Music Against the Night by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) ~Janet Brown

John Field is born with "music in his blood," or so he’s told by the mediocre musicians who are his father and his grandfather. John himself believes this is true; he hears music in his head, sounds he'd never heard before, each time he walks past crosses in a graveyard. He’s six.

From that time on, this boy loses his childhood. Groomed to be a prodigy, he measures himself against Mozart and knows he's already lost valuable time. Mozart had published his first opus by the time he was eight, while John, at that same age, has only composed a single piece of music.

But John is small for his age and is presented to the world as a younger child, a musical genius who can write music as skillfully as he performs it on a stage. Apprenticed to a master musician in London when he’s not yet ten, John turns his back on his family and never returns. And yet the magic that he conjured up in a graveyard has gone. Music becomes a form of "muscular dexterity and intellectual prowess, and beyond that, fortune and fame."

Although he creates the nocturne, the one who becomes famous from that creation is Chopin, not John Field. Taken to Russia by his musical mentor, Field achieves a measure of fame in Moscow, under the patronage of a princess who became the mother of Leo Tolstoy. But when he dies, few remember him.

In Pondicherry, a little orphan named Adelaide Percheron is trained by her grandmother to use her intelligence under a heavy veil of charm. Percherette, as a cousin nicknames her, is pretty, clever, and quick and when she is presented with piano lessons, she finds a fascination that becomes an obsession. Without a pianoforte at home, she practices on a keyboard made of paper and soon she becomes known for her musical talent. But Percherette wants more than what she's been given musically in Pondicherry. France is the beacon that brightens her ambition and when she discovers that her grandmother plans to marry her off, Percherette, at the age of twelve, finds a way to achieve her goal. She voyages to Paris under the protection of two older gentlemen. One of them presents her with her heart's desire, a pianoforte.

For Percherette feelings and music are intertwined. When she plays, she discovers her emotions and learns to understand them through the instrument she loves. But John Field's ambition will never be hers. Percherette was born too early to become a prodigy. 

Although both of these characters share a passion in common, their goals are different. Field wants "idolatry." Percherette longs to be recognized as his musical equal. Neither get what they want.

Music Against the Night juxtaposes these two lives, bringing them together only in its final chapter to achieve "their contrapuntal fate." As in musical counterpoint, they attempt to "establish a harmonious relationship while retaining their linear individuality." As a novel, this attempt fails.

Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants (Asia by the Book, March 2009) and Things in Nature Merely Grow (Asia by the Book, July 2025), took refuge in music when both of her two sons died by suicide. Striving to overcome her feelings, she used music as a way of marking time, an activity that demanded "the discipline of order and logic." When she was halfway through the writing of Music Against the Night, her second son died, and this novel became a testament to that discipline, devoid of emotion. 

Music without feeling is dead. A novel without feeling is a failure. Neither Field nor Percherette, both living people born in the 18th century and making their way through the world in the 19th, soar higher than figures in an incomplete biography.

Although online sources claim this is the first of a trilogy, nowhere is that made clear in an introduction or an afterword. Would knowing that make a difference? Probably not. This odd hybrid of fiction and historical fact, sprinkled with parenthetical observations made by an omniscient narrator and trite sentences that give nuggets of wisdom ("One person's valley might still be higher than another's mountain"), does nothing to whet an appetite for more.

Never Say Die by Ke Huy Quan (Grand Central Publishing) ~Janet Brown

I'd rather read the back of a cereal box than a celebrity bio so it surprised me when I came home from the library with a copy of Never Say Die. Was it the face on the cover, smiling and unrecognizable? Was it the blurb that appeared above the face, written by Ocean Vuong? Was it the subtitle that simply said "A Memoir" instead of something like "My Life in Hollywood"? In fact there was nothing on that cover to tell me who Ke Huy Quan was and that's probably why the book came home with me.

When I took it out of my book bag and gave it closer scrutiny, I was fairly certain that I'd be taking this back to the library, unread. But one evening last week I had nothing else to read and when I saw the quote that opened the first chapter, I kept reading. 

"you have to understand

that no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land."

   "Home," Warsan Shire

I didn't stop reading until I came to the end of the book, and a portion of another poem,"Refuge" by JJ Bola "...a refugee is simply someone who is trying to make a home." When I turned the last page, I had tears in my eyes.

This is the story of a family, from 1977 to 2023, from Saigon to Geneva,and how one small boy kept their hopes alive.

Ke Huy Quan begins his story with his first night in a jail cell. He was seven years old. When he, his brothers, and his father came home the next day, half of their family was gone. Quan wouldn't see his mother or three of his siblings again until 1979 when he, his father, and the rest of the family got off a plane in Los Angeles.

Quan's mother made it out of Vietnam when the family divided into two groups and launched their escape. His father had to make two more attempts before he and his remaining children were crammed on a ship that carried more than 3000 people out of Vietnam and into a refugee camp in Hong Kong. Because they had family waiting for them in Los Angeles, they were in the camp for only eleven interminably long months.

In three more years, their lives were transformed by a chance encounter, a film crew scouting for a small boy to be in a movie. They went to an ESL class and the boy they found was Ke Huy Quan, who would become famous as Short Round. The movie was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, starring Harrison Ford, directed by Steven Spielberg, and created by George Lucas. To Quan these names meant nothing more than that they belonged to men who encouraged him and took care of him.

With his mother Quan traveled to film locations all over the world. With the rest of his family he walked down the red carpet  to the premiere of the movie at Mann's Chinese Theater. He met Princess Diana in London and Michael Jackson in Los Angeles. He worked with Sean Astin and Josh Brolin in Goonies. And by the time he was a teenager he received an unexpected check from Lucasfilm for almost $100,000 dollars. Lucas and Spielberg had done something unprecedented in Hollywood. The contract Quan had signed as a small child included profit-sharing, in one of the most popular movies of its time. The checks kept coming and Quan took care of his family. He bought a house, he insisted that he bankroll his father's dream of beginning a factory to replace the one lost in Vietnam. 

And then the work dried up. Quan's father had a debilitating stroke. The checks dwindled and life changed by the time Quan turned eighteen.

That's where his story begins, with an adulthood of struggle, working toward a life as an actor, buoyed by the love and support of his family. It's a story of courage, persistence, and failures that eventually lead Quan to stand on a stage, saying, "Mom, I just won an Oscar."

Yes. I cried. Be warned. You just might do that too.

The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide (New Directions Books) ~Janet Brown

Even though all of humanity begins its time on earth with birth and faces a common end, most of us would fiercely contest that our lives are the same. Yet how many of us retrace the threads that our lives are made of, to discover where our differences are formed? Robert Frost chalks these up to roads not taken, while Machiavelli terms them acts of "fate," or "fortuna," an inexorable river that is counteracted only by "virtu," or "skill displayed in times of emergency."

The narrator of The Guest Cat subscribes to Machiavelli's theory, with a slight variation. He believes our daily movements create a current, a little river, that eventually flows into the larger one. But what happens when a small deviation deflects an established current? 

The narrator and his wife have their currents deflected by a single knothole. Both of them work at home and in their confined space they have found amusement in a tiny circular opening that gives a minute view through a fence. When they take a break and wander into their kitchen, their attention fastens upon what they can see through that knothole. Because it looks out onto an alley, that view always changes, regardless of weather or time of day.

But one day the view doesn't change. For hours all that it shows are what look like "ribbons of clouds," motionless.

They ignore the small sounds that seem to come from the opposite side of the fence but the little boy next door is attracted by them, discovers a cat, and bears it off to his house in an act of rescue.

The man and his wife are tenants of a guesthouse that's on the grounds of an old estate. They live next door to a mansion owned by an elderly couple who pride themselves on their extensive garden. The landscape is tended by hired workers and nothing is allowed to tarnish its perfection. When the husband and wife are accepted as tenants of the guesthouse, they're told quite sternly by their landlady, "No children or pets allowed." Since neither of them want the intrusions of offspring or animals, they agree and the little river of their daily movements goes undisturbed.

But then the cat next door comes visiting, not in a friendly fashion but in the way an invading army slowly conquers forbidden territory. In gradual increments she inches closer and closer to the guesthouse, providing an unexpected note of interest within the carefully nurtured garden. Even the landlady is charmed, since the cat is only a very pretty little guest who always returns home.

As is in the nature of any self-respecting cat, an open window becomes an irresistible invitation and Chibi, as the boy next door has named her, slowly infiltrates the household of the husband and wife.

Without making any sudden moves, Chibi becomes a diversion and a fact of life to both the man and his wife. They look forward to her visits and when they see her living her other life out in the garden they watch with fascination, until the day that she doesn't return. When they learn that she has died, both of them feel an absence that is surprising and life-changing.

Takashi Hiraide is a poet and an essayist who has become best known for his only novel, The Guest Cat. Since the biographical blurb on the back cover of this book says he lives with his wife (a poet herself) and a cat in Tokyo's suburbs, it's easy to wonder if this is fiction or a meditation on Hiraide's domestic life, "a raw open space covered by a sheet of pure white." But as Chibi causes two lives to become "an invisible body of water about to overflow its banks and inundate the surrounding area," her story makes us wonder what idiosyncrasies may have caused the currents of our own lives to go off course and take a different direction?

Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton (Ecco) ~Ernie Hoyt

Hooked is Asako Yuzuki’s second novel to be published in English, her first being Butter (Asia by the Book, September 2025). It was originally published in the Japanese language as ナイルパーチの女子会 （Nile Perch no Joshikai) in 2015 by Bungei Shunju. The book was translated by Polly Barton who also translated Butter. The book was nominated for the Naoki Prize for the first of 2015 but lost out to Akira Higashiyama’s Ryu (Asia by the Book, March 2026).

Hooked is a psychological thriller about obsession, betrayal, prestige, and female friendships. Eriko Shimamura is a young, single woman in her thirties who works in the food sales division at Nakamura, Japan’s largest trading company. Her section is in charge of importing food products from overseas, and selling them to domestic companies.

Eriko always had a competitive streak in her and liked being ahead of other people. Her father, who worked at this same company, instilled in her that “getting in their first was a crucial skill in a successful businessperson”. Although she lived with her parents in Setagaya Ward in Tokyo, they “weren’t delighted by the fact that their only daughter ate breakfast apart from them”. Eriko had been working for Nakamura for the past eight years so her parents didn’t complain about it anymore.

Eriko seems to have everything going for. She has good looks, she has a great job, she earns a salary of more than ten million yen but refuses to leave home. She can say with confidence “that the most valuable resource in the world was time. You could make a go of most things, if you only had time”.

However, there is one thing missing from Eriko’s picture-perfect life. She doesn’t have any friends. She’s never had a steady boyfriend and it seems none of the other women in the office want to hang out with her. 

Eriko’s idea of excitement is to read a blog. She had been following the blog for two years. Her morning breakfast was something the blogger had recommended - a Karinto Melon Bun.

Karinto is a traditional Japanese snack which is primarily made of four, yeast, and brown sugar. It’s sweet and deep–fried while the melon bun or melanpan is a popular sweet bun made from a soft bread dough and covered in a layer of crisp cookie or biscuit dough.

The blogger had written, “The idea of combining karinto and the trusty melon bun is, of course, totally stupid”. However, the blogger continues by saying, “when you bite into that greasy, crunchy coating with its hint of soy sauce not unlike mitarashi dumplings, it’s like emerging from a tunnel into the light, with the bright fresh green flavor of melon fanning out all around you”. 

The blogger says she’s now addicted to the item. “A stupid taste. A stupid price”. But then she writes, “...getting by on ‘stupid food’ actually makes things very easy. It’s kind of soothing  to feel like you’ve found a way to cheat at life”. 

It’s that last phrase that really caught Eriko’s attention. For Eriko, “life so far had been something to take deadly seriously, to grapple with as earnestly as one could”. For the last two years, Eriko’s sense of enjoyment was to read a blog called Diary of Hallie B, The World’s Worst Wife. 

One of her coworkers looked at the blog Eriko had been reading. The writer of the blog is a woman named Shoko. Her blog was on the list of the 30 Most Popular Homemaker Blogs. 

Her male co-worker was a little shocked and asked Eriko, “What does a single girl like you get out reading something like this?”.

According to the blog, Hallie B. is married and lives with her husband who is a local supermarket manager. Eriko was telling her co-worker, Hallie-B isn’t like other wife bloggers - “She doesn’t go on about being a wife all the time. 

As Eriko continues to read Hallie-B’s blog, she makes a new discovery. Hallie-B lives close by and like an amateur detective, Eriko begins to seek out the real Hallie-B. Their first meeting is what Eriko had been dreaming of for a long time. A female-friend to hang out with and talk to. To share lots of things. However, when Hallie-B doesn’t show the same enthusiasm, this leads Eriko to go to even more trouble to make Hallie-B understand her. 

Hooked really is a disturbing novel about how one woman will go to any lengths to change other people’s way of thinking to her own. Her obsession with Hallie-B goes out of control and begins to affect her work and personal life. We learn that Eriko experienced a similar incident in high school that she does with Hallie-B. 

I don’t see anything wrong with striving to be your best at what you do whether it be at work or in your personal life, but when you start infringing on another person’s life by trying to get them to change, then I think you need to take a good look at your own life and get your priorities straight.

Floodlines by Saleem Haddad (Europa Editions) ~Janet Brown

"To love an artist, you must have an even stronger belief in the power of art." Bridget, an English artist, is told this by her Iraqi mother-in-law, wife of a man who launched an artistic dynasty. His son, Bridget's husband is consumed by the dangerous marriage of art and politics, but before it eats him alive, he fathers three children, all of them daughters and each one an artist.

Three sisters is a grouping that echoes through time in mythology and literature, only surpassed by the power of the mother. Floodlines makes a daring choice by combining both tropes with equal force, and makes them soar beyond the usual pigeonholes.

True to life, each sister has her own designated slot. Ishtar has never been taught "to muzzle" her fierce and creative spirit. Zainab has been "taught to beautify, to make pretty all manner of ugliness." Mediha "believes in the plight of Arab women," with her life as the sacrificial daughter convincing her that this is true.

She's the one who has taken on the task of caring for Bridget as the mother ages, while Ishtar lives alone on a Thames houseboat and Zainab in Dubai becomes heir to a fortune when her husband dies. Her wealth is the catalyst for two separate dreams. Ishtar longs to build a new ark that will sail down the Tigris river, reviving ancient history and culture by using the forms of three traditional boats. Zainab yearns to collect their father's art which has been scattered by war and acquisitions, to reveal it all in a dazzling exhibition that will revive his legacy. Mediha is tepid to both of these ambitions, while Bridget veers between the past and the present with no thought of the future.

It's the only child that came from the three sisters, Zainab's son Nizar who is tossed into the middle of a family cauldron of desires, emotions, and memories. A war correspondent who's suffering from battle fatigue, the last thing he wants is to fall into his family's drama, one that a boyfriend accurately describes as "a war zone." But Nizar has inherited the artistic sense and he's possessed by the need to understand where this sense has taken his family. He agrees to help his mother realize her dream and as he does this, he becomes part of Ishtar's.

Saleem Haddad has drawn upon the life of an ancestor for "wells of artistic inquiry," not, he insists, "as blueprints for biography." Haddad's great-uncle, Jewad Selim, a sculptor whose wife Lorna Selim was a British artist is the creative seed that led Haddad to Floodlines. From that he has shaped new lives, along with "questions around memory, grief, and...creative hope."

In this novel, Haddid evokes Iraq in a way that only happens when a writer has been claimed by a place. "The smell of mud...the color of soil..memories bleeding into the present like shades of sienna," with Baghdad "shedding its skin in endless cycles..'this chaos of color and sounds." 

"This soil under our feet," he concludes, "is where the whole world began," a truth we need to hold close in the world we have today.

The Dilemmas of Working Women by Fumio Yamamoto, translated by Brian Bergstrom (Virago) ~Ernie Hoyt

Fumio Yamamoto was a Japanese author from Yokohama City in Kanagawa Prefecture. Her 1988 novel, 恋愛中毒 (Renai Chudoku) won the Eiji Yoshikawa Prize for New Authors in 1999. She died in the year 2021 of pancreatic cancer. She was only fifty-eight.

The Dilemmas of Working Women which was first published in the Japanese language by Bungeishunju Ltd. in 2000. The book’s original title is プラナリア (Planaria). It won the Naoki Prize in 2001 along with Kiyoshi Sugematsu’s Vitamin F.

This 2025 English translation by Brian Bergstrom, who has also translated works by Kotaro Isaka, Erika Kobayashi, and Koji Suzuki, turns Yamamoto’s prose into an easy to read and understand collection of short stories. 

The Dilemmas of Working Women focus on the lives and struggles of ordinary Japanese women in contemporary society. Yamamoto’s co-winner for the Naoki Prize, Sugematsu’s Vitamin F focuses on the lives and struggles of men. 

The book is a collection of five novellas. Planaria was the lead story in the Japanese book. In this English translation, the book opens with the story titled Naked. In this story, the main character, Izumi, is in need of a new job. She spends most of her days making stuffed animals. Her friends are worried about her and believe she needs a little push to get her motivated in going back to work. However, her friends don’t realize that Izumi has twenty-million yen in the bank. It’s not as if she really needs to go back to work but Izumi can’t decide for herself what she really wants to do.

Planarian is an even more interesting story. It is about a woman named Haruka who can’t seem to stop talking about having had cancer and then getting a mastectomy. Her boyfriend has even told her, “You need to stop”. She was out drinking with her boyfriend and friends when she said to them, “In my next life, I want to come back as a planarian.” She explained to her friends that if you cut one planarian in half, it would become two. 

Her friends asked, “Why would you be something like that?”. Haruka replies, “I don’t really know the technical details, I just think it would be really cool, you know, to have a body you could cut up all you want and it would grow back!” She further elaborates, “Like I had breast cancer right? If I’d been born a planarian, I could have just cut off my breast and it would have grown back, no fuss, no surgery, no bother!”

She thought she was being funny but nobody laughed. After they left the restaurant her boyfriend turned to her and said, “You need to stop.” He told her that if she kept bringing up her cancer, even though she is cured, she will lose friends. Unfortunately, a woman like Haruka just doesn’t want to face her own fears.

In the title story, The Dilemmas of Working Women, Mito needs to make a major decision - to break up with her boyfriend or to marry him. What spawned her to give this serious thought was the way in which her boyfriend proposed to her on her twenty-fifth birthday. He didn’t say, “Marry me” or “Let’s get married”. What he said was, “Well, I guess it’s about time. We can get married”. 

Her long-time boyfriend, who was still a student, said he had money. Mito knew that when he was talking about money, it was the allowance that was given to him by his parents. She was a little appalled at his idea of marriage. In Mito’s mind, she thought, “Don’t go around proposing to people when you don’t even earn your own money.” What will Mito do?

All the stories are related to what these women must face. Although the book was published nearly twenty-five years ago, the trouble these women went through are still relevant today. The women of Japan today are no longer meek or submissive. They make their own decisions and they choose their own lifestyles and no one should question their choices.

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles (Riverhead Books) ~Janet Brown

Kazu is one of the homeless whose improvised shelters cover the grass in Tokyo's parks and who face constant eviction when members of Japan's royal family are in the vicinity. Otherwise they're ignored, even when they are in full view, and as they grow old and sick, they have no place to die.

Kazu knows he's dead but he has no memory of how this happened. Only an eerie sound emerges when he tries to recall the moment of his death, one that he says "ripped me to shreds but the sound wouldn't die." It's an inescapable and unexplained feature in the world he inhabits now.

He's perpetually tired, perpetually in motion, surrounded by people whose faces are like "a small pool of water," their individuality shown through fragments of conversation that Kazu hears as the speakers pass by. Some he recognizes from his homeless existence, some talk about comfort that he rarely knew when he existed. Kazu lived a life of labor, working on construction sites far from home. Everything he made went to his family, with no room for incidental pleasures and he writhes when he relives a moment when his children ask for a pleasure that Kazu is unable to provide.

Trapped in a "never-ending anguish" of memories, Kazu relives the death of his only son, a young man whose future was a bright testimony to his father's constant labor. He realizes that in 37 years of marriage, he has spent less than a single year in the company of his wife. When she dies, he walks away from everything that he's worked for, including a granddaughter who has come to live with him. "She's only twenty-one," Kazu tells himself, "She shouldn't be tied down here with her granddad," and he leaves for Tokyo and a life without solace.

Suddenly he reaches his final memories, the moment when he realizes "exactly what I was going to do next, like a moment of enlightenment." The world around him takes on an unexpected beauty, colors "pouring into my eyes like paint dissolving into water." Looking at the golden swirl of gingkos leaves in the wind, he sees them as "a messenger of light." Walking onto a station platform, he leans into the path of the approaching train.

"There may be an ending but there is no end." Without the capacity to exist, time doesn't pass. It spirals and loops.

One of my favorite pieces of Hong Kong film-making, the three-part masterpiece, Infernal Affairs, is based upon the Buddhist concept of Continuous Hell. For the most evil of the dead, there is no escape from what they've done. They're forced to live their lives over and over again, without respite or escape.

Kazu, now dead, was never evil and the Pure Land school of Buddhism is a forgiving system of belief. However it teaches that life is a gift which shouldn't be tossed aside.. "How lamentable it would be to cast it away in vain," said Ippen Shonin, a founder of this sect.

Kazu knows the truth of this. Although we readers don't know when this loop will release him, while he relives and recognizes the nature of his life, he shows us the gift of our own.

A Japanese friend said Yu Miri was told this by one of the homeless people whom she interviewed while writing this book. “You have it. We don’t. Someone who has it can’t understand what it’s like not to have it.” That person was wrong. Yu Mari understands, describes, and makes sheltered people know what it is to have no home.

Ethnically Korean but born and living all her life in Japan, Yu Miri writes from the perspective of an outsider who has encountered rampant prejudice, including bomb threats that led to cancellation of public appearances. She refuses to let this stop her. Winner of Japan’s Akutagawa Prize, (and a single mother who never married), she has opened a bookstore and an experimental theater in Fukishima.

The Girl with a Thousand Faces by Sunyi Dean (Tor Publishing) ~Janet Brown

Mercy Chan is a woman who's rarely given a second glance, unless her only talent is desperately needed. She's grey, short, plump, and middle-aged but Mercy has an essential skill. She can talk to ghosts.

The place where she lives keeps her busy. Thirty-three years ago she showed up in Kowloon Walled City, with no memory of her past and uncertain that she would survive her present. But "Kowloon," as the residents call it, has no shortage of ghosts and many of them are unhappy, vengeful, and violent. Exorcists often fail to expel them but Mercy can understand them. In conversations, she learns what troubles these specters and helps them achieve peace. But these achievements are usually accompanied with grisly, deadly forms of revenge, giving Mercy a notoriety that brings her to the attention of the leader of the Snakeskin Triad, Cobra Lily. 

Being no fool, Cobra Lily swiftly realizes Mercy's uses and takes her on as an employee. LIfe goes well for both of them as long as they stay behind the walls of their city. But outside those walls, Hong Kong is steeped in the modernity of 1975 and Kowloon Walled City is a large blemish on the image of that metropolis. When Cobra Lily discovers that there are plans to demolish "Kowloon," she marshalls her legal defences and confronts the Hong Kong Executive Council. This decision brings supernatural forces into play, most notably one that not even Mercy can't reason with. 

Thousand-Faced Girl has no need for Mercy's understanding.  She has found a way to exert power in the mortal world as well as in the realm of spirits. For the past thirty-three years, she has taken on the form of the bodies she has killed, inhabiting them for a while, then finding another. At the moment that she and Mercy meet, she has claimed the body of a leading member of the Hong Kong Executive Council and with that, she has devised a deadly fate for that city and all who live in it.

Why is this spirit intent upon revenge? Why is there an eerie form of recognition between her and Mercy? Who is the villain of this story? What does Mercy fail to remember?

A strange set of truths pervades this novel, a code that posits a frightening philosophy. Humans feel no true sympathy for pain unless they experience it for themselves.People who have no sympathy cause the most suffering and they can't comprehend the pain they cause others. The only way to create understanding is through vengeance, by spreading pain to those who only cause it but never feel it.

"Do you like ghost stories, little sister? Sit down, get comfortable. You haven't heard this one before." These three sentences form the prologue of Sunyi Dean's novel--and she's right. Ghosts appear often in fiction from Asia, observing no national boundaries. But in The Girl with a Thousand Faces, there are two ghosts whom many readers will never have encountered before, in a story that the author says "is a love story to Hong Kong's ghost legends." Or are they legends? And do we need them now?

Go by Kazuki Kaneshiro, translated by Takami Nieda (AmazonCrossing) ~Ernie Hoyt

Kazuki Kaneshiro is a Zainichi Korean novelist. Zainichi Koreans or just Zainichi is a term used in Japan for ethnic Koreans who are permanent residents in Japan who have retained their Joseon (Choson), North Korean or South Korean nationalities. They are not to be confused with Korean Japanese who are Koreans residing in Japan but hold Japanese nationality.

Go is narrated by a high school boy born in Japan to North Korean parents. The novel opens with the protagonist talking about a time when he was fourteen years old when he first heard his father mention the word “Hawaii” during a cold snap in winter at their home in Tokyo. His father was fifty-four at the time and held North Korean citizenship. He is what the Japanese call Zainichi Chosenjin, a North Korean resident of Japan. His father was also a Marxist. The narrator says, “Up until then, Hawaii was known in our house as the symbol of depraved capitalism”. 

The narrator then tells this reader that what they are about to read is a love story - his love story. “And communism - or democratism, pacifism, otakuism, vegetarianism, or any other -sim for that matter - has got nothing to do with it”. But before he talks about himself, he talks about his parents. 

His father decided to start the process of changing his nationality from North Korean to South Korean. So, why did his father, who was born in South Korea, have North Korean citizenship? And why did he have to change his citizenship to South Korean just to go to Hawaii?

When his father was a child, he was a Japanese citizen. Why? Because during World War II, Korea was a Japanese colony. His father was forced to adopt a Japanese name, Japanese citizenship, and learn the Japanese language. He came to Japan when his parents were drafted to work in a munitions factory.

Then Japan lost the war, the government no longer allowed the Koreans to retain their Japanese citizenship. The Koreans who chose to remain in Japan were forced to choose between South and North Korean nationality. His father chose North Korean citizenship because the country’s ideology was suited to what he believed.

The narrator’s mother also gained South Korean citizenship and his parents went off to Hawaii when he entered his third year of junior high school. He didn’t go with his parents to Hawaii. Why? Because when was bron, his parents were still both North Korean so he automatically  became a Zainichi Chosenjin. 

He rebelled against his father’s changing of his citizenship but his father took him to the ocean in Kanagawa Prefecture, told him to look straight ahead and said, “Take a look at the wide world. You decide the rest.”

That’s when the narrator also decided to become a South Korean citizen. However, he did not go with his parents to Hawaii. Instead, he asked them if he could attend a Japanese school. And so begins the real journey. If his classmates at the Chongryon school were to find out, they would bully him and call him a traitor to the country. His teachers in his new school also told him that he should use a Japanese name to prevent himself from becoming a target of bullies. He was given the name Sugihara.

His first fight happened only three days after he started. The fight was with the son of a yakuza named Kato. Sugihara broke the boy’s nose with an ashtray. A few weeks later, Kato came to talk to Sugihara. He thanked him for breaking his nose as he never liked it to begin with. His father said that Sugihara gave him an upgrade. Kato also invited Sugihara to come to his birthday party that was going to be held at some club. 

At first Sugihara wasn’t going to go but against his better judgment, he decided to attend. It was at this gala where he met a girl, a Japanese girl, who seemed to know more about him than he did about her. He did learn that her name was Sakurai.

This spawns the beginning of a relationship, except Sugihara has kept one secret to himself. He has not told Sakurai that he is really Korean. If she finds out, will she accept him? Will she spurn him? Does she have her own prejudices against Zainichi Koreans?

This book is a love story that is still relevant today. Zainichi Koreans are still discriminated against and are treated like second class citizens even though most of them were born in Japan, have Japanese names, and can speak Japanese as well as any native. Even the U.S. has its share of prejudice, especially against immigrants (the current administration only adds fuel to the fire). 

If two people are in love and are not hurting anyone, it shouldn’t matter what their nationality is. We humans still have a long way to go in learning about compassion, love, and empathy. Although an idealistic dream, we should all strive for world peace. Sugihara and Sakurai are on the right path.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-Zi, translated by Lin King (Gray Wolf Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Yang Shuang-zi is a Taiwanese writer who based her book Taiwan Travelogue on a fictional journey by Japanese novelist Chizuko Aoyama’s 1938 visit to Taiwan, a time when Taiwan was under Japanese Occupation. Aoyama was invited there by the Japanese government and her publisher thought it would be a great opportunity for her as Aoyama sensei also likes to travel. 

She had a similar proposal in the past from her publisher. They told her, “We would love for you to write a serialized novel set in the South Pacific”. However, Aoyama-san asked the editor of that particular publication, “is that meant to compliment the Southern Expansion Policy?”

She told the editor she was not interested in writing a novel to  promote the Empire of the Sun and she already had her next travel destination booked. She was heading for Okinawa. The editor then mentioned that if Aoyama-san was interested in visiting Okinawa, why not visit Taiwan in the future. 

Later in the year, her wish came true. It was not only the Government General of Taiwan (run by Japan of course) and a Taiwan-based women's group who invited Aoyama-san on a lecture tour. She would be staying in Taiwan for a half-year or more. She is not at all interested in official banquets or imperialist agendas. She looks forward to trying the local cuisines from different parts of the island. 

A young Taiwanese woman named Wang Chien-ho, Ong Tshian-hoh in Taiwanese, and O- Chizuru in Japanese, is soon assigned as Aoyama’s interpreter and arranges all travel needs and is also a good cook. She makes Aoyama’s dream come true of eating truly local dishes. The story is one long culinary journey through Taiwan and is also about the relationship between the women - one from mainland Japan and other from Taiwan. 

But what is even more fascinating about this book is the history of its publication and translations which are also included before the story begins and after it ends.  The story goes back to 1938 when Chizuru Aoyama in fact went to Taiwan and published dispatches from her travels in mainland newspapers and magazines. The essays came to be known as a series titled Taiwan Travelogue.

However, the Taiwan Travelogue essay series does exactly correspond to the novel Taiwan Travelogue which was originally published in 1954, fifteen years after Chizuru Aoyama’s Taiwan trip. The book is an autofiction of her extended stay in Japanese occupied Taiwan. 

After the book went out of print, Chizuko Aoyama’s adopted daughter, Yoko Aoyama fulfilled her mother’s dying wish. To have Taiwan Travelogue reprinted and to give it a new title. Her mother also wanted her to take the book to Taiwan as well. The book was reprinted with the new title, My Taiwan Travelogue with Tshian-hoh.

The first Mandarin Chinese translation was published in 1977, however a new Chinese edition which was self-funded and self-edited was published in 1990 with the title A Japanese Woman Author’s Taiwan Travelogue. The book was published and translated by Ong Tshian-hoh’s eldest daughter, Wu Cheng-mei.

A new Mandarin edition of Taiwan Travelogue was published in 2020 by Yang Shuang-Zi. Shuang-Zi and her late elder sister were traveling in Japan and happened upon a postcard written by Aoyama Chizuko at the Hayashi Fumiko Memorial Reference Room located in the historical building of the Former Moji Mitsui Club. At the time, the sisters were doing research and fact-checking for a historical novel set in Japanese colonial Taiwan. 

Once they returned to Taiwan, their research led them to the Museum of Taiwan Literature. Unfortunately, they were informed by an administrator that the data they were looking for did not exist at their facility, but told them there was a Japanese researcher who was in possession of the complete manuscript and they were granted permission to contact her directly.

This leads them to Hiyoshi Sagako, a fictional translator and scholar. In the book, Sagako writes an introduction to the new Mandarin edition of Taiwan Travelogue which was published in 2020. Sagako describes herself as a wansheng which is a word to describe Japanese people born in Taiwan. 

Her fictitious introduction helps readers to understand the perspectives of the various characters they will encounter while reading. She explains, “By blood we belonged to the great Yamato race, but as Japanese citizens we were “subpar” and continued to say, “Even if our bloodlines were “pure”, many Japanese people argued that we could not possibly possess the true “spirit” of the Japanese people. Thus, the wansheng were often regarded as inferior”.

One more important aspect of understanding the novel is to read this introduction. It sets up the framework of the story. She goes on to say, “No matter how much the Japanaese administration in Taiwan promoted their official stance that all Taiwanese peoples were as much the children of the Emperor as any Japan-born person, the reality was that Taiwanese “Islanders” were second-class citizens.

The book I have just finished reading is the latest English translation of Taiwan Travelogue. It was translated by Lin King and published in 2024. King is a Taiwanese-American writer and translator. She was born in New York to Taiwanese parents who both worked for architectural firms in the United States for nearly ten years. King was one-year old when her parents moved back to Taiwan. 

King believes that the two main characters in the book - Aoyama and Chi-chan (O Chizuru) would be tickled by this latest edition. A Taiwanese translator, while bringing this book to the ultimate colonial language of English, has struggled to determine how the Japanese colonial government would have pronounced Taiwanese terms and therefore consulted the Japanese translation of a Taiwanese novel that claims to be a Taiwanese translation of a Japanese novel.

Oh, the complexities that went into bringing this story to English-readers. You might feel at a loss to determine if all the translator's notes are fictional or not. Still, be sure to have some snacks handy as I guarantee that you will become hungry while reading this novel.

A Guide to Khmer Temples in Thailand and Laos written and photographed by Michael Freeman (River Books) ~Janet Brown

Guidebooks are a lot like paper towels. You buy them, keep them until you need them, and get rid of them after they've been used. They're easily the most abused volumes on the planet. Pages are ripped from them for easy reference and they quickly become weatherbeaten. Even used bookstores shy away from guidebooks that linger on past their prime.

Back in the 20th Century, I bought a guidebook that I still treasure today. It breaks all the rules. It’s a size that isn’t irksome to carry (even though it has over 300 pages), it covers a subject that hadn't yet been given its own book, and it’s beautiful. I still have it in my bookcase, thirty years after it was published, and it still looks good. No yellowed paper or soggy binding has spoiled it, even though I carried it all over northeastern Thailand and have used it for reference--and for dreams--ever since.

Michael Freeman is arguably Southeast Asia's best-known photographer. His photographs have accompanied the work of other writers, including Jerry Hopkins' weird and wonderful Strange Foods (Asia by the Book, May 2024), have filled the pages of Smithsonian Magazine, and illustrate his own array of coffee table books. A Guide to Khmer Temples in Thailand and Laos was clearly a labor of love, both for Freeman and his publisher.

Although Freeman may never have met Christopher Pym, the two of them had an obsession in common, the road that extended across Southeast Asia in the days of the Khmer Empire. Pym did his best to trace this route from Vietnam into northern Cambodia and failed, as he described in The Road to Angkor (Asia by the Book, July 2024). Freeman is on the track of this road in the opposite direction, leading from Angkor, with greater success. As empire-builders. the kings of Angkor were hell-bent on extending their architectural marvels into their new territory and these structures still mark their road, even as all other traces of it have vanished.

Freeman visits them all, taking his camera and his photographic skill with him. But before he shows them in all their beauty to his readers, he gives brief and highly comprehensible crash courses in the history that preceded them, the religion that inspired them, and the architecture that makes them irresistible many centuries after their construction. Aware that travelers have limited time, he, no doubt reluctantly, ranks the temples in order of what may be deemed important, yet insists "all the sites are worth visiting...The delight of these monuments lies in discovery."

I know this is true. Over the years, Freeman has led me to thirteen out of the thirty-eight sites he has described and photographed. Discovery is what governs my choices of which I loved best.

Walking down a long dusty road in Surin, passing small households where everyone asked me where I was going, suddenly I was in a clearing surrounded by trees and silence. Before me was one of the smallest and most beautiful temples I've ever seen, Prasat Ban Phluang, chaste and simple, a single tower placed on a high platform, surrounded by a moat and ornamented with exquisite carvings on its pale sandstone. The other place that lives in my head is Preah Vihear, built on a "great overhanging cliff," reached by climbing a series of staircases that "rise about 125 meters." The divine insanity of this place, its wealth of carvings, the majesty of its long corridors, the sheer drop that lies outside of its doors with all of Cambodia spread before it in a carpet of unbroken green, made Preah Vihear eclipse any of the splendors of Angkor Wat or the Bayon for me. Thanks to Freeman, I now can better understand what made me stand in ignorant, transfixed awe.

Anybody who wants to go beyond the stereotypical Thai visit really needs to find this book. Unfortunately it's now out of print--but as Freeman says, "Delight lies in discovery." Search and be delighted.

(The only complaint I have is the size of the photographs. They are numerous and they are tiny, (keeping the book portable and affordable) but because of Freeman’s expertise all of them are detailed and enticing. The other caveat has to do with the age of this book, which was never updated. Although I found its directions and maps were wonderfully clear, that was a long time ago in a whole other universe so due diligence is essential.)

The Mountain by Paul Yoon (Simon & Schuster) ~Janet Brown

There are novelists and there are short story writers but seldom are these two separate talents done with equal skill by one author. Paul Yoon is one of the few who can create a world in either of these forms.

With Snow Hunters (Asia by the Book,November 2020), Run Me to Earth (Asia by the Book,December 2020, and Etna (Asia by the Book, August 2026), he gave safety to those who had been beset by war and made their refuges palpable within compressed and lyrical novels. In The Hive and the Honey (Asia by the Book, April 2025) and in Once the Shore (Asia by the Book,April 2023), he gave life and satisfying resolutions to characters within much smaller spaces.

The Mountain is different from his other books. In this, he creates fragments of dreams in a floating world. His characters are vividly alive but come and vanish without concrete endings. In their departures, they leave empty spaces behind. They exist like poems, anchored with compelling images and haunting bits of stories. They are, in different ways, refugees, most comfortable when they're in motion,looking for their homes, the ones remembered, the ones they've yet to find.

These people are all displaced, all of them seeking pieces of memories, propelled by recalling the joy of swimming in a poisoned river, snatches of music played by a long-dead mother on a vanished piano, words of Korean spoken by grandfathers who were brought to work in Siberian labor camps and raised children who bore Russian names. They are people who take comfort in addiction, in train journeys that may bring them closer to a home, who are more familiar with loss and death than anyone should be.

They all live in liminal states, neither here nor there, and their stories aren't linear. At the same time, they aren't without hope. Albert Camus once said that the unending work of Sisyphus gave meaning to his repetitive and laborious life. What Yoon gives his characters are lives made meaningful by their quests and the devotion they bring to their constant searches, no matter where this takes them. They drift in and out of bizarre situations, encountering strangers who appear like enigmas and cause no sadness with their departures.

The characters in these stories seem to be no more solid than ectoplasm,living ghosts.But Yoon cloaks them in beauty, with words that give them a softened radiance, a damaged beauty. They are not easy to love but Yoon gives no choice in this matter. He demands that they be loved and readers will obey.

In an interview, Yoon said he has never known war but he is related to it through the stories he's been told by his parents and grandparents.In every work of fiction, he's retold those stories. But only in The Mountain does he unsparingly reveal the outcome of war by giving a view of what is left for the survivors. 

They are all haunted. They will all haunt you.

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Betts and David Boyd (Europa Editions) ~Janet Brown

What happens to a person when she realizes at the age of thirty-four she has never made a choice? For her entire life Fuyuko has floated into opportunities when they’re offered to her, a brief sexual encounter, a job, a chance to make more money, passively and without pleasure. 

She has one talent that her work as a proofreader has uncovered. She has an eye for mistakes and seeking them out becomes an obsession.

Without friends in her workplace, she accepts an offer to leave and work as a freelancer, at home. Living under no externally imposed schedule, Fuyuko works fifteen hours a day, falls into bed, and wakes up to do the same thing again. The only deviation in her robotic existence comes on her birthday which falls on Christmas Eve. Observing this alone, she's adopted the habit of going out for a walk on that night, a solitary observer, watching "layers and layers of clouds like an enormous silent creature, hung in the night sky."

Suddenly, almost without knowing it, Fuyuko makes a choice. She chooses to drink, at first out of curiosity and then as a compulsion, finding that sake and beer "let her escape her usual self."  

One evening, hovering on the edge of passing out next to her kitchen wastebasket that holds unread promotional flyers, she begins to correct the errors that they contain. Suddenly one of them penetrates her alcoholic haze. A "culture center" offers a stunning assortment of community college courses and Fuyuko makes her second choice. She decides to sign up for one of the classes.

While waiting for her turn in a queue, sake rises up in her throat and she realizes she's going to be violently ill. On her way to the women's restroom, she's sick. Just sober enough to realize she may have spattered the shoes of a man she stood beside as she regurgitated, she finds him later to make an incoherent apology.

Then on her second attempt to enroll in a class, she passes out while sitting on a sofa. When she comes to, she finds her bag has been stolen and the man who had received her drunken apology on her first visit is by her side, taking care of her.

So begins an improbable friendship between two lonely people. Mitsutsuka is a 58-year-old bachelor who tells Fuyuko he teaches physics. In a series of meetings at a little coffee shop, the two of them discover a shared affinity for light. Fuyuko has no idea of why this natural phenomenon attracts her and Mitsutsuka is happy to give her a crash course in explanation. He hands her a book that explains the properties of light and a cassette disc that holds a lullaby composed by Chopin. 

When Fuyuko finally listens to this music, she hears "the sound of melted light," as if "the night is breathing." Her senses begin to open. When she meets Mitsutsuka, she discovers his coat holds "the smell of winter." When he tells her "At night only half the world remains," he gives her the reason for her nocturnal birthday walks.

But both of them have undisclosed secrets. Fuyuko has always come to their meetings when she’s drunk. Mitsutsuka is bathed in a hidden shame. These secrets keep their meetings and their nascent feelings of attraction within the realm of fantasy--until Fuyuko stops drinking, a choice that changes their friendship.

Some novels have the quality of a watercolor painting and All the Lovers in the Night goes from an undeveloped black and white photographic negative to the soft, blurred beauty of pale water-drenched colors, carefully put on paper. This strange little novel of a late-blooming life becomes more and more unforgettable with every passing page, defying any fictional category and skirting any conventional plot. It may, however, launch many walks through many city nights, with readers searching for the elusive beauty that Mieko Kawakami (author of Breasts and Eggs, Asia by the Book, November 2023) has shown them.

Milky Way Railroad by Kenji Miyazaki, translated by Joseph Sigrist and D.M. Stroud (Stone Bridge Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

As a longtime resident and ex-at living in Japan (21 years in Tokyo and 10 years in Aomori), I find my love for Japanese literature has grown over the past few years. Recently, I have been able to read many Japanese books in their original language. I also continue to read a number of Japanese titles and authors that have been translated into English.

The latest translation work I read is Kenji Miyazawa’s Milky Way Railroad which has also been translated into English with the titles Night on the Galactic Railway, Night Train to the Stars, and Fantasy Railway into the Stars. 

Miyazawa is also an author of short stories which has been compiled in the book Once and Forever : The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa (Asia by the Book, April 2020) and has written a series of children’s picture books - The Shining Feet, The Bears of Mt. Nametoko, and Crossing the Snow (Asia by the Book, September 2022). 

Milky Way Railroad is by far Kenji Miyazawa’s most popular work. It was originally published posthumously in the Japanese language as 銀河鉄道の夜 (Ginga Testudo no Yoru) by Bunkoshoin in 1934, a year after Miyazawa’s death. 

The story is about a boy named Giovanni who lives in the town of Hanamaki in Iwate Prefecture in Japan’s Tohoku region. He is the son of a poor fisherman whose father is miles away in Hokkaido. Giovanni’s best friend is Campanella who is the son of a professor.

The time of year is during Tanabata, known in English as the Star Festival. It is celebrated every year on the seventh day of the seventh month. It is a story about Cowherd (Hikoboshi) and Weaver (Orihime), star-crossed lovers who can only meet this one time during the year. 

On the night of the Star Festival, Giovanni was to get milk for his sick mother. He told his mother he would for an hour before coming home. As he was headed down to the river, he heard a bunch of voices. They were his classmates. Before he could say, “Going down the river?”, one of the boys started to mock him. Soon the other boys joined in as well. 

Giovanni also noticed that Campanella was with them. He was silent with a “rather pained smile on his face”. It looked to Giovanni that Campanella might have said, “You won’t be angry, will you?” Giovanni passed by the group of boys as they continued to whistle and shouted things at him. 

Giovanni felt so lonely that he just started to run. He had forgotten his promise to his mother about bringing home some milk. His only thought was, “I don’t have anywhere to play and be happy” and was thinking “and the others treat me like an animal”.

He continued running and stopped on a bridge to catch his breath. He “felt like crying but knew he shouldn’t”. After a short rest, he started to run again and ran up a hill that was located behind a farm. At the top of the hill, Giovanni looked to the sky and saw the Milky Way. 

While Giovanni was standing at the top of the hill, he heard a voice saying, “Milky Way Station! Milky Way Station!”. The next thing Giovanni knows is that he is on the Milky Way Express. Not only that, his friend Campanella is also on the train. 

Unbeknownst to Giovanni, Campanella has already drowned and he is on the train of death. The train stops at various places with people getting on and off but Giovanni will be the only person to return to Earth. 

Although Giovanni met other passengers on the train, he felt a deep sadness when the got off. At least Campanella was with him. As the train continued its journey, Campanella looked out the window and shouted, “Hey, don’t those fields look great, and everyone’s gathered there, and - that must be Heaven itself! And there’s my mother!”

Giovanni looked to where Campanella was pointing but all he saw was dim white smoke and two telephones across a river band that looked as if their arms were embraced. Giovanni was feeling an indescribable loneliness and said to his friend, “Campanella, we’ll stick together, right?” but when he turned to look at his friend, there was no Campanella, “only the dark green velvet seat”.

The most important message Miyazawa was trying to get across with this story is about having compassion for other people. Although Miyazawa’s characters live in a rural town in Iwate Prefecture in Japan, he gave them Italian names to give the story universal appeal. Miyazawa teaches us through Giovanni, that we all have our own paths to walk and it is up to yourself to find happiness.

The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions) ~Ernie Hoyt

Mai Ishizawa is a Japanese novelist who has lived in Germany since 2017. She was born in 1980 and grew up in Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture. Her debut novel, Place of Shells, was originally published in the Japanese language as 貝に続く場所にて (Kai ni Tsuzuku Basho nite) in the June, 2021 issue of the  literary magazine 群像 (Gunzo). It was later published into a book by Bungei Shuju and won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s distinguished literary prize, in 2021, along with Taiwanese writer Li Kotomi for her book 彼岸花が咲く島 (Higanbana ga saku shima), translated as The Island Where Red Spider Lilies Bloom although the book is not yet available in English.

It is the summer of 2020. A Japanese student living in the German city of Gottingen is waiting at a train station to meet her old friend Nomiya. It had been nine years since the protagonist last saw her friend. He had died in the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami and his body was never found. Now he’s here in Gottingen, a city known for its Planetenweg, a planetary path made up of scale models of the solar system.

The narrator learned from their mutual friend Sawata that Nomiya would be coming to Gottingham. Although the town was still on a lockdown because of the corona pandemic, the restrictions were slowly being lifted. The narrator went to meet Nomiya with her roommate’s dog.

For the narrator, it was Nomiya’s gestures, rather than his face or his body, “that the nine year gap was attempting to be bridged”. She felt a sense of relief that he appeared solid enough and noticed the sun didn’t shine through him. “He may have been dead but he still cast a shadow at his feet”.

The dog was watching Nomiya from a slight distance. The dog didn’t move and seemed to be a bit hesitant in approaching Nomiya. The narrator guessed that the dog “didn’t realize Nomiya was a ghost, and yet it seemed his behaviour toward any type of stranger was consistent, with no distinction between the living and the dead”.

Seeing Nomiya again after the 2011 Tohoku disaster, made her think about where she was and what she was doing on that day. She was at her family’s house up in the mountains so the thought of a tsunami never even crossed her mind. She remembered experiencing the tremors. The quaking “made cracks appear in the walls in our house. Most of the tiles in the bathroom cracked and fell off, the books came flying from the shelves, various pieces of furniture toppled over, and almost all our tableware broke”.

Ninomiya was in his house in Ishinomake, one of the cities located along the coast in Miyagi Prefecture. Neither the narrator, nor any of Nomiya’s friends could piece together what happened to him after the quake. They “couldn’t work out where and how he had been swallowed up by the water”. Their hopes of understanding what happened to Nomiya in his final moments left a mystery. 

Nomiya’s entire house had been desecrated by the tsunami and his entire family had been swallowed up by the water, separately from one another. The sea, “which had remained a stable presence throughout the majority of Nomiya’s time, hadn’t left behind even the slightest trace of their memories”.

After Nomiya’s arrival, the narrator’s roommate’s dog began to dig and bring different items from the forest. A model of Pluto that was part of the Planetenweg (a scale model walking path that maps out the solar system), and was disappearing and reappearing. The strange manifestations all seem to center around the fading memories of people who died in unusual or uncertain circumstances.

The Place of Shells is a surrealistic journey into memories, lost and found. For many of the characters, it is a search for someone or something that has been lost and forgotten. The story makes one open their eyes to death and its effect on those still living. 

Polly Barton, who has also translated a number of Japanese titles into English such as Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Asia by the Book, March 2026), Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Asia by the Book, May 2022), Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (Asia by the Book, August 2025), and Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Asia by the Book, September 2025), makes Ishikawa’s prose sound poetic and haunting and makes you think about those friends who have passed that you haven’t thought about in a long time.

The Seekers of Deer Creek by Thao Thai (Mariners Books) ~Janet Brown

In the refuge of a deserted forest, two little girls draw "worlds more beautiful and sensible than their own." Their mother has vanished, never to return, and in the wake of her abandonment, the girls' father has become violent. Vivi looks at her younger sister's face and mentally mixes the colors that would replicate "the tender pink of consequence" that marks Calla's slapped cheek. 

"Stay close to your sister," their mother told Vivi just before she left and Vivi takes these final words as a command. They give a deeper layer to the children's game the girls learned from their father, the Vietnamese version of hide-and-seek that was perfected by warfare, Seekers or trốn tìm. Calla is expert at running and hiding. Vivi is expert at worrying and searching.

Both girls become steeped in the art world, Calla as a painter who puzzles gallery visitors, Vivi as an art conservator at one of Chicago's leading art museums. Their lives have diverged; only at their father's funeral do they establish a tenuous form of contact. 

Calla is still the wild child, drawn to chaos and addiction. Vivi is on the brink of a stability she's always wanted, recently engaged to a museum colleague. Samuel is gentle and careful, a single parent who "sees  the world as it should be, not as it was." She and Samuel share a project, an exhibit that centers around The Blue Mirror,a painting by a Vietnamese French surrealist painter, K.P. Ly.

This orderly existence falls apart when Calla bursts in with a strange link to this painting and its creator, a sketch and a letter found in their father's memorabilia. Vivi shrugs this off until she sees Ly's painting. She discovers pentimento and against all protocol, goes below the layers of paint, and unearths a whole other work of art, one that is the same as the sketch that Calla discovered. 

Against her better judgement, Vivi leaves her carefully constructed life and joins Calla in a quest to uncover the layers of family mysteries that span three continents. It's a search that takes the sisters from their hometown of Deer Creek to an estate in Provence and finally to the Mekong Delta and the Vietnamese village where their father's family waits for them. 

Thao Thai, author of Banyan Moon (Asia by the Book, July 2023,) goes far beyond the "warped little fairy tale" that Vivi claims is the life that she and Calla have wrestled with since childhood. Thai explores the bond between sisters that is perhaps the most powerful and potentially destructive relationship of all, with love, honesty, and without a sugar-coated resolution. Mirroring the fairy tales that echo throughout this novel, she gives each sister what she's always wanted but with the slightly bitter twist that's true to the times we live in.She skillfully skirts melodrama while not shying away from the drama that exists in every family, disclosing secrets and mysteries that never ring false. Studding the narrative with evocative details and careful research, she offers the scent of crushed lilies, the smell of "fried scallions and wet dog" that clings to a dilapidated taxi in Ho Chi Minh City, and the "pungency of scorched cheese and coffee grounds" that clings to a deserted kitchen. She defines what it means to "rediscover oneself in a river of names" as the shadows gain solid forms and bring clarity to a hidden history.

Grand Canal, Great River by Lu You, translated with annotations by Philip Watson (Frances Lincoln Ltd, Publishers) ~Janet Brown

Almost all travel literature in English that’s about China have been written by people "looking from the outside in," translator Philip Watson points out in his introduction to Grand Canal, Great River. From Marco Polo to Paul Theroux, readers are presented with accounts that skirt the boundaries between what's real and what's imagined. Without linguistic, historical, or cultural knowledge, how can writers understand what passes before their eyes?

This is far from the case in this diary that whisks its readers on a 157-day, 18,000 mile journey across China in 1170, 100 years before Marco Polo ever set foot in this country. Lu You was one of the most famous poets of his time and a highly educated government official who was politically astute and well-versed in Chinese history. When he was given a post in a small Sichuan town, this resident of Hangzhou had no choice but to take to the riverine highway that connected Southern China from east to west.

It was a journey that began along the Grand Canal that stretched from Beijing to Hangzhou. This led to the Yangtse River which would take Lu You to Kui, a walled town in the hinterlands of Sichuan, traveling through gorges so perilous that Lu and his party left the boat and traveled overland on sedan chairs until the dangers were behind them. It involved switching from boats powered by oars to a ship propelled by wind in its sails, a vessel that weighed “150 tons,” yet "yawed and sheered under mountainous river waves like a leaf."

There may have been more than a few of these moments but Lu doesn't dwell on them. He's a poet after all, traveling in the wakes of poets who came before him, Li Bo and Su Shi. He pays homage to them while making poetic observations of his own. "Reed flowers...like snow" blanket the river banks, the river with ripples ""as smooth as a mat," "thousands of acres of empty river, and the moon, like a dish of purple gold, welling forth from within the waters." Yes, this man could write.

As a prominent dignitary, Lu travels from meal to meal hosted by other officials but he gives no culinary details. He's obsessed by potable water and assesses what he drinks throughout his journey. The "pure green" water of Gushu Creek he extolls for its "sweet smoothness" while in Huang he dismisses the spring water as "not very sweet," blaming it for the foul taste of that area's wine. In the wonderfully named Jade Void Grotto he praises the water from a "fragrant stream," saying it "tastes delightful.""Unless you're a connoisseur, it's not easy to detect the quality of poor tea," he sniffs dismissively at one point. Clearly he sees himself a connoisseur of water, not surprising in a culture that produced lists of the Classification of Waters in the ninth-century work, Record of Waters for Boiling Tea.

There are remarkably few complaints, with most of them concerning the plagues of mosquitoes encountered along the way. Toward the end of the trip a rare mention of food surfaces when Lu is served a meal of "delicious venison and wine of a fine vintage." At around the same time, this Southern sophisticate begins to greet any sign of urbanity with enthusiasm.

"There are shops, " he notes at one point and his relief is palpable. Later he views a settled town with a cry of joy, calling it "an enchanted land." Girls with hairdos that soar as high as two feet, anchored with silver hairpins and ivory combs as large as a hand also claim his delighted attention. Unfortunately his translator tells us at the end of his trip, Lu begins a "disconsolate” year, in a place that vanished beneath the floodwaters of the Three Gorges Dam, referring to one of the highlights of his new home as “the so-called Palace of Eternal Peace” that’s become “the prefectural graineries.”

But before he reaches the journey's end, he describes the sight of a "wooden raft, 100 feet wide and 500 feet long that holds 30-40 households, complete with pathways, alleys, livestock and a shrine to a deity. "This is still one of the smaller ones" of the raft communities found only on the Yangtse. One night he witnesses 500 lantern-bowls, "like a multitude of stars," released as an offering to the river in hopes that it will provide blessings and avert disaster. He's surprised by the belltower in the Hall of the Heartless that soars 100 feet or more, made of three storeys of brick "without a single piece of wood." He marvels at herds of wild water buffalo and schools of black and yellow dolphins, while feeling a stab of terror at the sight of a bright red creature that's several feet long,and swims against the current, churning the water into spouts a couple of feet high.

Philip Watson charitably converts Lu's ancient measurements into feet and miles and provides ample annotations that give insight into this 12th Century odyssey. Lavish use of photographs, showing the art and riverscapes of the time, make even the most ignorant reader an informed and enthralled part of Lu You's life and world.

Etna by Paul Yoon (Simon & Schuster) ~Janet Brown

Etna is born into a world of water, "sand floating in daylight" past "trembling grass." Within a year he's taken away to become a dog of war, trained to help troops from other countries who have come to fight in a place they've never seen before. He's given his name by the woman who drives him away from his family and his world, a human who can communicate in the silent language used by dogs. She tells him she's named him after a volcano and tells him what that is. Only years later does he learn that Etna, in its original form, means "to burn," and is asked by another dog, "Were you named after a war?'"

Etna is taught how to move, what to smell, and when to kill, fighting in a world of gunfire and shouting, for four years. When the war ends, he's covered with "scars like old worms" and no longer looks at his own shadow. He has one memory that gives him a reason to live. He remembers the ocean and he wants to go home.

He moves along "bombed-out roads" that lead to craters and woods that are filled with charred stumps. There are no birds and "living fields" carry death under their soil. When he finds another dog who becomes his comrade, that dog tells Etna how "the mountains burned" and cities were obliterated. "Just when you thought there was nothing left to destroy, it just went on." 

In fact, he informs Etna, it continues to go on. Up in the desolate destruction of the mountains, men "got so used to fighting" that they can't stop. "Maybe," he concludes, "there was never a place for us here."

Like Odysseus, Etna finds his way home to "the wind, the tide, the sand." Hearing waves on his first morning, he's lost in "the deepness of it...like first snow." Near the ocean, in a devastated landscape, there's life, a solitary human, a group of dogs playing in the surf, and a bird who knows the language of dogs and has lived through untold measures of time,

When Etna asks it how it survived the war, the bird answers with a question.

"Which war?"

That's a question that could be asked by anyone born in the last half of the 20th Century and into the beginning of the 21st. All of us came to life in the shadow of a war that was immediately succeeded by the next. Our visual vocabulary is filled with bodies lying in different parts of the world, but most of us have never seen that ourselves, other than on a screen or in a photograph. Most of us have never learned what life becomes in the aftermath of a war.

Paul Yoon is one of us, a person who has never gone through a war, but war is a central part of his family history. His Korean grandparents and parents had direct knowledge of what this does and Yoon has explored it in every book he's written, including Snow Hunters (Asia by the Book, November 2020), Run Me to Earth (Asia by the Book, December 2020), Once the Shore (Asia by the Book, November 2023], and The Hive and the Honey (Asia by the Book, April 2025). Each of these, through different voices, echo Etna when he says "There's no other place. This is the only world we have."

Poems, the ancient bird tells Etna, are the way humans really sing. Etna, through the voice of Paul Yoon, sings, not of "arms and the man," but of how to live in "the only world we have."

Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer (Vintage Departures) ~Janet Brown

In 1988 a book appeared that changed travel writing forever. Travelogues had dominated this category from its outset, taking readers from Point A to Point Z. That format had been in place from the days of Marco Polo right up through Dervla Murphy, and nobody saw reasons to deviate from it, until Pico Iyer came out with Video Night in Kathmandu.

This book broke right through the fourth wall that had stood implacably between the writer/instructor and reader/student. Iyer brought a subjectivity that was far from unassailable. He gleefully threw out observations and opinions that challenged conventional wisdom and invited opposing points of view. Instead of describing landmarks and monuments, he took the position that travel and travelers were a corruptive, inexorable force that were homogenizing the places they sought out as exotic.

Globalism wasn't a household word in the mid-80s but Iyer found it all over Southeast Asia, skipping blithely over this portion of the continent and finding Rambo in every country he visited. "Rambo," he claims, "was 'Reaganizing’ the world."

But Sylvester Stallone wasn't the only agent of change nor was America the only culprit. In Bali, the town of Kuta felt like an Australian 'holiday camp,' bristling with signs that promised "Aussie Breakfast" and "Bloody Good Tucker." In Ubud, where "the real Bali" was a strong selling point, the leading citizen is a Spanish artist, Antonio Blanco, who presents to Iyer a writer of "real genius," a role model to emulate. This literary god is Sydney Sheldon.

Hong Kong has no such perversions. An "expat city,” it’s a place where, two years before the hand-over, most of those expats are British. Their “voices of elegant irrelevance” identify them as Old Etonians to boot, lured by "a free flat, free holidays, free flights on Cathay Pacific." They pay for this ease by buttressing the truth that "Here work is life. There's no difference between the two." For the British, Hong Kong "is a tolerable halfway house fairly close to the tropics."

A train ride away, China, despite the intrusion of Rambo, remains resolutely untarnished. In 1985, traveling there was considered "an act of folly." Even in Beijing, those who journey from the West are corralled in foreign ghettos where they console themselves with expensive glasses of Coca-Cola. Only in Shenzhen, a city that’s in the rudimentary stages of construction, does Iyer find traces of Western decadence, Froot Loops in a local supermarket and a poster of Brooke Shields ornamenting an ice cream parlor.

In Japan Iyer discovers that America's national pastime has become Japan's national obsession. Baseball has replaced sumo wrestling all over the country. And yet when Iyer begins to investigate this takeover, he finds the Japanese have transformed it into a kind of "ideal social order." Fans exhibit a discipline that's "passion by remote control," within a setting of "unchanging ritual." Players submit to a tyrannical regimen. "Absolutely everything, " Iyer concludes, "was deadly serious" and the importation of American ballplayers was usually a miserable failure.

In an afterword written for the paperback edition, Iyer admits this book became obsolete so swiftly that within a Chinese calendar year he followed it up with a sequel, The Global Soul. Even so, this man, who in his own life (his Hindu upbringing in England, his Oxford education, and his stint of journalism in New York before finding a home in Japan) exemplifies globalism, has taken travel literature away from didacticism and into a whole new form of exploration. Half a century after he wrote it, Video Night in Kathmandu still rings true and still invites rebuttals.

Autumn Light by Pico Iyer (Knopf) ~Janet Brown

 A man who has become famous for writing about travel, Pico Iyer has had a solid base since he was 26. when he realized that if he didn't make the choice to live in Japan, that "meant a kind of exile." For over almost fifty years, that country has been his anchor, the place where he met his wife, where they share a home, and where he has found the stillness to write about his life there.

Autumn Light is part of a kind of trilogy that began with The Lady and the Monk (Asia by the Book, November 2025) and ends with A Beginner's Guide to Japan (Asia by the Book, April 2021). While the first book describes how he fell in love, with his wife and her country simultaneously, and the concluding volume tangentially addresses what happens when a dream becomes real, Autumn Light is an intimate look at the end of life, seasonally and inevitably, in a culture "that cherishes things precisely because they cannot last." 

Although the cherry blossom season draws local residents and tourists to admire and contemplate, Iyer prefers autumn, "the season of fires and farewells." He's called back home during that season by the death of his father-in-law, and finds his wife is taking care of matters with her customary "emotional efficiency.” Yet, when the two of them are alone, Iyer is given access to her emotional depths, a discovery that leads him to a greater intimacy with the people he loves, the people who have befriended him, and the world he strives to be part of.

Although Japan often describes itself as a country with four seasons, Iyer has learned its year actually contains seventy-two, each one lasting for five days.  His own suburban neighborhood is based on an agrarian calendar that is marked by nine harvests and prayers to the goddess of the sun. With time distinguished by periods of planting, blooming, ripening, harvest, and death, this cycle is always in focus and accepted.

Iyer, a man who works from home while his wife leaves for her job every day, has been given a nickname that he's heard from boys on the street. He's called Isoro, a parasite, since he seems to live a life of domestic leisure. There's one place where he feels accepted, if not understood, in a ping-pong club at a local exercise center. 

Surrounded by people who are old enough to be his parents, Iyer finds himself "entering Japan through the narrow gateway of ping-pong." As he plays and is soundly trounced by a community of the elderly, he observes and imitates them, feeling as if in this place he can almost "pass as a local while remaining the token foreigner." 

At home he travels through grief with his wife. At the ping-pong club he watches his comrades grow older and begin to fall away. Walking through tree-lined streets where the "leaves are scraps of flame" he wonders "how long these days of gold can last."

"Dying," he says, "is the art we have to master." In Autumn Light, both Iyer and Japan give concise and beautiful hints in how to master that art.