I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan (Astra House) ~Janet Brown

In China, Double Eleven and Double Twelve are two of the main commercial festivals. Double Eleven is a celebration for those who are single, giving themselves gifts and taking themselves out for dinner and a movie. Double Twelve is ostensibly a counterpart for couples, while actually it's the brainchild of online megasellers, Taobao and TMall, a way to stimulate e-commerce at the end of the year. This is when delivery couriers "start earning real money," as Hu Anyan is told when he tenders his resignation shortly before the onslaught of gift-giving begins.

Hu doesn't care. In his three months of working as a courier for one of Beijing's largest parcel delivery services, "the Haidilao of couriers," he has submitted to an unpaid three-day trial period, received a position as a contract worker with no benefits or insurance, and worked for weeks without a delivery trike, making his rounds on foot. A case of pneumonia has cost him a large amount of his monthly paycheck and his workday is brutally long. Taking a job at a smaller delivery service with shorter workdays and full insurance coverage is an easy decision. After all, he reasons, "What more do the poor really have to lose?"

Hu begins to examine the value of his work. All tasks not directly related to delivery are his fixed costs that make him no money. In order to reach his "desired wage," he has to complete a delivery every four minutes. Using a restroom costs him one yuan, so he cuts back on drinking water. A lunch break of twenty minutes costs him ten yuan, with the additional price of the food making this too expensive, so he forgoes lunch most of the time. "I became suddenly, painfully aware that time is money, " and he begins to "take time for myself." After work, he reads.

His choice of literature comes as a surprise. This man whose job essentially turns him into a human robot doesn't read comic books or martial arts thrillers. When he picks up a book at night, it's James Joyce's impenetrable classic Ulysses and The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil. Later in his narrative, when he tells about jobs he's had in the past before delivering packages, he reveals surprises. He's worked at a firm that produces 3D architectural drawings, learning Photoshop and AutoCAD.  He's been an anime artist and a graphic designer for a comic book publisher. He's had his own business. He spent time in Beijing as an artist, living a bohemian lifestyle. He's a published writer and a voracious reader of "American realism," devouring books by J.D. Salinger and Raymond Carver. He becomes a follower of Hemingway's "iceberg theory" that advocates leaving eighty percent of a story hidden, discovered only by careful readers. When covid arrives with its enforced isolation, Yu begins to write online and his work attracts magazine editors. 

It's only in his final pages that this man reveals part of the iceberg, showing his intellectual side, his thoughts on freedom, and his commitment to his work as a writer. "Freedom," he decides, "is largely a matter of consciousness, and not of what you possess."

The surprise that comes from reading his book is how much more freedom a Chinese worker has than an American laborer. Wages are low but jobs are so plentiful that Hu leaves one place of employment for another easily, without worry. Rent is cheap enough that he always has a place to sleep; homelessness isn't part of his narrative. He's able to afford food and medical care when he needs it and when he decides to move to another city, he does that without apprehension. When his work is contrasted against accounts written by American workers for e-commerce giants, Hu's life is the one to envy.

おばけ宇宙大戦争 (Obake Uchu Dai Senso) by 水木しげる (Shigeru Mizuki) (Poplar) ~Ernie Hoyt *Japanese Text Only

As I have mentioned in a previous review, I often read books in the Japanese language to improve my kanji character understanding and reading skill. The local city library sponsored a book recycling event and I took home five books. 

During my elementary school years (1st grade through 4th grade), our family lived in a housing annex for American military families living in Japan. We lived in a place called Narimasu in Itabashi Ward in Tokyo. As you can imagine, my older brother and I didn’t grow up with American superheroes like Superman or Batman and we didn’t get a chance to watch any American cartoons. 

My brother and I were big fans of Japanese cartoons. In the seventies, many of the titles were sports-related - Kyojin no Hoshi (baseball), Ashita no Jo (boxing), Tiger Mask (wrestling), and Attack No.1 (volleyball), were some of the anime series we watched. However, there was one cartoon which was very Japanese in content. That series was titled ゲゲゲの鬼太郎 (GeGeGe no Kitaro). Almost all of the anime series were adapted from manga of the same name. 

GeGeGe no Kitaro was written by Shigeru Mizuki. Osamu Tezuka may be considered the “Godfather of Manga” but Shigeru Mizuki is the manga artist who popularized and revived Japan’s yokai culture. Yokai are supernatural creatures and spirits in Japanese folklore. 

おばけ宇宙大戦争 (Obake Uchu Dai Senso) which literally translates into English as Ghost Space War is the fourth book of twelve in Shigeru Mizuki’s series おばけ学校 (Obake Gakko) - Ghost School series in English. All the books feature GeGeGe no Kitaro and friends. 

GeGeGe no Kitaro or simply Kitaro is the main character. He is a yokai boy who was born in a cemetery after his parent’s death. Besides his mostly-decayed father, he is the last surviving member of the Ghost Tribe or Yokai Tribe. His father, Medama-Oyaji is an eyeball with a full body that can also speak. 

Kitaro’s friends include Neko Musume (Cat Girl), Nezumi Otoko (Rat Boy), Sunakake-Babaa (Sand-Throwing Hag), Konaki-Jijii (Crybaby Geezer), Ittan-Momen (Roll of Cotton), and Nurikabe (Plastered Wall). They all help Kitaro protect humans against evil yokai and others. 

The main story of this book is about a UFO queen who wants to take over Earth. She looks nearly human but her minions squids with more legs. Her large spaceship is hovering over Tokyo. An egg-like item was dropped from the ship and when it hit the ground it released a smell so bad that the entire population of Tokyo's cats disappeared. 

Many yokai gathered at Kitaro’s house and told him that he needs to do something about it or life would become inconvient for all of them. Kitaro agreed that that would be a big problem and set off to counter the UFO Queen’s attack. 

The Queen became aware that Kitaro was the leader of the yokai. She ordered her minions to use their secret weapon on him - a hallucination bomb. He then saw his friends Sunakake-Babaa and Konaki-Jijii. They told him that Kitaro was in alliance with the UFO Queen and that he was here to attack humans. The hallucination bomb clouds gathered around Kitaro and stuck a “transformation nail” in his head. Kitaro had now become a slave to the UFO Queen. Not only that, Kitaro’s friends discover there is another group of aliens invading Earth. Are they here to help the Queen or are they going to help the humans?

Will the world be taken over by the UFO Queen? Will Kitaro’s friends be able to save Kitaro from being a slave? Your guess is as good as mine. 

The book includes a second story titled Neko Machi Kippu. In this story Kitaro and Nezumi-Otoko take a part-time job with Neko-Hakase (Cat Professor) to help him find out why when unknown humans increase, the more cats there are.  

I’ve always believed that you do not have to be a child to enjoy children’s books. I still believe that today which is why I enjoy reading books such as these.

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Knopf) ~Janet Brown

Ma has won the Third World jackpot. Her husband has a research position in the States that enables him to send for his family and she, her father, and her little girl have just picked up their passports, each stamped with visas to the "country of encompassing hope." The three of them have plane tickets that will, within a week, take them away from Kolkata where heat is "a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one's head," 

Farmers have died, street markets have vanished, while people "wept for a handful of something to eat." Ma and her family aren't weeping. She's pilfered food from the emergency shelter where she recently worked, enough to last until the day she leaves this stricken city forever with her family. 

At nightfall on the day they've received their visas from the American consulate, a boy from the shelter breaks into their house while the family sleeps. He has seen Ma laden with spoils from the shelter's store of food and he feels no compunction about stealing her stolen goods. On his way out, laden with bags that will keep him alive, he grabs Ma's purse and steals her future. When he discovers the passports inside the handbag, he has no idea of what they are and tosses them into a mound of garbage. 

The tragedy of this is diluted immediately as the boy's history becomes part of the narrative. Boomba has struggled to save his own family, as much as Ma has committed thefts to safeguard her own. His own attempts to bring his family out of rural poverty have been dashed by thieves and his efforts have been no less heroic than Ma’s, nor more evil either. 

Presiding over them all is a billionaire, a woman born in Kolkata who has achieved wealth beyond imagination and has built a palatial home, a hexagon floating on the city's river. Her only daughter will soon be married and the rumors claim she will provide a fabulous feast for the impoverished and starving of the city. 

As Ma, Boomba, and the billionaire careen toward a tragic union, Ma's father yearns to remain in the city he knows and loves, a place that in spite of its privations, makes him laugh and feel alive. Although Ma regards her husband as a man in which "all is true," he is keeping truths from her. America is "a fading paradise," where crops wither,  rivers dwindle, and the streets are filled with silence. "Climate immigrants" face bigotry and hatred, and he knows his family won't be exempt from that poison. He withholds these facts from Ma and she tells him nothing about the stolen passports.

Boomba knows what truth has become. "The worth of honesty was itself a lie," he decides. In this novel, all absolutes become a matter of necessity. Who is evil when they commit crimes to save the people they love? And what use is virtue in any form when it can be negated by the power of the most powerful government on earth?

Who is the Guardian? Who is the Thief? At the end of this novel, the blame rests upon all of us. Megha Majumdar extends a prophesy for the future that is already much too real.

Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami (Mariner Books) ~Janet Brown

"I've always thought it makes good sense that the word for 'clean' in Japanese is the same as the word for beautiful." Few sentences have illuminated Japan's culture so incisively as does this quote from Emily Itani's Kakigori Summer. In fact few books have done this as thoroughly as this sweet novel about a family reunion, which makes it a fine choice for anyone intrigued by Japan.

One reason why I avoid Japanese literature is because it's so opaque. With all that I've read, from Yasunari Kawabata to Pico Iyer, nothing has provided a detailed glimpse into Japanese daily life, and that annoys me.

Kagigori Summer tells a conventional story of three sisters who come together in their childhood home after the youngest of them becomes "a national scandal” in Japan. A popular singer who has been idolized by her fans falls into a pit of notoriety after being photographed kissing the president of a major record company at the entrance to a love hotel. She tumbles into a nervous breakdown and her sisters come to take care of her.

Three sisters are a standard archetype, and true to form, these each embody a different facet of femininity. Rei, the oldest, is the ideal career woman who has achieved success in London. Kiki, the middle sister, is steeped in Tokyo’s domestic life, a single mother to an adorable blond moppet of uncertain paternity. Ai is the beautiful, artistic rebel. 

What makes these sisters different is their bloodline. They are hafu, with a Japanese mother who committed suicide when they were young and a British father who left them long before that and is immersed in his second family. Their maternal grandmother is their only nurturing relative, living next door to the house where the sisters grew up and where they come after Ai's collapse. 

In predictable fashion, they clash and grow closer over the summer, each finding their true path in life by the novel's end. What isn't predictable are the sharp insights and marvelous details of the Japanese language and culture, served up within the context of the novel.

Rei, living in England, finds herself, when looking at group shots of herself with her friends and colleagues, wondering for a minute or two who the Asian is in the photo.In Japan, she and her sisters are anomalies, "the size of ordinary Westerners. Towering Olympic shot-putter by Japanese standards." As outsiders, they attract attention and they focus it too. They have the knowledge of Japan that comes from living in the country and the perspective that allows them to see what makes their birthplace unique.

Carefully the novel describes the layout of a Japanese family home, the flowering plants in a cottage garden, the appearance of a temple and its shrines in a place that isn't thronged with tourists, the art of fireworks in a small town, the sacred rocks and wind-battered trees of a deserted beach with "paradise colors." It tells exactly how to shop in a place without a supermarket and gives the ingredients for making plum liqueur. 

And by using Japanese words without explanation, leaving readers to figure them out through context or google searches, this story gives as much total immersion as possible in its 322 pages. 

"There's no exact translation for 'cosy' in Japanese," Kiki observes, but in Emily Itami's generous unveiling, readers see the coziness of daily life for themselves and are certain to end up yearning for it--or at least for kakigori, the delectable mixture of shaved ice, syrup, fruit, and beans that the sisters share in their emotionally fraught, yet idyllic, rural summer.

How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino, translated by Bruno Navasky (Algonquin Young Readers) ~Ernie Hoyt

How Do You Live? is the English translation of 君たちはどう生きるか (Kimitachi wa Dou Ikiru ka?) which was originally published in the Japanese language in 1937 by Iwanami Shoten. This English edition was published in 2021 and translated by Bruno Navasky, a teacher and writer based in New York City. The new edition also includes a foreword by Neil Gaiman.

I had read the manga and text verision of 君たちはどう生きるか (Asia by the Book, January 2024) and was not overly impressed. I discovered this English translation of the book at the local city library. I was thinking that reading the book in English might give me a new perspective on what Genzaburo Yoshino was trying to convey. 

In order to properly understand the book, you would need to know a little about the author, Genzaburo Yoshino. He was a journalist and a teacher. He graduated from the Tokyo Imperial University, now known as Tokyo University and is considered Japan’s most prestigious university. Although he studied to be a lawyer, his interest shifted and graduated with a degree in philosophy. 

After serving for two years in the Imperial Japanese Army, he got a job at the Library of Tokyo, where he developed an interest in politics. This was during the time Japan was becoming more militaristic and authoritarian. A special branch of the police department was created called the Tokubetsu Toukou Keisatsu, also known as Tokko which translates into English as the Special Higher Police, a division of the police force whose main purpose was to enforce civil law, control political groups and ideologies deemed to threaten the public order of the Empire of Japan. 

In 1925, the Japanese government passed the Peace Preservation Law which made it a crime for anyone to say or write things that were critical of the government. It sounds like something the current American administration is trying to replicate. Yoshino was arrested for having ties to alleged socialists. He spent eighteen months in prison. 

After he was freed, a friend of his offered him a job as an editor of a book series for younger readers. Their plan was to write an ethics textbook for the series to teach the next generation how important it is to have a free and progressive culture for humans to grow. 

The main character is Junichi Honda, known to his friends as Copper (Koperu in the original Japanese version), a nickname given to him by his uncle, attributing the name to Copernicus for one of his nephew’s insights into human nature. 

The book is mostly a coming of age story set in Showa era Japan but it’s more than just about Copper growing up and finding his way into the world. It includes a lot of life lessons - the importance of thinking for yourself, standing up for others, and doing what you believe is right.

Junichi goes through a lot of growing pains and many of his experiences are experiences we can relate to as well. The book may have been published many years ago but its message still holds true today. I found Nasasky’s translation of the original a lot easier to understand than I did when I read the manga version. Having learned a little more about Genzaburo Yoshino, I have a better appreciation of what this book tries to accomplish.

のらいぬクロの冒険 (Nora Inu Kuro no Boken) [Stray Dog Kuro's Adventure] by 那須正幹 (Masamoto Nasu) (Mainichi Shinbun) ~Ernie Hoyt *Japanese text only

As a long time resident of Japan and a self-taught Japanese kanji reader I often like to challenge myself by reading a book in its original language. The city library was holding a recycle book campaign where I picked up five books. My kanji reading ability is still probably around an elementary student’s level so I mostly chose children’s books to take home. 

The first one I read was のらいぬクロの冒険 (Nora Inu Kuro no Boken). The title translates into English as Stray Dog Kuro’s Adventure. It was published in 2003 by Mainichi Shinbun and was written by Masamoto Nasu and illustrated by Moe Nagata.

Kuro, the main character, was born at the end of spring in the garden of a house under a magnolia tree. He was one of a litter of four. Kuro’s mother was a young dog whose doghouse was located near the root of the magnolia tree. She was all brown except for the tip of her tail which was white. 

In reality, the parents had no intention of getting a dog but their children begged them so they got a dog from an acquaintance of the father. At the time, the dog was still a puppy and they named her Moko.

At first, everyday someone would take Moko for a walk in the morning, but after six months, the family stopped taking her for walks. Moko would spend all day tied up near her doghouse in the garden. 

When Moko was a puppy, the children would bring their friends over and play with the dog. Once Moko got older, the family would ignore her and Moko became hard to please. If someone new came into the garden, she would bark loudly and jump at them with such force it seems like the chain would snap. Whenever she did that, the father would punish her. Now, the only person taking care of Moko was the mother, but all she did was bring Moko food. 

One day the mother was shocked. She shouted, “Oh no! Moko has given birth to some puppies”. Sure enough, she gave birth to a litter of four. The children were excited and begged their mom if they could keep them. Their mother ignored their requests but their father answered, “How can you keep any more dogs if you can’t even take proper care of Moko?”

The father’s solution to the problem was taking the four puppies away from Moko, placing them in a cardboard box, and taking the box to a nearby park and leaving it there. These days if someone were caught doing something like that, they would be suspected of cruelty to animals. It’s unfortunate that this practice still continues today. 

The puppies were still small and crying for their mother. At the park, the puppies managed to get out of the cardboard box and they went running around the park looking for their mother. Unfortunately, one of the puppies fell into a small river and was taken away by the current. There were now only three puppies. 

An adult stray who lived at the park heard the cries of the puppies. An old lady who frequented the park and would often give her food called her Shiro as she was a white dog. Shiro. She decided to take care of the remaining three puppies. However, by the following morning, two more of the puppies were cold and didn’t have a heartbeat. Kuro would be the sole surviving puppy. 

This is where Kuro's real adventure begins. Shiro teaches Kuro how to be a strong and independent stray dog. She teaches him to avoid certain areas at certain times of the day. She shows him different places where humans will sometimes give them food. She also teaches him to not trust any humans. 

One day, a young boy finds Kuro at the park. Kuro reminds him of a pet he had when he was younger and decides to take Kuro home. At first, Kuro is very cautious but as the days go by, he learns to trust the boy and learns that the boy’s name is Tetsuo. Tetsuo takes good care of Kuro and becomes his pet. 

The story is simple and easy to follow. It teaches the reader about being responsible for a pet. As long as owners love and care for their pets, there would be less animal cruelty, such as the father abandoning newborn puppies in a park far from their home. 

I’m not a pet owner but when I hear or read about the cruelty some people do to animals, it makes me very angry. Kuro was lucky to have been found by a boy like Tetsuo. If only there more people like Tetsuo, this would be a better world.

Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki (Viz Media) ~Ernie Hoyt

Spirited Away is the international English title for director Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli film 千と千尋の神隠し (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi). This book is the graphic novelization of the 2001 full length animation movie of the same name. 

It is the story of a young girl named Chihiro who is on her way to her new home with her parents. However, the father gets lost and the family finds themselves in front of a tunnel that goes through an old building. The father decides to check it out and although Chihiro is a little afraid, she follows her mom and dad. 

Once they’re out of the tunnel, they find themselves at what the father believes is an abandoned theme park. The father also smells something delicious and as they go into town, they come upon an area with a number of restaurants with a lot of tasty looking items on the table. Although there is nobody serving the food, the parents decide to eat. The father tells Chihiro not to worry, “You’ve got Daddy here. He’s got credit cards and cash”. 

Chihiro refuses to eat any of the food and decides to do a little exploring on her own. She finds herself on a red bridge in front of a large bathhouse. From the bridge, she can see a train and thinks the station must be nearby. She then hears someone shouting at her saying, “YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE! GET OUT OF HERE! NOW!”. 

Chihiro and her parents had unwittingly entered into the world of kami or spirits. The boy she meets on the bridge is named Haku. Haku tells Chihiro that she needs to cross a riverbed before it gets dark and the spirits start showing up. As Chihiro goes to find her parents, she finds that they have been turned into pigs and she can no longer cross the riverbed as it has become flooded. 

Haku comes to help her again. He tells her in order to save her parents and return to the human world, she will have to get a job here in the spirit world. He tells her to go see a person named Kamiji, a man who works at the boiler room for the large bathhouse. Kamiji sends her to the owner of the bathhouse - a witch named Yubaba. 

Yubaba tries to turn Chihiro away but eventually gives her a work contract. As Chihiro (千尋) signs her name, Yubaba takes awa the second kanji character of her name and renames her as Sen (千) and Chihiro soon forgets her real name. Haku later explains that that is how Yubaba controls people by taking their names. If she completely forgets her name, she will be stuck in the spirit world forever. 

Chihiro is taken under the wings of a bath worker named Lin. Lin shows her the ropes. However, Yubaba and the bath workers make things difficult for Sen. One of her first jobs is to clean a tub that hadn’t been cleaned in months. She then has to take care of a customer who is not only really large but also smells really bad. 

Later on, she sees another spirit and believing it to be a customer, she lets it into the bathhouse. However, that customer turned out to be a monster called No-Face and it is causing havoc on the premises. 

Can Chihiro save the bathhouse from the monster? Can she be able to find her parents and help them become human again? Will she be able to remember her real name and will she be able to help Haku find his own real name as well? All the answers to these questions will depend on the courage and spirit of Sen herself as she faces many challenges and obstacles to reach her goal. 

Spirited Away is not only a beautiful story that incorporates Japnese myth and folklore, it was also the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Annual Academy Awards held in March of 2003. It was also Japan’s highest grossing film until until 2020’s Demon Slayer : Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Movie Mugen Train,

Mending Bodies by Hon Lai Chu, translated by Jacqueline Leung (Two Lines Press) ~Janet Brown

Back in a distant decade I edited a series that had been translated from Chinese into English. The books were comprehensible but almost every sentence needed to be rewritten, something I had never done before as an editor. When the review comments began to stream in from people who had read the saga in Chinese, it became clear that much of the lyrical quality that had made the books a sensation in their native language was gone in English, completely lost in translation.

For a long time I had read contemporary Chinese literature and had decided I disliked it. After my editing experience, I realized what I had disliked were the translations done by Howard Goldblatt. After I finished reading that man’s translation of Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, I met the publisher who had come out with a Thai translation of the novel, a woman who had read it both in English and Chinese. “The Thai translation is better,” she told me.

I’ve never approached fiction in translation in the same way again. A translator, I’ve decided needs to be a writer who respects and conveys the feeling behind the words, as well as their exact meaning. If that doesn’t happen, the novel is flat and lifeless.

With this always in mind, I often read a translated novel wishing that I could read the original work without an intermediary, a feeling that haunted me as I recently read Hon Lai Chu’s Mended Bodies.

In an unnamed island city, the Conjoinment Act is changing the basis of the primary social contract. Individuals of the proper age are matched with another person of the opposite sex and the two are stitched together, quite literally becoming one flesh. The couples take new names and are given a common identity card. They lose any vestige of privacy and can escape each other only when they’re sleeping.

The surge of conjoined couples revives the economy, as they launch a need for medical professionals, filling hospital beds and therapists’ offices post-surgery. Clothing, cars, furniture, are all redesigned for the altered bodies. Employment figures soar. 

The newly instituted law evokes controversy. Some maintain its necessary in order to reconfigure failing social norms, while their opponents claim conjoinment is in place to distract people from “a long campaign for the city’s independence.” Others say it reduces the environmental evils that come from overpopulation. But in spite of the various opinions, nobody actively agrees or disagrees. “A certain ambivalence toward policies we had no control over was the last effective resort for protecting our remaining freedoms.”

This is the thought of the young university student whose dissertation is on conjoinment throughout mythology and history. Unsure of her conclusion, she finds a mate through a body-matching center and the two of them are stitched together. Unknown to her husband, this woman has chosen conjoinment as an experiment that will help her to advance her thesis.

“It’s both of us or neither of us,” her husband says after the surgery is over. He’s convinced this is the death of their individuality but his wife soon knows “we never asked what the other person did while we were asleep.” 

As she continues her study of historical conjoinment, she realizes the artificiality of the stitched bodies and the impossibility of a manufactured union. To continue her exploration, she drugs her husband into unconsciousness and, struggling under his dead weight, visits her aunt who chose to be separated after conjoinment, and the university professor who is her dissertation adviser. Slowly she discovers the conclusion that’s eluded her and she makes her choice.

An allegory that lacks subtlety, Mending Bodies never comes to life. It drowns under images that are poorly conveyed by someone who has no gift for rhythms in sentences nor for dialogue that is unstilted. One character bites into “a dank piece of tuna.” Another “knits her brows.” Descriptions miss their mark and become comic, “an afternoon in plum rain season, lush mold blooming all around.” So many promising images go awry, speeches become clumsily polemical, and I blame the translator.  Let’s hope that Hon Lai Chu finds a better one for her next foray into English.

The Elimination by Rithy Panh with Christophe Bataille, translated by John Cullen (Other Press) ~Janet Brown

Rithy Panh’s childhood ended when he was thirteen, when the Khmer Rouge changed Cambodia overnight. He “walked barefoot for four years,” watched his father commit suicide by refusing to eat, and saw his mother borne away in an oxcart, never to glimpse her again. He learned that “survival was our first duty,” and stripped of “his name, his family, his face,” he discovered that “nothing is more real than nothing.” As the Pol Pot regime began to crumble under a Vietnamese invasion, he led fifteen children, orphans who were no older than seven or eight, away from the fighting, slowly advancing toward safety. Astoundingly, he found his only surviving sister and with her made his way to the Thai border and a refugee camp. Two of his brothers had gone to France before Pol Pot took power and Rithy and his sister joined them.

When the Khmer Rouge leaders faced a tribunal, Rithy, now a filmmaker and writer, spent months in a jail cell, interviewing the man known as Comrade Duch. Duch had been the head of S-21, the Phnom Penh high school that had been turned into a torture center “where no one escaped death.” Under his leadership, 12,380 people were photographed, tortured, and died. 

Rithy finds “a man of memory, fluent in “the language of slaughter,” who says of the people who died under his direction, “They were at the end of the line. They were already corpses.” On a list of prisoners, next to the names of three young children, Duch has written the instructions “Grind them into dust.” He orders the draining of all the blood from living bodies to be given to wounded soldiers at the front.  In one case he gives the puzzling and horrifying order of “moderately hard torture.” He says that he never dreams, while he “incessantly draws mounds of skulls.” It was, he claims, his duty to follow orders. 

For the Khmer Rouge “there was no moral law,” Rithy says.  Educated men killed the educated class because “the closest followers of Marxism are the illiterate…Elimination was the goal.”

Duch spent his life moving from one belief system to another, from Buddhism to Marxism to evangelical Christianity which he believes has given him another life. He laughs and smiles as he’s interviewed, clinging to the belief that “the blood debt must be repaid with blood.” In his case and that of other Khmer Rouge leaders, this doesn’t happen. Pol Pot dies in his bed within a jungle encampment. Duch and the others die in prison cells.

They died victorious, Rithy claims, with their erasure of the dead. Only those who survived stand as memorials to the years of starvation and torture. While accepting the concept of the “banality of evil,” Rithy ends by extolling the “banality of good” that’s inherent in everyday life and is “inerasable,” a “work in progress…the human world.”

The Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer (Vintage) ~Janet Brown

Who can explain why a country that we’ve never known can call to us? Pico Iyer, a man of many backgrounds, felt an inexplicable affinity for Japan from childhood onward. Without ever having been there, it always felt like “an unacknowledged home” and when he spent a long layover in the town of Narita while on his way to Southeast Asia, what he saw was much like his boyhood in England. “A sense of polite aloofness” in “an island apart from the world,” “an attic place of grey and cold” where “polished courtesies kept the foreigner out” all felt very British. Iyer, “with no plans, no contacts, no places to live,” came to Kyoto with two suitcases, hoping to live a solitary life of learning and exploring the spiritual life in Japan.

Spending his first weeks in a temple, Iyer discovers that the temple is “ringed by love hotels. “A wonderland of indulgences” is only five minutes away, where streets explode with pachinko parlors, convenience stores, and shopping malls. Soon he finds a room on a narrow lane in a residential neighborhood that’s occupied almost exclusively by women and children. Iyer is probably the only male in the area who doesn’t spend his working hours in an office.

Kyoto, he says, more than almost any other city in Japan, is “self-consciously Japanese,” a “repository of the country’s female arts and of the spiritual life found in temples…a city defined by monks and women.” So it’s almost inevitable that on a visit to a temple he meets an elegant Japanese lady who invites him to come to her daughter’s birthday party.

Iyer is in love with Kyoto by now, wrapped in “the blue intensity of knowing nothing but the present moment.” His senses sharpened, he finds that living in “a flawless world shook me out of words. Still his descriptions are precise and painterly, seeing “the moon a torn fingernail in the sky,””the sky a burnished strip of gold and silver,” and autumn as a series of “tidy daily miracles” with “drizzle softer than a silk still life.” He becomes enthralled by Japanese classic literature in which poetry and its two most famous novels, The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon were written by women. “Enameled perfection,” Iyer describes this, “poetry of the paper screen.” In Japanese, he’s told there are “different colors for each wind, different words for moonlight on water.”

It’s an easy step to go from this deep infatuation with a culture to a fascination with the one person who opens this culture for him. The elegant lady quickly reveals her restless spirit in English that is as articulate as it is charmingly flawed. She longs for Iyer’s freedom. He becomes enthralled by her quick intellect and her delightful candor. A prisoner of her traditional culture, Sachiko welcomes the opportunity to leave her household and take this foreigner to places she’s never been able to visit until now. She’s a fearless speaker of English and Iyer is eager to use the Japanese language in which he’s still a beginner so their conversations are “three-legged waltzes” in which emotions take on a greater prominence. While they discuss Herman Hesse and Emily Bronte, they forge a form of intimacy that neither expected.

The Lady and the Monk is a book that only carries a special meaning if the readers know the life that Iyer has now. Without that knowledge, it ends on a note reminiscent of Madame Butterfly, with Iyer leaving Japan and Sachiko embarking on a new life without him. In truth, this is an introduction to their life together in Japan and should have included an afterword to this effect. But even without that, this scrupulous and lyrical story of a double-barreled love affair, with a country and a person, is told with delicacy and grace, leaving readers with this question. Where is your own “unacknowledged home” in the world?

カリフォルニア留学記 ちょっとスローにみちる流 (California Study Abroad Diary : A Little Slow Life, Michiru-style) by ショート・みちる (Michy Short) (Komine Shoten) *Japanese text only ~Ernie Hoyt

The Japanese title, [カリフォルニア留学記 ちょっとスローにみちる流] translates in English to California Study Abroad Diary : A Little Slow, Michiru Style. The book is written by Michy Short. She was born in Hokkaido in 1980. Her father is American and her mother is Japanese. She moved to the United States with her family in 1983. Her family moved back to Japan in 1985. She spent her elementary school years living in Japan. However, after graduating from elementary school, she decided to move back to the U.S. for her junior high school and high school years. 

She has previously written two other books in Japanese about her experiences in the United States - みちるのアメリカ留学記 (Michiru no America Ryugakuki) and みちるのハイスクール日記 (Michiru no High School Nikki), Her first book was about her initial experiences of moving to the United States and talking about the challenges she faced in junior high school. Her second book which translates to “Michiru’s High School Diary” continues her journey of living and going to school in the U.S. 

Michiru should have been in the 8th grade when she first moved back to the States and even though her father is American, Michiru could not properly write the alphabet, so she was placed in the 6th grade. The family would spend the summers back in Japan. 

When Michiru started high school, her father, who is an anthropologist, remained in Japan. She went back to the U.S. with her mother, younger brother, Rookie, and their dog Kuma. Michiru graduated from an elite all girls high school.

In this book, Michiru is now a university student. She talks about living alone for the first time, then moving into a share-house with friends. The house appears to have a revolving number of residents including a hippy, a wandering traveler, and a graffiti artist to name a few. She also talks about her first part-time job to help her support her university tuition and other expenses. 

Michiru has always loved drawing pictures and making things with clay. She decided to further her interest in art by applying to San Diego State University which has a strong art program. 

Michiru divides her book into four parts. In Part 1, she talks about starting life as a university student. She also talks about living on her own in her first apartment, getting a part-time job at a sushi shop, creating her first piece of art for a class at university, and of course she introduces the reader to San Diego State University as well. 

In Part 2, Michiru, along with a few of her friends decide to rent a house together and introduces the revolving number of housemates. The differences between the U.S. and Japan when it comes to the legal age of drinking alcohol and getting your driver’s license. She also writes about exploring a cave and camping on the Channel Islands. 

Part 3 covers things that Michiru is concerned about while living in the U.S. One is the price of health care, including going to the dentist. Some of her friends suggested going over the border to Mexico and having her teeth taken care of. Although she was a little reluctant at first, the pain was becoming too unbearable so she decided to heed her friend’s advice. 

Michiru’s book was published in 2005 so she was still living in the U.S. when President George W. Bush started the Persian Gulf War. Most American citizens were opposed to America going to war with Iraq as there was no proof that Iraq was involved in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Building in New York City, nor was there any proof or evidence of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. Michiru would join demonstrations against the war. However, that didn’t stop President Bush from starting the war. 

Another thing which worried her about America was the fast food industry. One of her housemates had just Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. After she read the book, it made her think twice about going to McDonald’s. 

The final part of the book deals with her final years at university before graduation, what she plans to do afterwards, and what it’s like being a Japanese-American with Japanese citizenship and living in the United States. 

I often enjoy reading about foreigner’s who decide to come to Japan to study or make it their home, so it was refreshing to read a book about someone with a similar but opposite background. Michiru has an American father and Japanese mother. She is a Japanese citizen, but decided to move and go to school in the United States. I don’t know if she still lives in the U.S. or has moved back to Japan but in her writings she often states that she says she probably wouldn’t fit into Japanese society and doesn’t think she will move back. 

On the other hand, I am an American citizen but also have an American father and Japanese mother. Although I didn’t go to school in Japan, as an adult, I decided to move back to my mother’s home country to live and work. I also have no intention of moving back to the United States. And like Michiru, I am also often asked similar questions about which country I like better, the U.S. or Japan. I am just like Michiru - I love both countries. I consider both of them as my home. And like Michiru, I am unwilling to choose one country over the other.

Breakneck by Dan Wang (W. W. Norton) ~Janet Brown

What would have happened if the iPhone had been built in the United States? When Apple chose Shenzhen as its manufacturing point, it made that city a breeding ground for increased technological innovation, “the hardware capital of the world.” Dan Wang says this came about for a simple reason. China is a nation of engineers while the U.S. is a nation of lawyers. The first brings about rapid changes in infrastructure while the second breeds regulation and restriction. One builds while the other blocks.

The People’s Republic of China came into being under the leadership of a poet. Succeeding leaders have been trained engineers, beginning with Deng Xiaoping who “promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government throughout the 1980s and 1990s.” Under their guidance China began racing toward modernity and has never slackened pace.

In 2008, both the U.S. and China realized the importance of high-speed rail. By 2011 this was a reality in China while the U.S. claims it might be a functioning transit option by 2033.  The development of AI with its need for massive amounts of electrical power flourishes in China while in the U.S. the essential data centers that gobble electricity are blocked by widespread public opposition. 

Wang traces the history of modern China in seven chapters, each narrated in the same breakneck pace with which this transformation took place. Engineering, he claims, is responsible for China’s greatest successes as well as its most grievous failures. In factories engineers are in their element. When they turn to social engineering, as in the one child policy that was conceived by an engineer, they breed disaster. When they turned their talents to the Zero-Covid plan, their draconian policies caused an unprecedented number of nationwide protests.

Engineers have built not only a high-speed rail network, they have given Chinese cities subway systems that rival any in the world. They enabled Chinese citizens to leap directly past laptops and tablets to smartphones that have made cash obsolete with the use of QR codes. They have turned isolated villages into pocket-sized manufacturing centers, concentrating on a single product. They have made solar and wind power a reality, while pragmatically continuing to use their bounteous resource of coal. They made manufacturing a high priority during Covid, keeping factories running at full speed, producing consumer goods sold online to customers who had no other way to shop.

Xi Jinping, a chemical engineer himself, uses his political power to keep his engineering state intact. When the Chinese tech oligarchs began to exert their influence in threatening ways, Xi swiftly reined them in. His primary focus is directed toward energy security with the development of solar, wind, nuclear, and coal; toward food security, with farmers producing rice, grain, and vegetables across the country and grocery markets readily available to local residents; building manufacturing capabilities while increasing China’s technological power. Few of these goals, Wang claims, are being pursued in the United States.  

A Canadian, Wang has the benefit of being an outside observer in both China and the United States. He’s an engaging writer, as well as an analytical one, with the ability to create a vivid description  in a single concise sentence. “Beijing,” he says, “enthralls not because it is nice, but because it isn’t,” while Shanghai’s “streets have remained human-scaled rather than being built for cars.” “With its Blade Runner aesthetic, Chongqing is the embodiment of cyberpunk,” in contrast to Yunnan where “tea hills and rubber plantations rise above the Mekong River, carrying snowmelt from Tibetan highlands.” 

Because he spent the Covid years in Shanghai, his chapter gives a different perspective to this wellworn topic, and his Canadian passport lets him explore the places where young Chinese artists and entrepreneurs have emigrated and are making their homes, from Vancouver to Chiang Mai.

Although you may disagree with some of Wang’s points of view, you will never be bored. Breakneck is a book for our time, resonant and prescient.

Hell by Yasutaka Tsutsui, tranlated by Evan Emswiler (Alma Books) ~Ernie Hoyt

Yusataka Tsutsui is a Japanese writer who is mostly known for his science fiction novels. One of his earliest novels - 時をかける少女 (Toki o Kakeru Shojo), known in English as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was adapted into a feature length movie in 1983, 1997, and 2010. It was also made into a full length animation movie directed by Mamoru Hosoda in 2006. 

Hell is an altogether different kind of book. It was originally published in the Japanese language as ヘル (Heru, which is just romaji for Hell) and not 地獄 (Jigoku) which is Japanese for hell, in 2003 by Bungei Shunju Ltd. 

Nobuteru and his friends, Yuzo and Takeshi, were playing on a school-yard platform about five feet off the ground. However, the boys weren’t thinking how dangerous the platform was. They were just goofing off. Unfortunately, one of the boys bumped into Takeshi, who fell to the ground and hurt his leg. The other two boys just laughed, jumped down, and began dragging around Takeshi by his oddly bent leg singing one of the songs that was popular on TV at the time. 

But then, Nobuteru thought, that’s kind of strange. The song was released after the war. They couldn’t possibly have sung that song. The more Nobuteru thought about it, an even stranger thing occurred to him. Nobuteru and his family moved to a different city when he was in the fifth grade. After the war was over, Takeshi and Yuzo had never returned to school. In fact, Nobuteru had no idea what had happened to either one of them. 

Nobuteru was in his seventies and often thought about Takeshi and how he and Yuzo crippled had crippled him. While at university, Nobuteru had heard from one of his classmates that Yuzo became a yakuza and was killed by a rival gang member when he was in his twenties.  He also heard through the grapevine that Takeshi graduated with honors from a top university and was working up the ladder in a large corporation. Nobuteru was happy and relieved but still felt a little uneasy, thinking that one day, Takeshi might want to take revenge on him and Yuzo for what they did to him.  

However, Takeshi died in an automobile accident when he was fifty-seven years old. When he awoke, he was in a dimly lit bar. He was no longer crippled and his damaged organs were all repaired. The other people he met in the bar called this place “Hell”. Takeshi wasn’t perturbed about being there. He remembered what a man once told him when he first arrived, “You know what Hell is? It’s just a place without God. The Japanese don’t believe in God to begin with, so what’s the difference between this world and the world of the living?”

The same man who had told Takeshi that Hell is no different from the world of the living also told him, “Most Japanese have no religious faith, and they have no one, including their parents, who can serve in God’s stead. So if they get even a little power, they start to think of themselves as gods. You might say that Hell exists solely for the purpose of ridding ourselves of that illusion. After all, there’s no place that can do that in the world of the living.”

So, what exactly is Hell? In Tsutsui’s world, it certainly isn’t a “fiery place of torment” or “an outer darkness and separation from God”. People don’t suffer eternal damnation in Tsutsui’s hell. He does get the reader thinking about what happens to us after we die. Do we go to heaven or do we go to hell? Is Tsutsui’s Hell more akin to purgatory? It will up to you, the reader, to decide.

The Unveiling by Quan Barry (Grove Press) ~Janet Brown

I couldn’t fall asleep last night and I blame Quan Barry.

Long before climate change became a global preoccupation, Antarctica fascinated me. A place colder and less populated than my part of the world? As an Alaskan child, I knew what winter was. Learning about a continent where the landscape was composed of ice, all year round, was horrifying and compelling.

Now I’m much older and that horror has taken on more resonance as Antarctica melts. Photographs of icebergs, only partially visible, looming in the seas of the Southern Ocean hold threats and mysteries that are impossible to ignore. 

It’s one of those photographs that make The Unveiling irresistible and for an entire day I failed to resist, even though horror novels aren’t my genre of choice. It hooked me from its first page, where Striker, a Black location scout for a film company, is in the middle of Antarctica’s Drake Passage, seated in a zodiac, in the company of wealthy white adventure tourists. When an unnamed disaster hits, she and a handful of other passengers manage to find shelter in a little cabin built as a shelter for past explorers. Suddenly the novel becomes a version of Lord of the Flies, with a wildly diverse cast of characters, one of whom is a murderer.

He isn’t the most bloodcurdling aspect of the book (nor is it the graphically described effects of advanced scurvy on scars from cosmetic surgery.) That’s reserved for Striker, who’s beset with auditory hallucinations and extended periods of blackouts, her medication that prevents this from happening still aboard the vanished cruise ship. She’s a woman haunted by her childhood, when she and her sister were adopted as a pair by a white couple in a small New England town. She grew up with a visceral understanding of Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece of horror, The Lottery, and Jackson’s lesser known account of blossoming madness, Hangsaman. She’s now haunted by memories of her dead sister and a group of weird specters who come to her without warning in the Antarctic ice.

As a perpetual outsider, Striker is a pitiless observer and what she sees in the other passengers is innate savagery and racism glossed over by education and social class. In the frozen darkness, surrounded by murderous skua and staying alive by eating scavenged penguin eggs, they debate slavery, affirmative action, critical race theory, while ignoring the central issue. They’re alone and nobody is coming to their rescue. 

“We are dead,” a Russian crewmember, a veteran of the war in Ukraine who carries his own ghosts, tells Striker, “We just need to believe we are.”

The Unveiling is an allegory, which makes it true horror. There are no saviors, there is no triumph in its ending. We are all in that cabin.

Quan Barry is a poet, an academic, as well as a novelist. Her poetry is scathing, not lyrical, dipping deep into her personal history without being personal. Barry was born in Saigon, two years before it became Ho Chi Minh City. Brought to the U.S. by Operation Babylift, she was adopted by a New England couple and grew up in a town that was once known as Salem Village, home of the Witch Trials. Her history is steeped in horror on every side and her writing explores all of these facets.

“Half-Black, half-Vietnamese, I’m transracially adopted—I just don’t believe in that idea that you have to stay in your lane,” and nobody is as skillful as she when it comes to forcing us out of ours.

Intemperance by Sonora Jha (HarperCollins) ~Janet Brown

Nobody is too old for a fairy tale. Just look at the success of the classic movie Pretty Woman or the undying allure of Pride and Prejudice whether it’s presented in print, in a movie theater, or on streaming video. Now Intemperance gives the fairy tale a new twist, putting it on social media with a dip into Hindu ritual, and help from various Indian goddesses.

“I am fifty-five years of age, own my own home but am otherwise modest of income, am twenty pounds overweight and face increasing disability in my legs as my age advances.” This is hardly the sort of post that’s likely to go viral except for one key factor. The writer plans to select her own husband from a host of contenders that will compete for her hand in marriage, in a ritual known as a swayamvar, once practiced in ancient India and now known largely through Bollywood musicals. 

The unnamed narrator, a Seattle university professor, expects outraged reactions from the Sociology department where she works, especially from the branch that concentrates on Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. To her surprise, she’s heralded as a feminist beacon for assuming agency in mate selection and is suddenly a subject on The View and Oprah. Drew Barrymore and the mayor of Seattle provide moral support and a successful wedding planner offers her services for free. The opposition comes from India, where strangers and family members excoriate her for brazenly bringing shame to her native culture.

The professor’s “quiet life of books and bookstores…in this soggy little town of Seattle” becomes besieged with media attention and unsettling encounters with mysterious women whom she’s never seen before, all of them eager to offer their wisdom and advice. At night her dreams become cinematic nightmares as she relives a scandalous portion of her family history, recently told to her in letters from a “distant cousin-brother” in New Delhi. Worst of all, she has a feeling that her “goddesses are coming after her.”

But the swayamvar takes on a life of its own, as the wedding planner enlists the help of a renowned culinary artist to make the wedding cake and a sought-after stylist who provides the perfect bridal outfit, traditionally Indian in blazing red. When the day finally arrives, twelve men show up at the beachside park where they may or may not be chosen. Is this fate or the launching of a public disaster?

Although this may sound like an average rom-com scenario with a dash of kohl and mythology to liven things up a bit, Intemperance is a chocolate bonbon laced with a satirical sense of humor, an unflinching examination of female desire in midlife, and a look at the way physical disability can shape a woman’s life as she develops attractions to compensate, increasing her power.

Under the guise of a modern day Cinderella story, Sonora Jha has written a smart, sensual, and mildly scathing look at the way we live now. The absurdity of dating apps, the power of the algorithm, the invisibility of aging women are all dissected cleverly within a framework of an impossible dream--or is it?

Abroad In Japan by Chris Broad (Penguin) ~Janet Brown

Chris Broad is a real-life incarnation of Forrest Gump. Looking for his first job after leaving his university, he applies to Japan’s JET program that supplies native speakers of English to Japanese schools, despite having no interest in teaching, no knowledge of Japan, and absolutely no proficiency in Japanese. He has one thing going for him. He’s savvy enough to know that few applicants will voice their preference for a rural assignment and this gets him a job.

He arrives in a city in decline where boarded-up windows are a common sight and the bordering mountain range makes the place isolated in winter. The most flourishing feature of Sakata is Chris’s workplace, a high school with 1200 students and 120 teachers. In this area with a population of 100,000, Chris is one of fewer than ten Westerners, with only one other gaijin in his school.

To anyone who’s ever taught in Asia, it looks as if Chris has fallen into a rather cushy gig. He’s never in a classroom without a Japanese co-worker and his workload consists of lessons taught straight out of the supplied textbooks. His apartment is ready for him upon arrival and costs a mere $110 a month. On the other hand, he’s had only three days of training, he’s given a workload of thirty classes with forty students in each, his Japanese colleagues who are seasoned English teachers speak minimal amounts of that language with maximum amounts of errors, and they’re the ones who have written the textbooks.

His sole compatriot in the school is a hard-drinking chainsmoker, the only affordable nightlife is found in a local tavern, and the winter brings two feet of snow every night, burying cars in drifts and making the mountain roads impassable. Out of boredom and in competition with his colleague who’s one of the few gaijin who has passed the Kanji Kentei, an examination that demands the knowledge of 3000 characters, Chris sets himself a goal of learning the basic requirement of 2200 characters, memorizing 25 of them every day.

His luck continues, first with a group of middle-aged adults who ask him to tutor them in English and who become his social safety net. But he hits the jackpot when he’s approached by a convivial passerby who insists on becoming his friend. Natsuki is a fearless English speaker who loves nothing better than sprinkling his usage with the f-bomb. He quickly becomes Chris’s mainstay and eventually his video co-star.

His biggest stroke of Gumpian luck comes through Youtube. Chris once had dreams of making movies so this becomes his way to stay in touch with family and friends while amusing himself in the evenings. Youtube is still a novelty back in 2012 and Chris becomes a version of Mr. Bean, bumbling his way through Japanese culture as he strives to assimilate. When he goes to the public baths and finds he’s meant to be in the nude, armed only with a modesty towel; when he ventures into the rarified atmosphere of a hostess club where a night out can easily cost $240; when he’s thrown out of a love hotel; when he samples McDonald’s fries drizzled with chocolate sauce, Chris begins to clock up views, sometimes a quarter of a million in a night. In a fit of daring that’s perilously close to madness, he decides to make Youtube his primary occupation--and it works. 

A friend in Sakato knows a man in a nearby city who works in “in-bound tourism,” went to school in Seattle and London, worked for years in Frankfurt and Sydney, speaks fluent British English, and has adopted a Western mindset. Ryotaro hires Chris as a videographer who explores Japan via Youtube.

By this expansion of his territory, Chris’s luck continues. A video of him leaping from his bed when a nation-wide alarm system announces an incoming North Korean missile makes him famous. A visit to an island recovering from the disaster of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami puts him up close and personal with his idol, Ken Watanabe. Even an earthquake that destroys his filming studio proves to be a bit of good fortune.

The same convivial charm that has made him a Youtube star makes this memoir irresistible. He’s a clever phrasemaker, describing his first breath in Japan as “so despicably humid, each breath was like inhaling a mouthful of steam.” On his first visit to a Tokyo sushi bar, he decides “The sushi I’d experienced in the U.K. felt like a hate crime compared to this.” Unlike far too many other expats in Asia, he reserves his ridicule for himself rather than a culture that is frequently confusing.

There’s little in his memoir that can’t be read in every book ever written about Japan but only this one is told by Forrest Gump. For a distraction from the bleak and the dispiriting literature that’s all too easy to find,  Abroad in Japan is hard to beat.

The Human Scale by Lawrence Wright (Knopf) ~Janet Brown

Anthony Malik is the only survivor of a terrorist bomb blast, one that cost him his right eye, his memory, his relationship, and quite possibly his job. As a member of the FBI, he is given medical leave but this is running out and he’s still not back to the man he used to be. To fill up a barren stretch of time, he turns to Facebook in search of his father’s roots in Palestine and discovers family members whom he never knew existed. One of his cousins is getting married and she invites Malik to come to the West Bank for the wedding.

The Bureau tosses Malik a simple job that will give him a professional reason to be in Palestine, a meeting with an Israeli policeman who has asked for help. But soon after Malik arrives in Hebron, this man is brutally murdered. Malik comes under Israeli scrutiny as “Moishe Dayan,” since he shares an eyepatch with this national icon.

Because he’s an unknown quantity who appears to be Palestinian, the attention becomes intense, especially after all of Malik’s identification is stolen. Only a phone call to Jerusalem that verifies his status as a U.S. government employee keeps him from rigorous interrogation. Although Malik’s mother was a white girl from the South, his father’s genes are uppermost, which make him an asset and a liability in the West Bank.

From there, the plot devolves into a boilerplate thriller with a large cast of characters and a predictable ending. What saves it from being just another page-turner is its author. 

Lawrence Wright is a journalist and author who won the Pulitzer Prize for his account of 9-11 and its causes. Since writing The Looming Tower, he’s decided to cloak his discoveries in novels, books that convey valuable facts within lackluster fiction. In the spring of 2020, when Covid-19 sent most of the world into isolation, Wright came out with The End of October (Asia by the Book, May 2020). Using his considerable talents as a journalist, he presented a carefully researched account that detailed the causes and effects of a global pandemic and conveyed that information through a number of stereotypical characters. His timing was impeccable but his release date was unfortunate since at that stage, most of the world’s bookstores were closed. For those who read a digital copy, his information was chilling and illuminating--and uncomfortably familiar. Still Wright found his winning formula, which he uses once again in The Human Scale.

Since October 2023, Gaza has dominated headlines and polarized opinions around the world. Clearly Wright has taken James Reston’s observation about Latin America to heart, “The people of the United States will do anything for Latin America except read about it,” and adapted it to the Middle East. Realizing all the current discourse about Palestine and Israel came from a vast swamp of passionate ignorance, Wright took everything he’s learned about the region and sprinkled this knowledge over the course of 425 pages. For most of his audience, this will be the only reason to keep reading until the end.

By the time the final page is turned, the history and background of Israel, Palestine, Zionism, and Hamas have been revealed, along with different voices from both sides. Contemporary factors are brought into play, ones that seem at first to be wild twists demanded by a thriller but that prove true when they are researched. The U.N. has issued reports of rampant drug traffic in the Middle East, with Syria supplying Captagon, a form of amphetamine laced with caffeine, and the Taliban providing heroin and cocaine. Fentanyl comes from the Sinaloa Cartel, channeled through Turkey.  “The Middle East was a carnival of crooks and terrorists and smugglers…the dark matter of civilization,” Wright claims and the U.N.’s World Drug Report backs this up. Captagon, the report says, has been called the Jihadi pill since it was found to be used by “perpetrators of some terrorist attacks.” The U.N. has pinpointed Gaza’s tunnels as drug corridors as well as conduits for food and medical supplies.

Wright fleshes out his cardboard characters by giving texture to their activities. Through them he shows the halal method of killing a chicken, the proper way to mount and ride a camel, and an effective way to build a bomb. He uses them to give voice to their allegiance to ideologies, words that seem to have come directly from various interviews. Above all, he shows the tragic divergence from David Ben-Gurion’s belief that Israelis and Palestinians all descend from the same root and have historically been one people.

Skip over the fiction and go for the facts in a book that’s essentially a version of Israel and Palestine for Dummies. It’s a fine starting point.

Human Acts by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith (Hogarth) ~Ernie Hoyt

In May of 1980, I was still a junior in high school. Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States, MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers) was established, the second full length Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back was released, and on the 18th was the eruption of Mount St. Helens. I was looking forward to my summer vacation which I would be spending in Japan. 

Little did my teenage mind know what was happening halfway across the world. I did not follow current events, politics, or world news at the time. Looking back, I’m shocked by what happened on May 18, 1980 in a town called Gwangju in South Korea. 

Han Kang, author of The Vegetarian (Asia by the Book, September 2024), We Do Not Part (Asia by the Book, October 2024), Greek Lessons (Asia by the Book, October 2025), and The White Book (Asia by the Book, July 2025), has also written a book about the Gwangju Uprising titled Human Acts. 

Before reading the story, translator Deborah Smith, provides an introduction to the Gwangju Uprising. President Park Chung-hi who had ruled the country since 1961 was assassinated. He was assassinated by the director of his own security services. 

Park had “succumbed to the classic authoritarian temptation to institute increasingly repressive measures, including scrapping the old constitution and having a new one drawn up making his ruling a de facto dictatorship”. Unfortunately, Park’s assassination was “no victory for democracy”. 

Stepping into the void was Park’s right-hand man - Chun Doo-hwan. After he came into power, he implemented martial law on the entire country. He had opposition leaders arrested, closed universities, banned all political activities, and silenced the press. What is most disturbing is that today’s America seems to be reflecting South Korea’s past. 

Human Acts opens a few days after the South Korean army opened fire on unarmed citizens. The President had falsely claimed that the rebels in Gwangju are communists who are in league with North Korea. As students demonstrated against martial law, they were shot, beaten and tortured by the South Korean military. 

The book is written in chronological order starting with the Gwangju Uprising, also known as the Gwangju Democratization Movement and May 18 Democratization Movement. It follows a boy named Dong-ho, a middle-school student, during the incident and the people surrounding him. 

The first chapter of the book introduces Dong-ho and the people surrounding him. In subsequent chapters, the narrator is one of the people that either worked with or was related to Dong-ho in some way. He has been helping people keeping a ledger of the dead bodies that were killed in the uprising. His motivation was to find his friend Jeong-day who died at the massacre. 

The following chapter is told through the eyes of Dong-ho’s friend, Jeong-day. The story then jumps ahead to 1985 and is told in the first person by Eun-sok, a girl who helped Dong-ho collect dead bodies. She is now working as an editor for a publishing company. She has a clash with the police for keeping silent about the whereabouts of an author who the authorities are looking for. His play reminds her of Dong-ho who was killed by the South Korean Army. 

There are others who all have their story to tell - Kim Jin-soo, who was one of the survivors of the uprising. Seon-ju who was sexually abused during the uprising. Dong-ho’s mother and finally the author herself, who was six years old at the time of the Gwangju Uprising. 

This is not an easy book to stomach when you take into consideration that it was inspired by a true incident that took place less than fifty years ago. The story will stay with you long after you have finished reading it. It may interest you in learning more about how and why it happened.

When I did my own bit of research to find out what had happened to the man who instigated this crime - Chun Doo-hwan. In the 1996, August 27 issue of the Korean Times, an article wrote that the Seoul Distric Court sentenced him to Death. Later that same year, the Seoul High Court changed it to life imprisonment and a fine of 220 billion won. He was officially convicted of leading an insurrection, conspiracy to commit insurrection, taking part in an insurrection, illegal troop movement orders, dereliction of duty during martial law, murder of superior officers, attempted murder of superior officers, murder of subordinate troops, leading a rebellion, conspiracy to commit rebellion, taking part in a rebellion, and murder for the purpose of rebellion, as well as assorted crimes relating to bribery.

What I find most disturbing is that the current President of the United States is using some of the same tactics as Chun Doo-hwan such as spreading misinformation, firing anybody opposed to his views, trying to suppress the press, ordering the military to use force against American citizens. If there is something to be learned from Kang’s book Human Acts and the facts behind the Gwangju Uprising, then there should be no mistake that the man is to be ousted from office so the country will remain a democracy.

Kiki's Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono, translated by Emily Balistrieri (Yearling Books) ~Ernie Hoyt

Eiko Kadono is a Japanese children’s author and illustrator. She is also a nonfiction writer and essayist. One of her most popular books to be translated into English and which has also been adapted into a feature length animation film by Studio Ghibli is Kiki’s Delivery Service. 

The previously reviewed Kiki’s Delivery Service (Asia by the Book, September 2024) was the graphic novelization of the movie and was written and drawn by Hayao Miyazaki. As much as I enjoy watching the movie, I was interested in reading the original story. As a reminder, the story was originally written in the Japanese language with the title 魔女の宅急便 (Majo no Takkyubin) which translates to The Witch’s Delivery Service and was published in 1985. 

This English edition of Kadono’s story was published in 2021 by Yearling Books, a division of Random House Children’s Books. The book includes a note from the author. She tells her readers that the story was inspired by one of her daughter’s drawings. It was a picture of a witch flying in the sky while listening to a radio. The picture included musical notes that danced around the witch. 

Kiki’s Delivery Service is a young girl’s coming-of-age story. It is set in a world where witches still live among ordinary humans. The protagonist, Kiki, is the daughter of Kokiri and Okino. Kokiri is Kiki’s mother and comes from a long line of witches. Her father, Okino, is an ordinary human. Okino is a folklorist who studied legends and tales about spirits and magic. Kiki was about to turn thirteen years old. 

In Kadono’s world, when the daughter of witches and humans turn ten years old, they must decide if they want to follow in their mother’s footsteps and become a witch. If they chose this path, they would learn their mother’s magic and would have to choose a full-moon night of their thirteenth birthday to leave home. 

This meant that a young witch would have to search for a town of their own where there wasn’t a witch in residence. Over the years, the witches' powers have gotten weaker and their population has decreased. It is also difficult for young witches to find a witchless town or a town that will welcome a witch to their community. 

Kokiri had only two magic powers. One was to grow herbs to make sneeze medicine and the other was flying through the air on a broom. Kiki took to flying pretty well but would often get distracted and fall to the earth. She was never able to get the hang of growing herbs to make the sneeze medicine her mother perfected. Still, Kiki believes she can become anything she wants. 

Kiki would leave her home accompanied by her black cat Jiji. They would have all kinds of adventures, not only searching for a new town, but also in becoming a member of that town. As a young girl, Kiki will have her ups and downs as do all adolescents. She must also find a place to live and needs to find a way to make a living. It may seem like an impossible task for such a young girl but it’s a well known fact that girls mature faster than boys. I imagine a young female witch matures even faster!

A Year in Japan by Kate T. Williamson (Princeton Architectural Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Kate Williamson is a writer and illustrator who studied film at Harvard University. She is also fond of traveling. She was awarded the George Peady Gardner Travel Fellowship which grants post-graduate students an opportunity to further their education by immersing them in a foreign culture. Thanks to the grant, Williamson was able to spend a year in Kyoto, Japan. 

Her book, A Year in Japan, is full of illustrations and her musings about what she saw and thought while wandering the streets of Kyoto. It is a humorous travelogue with beautiful drawings. It is not a guide about where’s the best place to eat or where’s the best place to stay. The drawings are of the things that she saw and experienced. 

When Williamson got off the train at Kyoto station and was walking along the ground floor department store to the street,  the first thing that caught her eye was a display of colors and patterns next to some purses and scarves - “plaid, polka dots, orange and turquoise, , red and magenta, lime and navy”. When she took a closer look, she discovered it to be a display of washcloths or hand towels. She writes, “the washcloths were my first exposure to the attention to detail that characterizes much of Japan - both socially and visually”. 

She noticed that the wagashi shops, traditional Japanese confectionery shops, the colors of the shapes of the sweets would change with the seasons. The sweets are often sold in boxes and seem almost as if it would be a crime to eat since they are so beautifully displayed. 

Williamson immersed herself in Japanese culture. Not only did she eat wagashi, but she made a request to visit a Saihoji Temple, also known as Kokedera or the Moss Temple. At the temple, Williamson, along with a few other people, were taken to a large room set with small tables. Next to each table was a brush and ink set and a Buddhist sutra written in Japanese. It is the task of the visitors to copy the sutras with the materials at hand. 

Another thing, most visitors, Williamson included, like to do, is to travel on the Shinkansen. Many people still refer to the shinkansen as the “bullet train” due to its shape. Whenever Williamson took a trip on the shinkansen, she would treat herself to an ekiben, special bento boxed measl that are sold on trains and at train stations. 

In the spring, Japanese people have hanami or “flower viewing” parties. They gather with friends and family or co-workers and drink and eat while enjoying the cherry blossoms in full bloom. 

In the fall, when there is a full moon, Japanese also enjoy tsukimi or “moon-viewing” parties. It is a festival to celebrate the autumn moon. It is a tradition that dates back to the Heian era (794 - 1185). 

As a long time resident of Japan (over thirty years), I still enjoy reading the perspectives from newcomers to the nation.  Their wonderment at all they see and experience reminds me of my first days in the country as a resident. It really is one thing to visit a country but quite another when you decide to live there, be it three months, one year or even thirty years or more. There’s always something new to discover.