Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri (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, Internal 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.

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 gives 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.

Inseparable by Yunte Huang (W.W. Norton & Company) ~Janet Brown

The men who were the inspiration for the coinage of "Siamese twins" as a popular description for conjoined siblings have been the subject of curiosity and intrusive speculation for over two hundred years. They weren't the first babies to ever share a body but thanks to a Yankee businessman, they became the most famous. Their history continues to evoke interest, with at least four books written about them in this century alone. 

What is usually overlooked in all the miles of print that focus upon their lives is the extraordinary success the brothers achieved in a country far from where they were born. This is what Yunte Huang has chosen to  illuminate in his biography of Chan and Eng, Inseparable.

Born in a Thai fishing village in 1811, the twins immediately excited local curiosity that they turned to their benefit as they grew up. In their teens, they began their entrepreneurial career by selling ducks and preserved eggs in the public market, with their unusual status drawing more than their fair share of customers. When two New Englanders discovered them, the men instantly recognized the twins' potential. But even then, when they were seventeen, Chang and Eng knew how to drive a bargain. They knew their worth. They had already been presented to the King of Thailand and his royal court, where they had received attention and gifts.Before they agreed to leave home, they arranged for their mother to receive $500 and negotiated a five-year contract in which they would receive "ten Spanish" a month with all expenses paid. 

By this time, Chang and Eng were fluent and literate in Chinese, the father's native tongue, and in Thai, the language used by their Sino-Thai mother. During the four-month voyage from Thailand to Boston, they learned basic English and when they reached America, they continued to learn three or four English words a day. As their vocabulary became more extensive, the twins began to add comic badinage to their hours on stage and became avid readers, presenting their favorite book, The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, to a university that had hosted them in a Southern town.

On a thirteen-month tour of England, the twins were given A Dictionary of General Knowledge, a hefty one-volume encyclopedia, that they kept and read throughout their lives. (It was found on their bedside table after their deaths and was obviously well-used.)

Perhaps it was through this gift that Chang and Eng realized they had legal rights. At 21, they declared themselves free from the men who had profited from them, hired a manager, and began to tour independently. In addition to booking stage time and selling tickets to their exhibition, they returned to their roots, selling merchandise to their audiences. By the time they were 28, Chang and Eng had more than $10,000 dollars in savings, which would amount to over $385,000 in 2026 dollars.

Their tour took them to North Carolina where the climate and topography made them feel at home. They hunted, fished, and decided this was where they would settle down. They established a general store, bought 150 acres of farmland, and had a house built to their specification, with big windows in every room to capture the light and a view of the nearby Blue Ridge mountains. Sending their manager to New York as their personal shopper, Chang and Eng revealed a taste for elegance and luxury in their daily lives. 

Perhaps it was their status as sophisticated and successful men of the world that made them successful when they began to woo two sisters who would become their wives. It certainly helped them to achieve American citizenship which by law was conferred only to "free white persons." Marrying was more problematic. Miscegenation laws got in the way, as well as newspaper articles that inveighed against women marrying "quadrupeds." Still Chang and Eng stood out in the rural South with their charm, fame, wealth, and good taste. They held a double wedding with the brides coming home to a house that was described as "uncommonly elegant." The sisters were now both Mrs. Bunker, the surname their husbands chose to put on their marriage licences, since in Thailand at the time of their birth, surnames weren't used.   

Chang and Eng had developed a way of living together that brought the concept of "alternate mastery" into play. Every week one of them took his turn in making decisions and having a private life, while the other kept silent and "turned his face away," essentially blanking out as a person, an act of disassociation and survival. This practice was observed religiously, even more so when each twin set up his own household in a separate home. (When one of Eng's children died in infancy, he refused to attend the baby’s funeral because it was his week to be the invisible man. This may be why his wife refused to be buried in the family cemetery, next to her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister.)

By the time the Civil War broke out, Chang and Eng owned 800 acres, two homes, and 32 slaves. Patriotic citizens of the Confederacy, the twins put their money in Confederate bonds. At the end of the war, their wealth plummeted from $34,000 (over $725,000 in 2026 dollars) to just over $9,000, with most of that tied up in acreage.

The twins abhorred P.T. Barnum. They'd worked with him in the past and decided that of all that Barnum exhibited, he himself was the most freakish of all. But they were wiped out. First they submitted themselves to Barnum's flim-flam, then they went out on their own. But times had changed and the twins were old men. They once had prided themselves that they were "never part of a circus," but their final appearance was in a Berlin arena, appearing after the clowns and bareback riders. Humiliated and depleted, they returned home.

By now Chang was an alcoholic, in poor health, while Eng's only vice was being "an addict of late night poker." After suffering a stroke on their final voyage from Europe, Chang became an invalid, while Eng, still healthy, did all he could to keep his brother alive, knowing that without him, he would himself become a "walking shadow." When he awoke one morning to learn that Chang had died, he immediately told his family. "Then I am going too." He died several hours later, killed by failure of the liver that the twins had shared.

When considering the lives of Chang and Eng. men who made a successful place for themselves in a foreign country, refusing to deny themselves as much normalcy as they could muster in their connected bodies, and founding a dynasty of Bunker descendants that number around 1500 today, Chang and Eng are men who deserve to be regarded with marvel. Instead their shared liver is gawked at every day at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. If the twins could see that, they probably wouldn't be surprised.

The Foursome by Christina Baker Kline (HarperCollins) ~Janet Brown

It would be easy to mistake The Foursome as a romance novel or even as a retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Two daughters of a wealthy plantation in rural North Carolina have been touched by scandal. Despite the beauty of the youngest and the ample charms of her sister, they remain unmarried until two gentlemen come to town. One of them is attracted to the youngest but he can't marry unless his brother does too.

The prospective suitors are the richest men in the county and they intend to stay. They've opened a general store, purchased 150 acres of farmland and have furnished their newly built house with a taste for luxury. They are "uncommonly elegant," well-traveled, and cultured. They have only one drawback. They are Chang and Eng, the world-famous Siamese twins, joined at the breastbone by a four-inch piece of cartilage. They've been together since birth and they will never be apart.

Once exhibited by showmen, they were able to break their contract when they turned twenty-one and are now U.S. citizens with all the rights that this confers. But they will always be seen as curiosities or, worse yet, freaks. Their existence provokes gossip and vulgar rumors about how two men in one body can conduct basic physical actions.

The youngest sister, Adelaide, swiftly makes her decision. She will never have a better offer than the one she's received from Chang and she's pragmatic enough to accept it. But she can only marry him if her older sister accepts Eng. One woman in a bed with two men will incite charges of polygamy.

Sarah agrees to a double wedding and the sisters and brothers enter into a marriage that will last for over thirty years, until the deaths of Eng and Chang. The brothers build a second house when their wives begin to have children and long for homes of their own. Eventually they have large families, Sarah with eleven children and Adelaide with ten.

In this account of two unconventional marriages, Christina Baker Kline delves into the lives of the two sisters, concentrating mainly upon Sarah, who was inexplicably buried far from the graves of Eng, Chang, and Adelaide. Kline has reason for this focus. Sarah and Adelaide, she says, were "distant cousins of mine,” and she is one of 1500 descendants of the family the two women formed with these two men from Siam.

Her research has been thorough. Even the most incredible details in her book are corroborated by a scholarly examination of Chang and Eng's lives, Inseparable by Yunte Huang. (in fact Kline took the name of her book from a chapter in Huang's that describes the two marriages and is entitled The Foursome.)

The solution that the twins find to the dilemma of sharing a body as described by Kline is corroborated by Huang. Every three days, a husband lives with his wife. During that time, his brother remains as detached as possible, silent and emotionally removed. This was the way they led their lives, Huang says, "with an understanding of 'alternate mastery. Each in turn controlled all actions, while the other practiced a "mental withdrawal," "blanking out."

The twins die within hours of each other. Sarah and Adelaide reluctantly agree to an autopsy in which it was found that the two men could never have been separated, nor could one live without the other. The brothers shared a liver and were connected by its tissue.

This organ is now exhibited at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, ensuring that two men who did their best to live normal lives are still gawked at by hordes of intrusive strangers.

The Forest of Wool and Steel by Natsu Miyashita, translated by Philip Gabriel (Penguin Books) ~Ernie Hoyt

Did you ever see something or hear something that would change your life forever? That’s what happened to seventeen-year-old Tomura. He was asked by one of his teachers to meet with a visitor who was scheduled to visit the school at four o’clock. The teacher was in the middle of a staff meeting and wouldn’t be able to meet the guest himself. 

Tomura was a junior high school student. It was the second term of the year. It was the week of mid-term exams so all club activities were suspended so students could focus on their studies. Tomura wasn’t busy at the time so he didn’t mind doing the favor for the teacher. Although he had more school tests the following day, the only thing he had left was graduation and searching for a job.

Tomura was born and raised in a small rural town in Hokkaido. He grew up living near a forest. He was thinking to himself, “I inhale the scent of a forest close by. I can smell the earthly fragrance of autumn as night falls, the leaves gently rustling. I can feel the damp air of dusk descending”. However, Tomura is not in a forest. It is only in his imagination. 

He is standing in the corner of an empty school gym. He has just brought a man with a black briefcase here. The man is here to tune the school’s piano.  “He gently presses down on the keys and the scent of warm and whispering leaves rises up in my mind, drifting from beneath the open lid of the piano.”

And so begins Natsuya Miyashita’s story, The Forest of Wool and Steel. The man he met at the school gymnasium was a Mr. Itadori from the Eto Music Shop. After Tomura led the man to the piano, he was going to go back to study for his upcoming tests but then he heard the sound of the piano. 

For Tomura, it was “mellow and rhythmic”. Tomura took a deep breath and listened again. The sound was hard for him to describe but he felt that his “soul was suddenly filled with a nostalgia and longing” and something else he “couldn’t quite define”. 

Mr. Itadori moved around the piano, opened the lid, and pressed a few more keys. It was then that Tomura “smelled the unmistakable scent of forest at nightfall”. The sound of Mr. Itadori tuning the piano changed his life. Mr. Itadori said he was welcome to come to the shop. When Tomura went to visit, he could not forget the memory of Mr. Itadori tuning the school’s piano. He asked if Mr. Itadori would take him on as a piano tuner, even though he has never learned how to play or even touch a piano.

This begins Tomura’s journey to become the best piano tuner he can be. The story follows Tomura’s path as he goes to a specialist school, then begins to work for Mr. Itadori’s shop. Aside from Mr. Itadori, Tomura is taken under the tutelage of two other master piano tuners - Mr. Yanagi and Mr. Akino. No matter how hard Tomura tries, he’s always asking himself, “Do I have what it takes?”

The Forest of Wool and Steel is a beautiful story about finding your calling in life and striving to be the best you can. It was originally published as a serial from the November 2013 through the March 2015 issue of the literary magazine, Bungei Shunju Extra, as a serial in the literary magazine, Bungei Shunju Extra. The original Japanese title is 羊と鋼の森 (Hitsuji to Hagane no Mori). It was subsequently published as a book in 2015 by Bungei Shunju, then published again in 2018 by Bunshun Bunko. It won the 2015 Japan Bookseller’s Award and was adapted into a full length feature film starring Kento Yamazaki and directed by Kojiro Hashimoto.

When I was a seventeen-year-old high school student, I still had no idea what I wanted to do for a living. It’s refreshing to read a story about a young person who finds his calling early in life and strives to be the best he can. It’s an inspirational story about perserverance, self-confidence and believing in what you’re doing, no matter what path you choose.

デッドエンドで宝探し by 能町みね子 (Mineko Nomachi) (Hayaoki Books) *Japanese text only ~Ernie Hoyt

Mineko Nomachi is a Japanese writer, illustrator, and manga artist. She was born in and raised in Ushiku City in Ibaraki Prefecture. In 2005, Nomachi started writing a blog titled オカマだけどOLやってます (Okama dakedo OL yatte masu). The title translates into English as I’m a Gay Man but Work as an Office Lady. The following year, a book based on the blog with the same title was published officially starting Nomachi’s writing career. Nomachi is also known for having gender-affirming surgery, still known to older generations as sex-change operation, shortly after her book was published. 

デッドエンドで宝探し (Dead End de Takara Sagashi) which has the English subtitle of Treasure Hunt at the Dead End is her collection of essays compiled from a column she wrote on a blog titled まるごと靑森 (Marugoto Aomori) or Amazing Aomori in English. The blog is operated and managed by the Aomori Prefectural Office. Its purpose is to provide information on tourism, regional products, and local cuisine. 

Before Nomachi started writing the blog, she would come and live in Aomori City to escape the hot and humid summers of Tokyo. She fell in love with the city when she would visit the place on vacation but became even more enamored of it when she decided to live there for a few months of the year. 

She would tell whoever would listen to her that Aomori is such a beautiful place and how much she loves it. However, she said the ninety percent of the Aomori citizens would ask her, “Why?” or laugh and say, “There’s nothing here”. Still others were more harsh in their criticisms saying things like, “You’ll realize how hard it is once you live here” or “Try living here in the winter”. 

Nomachi realized that what many of the citizens said were true. Although she has visited Aomori in the winter, she has never lived through an entire winter season and since she only lived in Aomori during the cool summers, she came to realize that she was cherry-picking the best of what the city had to offer. Heeding the word of many Aomori citizens, she packed up her things and began to live in the city full time. 

She thought once she starts living in Aomori, she would get to know the city and prefecture more deeply and wants to share her appreciation of it with others. In her column, she started writing about the “dead ends” of Aomori Prefecture. 

Pictured above is a map of Aomori Prefecture. It is the northernmost prefecture on the island of Honshu. There are two distinctive peninsulas. On the east side of the prefecture sitting between Mutsu Bay and the Pacific Ocean is the Shimokita Peninsula. On the west side sitting between the Sea of Japan and Aomori Bay is the Tsugaru Peninsula. 

Nomachi has alredy been to the ends of both peninsulas - Cape Oma in the Shimokita Peninsula and Cape Tappi in the Tsugaru Peninsula. In this book, she focuses on going to other “dead ends” of the Prefecture. She starts by going to a place called Oshima,  a small island that is located at the ends of the Natsudomari Peninsula located in Hiranai City and lies between Aomori Bay and Mutsu Bay. 

Her local travels also take her to Metoki, the last station on the Aoimori Railway line located in Sannohe Town near the border of Iwate Prefecture. She goes to Itagai, a small settlement in Fukaura Town near the border of Akita Peninsula. She often rides the bus to the final stop where she would meet a couple of her co-workers who would then take her to her chosen spot by car. 

As with Nomachi, I am also a transplant from Tokyo to Aomori City and like Nomachi, I have also fallen in love with the most northern of prefectures on Japan’s main island. My wife and I also drive to places in Aomori Prefecture that are often not listed in any guide books. However, I am not quite as manic as Nomachi. My wife and I choose places where there are things to see and are not so far off the beaten path. 

It doesn’t matter how long you have lived in one place. One person’s perspective is going to be different from another. I have been to many of the places Nomachi has featured and yet, I have also found that there are more places in my adopted prefecture to discover. I believe getting to intimately know the place you’ve chosen to settle will make living in that city, town, or village even more special.

The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, translated by Sam Bett (New Directions) ~Ernie Hoyt

It appears that the Japanese writer from Aomori Prefecture in the Tohoku region of Japan is becoming popular as the years go on. It seems that more and more of his early works are being translated into English. The Beggar Student became available to English readers in 2024. 

The Beggar Student was originally published as 乞食学生 (Kojiki Gakusei) as a serial in 1940 in the July through December issues of 若草 (Wakakusa), a magazine that centered on reader submissions and evolved into a literary journal. Kojiki Gakusei was later published as a book in 1941. 

The story begins with a writer who is not pleased with his latest offerings but forces himself to send it to his publisher. As he drops the manuscript into a mail box he thinks to himself, “Another crummy story. On the surface, it pretends to be a mirror to my soul, although I know as well as anyone the slimy worms of compromise are wriggling in the muck at the bottom”. 

The writer continues to admonish himself for writing such a terrible story. He feels so ashamed he wants to scream and run around in circles. “A lousy piece of trash. I have no right to call myself a writer”. The way Dazai writes, it makes you, the reader, want to read the story he just sent to his editor just to see why he thinks it’s so bad.

Even after dropping off the story, the writer continues to agonize over his decision to send the story. “I should have torn that lousy story into pieces and retreated to the mountains, never to return”. But what’s done is done. The writer then tells us “the misery that followed was beyond compare”. 

The writer was so depressed he didn’t feel like walking home so he headed in the opposite direction and walked along the banks of the Tamagawa Canal. It was in the middle of the day in April and he was watching leaves floating downstream. He had just crossed Mansuke Bridge. Near this bridge, a teacher once tried to save one of his students but ended up drowning himself. Ever since then, this area became known as Maneater Brook.

It was right about that time that the writer heard a voice coming from the river, “Whew! That’s cold!”. What he saw was a “pale-skinned naked boy swimming in Maneater Brook. No, not swimming, he was being pulled downstream.” He saw the boy look at him. The boy was grinning from ear to ear and shouting, “Whew! That’s so cold! So cold!”.

The writer was caught in a conundrum. He thought to himself, if I don’t save him, he’s going to die. “So what if I can’t swim, I can’t just let him die! I’m going to die someday, it may as well be now.” The writer ran along the bank to catch up with the boy but he was caught short when he heard a yelp. It was the boy floating downriver. 

The writer was surprised to see that it was the boy from the river. This upset him even more and he shouted at the youngster, “Watch out! This river isn’t safe.” It took him a minute to realize that the boy was already out of the river but continued to scold the boy and said, “I’ve come to save you.”

The boy looks at the writer as if he’s crazy. In fact, he says to the writer, “You’re crazy, you know that? Didn’t even look before you ran over me.”　The boy’s attitude enrages the writer and the two start an intellectual debate. The writer thought he would give the boy a good thrashing. However, the boy’s rebuttal gets the best of the writer and the writer ends up taking the boy out for lunch to continue their “debate”. 

Most of Dazai’s famous works are dark, dreary and depressing but in The Beggar Student, Dazai shows another side to himself. His writing shows that he is also full of humor and is a master of intellectual banter, even if the characters are his own creations. It’s a tragedy that he ended his own life at such a young age, he was thirty-eight years old at the time of his death. I’m sure he would have written more masterpieces but it’s great that many of his early works are now available in English.

Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim (Tor Publishing Group) ~Janet Brown

In the world that Isabel J. Kim creates in Sublimation, when someone crosses a border with the intention of leaving their home country to live in another nation, they split in two. One self remains, the other moves on into a new life, taking on another "settled culture with intent” and severing “the self from the self.” One person becomes two, like identical twins or physical clones, yet they’re separated by different environmental and societal influences.

In Kim's world, this has existed forever, or at least since 1753 B.C. when it was mentioned in Hammurabi's Code of Laws. It's called "Instancing" and the divided selves are known as "instances." They can be reunited in an act known as "reintegration," when two instances touch, skin to skin. But, as Soyoung wonders in a Seoul shopping mall where she meets her friend Yujin, a man who is also an instance, is this act of reintegration "emotionally equivalent to murder?" 

She has reason to wonder. Her grandfather, on his deathbed, issued his last request: that she and her instance, Rose who lives in Brooklyn, reintegrate. Soyoung has told Rose that their grandfather has died but fails to mention his dying wish, not even when the two of them meet for the first time in Seoul at his funeral.

Their two selves are far from compatible and the two women have jagged encounters. Yujin is the one to tell Rose what the grandfather wanted. When she's given an envelope with the deed to the family home, willed to her by her grandfather, the tensions between the two women heighten and in a moment of rage, Soyoung grabs Rose by the hand. They merge into one body but their separate beings and their separate remain intact. 

YJ, Yujin’s instance, works in a New York high-tech firm and he’s told Yujin that he's working on something called Mitosis, which will reverse the reintegration process. The woman that's now a blending of Soyoung and Rose sets off to find this man so their two selves can resume their separate existences.

When Soyoung-Rose persuades YJ to let them become part of the Mitosis beta-testing, they learn it’s far more than just a reintegration process. Mitosis works through special gates that can both prevent and cause instancing. It can allow, or force, instancing and reintegration to take place. Its gates can create a border anywhere and it will soon be sold to the U.S. government. From there it will be put on the market to other countries as a state monopoly. Instancing and reintegration will stop being voluntary, except for those who can afford it.

"Instancing relies on the knowledge that you're never going to return, that you don't want to return...(Mitosis) decouples the action from the emotion."

Kim cleverly links the ethical and psychological implications of this to Eve and Adam biting into the apple of knowledge. Soyoung-Rose becomes aware that with Mitosis everything will change. No longer will people face the private question of "Do you want two selves?"

Sublimation is a thriller that goes for the throat and hangs on right up to its last word. But for some readers, it will go deeper, heading straight to the heart. For anyone who has left their birth country and made a home in another part of the world, the two selves created by instancing are very real, each one always painfully aware of who they are in another part of the world. As Kim shows in her stunning debut novel. those people have taken a bite from the apple of knowledge and will always live with the uncomfortable yet profoundly exciting result.