated his shoulder and was hoping to walk away before the police arrived but three more bad guys stepped out of the building and blocked her way. 

Unfortunately for Shindo, she was knocked out with a thick-glassed beer bottle. When she came to, she found herself at a large home in a nice part of Setagaya Ward in Tokyo. Shindo wasn’t done fighting though. “Faced with all this rage and consternation, the woman showed her teeth and smiled. She was covered in their blood. She laughed out loud and doled out punch after punch, kick after kick”. 

This is how Yoriko Shindo found herself being recruited by the boss of the Naiki Yakuza family. The boss had a special job in mind for her. She was to become the full-time bodyguard of the boss’s only daughter, Shoko. 

To Shindo, Shoko seemed really out of place in a Yakuza den, “like a crane perched in a landfill”. Naiki gave Shindo a simple job description - “Any shady character comes near her, break his neck”. Shindo still didn’t understand why a Yakuza boss would trust his daughter with a total stranger. However, he tells Shindo what happened to the last bodyguard. One of his lackeys brought in a lacquer box. Shindo opened it and saw that it contained a man' s right hand. “Severed through the wrist , where you might wear a wristwatch”. 

Shindo thought Shoko was a spoiled and naive rich girl. “She looked so delicate even a gentle prod might shatter her to pieces”. However, the more time Shindo spends with Shoko, she becomes more protective of her. When she sees Shoko in front of a bank on the verge of tears while a stranger is holding her by the wrists, Shindo goes into animal mode - “she charged, winding up, and drove her fist between his eyes”. 

After the man went down, the doors of a Mercedes opened and out came more well-built guys - Yakuza! Shindo thought, “Not again”. However, Shoko screamed for Shindo to stop. The man she had knocked out was Shoko’s future husband - promised to him by Shoko’s father. 

Will Shindo ever be able to extricate herself from this life? Will she be able to protect Shoko from this life where violence begets violence?

Otani has created an action-packed story that will keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish. Unfortunately, the latter half of the book, not only does the action dwindle down, but the timeline jumps from two years later to ten years later to twenty years later and makes you wonder what happened in between those times. Still, I believe this would be a great book to be adapted into a feature length movie!

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton Mifflin) ~Ernie Hoyt

Jhumpa Lahiri is a British-American novelist of Indian descent who currently lives in Rhode Island in the United States. Her first novel was The Namesake which was published in 2003 and adapted into a movie in 2006. Some of her other works include Whereabouts (Asia by the Book, October 23) and In Other Words (Asia by the Book, July 2022). 

Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of her short stories and was first published in 1999 by Houghton Mifflin. The book won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award.It includes nine stories about the lives and experiences of Indians and Indian-Americans. The titles of the stories including Interpreter of Maladies are A Temporary Matter, When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, A Real Durwin, Sexy, Mrs. Sen’s, This Blessed House, The Treatment of Bibi Haldar, The Third and Final Continent. 

The title story, Interpreter of Maladies, originally published in Agni Review, is about a man who works as a tour guide on the weekend. He was taking an Indian-American couple and their two children to see the Sun Temple in Konorak. Although it is located only fifty-two miles away, the trip takes approximately two and half hours. The man tells the family that being a tour guide is not his main job. He says he works as an interpreter at a doctor’s office. Although the husband and kids did not seem interested, the wife continued to ply the driver with questions about his other job. Near the end of the tour, the wife makes an amazing confession that shocks the driver. 

When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, originally published in the Louiville Review, is told through the eyes of a young girl. The time was August of 1971. A man named Mr. Pirzada used to come visit the home of the narrator “bearing confections in his pockets and hopes of ascertaining the life or death of his family”. He was from Dacca, which is now the capital of Bangladesh, but used to be a part of Pakistan. However, the country was in the midst of a civil war. 

The narrator’s parents were from India but the family was now living in Boston. The narrator had always thought that Mr. Pirzada was Indian like her parents but was shocked when her father stated, “Mr. Pirzada won’t  be coming today. More importantly Mr. Pirzada is no longer considered Indian”. 

It was confusing for the narrator. To her, Mr. Pirzada and her parents were almost the same. They spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes and even looked rather similar. Mr. Pirzada had the same habits as her parents as well - eating dinner with their hands, taking their shoes off before entering a room but her father “insisted that I understand the difference”. 

Each story is unique and original. All the stories were originally included in a variety of literary publications. Some of the stories will make you laugh, some of them will make you cry, and some of them may even make you angry but one thing you can be certain of, you will not be bored. Although the stories are fiction, it is a great introduction to the culture of India and its people.

Capitalist Colonial by Matan Kaminer (Stanford University Press) ~Janet Brown

In October 2023, 39 Thai farm workers were murdered in the Hamas massacre and 31 of them were taken hostage. Three of them died in captivity and not until early 2025 were all of the surviving Thai prisoners finally returned to their home country.

Although many were surprised at the presence of Thai laborers in Israel, this has been a reality since the early 1990s, with 20,000 Thai people employed in Israel by the middle of that decade. Most of them come from the impoverished northeast of Thailand, Isaan, which has been exporting labor to the Middle East and other countries in Asia as a way of keeping that region alive.

Israel maintains its imperiled borders by using agriculture. Kibbutz, cooperative farms, attracted volunteer labor in the 60s (probably as a result of the romantic ideal presented in Exodus, both the novel and the movie). When this source flagged, Palestinian labor took up the slack, until politics made this a hazardous move. 

As Israel expanded its borders, more agriculture came into play and the southern wasteland of the area known as Arabah (“Wilderness” in local parlance) became an essential keynote of this policy. In their quest for cheap labor, Israeli politicians found allies in Thai employment brokers who began their export of workers from Isaan to another harsh corner of the world, the desert of Arabah.

Intrigued by this addition to his country, Israeli anthropologist Matan Kaminer quite literally began fieldwork to explore the world of Thai labor in Arabah. Diving first into the history of Israel’s agricultural movement and then into the economic disaster that exists in Isaan, Kaminer persuades a moshavim, a farm owner, to let him join the workers, all of whom are Thai except for Kaminer and an Israeli who is nominally the manager., although a Thai man is the actual foreman, due to linguistic and cultural barriers. With this team, Kaminer begins a workday that starts at sunrise and winds down at sunset, both in the fields and inside sweltering greenhouses. What he learns is limited by two factors: his coworkers’ lack of English or Hebrew and the Thai ingrained etiquette that keeps them from criticizing their superiors to outsiders.  As an educated Israeli, with privileged access to his employer’s household, Kaminer faces an insurmountable barrier that is indelibly Thai.

Turning to interviews with former laborers who have returned to Thailand, Kaminer tríes to flesh out a picture of Thai workers on the Arabah’s moshav.

For Israeli farmers, Thai employees are close to perfect. Skilled farmworkers who also live on a frontier, accustomed to low wages and a low standard of living, they are deferential to authority and they arrive with a heavy debt to pay off to the brokers who have made their jobs possible. That, coupled with the traditional obligations to their parents, make them hard workers, desperate to keep their jobs.

Without an awareness of Israel’s labor laws, Thai workers receive less than the country’s minimum wage and are without the protection of health and safety regulations. While they make not much more than they would at home, they work under a contract that guarantees them five years and three months of a steady job. Although their contract keeps them from finding more lucrative employment, it also protects them from an early dismissal. Once they complete their contracts, Thailand gives them an easy route to return to their Israeli jobs by changing their names and receiving new passports. Job security and family pressure is the impetus for coming back, while the foreign exchange that comes from remittance payments keeps Isaan villages thriving communities.

Anyone looking for deep insights into Thai labor in Israel will be disappointed. Kaminer’s time in the field lasted for less than eight months. Much of his information comes from interviews within Thailand, through an interpreter. Although he hints at changes that take place in Thai labor behavior after years of being in Israel, while mentioning the difference between Thai behavior at work and during leisure hours at night, these are swiftly skirted over. His 269 pages consist of 75 pages of historical background and 92 pages of footnotes, bibliography, and an exhaustive index. Capitalist Colonial begins with promise but it remains a book that still waits to be written.

The Bomb by Makoto Oda, translated by D. H. Whitaker (Kodansha) ~Ernie Hoyt

Makoto Oda is a Japanese writer who was born in 1932 and died in 2007. He was also a political activist and was the founder of the Citizens’ Coalition for Peace in Vietnam and one of the founders of the Article 9 Association of Japan. Article 9 is a clause in the Japanese constitution which outlaws war as a means to settling international disputes of state. 

The Bomb is his first book to be translated into English. It was first published as Hiroshima in the Japanese language by Kodansha. This new edition was translated by D.H. Whitaker, who at the time of publication, worked as lecturer in Japanese Studies at Cambridge University. 

This book is not your average story about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It does not focus on the destruction of the city. It is not about the making and dropping of the bomb and is ethical usage. It is about how war affects everyone - those abroad and those at home. 

Oda presents a collage of stories and people that are interconnected - a young man working in a small town near White Sands, New Mexico, the testing ground of the atomic bomb. Japanese emigrants and their internment, the legends of the Hopi and how the U.S. government forced them off their own land. 

When the story shifts to Japan, Oda focuses on the problems that face returnees from the U.S., the plight of the Koreans forced into labor, the portrait of the Emperor and Empress of Japan, and of course, the devastation caused by the bomb. 

Joe was a ranch hand who worked for a man named Will, the owner of the ranch. Joe often ran in the desert gaining him the nickname of “the runner” by the locals. Joe had left home when he was seventeen to find work and a place to live on his own. His parents were already dead and he felt he was becoming a burden on his brother’s family. 

Will had introduced Joe to Chuck, an Indian who was famous among his tribe. Chuck was also a runner and had won the bronze medal in the marathon at the Olympics some thirty years ago. He was famous, even in the white man’s world. 

Joe had a secret admirer. Her name was Peggy. Laura, an Indian who worked as a maid at Peggy’s house, had told Peggy about Chuck. Of course, Peggy didn’t believe her. Her mother had said to her, “Indians are liars”. Her mother also said, “you never knew what those people were thinking”. Those people included “Indians, Negroes, Chinese and especially Japs”. 

The Hopi, the tribe which Chuck belonged to, are a peaceful tribe. It was against the tribe’s tradition and culture to take up arms against another race. Chuck was given the choice of joining the army or going to prison. He decided to join the army. 

The Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor and it’s only a matter of time before Joe would be called up to service. After the bombing, the U.S. government issued Executive Order 9066 and Public Law 77-503. These laws authorized the forced interment of over 120,000 Japanese-American citizens during World War II. 

Many nisei or second generation Japanese - people who were born and raised in the United States, chose to move to Japan even though they couldn’t speak the language. They were as unwelcome in their parent’s home country as they were in their own. 

Oda sheds light on many aspects of the bombing of Hiroshima that a lot of Americans may be unaware of. If I remember my U.S. history classes, we were taught that the U.S. tried to remain neutral but joined the war after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. 

What we are not taught is why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor (it had something to do with the oil embargo the U.S. placed on Japan). We were not taught that the U.S. governments forcibly removed Native Americans from their lands so the government could build and test a new weapon they were working on. The classes also didn’t teach us about the Americans who worked in the uranium mines and suffered the same fate as the bombing victims of Hiroshima. 

The Bomb may be a fictional account of actual incidents but it makes its point quite clear - “In war, there are no winners!”. We, as humans, have a long way to go before we can achieve world peace but it’s a goal worth attaining.

Greek Lessons by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith and E. Yaewon (Penguin) ~Ernie Hoyt

Han Kang is a South Korean writer who debuted with her novel The Vegetarian in 2007. She is also the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. Greek Lessons is her seventh novel which was originally published in the Korean language by Munhakdongne in 2011. The English edition was translated by Deborah Smith and E. Yaewon was published in 2023.

The book centers on two main characters. A university lecturer who is nearly blind and a woman who has lost the ability of speech. The lecturer teaches Ancient Greek and the woman is one of the few students enrolled in his class.  

All the chapters of the book are written in the first person. Sometimes it’s the lecturer and sometimes it is the woman who cannot speak. The author doesn’t give a hint to whose point of view is spoken and the reader must infer from the context to determine if it is the lecturer or the woman who cannot speak.

We learn that the woman was also a teacher until the spring of the previous year. One day she was at the front of the class writing something on the blackboard but then froze for about a minute or so. One of her students asked if she was okay. She tried to smile back at the student but “her eyelids spasmed for a while”. “She muttered to herself from somewhere deeper than her tongue and throat: It’s come back!”. 

When she was a young girl, her mother always told her how bright she was. She was able to learn Hangul (Korean script) when she was only four years old. When she started primary school, she used to write new words at the back of her diary “with neither purpose nor context, merely a list of words that had made a deep impression on her”. 

However, “the words she’d jotted down in the back of her diary wriggled about of their own volition to form unfamiliar sentences”. The words would shoot at her in the middle of the night, waking her up a number of times. For her, “the most agonizing thing was how horrifyingly distinct the words sounded when she opened her mouth and pushed them out one by one”. 

It was when she was sixteen when “the language that had pricked and confined her…abruptly disappeared”. Now here she was - a middle-aged woman who once again could not find the words to speak. 

As for the lecturer, he lived in a town called Suruyi in the southern part of South Korea until he was fifteen. One Sunday, his mother informed them that the family would be moving to Germany in two months. He spent the next seventeen years of his life in Germany. It was in Germany when the lecturer learned of his condition. He knew he would be losing his vision sometime in the near future.

The lecturer decided to move back to his home country before losing his sight permanently. He was able to get a job teaching Ancient Greek at a local college. He did not admit the severity of his condition to his employers. 

The core of the story is how these two unlikely individuals begin to find solace in each other. One who could not see and one who could not speak. Would their relationship flourish or is it destined to be a disaster? 

Kang’s prose will grip the reader. It is not only a story of loneliness and solitude, but it’s also about love, compassion, and intimacy. It is sure to stir your heart.

Teo’s Durumi by Elaine U. Cho (Hillman Grad Books) ~Janet Brown

Back in the middle of the last century, there were serials, a clever marketing device that instilled customer loyalty. Magazines, radio stations, and movie theaters all produced stories that ended with cliffhangers, to be continued in the next installment. Still to be found on streaming sites (Game of Thrones anyone?), the gimmick dissolved in other arenas--until Elaine U. Cho resurrected it in Ocean’s Godori, (Asia by the Book, May 2024).

This science fiction adventure ended so abruptly that some readers were infuriated. Clearly they had never gone to a movie matinee where a weekly Saturday serial ended with the invitation to return for  “another episode in this thrilling drama.” For those of us who had, we knew there would be a sequel. Unfortunately we had to wait longer than a week to discover what would happen next.

It’s been over a year since the characters of Ocean’s Godori escaped death by crash-landing their spacecraft on a distant moon. Although Teo’s Darumi, begins at the exact point where its predecessor ended, memories fade and not everyone will have a copy of the first installment in their bookcases for quick reference.

Luckily Elaine U. Cho offers a brief refresher course given by one of the minor characters, providing thumbnail sketches of the multitudes who propel the plots of both books. It would have been helpful to have included the glossary of Korean vocabulary that came at the end of Ocean’s Godori, adding the new words that appear in Teo’s Darumi. Still careful readers will find clues to their meanings through context and quick explanations given when the words first show up. 

For those who have come to this sequel without having read its predecessor, Cho has constructed it so cleverly that it works as a stand-alone novel. While those who read the first might miss the focus on Ocean, that prickly daredevil loner, the characters in this new book soon flourish under their newly acquired spotlights and the plot swiftly moves into new dangers and fresh horrors.

Teo, the only survivor of the massacre that killed off the rest of his family’s wealthy dynasty; Sasani, a pariah, shunned for his knowledge of funeral arts, who has found hopes for a new community as the spacecraft’s medical officer; Phoenix, the dashing space raider who’s attracted to Teo’s fortune and Ocean’s skills as a pilot; Ocean who finds a kinship with Sasani, since she is also a pariah of sorts, band together in ways that surprise them all.

Cho has given alarming depths to Corvus, one of the most hideous villains in any galaxy, giving him accessories that can suck the souls and memories from his victims, an activity to which he has become addicted, with dreams of interplanetary domination. As a counterpoint, she gives her main characters whopping helpings of romance, so much of it that only the grisly violence of the final battle can submerge the affairs of the heart. 

The violence goes on for fifty horrendous pages in which nobody is sure that goodness will triumph--squeamish readers, be warned. Since Cho has given new dimensions to Ocean and her colleagues, their bloody struggles to survive are close to unbearable and will be absolutely impossible to abandon.

Once again, room is left for another installment but these new conclusions will leave readers satisfied. Too bad. As a person who grew up in the mid-20th century, I miss that cliffhanger.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda (Soft Skull Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Hiromi Kawakam is a Japanese writer from Tokyo. She started her career writing and editing for a science-fiction magazine called NW-SF after graduating from college. She also taught science in middle school and high school. She debuted as a writer in 1994 when she was thirty-six. Her first book was a collection of short stories titled 神様 (Kamisama) which translates to God in English. 

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a speculative fiction novel. It was originally published in the Japanese language in 2016 by Kodansha as 大きな鳥にさらわれないよう (Okina na tori ni sarawarenai yo). The title literally translates to To Avoid Being Carried Away by Big Birds. The English edition was translated by Asa Yoneda, who also translated Rin Usami’s Idol, Burning (Asia by the Book, December 2023). 

The book is written as a collection of connected short stories. It’s the distant future and humans are on the verge of extinction. Those who are left live in small, isolated communities. They are under the protection and care of “Mothers” who are not really considered human. The “Mothers” all share one memory and consciousness and are very kind to humans. 

Some children are made in factories, others are clones from the original copy of themselves, while some children grow by photosynthesis, similar to plants. They also have a slight green hue to their complexion.

There are also a number of “Watchers” who may or may not be human. They can live for thousands of years as their consciousnesses can be transferred to their clones. It is their job to oversee the community of humans in the hopes that mankind will survive. It was the “Watchers”, Ian and Jakob who came up with the current system to preserve the last remaining humans and hope for evolution to occur to ensure mankind’s survival. 

Near the end of the book, mankind’s quest for progress and ultimate decline is described by one of the final living “Mother”. She uses “you” to collectively refer to humans as she describes her emergence, how she came into being. 

She tells one of the last living humans, “At a certain point in the past, you came up with the technology to produce learning machines whose capacity to process information was extremely close to your own”. This new technology was called Artificial Intelligence or AI for short. The mother further explains, “But before you could use what you created as a result of your success, you first had to consider the implications - legal, moral, philosophical and so on”. 

What really hits home and is true even today is how the “Mother” describes the fear humans feel towards their own creation. The “Mother” says, “what you feared, to put it bluntly, was the possibility that the powers AI had would grow far to surpass yours, such that AI would take over human society as result”.

Can we really leave the future to humanity to humans or will they make the same mistakes they made in the past over and over again? Are humans leading the way to their own extinction? Will there be such a thing as “hope” left in the future? 

It is my opinion that this book will haunt your mind long after you have finished reading it.

One Hundred Sacks of Rice by Yuzo Yamamoto, translated by Donald Keene (Nagaoka City Kome Hyappyo Foundation) ~Ernie Hoyt

One Hudred Sacks of Rice is an English translation of a stage play based on the fictionalized story of Torasaburo Kobayashi, the Grand Council of the Nagaoka Domain in feudal Japan. The play titled 米百袋 (Kome Hyappyo) was written by Yuzo Yamato. This English edition was translated by Japanese scholar and permanent Japan resident, Donald Keene. 

The story is set in the city of Nagaoka in Echigo Province, present-day Niigata Prefecture. Currently, the  city is famous for its summer fireworks display. The time is the third year of the Meiji era (1870) at the end of May. There were still many domains throughout the country and the order for men to cut their hair and give up their swords had not yet been issued. Many of the policies of the new government had yet to take effect and a lot of old customs still lingered. 

During the Boshin War, Japan’s Civil War, Nagaoka had sided with the Tokugawa Shogunate who fought against the domains for the Imperial Court who wanted to “revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians”. To put down the rebellion, the Shogunate forces literally wiped Nagaoka off the map. After the war, Nagaoka was impoverished and the people were starving. A neighboring province gifted the city with one hundred sacks of rice. 

In feudal Japan, rice was the equivalent of hard currency. When the lower ranked samurai of Nagaoka learned that the city would be getting one hundred sacks of rice, they felt they would be relieved from their suffering. However, when they learned that the Grand Councillor was going to sell the rice so he could build a school.

This decision angered the samurai and they decided to take action against the Great Councillor. They went to Grand Councillor Torasaburo Kobayashi’s home, brandished their swords and demanded that he divide up the rice and comply with their wishes immediately.

Torasaburo Kobayashi doesn’t answer them. The samurai ask Torasaburo, “Why don’t you answer?”, “What’s the matter? Why are you silent?”. He finally responds by saying, “Nothing can be done to help”. One of the samurai says, “No, there is something. Don’t we have the hundred sacks of rice given to us for relife. If you distribute it, that will settle everything”. 

Kobayashi is not taken in by their threats. He admonishes them, saying, “Have you nothing better in mind? Why do you suggest anything to picayune? ‘A hundred sacks of rice’, ‘a hundred sacks of rice’. He asks the samurai, “just how much do you think this represents?”. He tells them if he were to divide up the rice for everybody, they would have enough to eat for two days. What will the samurai do after that?

Kobayashi tells them it’s because there were no capable men in the government. What the nation needs are capable men, and the only way to get capable men is by education. “Whether a town flourishes or decays, the answer relies in every instance with the people” - “as long as people continue to appeary and they are educated, no matter how badly a country has declined, they will restore it”. 

What really shames the samurai is Torasaburo Kobayashi’s final trump card. He shows the samurai a scroll written by Shozan (Sakuma Shoza, aka Sakuma Zozan), a scholar and teacher that every samurai is familiar with. Written on the scroll is “Always on the Battlefied!”. Kobayashi reminds the samurai that these words have been instilled in every samurai of the Mikawa clan (which includes Nagaoka) and has been observed as a particarly important principle. He explains, “To say ‘We are always on the battlefield’ means that even in times of peace, we must endure every hardship and privation in the same spirit as on the battlefield”. 

Although the script for the stage play is rather short, falling around less than one hundred pages, this book includes a lot of extra material that will help the reader appreciate the story even more. 

First, Keene says to better understand the story, you need to know about the writer, Yuzu Yamamoto, as well. Although the play is based on an actual incident and Torasaburo Kobayashi did exist, the rest of the characters were from the imagination of Yamamoto. The story is not presented as a mere history lesson but is an entertaining piece of literature as well. 

Keene also provides background on the “Spirit of Bushido”, the “Way of the Warrior”, a short history of the Boshin War and the true story of the “The Hundred Sacks of Rice”, followed by a profile of Torasaburo Kobayashi. 

Torasaburo Kobayahi may not be as well known Ieyasu Tokugawa, Japan’s first Shogun” or Nobunaga Oda, Takamori Saigo, or Ryoma Sakamoto but he is an integral part of the modernification of Japan. The story still holds true today - “Whether a country rises or falls, whether a town flourishes or decays, the answer lies in every case with the people” - educated ones at that!

Moderation by Elaine Castillo (Viking) ~Janet Brown

Girlie is “a 24-karat hottie” who works in America’s capitol of sleaze, Las Vegas. In her workplace, she is “by any conceivable metric, one of the very best.”  Like the majority of her co-workers, she’s Filipina, in an occupation where “none of the white people survived.” Girlie works for one of the world’s leading social media sites as a content moderator. For eight hours a day, five days a week, she watches a screen, viewing and removing the posts that are unspeakably and horribly obscene, before they can go online. Girlie is known as a Subject Matter Specialist whose expertise lies in ferreting out child sex abuse online, with a success rate of 99.5 %.

This seems as if it’s leading into the sort of dark and cruel satire that was popular in the 1970’s. Girlie is the sort of character who could easily become the 21st Century version of Candy by Terry Southern. For the first thirty pages of Moderation, Elaine Castillo presents her in a merciless light that threatens to make this novel nobody’s idea of a good time. Nevertheless, the smart and scathing observations that leap out of nowhere are enough of a reason to keep reading--and then they come from the sharp and sardonic brain of Girlie. 

Girlie Delmundo is the pseudonym she chose when she began to work as a content moderator, a job she took when her mother went broke flipping houses in the red-hot real estate market that preceded the crash of 2008. Since then Girlie has paid off her mother’s sizable debt to the IRS and has bought her parent a Tesla. She’s the mainstay of her two-family household that lives together in a “copy-paste Spanish-tiled dreamer’s monstrosity” in a gated community far from the glitz of Las Vegas. She’s a graduate of Berkeley, a classicist with a penchant for medieval French. 

When she’s given a promotion that will take her from the dregs of social media to the world of virtual reality, Girlie isn’t intimidated by the man who offers it to her. She recognizes him, a Chinese man in a well-cut suit who speaks with “careful…faintly Hong Kong- inflected British English.” William has the “British talent of making a thank you sound like a death wish” but Girlie knows how to counter that “in her affable little killer’s voice.”

Moderation specializes in twists of a kaleidoscope. What begins as a satirical examination of social media and social aspirations becomes an examination of the world of virtual reality and the international players who are parlaying that into unbelievable fortunes. Tinges of romance flare up in the verbal duels that Girlie and William are fond of, reminiscent of the sophisticated badinage of movies from the 1930’s, carrying a degree of sexual tension that moves on to some rather steamy fantasies. An undertone of a thriller emerges with the disclosure of a convenient death and political scandals appear in a flurry of headlines near the novel’s end. 

Elaine Castillo blends all of these elements together in a brilliant pastiche that often seems to give nods to writers who have recently preceded her. While this book has been compared to Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, there are portions that bring to mind Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time (Asia by the Book, November 2023) and Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej (Asia by the Book, May 2022). Still even with these little pieces of homage to fellow-authors, Elaine Castillo has written a highly original and wildly entertaining novel that’s the perfect book for summer’s end.

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton (Penguin) ~Ernie Hoyt

Hunchback is the debut novel by Japanese writer Saou Ichikawa. It won the 128th Bungakukai Prize for New Writers and the 169th Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, in 2023. She is Japan’s first disabled writer to receive the Akutagawa Award.

The book was originally published in the Japanese language as ハンチバック (Hunchback) by Bungeisha in 2023. The English edition, translated by Polly Barton, was published in 2025. Barton is also an author in her own right and has published two non-fiction books. She has translated a number of titles of Japanese books including Where the Wild Ladies Are (Asia by the Book, May 2021). 

Ichikawa was born in 1979. She has congenital myopathy, a muscle disorder which confines her to a wheelchair. She has also been on a respirator since she was thirteen years old. She decided to become a writer at twenty as she felt her job opportunities were very limited due to her handicap. 

The protagonist of Hunchback is also born with a congenital muscle disorder. Shaka Ishizawa has a severe curvature of her spine and must use a wheelchair and ventilator. She lives in a nursing home and makes a living by freelancing, contributing stories and articles to erotic online websites. 

After writing Part 1 of her story, My Steamy Threesome with Super-Sexy Students in One of Tokyo’s Most Sought After-Swingers’ Club, she had to turn her attention to her body. She explains, “mucus had built up in my windpipe, and the alarm on my Trilogy ventilator was chirruping furiously”. 

Ishazawa says that she’s been living in Nirvana for twenty-nine years, “ever since the day my underdeveloped muscles had prevented my heart and lungs from maintaining a normal level of oxygen saturation, and I’d grown faint and passed out by the classroom window in my second year of middle school”. 

Ishizawa also spends a lot of time tweeting on Twitter. However, she says she has hardly any followers and never got any “likes”. She assumed that people didn’t know how to respond to a bed-bound woman who would tweet things like - “In another life, I’d like to work as a high class prostitute” or “I’d have liked to try working at McDonald’s”, “I’d have liked to see what it was like to be a high-school student”. 

Another tweet she saved in her drafts on her iPhone was “I’d like to know what it’s like to have an abortion”. She says this is one of her tools to organize her thoughts. She has also saved tweets such as “I want to get pregnant, then have an abortion” and continues with “I can’t imagine a foetus growing properly inside this crooked body of mine”. She ends this line of thought with “My ultimate dream is to get pregnant and have an abortion, just like a normal woman”. 

One day, one of the male carers at the facility she lives in tells her that he has read all of the material she’s written. He has read her sexploints on the erotic websites, he has read her tweets on Twitter. 

Ishizawa then makes a proposal to the man. She would pay him one hundred fifty-five million yen to have a sex with her. Will the carer take Ishikawa up on her offer? Is this really what Shaka Ishikawa wants? 

Only someone who suffers the same condition as Shaka Ishizawa could concoct a story so out of the ordinary that it may make a normal, healthy person think about the things they take for granted - being able to read a book, walking to the neighborhood convenience store, riding on trains. Everyday, ordinary things. Ichikawa shows the world that disabled people have the same hopes and dreams as normal people and that they can be successful as well. 

Japan is still far behind the times where it comes to caring for the disabled. The handicapped are still shunned and are prone to be victims of prejudice. Perhaps if people like that were to read this book, they would learn what empathy means.

The End of August by Yu Miri, tranlated by Morgan Giles (Tilted Axis Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Yu Miri is a Zainichi Korean novelist. Zainichi Koreans are ethnic Koreans who immigrated to Japan before 1945 and are citizens or permanent residents of Japan, or who are children of those immigrants. Her native language is Japanese but she is a citizen of South Korea. She writes her books in Japanese. 

She is the author of Tokyo Ueno Station (Asia by the Book, May 2021). The End of August is her latest novel. It was originally published by Shinchosha in 2007 in the Japanese language as 八月の果て (Hachigatsu no Hate). The English edition, translated by Morgan Giles, was published in 2023. 

The End of August is a semi-biographical family epic. The tome is over seven hundred pages and focuses on several generations of Yu Miri’s family. The story takes place in Japanese-occupied Korea in the mid-1920’s. The reader should be warned that they should study Yu Miri’s family tree, provided at the beginning of the book,  before taking on the immense task of reading this saga.

Here is a short summary of Yu Miri’s family, starting with her great grandfather, Lee Young-Ha. He was married to Park Hee-Hyang and had five children with her. They had four sons and one daughter. The eldest son was Lee Woo-Seon, followed by their daughter, Lee So-Won. Lee Woo-Cheol was the second son. His two younger brothers were Lee Woo-Gun and Lee Su-Yong. 

Lee Yong-Ha also had a mistress named Mi-Ryeong. They had a daughter named So-Jin, a girl who would never meet her father. The only thing she would know about him is that he gave her her name.

Lee Woo-Cheol is married to Chee In-Hye and has four children with her. Their daughter’s names are Mi-Ok, Shin-Ja, and Ja-Ok. They named their son Shin-Tae and like his father before him, Lee Woo-Cheol has a son with his mistress, Kim Me-Yeong, who the name’s Shin-Cheol. 

Chee In-Hye is Lee Woo-Cheol’s first wife. After she leaves him, Woo-Cheol marries An Jeong-Hye and has four children with her. They have three daughters and a son. Their daughter’s names are Shin-Ho, Shin-Myeong, and Shin-Hee. Their son is named Shin-Hwa. Shin-Hee marries a Japanese citizen named Yu, against her parent’s wishes. Shin-Hee and her husband are the parents of Yu Miri. 

As the country becomes more unstable, Lee Woo-Cheol runs away to Japan. His brother becomes the leader of a resistance movement against the Japanese forces. Their stories are both hopeful and tragic. After running away to Japan, Lee Woo-Cheol marries a Japanese woman named Nemoto Fusako and has a son with her who he names Shin-Il. Fusako only discovers that Woo-Cheol was married and has children when his second wife, Jeong-Hee appears at their door with children in tow causing more family turmoil.

As interesting and entertaining as the story is, the book has many flaws as well. My first and foremost complaint is the Morgan Giles translation. Although the book was originally written in Japanese, the characters often speak in Korean and most of the Korean words and phrases are not translated and the translator does not provide a glossary forcing the reader to look up the words and phrases on their own or they must infer meaning from the context of what’s being said. 

The writing style is also quite difficult to follow especially when Lee Woo-Cheol or Yu Miri are running. The sentences are mostly fragmented and interspersed with “inhale-exhale” making it very difficult to understand what the character is thinking. 

On the positive side, the book sheds light on the atrocity and experiences of the “comfort women” - young women, sometimes as young as thirteen, who were tricked and made to serve as sexual slaves for the Japanese army. It also sheds light on the treatment of Zainichi Koreans who are still oppressed even today. 

A remarkable book but a very difficult read. Be sure to invest a lot of time if you plan to challenge yourself to the task of reading it.

The South by Tash Aw (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) ~Janet Brown

Just when it seems as if the coming-of-age novel is threadbare and ready for a decent burial, Tash Aw brings it back to new life in The South. Placing this at the southern edge of Malaysia at the time of the Asian financial meltdown of 1997, when even Singapore teetered on the edge of disaster, Aw puts his young protagonist’s growing pains squarely against the challenges brought to the world by globalization and climate change, making potential cliches turn fresh and poignant in this juxtaposition.

When Jay’s mother inherits a farm from her father-in-law, she packs up her entire family and takes them to a part of Malaysia that her urban children have never known. Her husband, a taciturn and stern academic, isn’t enchanted by this odyssey. He’s never understood why his father bought this piece of land that becomes less productive every year. Although he grew up with the farm’s manager, he has never established a true friendship with Fong and is uncomfortable with his wife’s inheritance. 

Jay, however, is immediately drawn to Fong’s son, Chuan, a boy several years his senior who is doing his best to construct a future that doesn’t include his father’s rural existence. He’s an attractive rebel and Jay, who has realized years ago that he is sexually drawn to his own gender, spends as much time with Chuan as he can.

Jay’s two sisters, on the threshold of adulthood, have chosen their separate strongholds. Lina has cut her hair painfully short, smokes cigarettes, sports a tattoo, and disdains any thought of romance. Yin has patterned herself after her mother, whom she resembles and has fallen in love. Unfortunately the man she has chosen is Malay and Muslim which guarantees the opposition of her Malaysian-Chinese parents, should they ever learn about this relationship.

With the parents preoccupied with what seems to be a failing marriage and with the problems of owning a failing farm, each member of the family carves out their own personal territory. Nobody notices the intimacy that is burgeoning between Jay and Chuan, with Jay taking on the status of a quasi-adult both on the farm and in the neighboring towns. He’s developing an attachment to the land that he thinks may become his home, along with a detached passion for Chuan. Although they’re physically close, Jay is aware that their future lives will diverge and he brings that lens to this love affair, savoring it while knowing it will be only his introduction to a life of intimacy with men.

Aw brings a lyrical sensibility to a vanishing way of life when he describes the farm. As Jay learns to love this harsh and deteriorating landscape, so do the readers. When it’s betrayed by its new owner, this is a tragedy that’s painful, an aching loss that’s as haunting as the expulsion at the end of Genesis. 

Aw prefigures his conclusion with a number of clues: the holiday chalets built on land that had once been part of the farm but which remain unfinished when the Southeast Asian economies collapse, the Burmese woman in a rural Malaysian market who speaks Cantonese and sells smuggled goods that are made in Thailand and embossed with the logos of multinational brands, a recent rush on the banks that drained ATMs across the country, the demonization of the IMF and George Soros.

Chuan reveals his ambitions, “to get a big TV and a karaoke set and a huge stereo,” disregarding his father’s struggle to keep the farm alive, even though its greatest value lies in its proximity to Singapore. 

“You can’t call it an orchard if it no longer bears fruit--we agreed on that.” “When a piece of land that was once a farm is no longer a farm,” what is it going to become?

“It’s called El NIno,” Jay tells Chuan, describing the drought that is killing the land as “a cyclical weather system.” But who has the patience to wait out a cycle when there’s money to be made? How can a boyhood love affair prevail when one of them is slated for a university education while the other had failed all his subjects and left school at seventeen? It’s a tribute to Aw’s artistry that he brings grief to these endings by linking them to a loss of innocence that, without warning, will soon strike the entire world.

The White Book by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith (Hogarth) ~Janet Brown

White is an enigma. Is it a color or is it an absence of color? This makes it an appropriate preoccupation for this enigmatic little book, which at first reveals no gender for its narrator, no name for the city in which it is set, and no plot. Instead it begins with a list of things that are white and a few spoken words that are repeated throughout The White Book: “Don’t die. For God’s sake don’t die.”

White is the color of purity and the color of death. Death is the prevailing theme for the narrator. Her mother at the age of twenty-two gave birth to her first child, alone.  She dressed the baby girl in a white gown she had made while racked with labor pains and wrapped the newborn in ribbons of cloth cut from a white quilt to serve as swaddling bands. The baby, born two months early, her “face as white as a crescent-moon rice cake,” lived for only a couple of hours. That night her father buried her on a mountainside. Her “gown became her shroud. Her swaddling bands became a coffin.” Her death made way for the narrator’s own life and this fact haunts the white view of a book that the author describes as “a kind of essay-cum-prose poem.” “My life means yours is impossible.”

Snowfall obscures the novel’s setting, a “white city” which was so thoroughly destroyed by Hitler, “literally pulverized,” that before it was rebuilt, “the white glow of stone ruins” was all that remained. Walking through it brings the knowledge that every part of the landscape was once dead and was “painstakingly reconstructed.” The wings of a solitary white butterfly loses their  whiteness as they slowly freeze on the outskirts of the city, becoming “close to transparent…something other, no longer wings,” and snow falls “with an equal absence of joy or sorrow.”

The narrator turns into “she” with a view of whiteness that is less apocalyptic. A “white cloud of escaping breath is proof that we are living.” A white pebble found on a beach is seen as what silence would be if “it were condensed into the smallest, most solid object.” “Black writing through white paper” makes her understand that “learning to love life again is a long and complicated process.” She explores the art of “laughing whitely…laughter that is faint, cheerless.”

Han Kung has admitted that The White Book is somewhat autobiographical. She was born after a sister who died before she had taken three hours of breath and that dead infant lives within these pages, as “she,” who sees the beauty and promise that lies within whiteness. Kung wrote this novel while living within this “city of severe winters,” that sprang into new life after all but a tiny fraction was demolished in warfare, when she was given a writer’s residency in Warsaw. 

In sixty-five short pieces, Kang examines grief, guilt, and the life that lies within whiteness. Presented as a novel, its essence is poetry, imagist language clad in thought, showing the perfection of a sugar cube, a glacier…sacred, unsullied by life,” “the impossibility of forever.”

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (Vintage Books) ~Janet Brown

Kathy is a caregiver, or as she calls herself, a carer, driving around England to nurse a select group, the donors. Coming from a privileged background, she prefers to work with donors who also grew up at Hailsham, a place that fascinates others who didn’t have that as their past history. 

In a matter-of-fact voice, Kathy explains why Hailsham is enviable. Not a school, not an orphanage, it blends elements of both on a large estate where the children live, taught and are brought up from early childhood until late adolescence. The estate is presided over by a number of instructors who give their young charges an education laced with freedom, medical attention,  and meticulous care. 

The children have known no other home. They know they are special and that they will become donors when they reach adulthood, but beyond that they’re consumed by childhood games, adventures, and friendships. Only one teacher breaks into this idyllic world, telling them “we weren’t being taught enough about donations and all that.” When she hears two boys discussing how they plan to move to America when they grow up, she intervenes. “You’re special. Your lives are set out for you. None of you will go to America..you’ll become adults and you’ll start to donate your vital organs.”

Slowly the children realize who they are. They are clones, without families. As they get older, they begin to search through magazines, hoping to find their “possibles,” their replicas, the people from whom they were cloned. Friends become family and Hailsham holds their only history. 

As a carer, Kathy sees the lifespan of the donors, with them when they reach “completion” after their fourth donation, or even before that. It’s her job to keep her donors happy, well-healed, and ready for their next step. But among those who grew up at Hailsham, there’s a belief that there could be another chapter. If a relationship passes a test administered by Hailsham’s headmistress, the couple could be given time to be together, a break from their fates, before their donations bring them to completion.

Reading Never Let Me Go twenty years after it was first published is an eerie experience. Enshrined as one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the 21st Century, it’s taken on the hallowed glow of a classic. Over the past two decades, AI and humanoid robots have made the idea of human clones almost quaint. And yet unlike Orwell and Huxley in their bleak, dispassionate visions of the future, Kazuo Ishiguro has given his characters warmth, depth, and an enduring humanity that makes their fates tragic, although they don’t see them in that light. For these children, this is the normal progression of a life. Raised in isolation, they’re have a vague awareness of how humans live and die, but their only reality is donation and completion. 

However, when Kathy and Tommy, a boy she grew up with at Hailsham, fall in love as adults, they yearn for more time together and begin to pursue the childhood rumor that this might be allowed to happen. Even though Kathy will soon become a donor and Tommy is nearing completion, they allow themselves dreams of a future, for the first time.

“We gave you your childhoods.” With that statement comes a horrible reality that will strike at the soul of every living parent. We have given our offspring that. Now what will be their futures?

May You Have Delicious Meals by Junko Takase, translated by Morgan Giles (Hutchinson) ~Ernie Hoyt

Junko Takase is a Japanese writer whose first novel was 犬のかたちをしてるもの (Inu no Katachi wo Shiteru Mono) (Things with the Shape of a Dog), won the Subaru Literary Prize, a literature prize sponsored by the publisher Shueisha. The book was published the following year. 

Takase was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, along with the Naoki Prize, for her book 水たまりでいきをする (Mizutamari de Iki o Suru) (Breathing in a Puddle) in 2021 and won the Akutagawa Prize the following year for May You Have Delicious Meals.

May You Have Delicous Meals which was originally published in the Japanese language as おいしいごはんをたべられるますように (Oishii Gohan wo Taberareru masu yo ni) and was serialized in the magazine 群像 (Gunzo) in 2020. The English edition was translated by Morgan Giles who also translated Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station (Asia by the Book, May 2021).

The story centers around three main characters - Oshio, Nitani, and Ashikawa. They all work for the same company in Saitama Prefecture. Their company produces labels and packaging for food and beverage products. Oshio was hired right out of university five years ago. Ashikawa was hired a year before and Nitani was hired a year before Ashikawa although he worked at a different branch for six years before being transferred to the Saitama branch. 

The story is narrated by Oshio. She and Nitani were heading back to the office after taking part in an off-site training course. It was already five thirty in the evening so they decided to grab a bite to eat and have some drinks at a local izakaya. Once the booze starts flowing, Oshio says to Nitani, “Do you know who I can’t stand? Ashikawa.”

As Oshio explains why she doesn’t really like Ashikawa, Nitani discovers that it wasn’t anything Ashikawa did or said to Oshio. He surmises, “you don’t like her because she’s not competent?”. Oshio’s response is, “More like, because everyone knows she isn’t, I guess.” 

When Nitani joined the Saitama office, Ashikawa was supposed to show him the ropes. But after two weeks, Nitani had the thought, “I’m gonna overtake her in no time at all, easy. It’s hard to respect someone after that”. 

Nitani gave up respecting Ashikawa “the moment the thought she lacked a backbone came to the surface of his mind”. However, he is attracted to her weakness and they begin dating. However, there is one thing that really annoys him - it is her love of eating proper food. Nitani is happy with instant pot noodles. He wished he could “eat pot noodles three meals a day and still meet all the dietary requirements for a healthy life”. 

The story is an interesting take on office dynamics. I’m sure many people can relate to disliking a co-worker either because they are incompetent or because they have annoying habits or maybe a bit of both and yet they tolerate their presence to keep harmony in the office.. I’m no different. There are co-workers in the past I did not particularly enjoy working with but I didn’t go out of my way to get them fired. 

You can’t help but wonder what will become of the trio. Will Nitani end up marrying Ashikawa? And what will happen to Oshio? Was she also in love with Nitani? You’ll just have to read and find out.

Invisible Helix by Keigo Higashino, translated by Giles Murray (Abacus Books) ~Ernie Hoyt

Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s most prominent mystery writers. Many of his books have been adapted into movies and television series. One of the most popular is the adaptation of his Detective Galileo series starring popular actor and singer-songwriter Masaharu Fukuyama. The book series includes The Devotion of Suspect X (Asia by the Book, December 2020), Salvation of a Saint, A Midsummer’s Equation, and Silent Parade.

Invisible Helix is the latest addition to the Detective Galileo series. It was originally published in the Japanese language as 透明の螺旋 (Tomei no Rasen) in 2021 by Bungeishunju Ltd. The English edition was translated by Giles Murray who has translated a number of Japanese books, from business biographies to history, fiction and essays and even manga. 

The body of a young man is found floating in Tokyo Bay off the coast of Chiba Prefecture. The corpse’s body was so decomposed that it was hard to determine the victim’s age. There were no clues to his identity either; however, the police did discover something very important - the man had a small wound that looked similar to a bullet wound. The autopsy confirmed that it was indeed a bullet wound, turning this into a homicide case. 

After making a number of inquiries, the police were able to determine that the dead body was most likely a man from Adachi Ward in Tokyo named Ryota Uetsuji and was currently living with his girlfriend Sonoka Shimauchi. It was his girlfriend who filed a missing persons report. When the officer who took her report tried to contact her, he had no response and went to her apartment  but she wasn’t home. 

The detectives called her employer and found that she had suddenly taken time off from work only three days after filing the report. When the detectives investigated the couple’s apartment, they found clothes and other items were missing as well. It also came to the light that Sonoko was a victim of sexual abuse and the police assumed she must be the killer since she disappeared shortly after his  body was found. 

However, Shimauchi has an airtight alibi. She can prove that she was miles away, in Kyoto, when Ryota Uetsuji disappeared. Now the two detectives on the case, Detective Kusanagi and Detective Utsumi have to restart their investigation. If Sonoko Shimauchi didn’t kill her boyfriend, then who did?

They found that before her boyfriend moved in with her, she was living with her mother Chizuko. Chizuko had died a year and half earlier.  The detectives discover that Chizuko became good friends with a children’s book author named Nana Asahi who writes unusual stories usually related to science. The detectives managed to talk to her editor and learned a little more about her. One of her books was titled Little Lonely Monopo. It was a story about a monopole. In physics it is a single electric charge or a magnetic pole. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it is a “hypothetical north or south magnetic pole existing alone”. 

The detectives were able to contact Ms. Asahi’s editor and they discovered that was a pseudonym she used. Her real name is Nae Matsunaga. However, what really caputured Detective Kusanagi’s interest was the bibliography where he saw the following entry: Yukawa Manabu, If I Ever Met a Monopole, Teito University. 

Manabu Yukawa is a physics professor and an old friend of Kusanagi’s. He has also helped the police department solve difficult cases in the past. Once Yukawa gets involved, another name is added to the list of suspects. The owner and mama-san of a high-class hostess bar called VOWM. This woman seemed determined to recruit Sonoko to work at her club even though Sonoko wasn’t as beautiful as most of her other employees. 

As Manuba Yukawa, nicknamed “Galileo” helps the police in the investigation, he must confront his own past as well. Will he help the police to solve the case? Will he be able to find Sonoko Shimauchi? And will he be able to find out who exactly murdered Ryota Uetsuji and why…

Strangers in the Land by Michael Luo (Penguin Random House) ~Janet Brown

Expulsion. Detention centers. Separation of children from their parents. Battles over birthright citizenship. Legislation banning  immigration. Vilification of targeted ethnicities. 2025? No. This happened at the  end of the 19th century and well into the 20th, directed at what we now call the “Model Minority.” The parallels between that time and our own are as horrifying as they are ignored. 

The end of the Civil War in 1865 that brought a stop to slavery in the U.S. gave rise to a labor crisis and a demand for cheap labor. Households needed servants, mines and factories needed workers, and the most difficult portion of the transcontinental railway was yet to be built. In parts of the nation where slaves were not in use, immigration provided essential workers who would work more cheaply than native citizens, and while the East Coast was the entryway for European immigrants, San Francisco was the gateway for the Chinese. 

The first recorded Chinese arrival to that city was in 1848. Within two years there were 800 Chinese and by 1852, the number of arrivals from China that disembarked in San Francisco swelled to over 20,000, which was deemed “a frightening number.”

However these immigrants were almost all male, looking for work, and were found to be “as efficient as white laborers.” While Irish workers were apt to strike for higher pay, the Chinese didn’t and for that they faced retaliation. The first expulsion of Chinese labor from a mine site took place in 1849 and over the years this happened repeatedly and violently. Houses were set on fire, lynchings took place, and vigilante mobs assaulted and murdered Chinese workers with impunity, joined by the Ku Klux Klan under the guise of “The Order of Caucasians.” Cities in the Pacific Northwest fell prey to vigilantism with a three-day  spree of violence driving out Chinese residents in Tacoma and mobs in Seattle forcing residents of Chinatown onto waiting ships, leaving a “small contingent” within the city.

With a smaller number of Chinese arrivals, the East Coast had to bring Chinese workers from San Francisco to serve as strike breakers and to staff factories. When immigration battles were waged in Congress, it was Easterners against the West, with the lawmakers who defended Chinese rights coming from eastern states with smaller Chinese populations. The Chinatown in New York City grew along with a professional class that became politically active, while in San Francisco a detention shed that served as an immigration station was a national disgrace for twelve years.

Michael Luo, an editor at the New Yorker, has painstakingly given an overview of the Chinese presence in America, an account that dwells as heavily upon battles among U.S lawmakers as it does upon the bigotry and violence that assailed Chinese, no matter what their immigration status might be. His account is vivid and detailed, but he gives this history a staccato presentation rather than a linear one. By focusing on issues thematically rather than as an ordered number of events, he brings an element of confusion that is daunting to the average reader, who will find themselves wishing for a timeline. He ignores the history of the Chinese in places other than San Francisco and New York, except for the massacre in Rock Springs, Wyoming and the expulsions in Tacoma and Seattle, while the Chinese migration from the Southwest into Mexico is nowhere to be seen. Still this mammoth accomplishment is important, relevant, and needs to be read.