Rosarita by Anita Desai (Scribner)

Our mothers are the ones who first teach us about secrets. They’re the ones who tell us the truth about Santa and the Tooth Fairy after hiding that from us during our earliest years. They slowly divulge other hidden stories as we get older, but it’s only after they die that we realize they’ve concealed the biggest secret of all from us, one we’ll never know, Who were our mothers in the years before we were born to them?

The narrator of Rosarita is certain she knows all there is to know about her mother and none of it is particularly interesting. Then she goes off from her home in India to San Miguel in Mexico, a place she’d never heard of before until she goes there to study Spanish. While sitting on a park, she’s accosted by a stranger who greets her effusively, saying she once was good friends with the narrator’s mother. “Rosarita,” she calls her vanished friend although the narrator assures her that her mother was Sarita. “Did I not say?” the stranger insists, and is delighted to learn that the narrator is named Bonita. “She would of course have given you a name she heard here,” the woman claims, while Bonita insists her name is similar to others given to girls in India. 

“You look just like your mother,” the stranger insists, “Are you an artist too?” Your mother came here to paint and we were good friends, is the burden of this stranger’s insistent story.

Although Bonita is convinced that this old woman is mad, she begins to piece together all she remembers of her mother and finds there are large gaps in her knowledge. Little unexplained scraps of her childhood reappear in her memory, the boxes of paper stored away and never unpacked in an unused room where she often finds her mother collapsed on the floor, in tears; the small unsigned pastel sketch that hung above her bed that was a picture of a woman sitting on a park bench with a small child playing in the dirt nearby. Yes, she admits to herself. This park looks much like the one where she was accosted by the eerie stranger.

She begins to see the old woman everywhere she goes and is persuaded to accompany her to places where her mother once lived during her Mexican sojourn. Disbelieving but still curious, she follows the person she’s begun to think of as The Trickster to spots that have been abandoned--a house her mother supposedly had lived in that’s now a piece of a tiled wall in a vacant lot, a place that had been a refuge for artists that has only the remains of a ruined chapel and a few dilapidated huts.

As she learns about the dreadful similarities between the Mexican Revolution and India’s partition, each with their trains carrying “unspeakable cargoes” of corpses and injured refugees through “barbaric landscapes,” she remembers her mother being disparagingly termed as one of the “railway people” by relatives of Bonita’s father. When asked about her past, her mother would say only “I can’t remember.” As The Trickster leads her to the Mexican coast, a relative of this strange woman might have details of truth about Bonita’s mother, but when her guide lapses into madness, the questions go unasked. The life of her mother becomes alive in her imagination, “a fragment of truth,” “unfolding like a scroll, its beginning and its end both invisible.”

Yet there is that solitary sketch that evokes Mexico, her mother’s unexplained misery and long absence, and the kohl-rimmed eyes, the arms filled with bangles, and the smell of a South Asian fragrance that The Trickster wears when she introduces herself at the beginning of this quest. Is this enough to establish a tenuous truth? It becomes enough to lead Bonita through Mexico, with her unanswered questions and the possibility of discovering her mother’s past.

Although Rosarita is a slender book with a size much smaller than one usually expects, it teases and haunts with that universal mystery of the secrets mothers never divulge. Desai makes Bonita’s Mexican journey irresistible with descriptions that beckon and entice, with a bright and sharp beauty. In an author’s note, she elaborates upon the parallels between the histories of India and Mexico that drew an Indian artist to this other country, in the same way The Trickster claims it drew Bonita’s mother. Gently and inexorably, Rosarita demands more than one reading in a way that’s both tantalizing and satisfying, ending with questions and the joy of an unending adventure.~Janet Brown

Darkmotherland by Samrat Upadhyay (Soho Press)

Never before have I read a book simply because it’s an inexplicable train wreck but nothing else kept me going through the recent release from Soho Press, Samrat Upadhay’s 759-page novel, Darkmotherland. 

Set in a thinly-disguised Nepal after a devastating earthquake that has left many survivors homeless and housed in tents, the plot plunges into a coup that has put a minor bureaucrat in charge of a shattered country. Derisively nicknamed the Hippo but faced with little opposition, the new ruler is gleefully enriching himself and increasing the fortunes of the affluent, while everyone else clings to a precarious form of existence. He is strengthened by the tweeted message conveying support from the Amrikan leader, President Corn Hair which inspires him to adapt a slogan from that country--”Make Darkmotherland Great Again,” while encouraging his citizens to wear red caps.

Although a cast of characters that rival the ones found in War and Peace fill the pages of this book, there are two main figures. One is Kranti, the daughter of a dissident mother. Although her name means Revolution, Kranti loathes her mother’s politics and silently supports the Hippo. Her rich and handsome boyfriend, on the other hand, has become one of her mother’s supporters. The other leading character is Rozy, a gorgeous homosexual whom the Hippo adores and has elevated to a prominent position of influence. 

Slowly both of these protagonists take on different states of mind. Kranti, before marrying her boyfriend, becomes enthralled by a resident of the tent community, a poet whose politics are devoted to humanitarian efforts extended to the refugees he lives among. When Kranti’s husband is killed because of his dissident stance, she becomes openly involved with the poverty-stricken poet.

Rozy, privy to the Hippo’s secrets and regarded in a tacit form of awe by his cabinet, gradually learns that the veneration of the Darkmother can become a political advantage. In a place where coups are easily accepted, no leader is secure--unless that figure becomes spiritually entwined with the goddess that has given her name to the country.

In this morass of characters and intrigue, a satirical allegory lurks. An Amrikan expat gives names to the dogs who cluster near his restaurant: Eric, Ivanka, Pence, Pompeo. When the Hippo makes a trip to pay homage to President Corn Hair, he discovers that the “Amrikan press has been cowed and tamed,” Political protests in Amrika have dwindled because “the people have simply exhausted themselves protesting.” The Hippo finds reassurance in President Corn Hair’s hints that future elections may be forever cancelled but when he returns to Darkmotherland, he finds everything has changed in his absence.

No character in this novel deviates from the repulsive and the only feeling evoked by them is a horrified and nauseated fascination. Upadhyay gives free rein to an unfortunate predilection for clumsy wordplay and sentences that all too often rhyme. What at first seems to be an excursion into Orwellian satire becomes a quagmire of absurdity. 

The only reason to pay attention to Darkmotherland is to warn off any prospective readers. This is a contender for one of the worst novels written in English. Buyers beware.~Janet Brown

Thai Food by David Thompson, photography by Earl Carter (Ten Speed Press)

Do you remember life back in 2002? Internet cafes were a popular feature in big cities and email was considered cutting edge technology. Letters and postcards were keeping post offices afloat all around the world and bookstores were just beginning to worry about that online business, Amazon. Facebook wouldn’t be invented for another two years and wouldn’t be released to the general public until two years after that. Digital cameras were just beginning to catch on. Nobody had heard of Kindles because they weren’t invented until 2007. Many people had landlines and answering machines because cell phones were too cumbersome to use as a primary form of communication. Books were read on paper, not on screens. 

And in that year, Ten Speed Press, an upstart publishing house based in the Bay Area of San Francisco, released a 674-page cookbook with a simple title, Thai Food. 

At this time, Thai restaurants weren’t a common sight in American cities of all sizes and Thailand hadn’t yet become the world’s favorite holiday destination. David Thompson was a young Australian who had fallen in love with Thai food and the country where it was eaten every day, whose London restaurant had received a Michelin star the year before. Outside of the culinary world, nobody knew his name. His new book cost $45.00, the equivalent to $78.95 in today’s currency. Why wasn’t it a flop?

The best cookbooks are the ones that people read for pleasure. M. F. K. Fisher, Laurie Colwin, Brillat-Savarin, even Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, are picked up because they’re all interesting—and often fun—to read. David Thompson knew that and wrote a cookbook that’s an encyclopedia of Thailand’s history, geography, culture, and food, along with detailed instructions on how to create its recipes.

The recipes, he’s quick to assert, aren’t his. He was fortunate to become friends with some of Thailand’s aristocratic matriarchs who had been rigidly trained in the art of royal Thai cuisine. Their standards were unyielding and painstaking. The food they had eaten all their lives had three unassailable components: taste, texture, and seasoning. In pursuit of these attributes, they tolerated no shortcuts and no skimping. 

Their own training came from “memorial books,” that collected recipes beloved by the deceased noblewoman to whom the book was a tribute. They shared these with Thompson and he took their standards as his own. “The best food of any country, “ he says, “has always been centered around the court, and this was certainly true of Siam.” Although Thai Food doesn’t ignore street food and rural staples, it has a primary goal: to preserve how to make the food that was eaten by those who could afford the very best, “before it is eroded, altered, and modernized.”

Thompson is an exceptionally fine writer and an opinionated one who sternly proclaims that Thai cookery is “not an instant cuisine.”  “Substitutions and shortcuts in describing the food would not only be disrespectful but debasing.”

Canned coconut cream he deplores as “bastardized” and he tells exactly how to extract milk and cream from a fresh coconut. Fortunately he ends his description of this agonizing process by saying that using a food processor is allowed. Almost every recipe that he provides involves making a curry paste from scratch, a daunting process for which he grudgingly allows the use of a blender. “Be patient as you make a paste,” he cautions, “The blender, regrettably, was not created to make curry pastes and therefore may expire under such spicy exertions.” When he turns to recipes from the Muslim population of Southern Thailand, such as oxtail soup, he insists on freshly made curry powder for which he provides a list of ten ingredients, most of them ground on the spot. (Thank goodness, using “a clean coffee grinder” is okay.)

On one subject he is adamant. “A meal without rice is inconceivable.” He then provides the necessary components for a proper Thai meal: a relish, a soup, a curry, a salad (which, he says, is a “mistranslation” of what that dish truly--not the salad Westerners include in a meal but “ a lively assemblage of ingredients” whose “sprightliness adds savor and contrast”), and perhaps a simple stir-fried, grilled, or deep-fried dish. No need to worry about the food cooling before it’s served because “flavor is at its optimum just above room temperature.”

In spite of his royalist leanings, Thompson is remarkably generous with recipes for street snacks, dishes made by lesser mortals, and ones that have migrated from other countries. He tells how to make Chiang Mai sausage and its distant cousin that comes from the Northeast. He gives recipes for dishes that are clearly spawned from poverty--minced rabbit curry and curried fish innards (the innards are discarded after making a stock but even so, the name does startle.) He divulges secrets that aren’t commonly known--a source for prepared spices is any Chinese medicine shop, since these are regarded as medicinal and are kept in wooden apothecary drawers.

All of this is embellished with stunning food photography, full-page and in color, almost suitable for framing and definitely appetite-enhancers. Thompson concludes with an extensive bibliography, six pages of sources written in English and four pages that list cookbooks and memorial books that are available only in Thai.

Thompson wrote this to create a record of food that might easily succumb to global influences and modernization. He succeeded. His passion is contagious and his writing is absolutely delightful, while providing an invaluable tutorial in what Thai food has been and what it may no longer be again. ~Janet Brown

Aflame by Pico Iyer (Riverhead Books)

In a year that has begun with the horror of conflagration, Aflame seems to be an unfortunate choice of title, but Pico Iyer earned the right to use it. On the day his California home burned to the ground, he was in his car, “surrounded by walls of flame, five stories high…not even thinking that a car might be the least safe hiding place of all.” With no place to go, he was sleeping on the floor at a friend’s house when another friend told him about a monastery in Big Sur. There he would find a room of his own with ocean views, “no obligations and a suggested donation of thirty dollars a night.”

It was thirty-three years ago when Iyer first learned “the silence of this place is as real and solid as sound.” He’s been a regular visitor every year since then, so devoted to it that when he leaves his home in Kyoto to come here, his wife tells him she’s worried. Another woman she could contend with but “how can I compete against a temple?”

Iyer is a student of many spiritual disciplines, a man who has known the Dalai Lama since he was a teenager when his father took him to Daramshala.  Espousing no particular religious faith, he respects them all. His mother, a renowned religious scholar, asks with a fair amount of alarm when she learns where her son has found refuge,”You’re not going to get converted?” Iyer reassures her that the order of monks whom he is living among are heavily influenced by Hindu and Buddhist teachings. Proselytization is not their stock in trade.

What they offer is the gift of silence, in a natural sanctuary. Although every Fire Season brings smoke and the threat of flames to their community, they describe the fires as “incandescent,” “radiant.” As neighbors to 900 acres of trees and brush, they coexist with the danger of infernos, the cost of living near a gorgeous source of fuel. Iyer, who has come to them fresh from a fire that “left its mark” on him, discovers this way of being is contagious, even though the monastery’s view includes a sweep of scorched hills.

The monks whom he lives with are contemplative, not ones who observe rules of Trappist silence. They’re all busily maintaining the domestic and spiritual life of their community, without disturbing the visitors who have come to find peace. Iyer immediately and reflexively falls into his own work, writing four pages without stopping within the first twenty minutes in his room. In a place of “silence and emptiness and light,” one without screens of any kind, he becomes attuned to the world around him “in all its wild immediacy.”

While steeped in the company of books written by connoisseurs of silence, Kafka, Admiral Byrd, Henry Miller and Thomas Merton (who became unlikely friends with Miller praising Merton for looking as if he were a former convict), Iyer also meets monks who “stay calm amidst the flames” and “trust the dark.” Walking through “knife-sharp light,” he hears a voice singing in a chapel, sweet music he’s certain must be coming from a young woman. When he catches a glimpse of the singer, the person he sees is an old monk, one who is usually silent, “deep in adoration.” In his song, Iyer hears everything the man has given up, transformed into pure clarity.

In the pages of Aflame, Iyer offers up the loveliness and the serenity that he finds in this community of monks, along with apt quotes from other writers whom he taps into while he’s there. With him, we see “stars stream down as if shaken from a tumbler,” “a turquoise cove, white frothing against some rocks,” “great shafts of light between the conifers.” As we follow him, we have a glimpse of what it is to “be filled with everything around” us and we gain a measure of true quiet, the kind that keeps spirits from starvation.~Janet Brown

First Love by Rio Shimamoto, translated by Louise Heal Kawai (Honford Star)

Rio Shimamoto is a Japanese writer who was born in Tokyo in 1983. She was the winner of the Gunzo New Writers’ Prize in 2001 for her book Silhouette while she was still a high school student. She was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize in 2002 for her novella Little by Little which did not win but did win the Noma Literary New Face Prize. 

Shimamoto was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize four times and she was nominated twice for the Naoki Prize. Her book, First Love, was first published in 2018 by Bunshu Bunko. The English language version was translated by Louise Heal Kawai and published in 2024.

Kanna Hijiriyama is a young college student whose goal in life was to become a television news anchor. She has just been arrested by the police for stabbing her own father. When she was being taken into custody by the police, she said to them, “You’ll have to discover my motives for yourselves”. 

You would think that Hijiriyama would be the main focus of the story but she’s not. The true protagonist is Yuki Makabe, a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with hikikomori, socially withdrawn children. The book begins with Makabe being interviewed on a television program titled After Hours Children Clinic which is hosted by a man with four children of his own. 

When asked if she thinks there is anything particular that strikes her about hikikomori, she tells the interviewers and the viewers at home, “Everyone believes that love is something that you have to show your children constantly. But in fact, sometimes that can be the root of the problem”. This scene foreshadows the plot of the story which starts out as a murder mystery but evolves into a courtroom drama focusing on filial piety. 

Makade was approached by a publisher to write a book about Hijiriyama from a psychologist’s perspective. Around the same time, she is contacted by Kasho, her brother-in-law, who wants to discuss an upcoming case about a certain young woman. Kasho has been appointed the defense lawyer for Kanna Hijiriyama. 

Makabe and Kasho are still pondering the motive for the murder. Makabe can’t believe that her parents' opposition to her chosen profession is motive enough to kill her father. Makabe believes there’s something hidden deep within Hijiriyama that triggered her actions. Makabe also doesn’t want to sensationalize the murder which may have an influence on the case. 

As the story progresses, we learn that Kanna Hijiriyama’s father is a famous artist. He is also a strict disciplinarian. Her mother is portrayed as being subservient to her husband and is quite selfish herself. Although Hijiriyama’s case doesn’t seem to be all that complicated, Makabe still cannot make sense of Hijiriyama’s motive. She believes that a “young woman would have to be very determined to kill her own father”. 

She also asks herself, “Why did an ordinary student, in the middle of the regular job-hunting-season, suddenly exhibit such violence”. As Makabe and her brother-in-law dig deeper into the case, we learn more about Kanna Hijiriyama’s past. It becomes evident that she did not have a normal childhood which may have been the root cause for her to kill her father. 

The problem is how can the defense attorney prove that Kanna Hijiriyama was not in a right state of mind when the murder happened. Can he gain sympathy for her even though she admits that it was by her hand that her father died. And will Makabe’s expertise as a clinical psychologist help in any way? The answers may surprise you. ~Ernie Hoyt

ももこの話 (Momoko's Story) by Momoko Sakura *Japanese Text Only (Shueisha)

Momoko Sakura was first introduced here with her travel essay (またたび ‘Mata Tabi’, Asia by the Book, October 2004). She was first and foremost a manga artist. The creator of Chibi Maruko-chan which has become one of Japan’s longest running television anime series. 

ももこの話 (Momoko’s Story) is the third collection of essays in her “Those Days” series which mainly focuses on her memories and episodes from her childhood. These essays were originally published by Shueisha in 1998. The essays were compiled and released in book form in 2006. 

At the beginning of the year in 1998, Sakura got a call from her editor asking when she wanted to holed up in a hotel to focus on writing her next batch of essays. Instead of staying at the Park Hyatt, Sakura requested the Hotel Otani which surprised her editor. 

Her reason for staying at the New Otani instead of the Park Hyatt was simple. Although she likes both hotels, she really enjoys the room service at the New Otani and was looking for to eating Chinese fried rice. She would also be able to enjoy the Otani’s annin-dofu (almond tofu) for dessert. 

Sakura had her editor make reservations for mid-February. She said it was fortunate that one of co-workers came to pick her up as she always brings a number of items with her even if it’s for a short stay. As Sakura is a tea and coffee drinker, she needs her tools to make good tea - tea strainer, a special mug and tea and she needs her tools to make a good cup of coffee - coffee beans, coffee liquor, filters, etc. 

She also brings her favorite sparkling wine, chocolate, konjac jelly (also known as devil’s tongue, voodoo lily, snake palm, or elephant yam), cigarettes, health foods, CDs and CD player, work tools, and clothes. While being holed up in the hotel, the offices of Shueisha were moving to a bigger and more convenient location. By the time Sakura finished writing half of the book's essays, the office move had been completed. 

Sakura wrote half of the book's essays in the five days she spent at the Hotel Otani. She felt relieved that she would have enough time to complete the essays for another book in a reasonable amount of time. So she went back to gardening, went to flower shops, repotting pots in the garden, etc.

After finishing taking care of the garden, she took care of her tropical fish. After the fish, her pet turtle. Once that was done, then it was off to the department store to buy spring clothing. On weekends, she would play with her son at the park. He was at the age when he began to think that Momoko Sakura was his own mother. February turned to March, March turned to April. 

Sakura showed her face at the office around the middle of April. Her editor asked how the rest of her essays were coming. At the time, Sakura was truthful and said she hadn’t written any in a while. Her editor said the deadline for the book is the twenty-fourth of this month. Sakura was at the office on the fourteenth. 

Oh no! Sakura had only ten days to complete the book. She was a little nervous about finishing the project but being a professional, she finished in the nick of time. Some of the things she talked about from her childhood were being a kid without a huge appetite, trying to teach her father the words to popular songs at the time while taking a bath together, her own forgetfulness, trying to stay warm under the kotatsu in the winter, her kakizome homework which is a special piece of calligraphy for the new year, buying sweet potatoes from the sweet potato truck even though her parents ran a fruit and vegetable shop. 

Sakura’s memories of her childhood are nostalgic for anyone who loves the Showa era of Japan or had lived in Japan during that time. Sakura was born in 1965, so she was only two years younger than me when my family moved to Tokyo from Greece. Which means I grew up watching the same television shows and listened to the same music she did. These essays brought back memories of my own childhood.~Ernie Hoyt

Sunny by Colin O'Sullivan

Colin O’Sullivan is an Irish writer who currently resides in Aomori Prefecture in the Tohoku region of Japan. He first came to Japan to teach English but has been living in Japan for more than twenty years. 

Sunny was originally titled The Dark Manual and was published in 2018 in Ireland by Betimes Books. It was also adapted into a television series and was aired on Apple TV+ but cancelled just after one season. As I haven’t had a chance to see the show, I cannot comment or make comparisons to the book.

In the book, Susie Sakamoto is an Irish woman who married a Japanese man named Masahiko. They have an eight-year old son named Zen. Her husband works at a high tech firm called ImaTech, a firm that specializes in robotics. 

Susie’s husband and her son were on their way to Seoul, South Korea where Masa was going to give a talk at a conference. It was Zen’s first ever flight. Unfortunately, due to the trajectory and interference of  a North Korean missile, the plane was sent off course and ended up crashing into the ocean. 

In the Sakamotos home, there is Sunny.  Sunny is a silver, one-meter-tall homebot (Model SH.XL8). Its eyes are two red orbs. At night, if the house is dark, this is all you see: “two red orbs from deep black”. “These are its eyes. Scarlet, but bloodless. It makes them strange. Eyes with no blood, no whites, are strange. No irises, no change, strange”. 

Homebots are the way of the future. Although the robots are not yet sentient, they seem to be on their way and ImaTech is in the lead to make it a reality. However, Susie doesn’t care about Sunny. All it does for her is remind her that her husband and son are no longer with her. 

In her grief, all Susie wants to do is join her husband and son. Sunny is a constant reminder of her husband. It was he who programmed it. Masa programmed it to help Susie around the house. She hates its efficiency. She doesn’t really want to think too much about the robot and its efficiency but lately she cannot help herself from not thinking about it. She wants to turn it off permanently, but doesn’t know how. 

She is alone with Sunny all the time and this makes her angry. She hates being alone and feels great animosity towards the machine. She wonders why her husband programmed it with such an annoying voice and such proper manners. 

To deal with her grief and loneliness, Susie goes to a local bar where she has become friends with a woman named Mixxie. She drowns her sorrows in alcohol and whatever else she can get her hands on just to cope. It isn’t until she hears rumors of something called the “Dark Manual” at the bar which helps her come out of her depression. 

Now with the help of Mixxie and the bar’s owner, they go in search of the “Dark Manual”. But they aren’t the only ones looking for it. When Susie discovers that it was written by her own husband, she makes an even more desperate search for it, believing that it is hidden somewhere in her own house. 

There have been many stories dealing with the concept of humans vs. machines. This is just one in a long line of titles with a similar plot. At times Sunny is reminiscent of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and is an excellent cyber-thriller. However, more than half the story focuses on Susie Sakamoto’s grief and anger. 

You almost wish she would end her life just so we could stop feeling her hopelessness and despair. Fortunately, the book comes into its own after Susie becomes determined to find the “Dark Manual” but will she be able to shut down Sunny for good? Will Susie and friends find it before the others? Are the robots on the verge of thinking for themselves? And what will happen to Sunny if Susie does find the “Dark Manual”?.... ~Ernie Hoyt

Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East by Gita Mehta (Vintage Books)

Blame it on the Beatles. When they found their popularity was beginning to fade as the Rolling Stones climbed to the top of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, they turned to the mystical world of India. “The kings of rock and roll abdicated. To Ravi Shankar and the Maharishi.” Meditation, gurus, and sitars became cool and India became the new Mecca for hip westerners. While those who couldn’t afford the plane fare took refuge in reading Siddhartha and listening to “raga rock” with its tabla and sitar influences, the more adventurous and affluent descended upon the Subcontinent, looking for whatever enlightenment might descend upon them there. 

Suddenly pseudo-Hindus took their place among the Europeans who had traveled the latest version of the Silk Road in search of cheap drugs. The two forms of quests collided and merged, providing a convenient source of revenue for Indian entrepreneurs on every economic level. “From accepting the fantasies it was a very short haul to…manufacturing them.” Mysticism became “a home industry,” supplied to hordes of Westerners who were fleeing materialism and wanted to experience the spiritual cleansing of poverty.

A French diplomat claimed that 230,000 of his country’s citizens had arrived in India by the 1970’s, with at least another 20,000 who were there without proper documentation. Their numbers were swelled by other Europeans, Americans, Australians, and Canadians, “in pursuit of either mind expansion or obscure salvations.” 

Jung had arrived long before this influx and correctly assessed the risks of becoming an expat in India, saying that India was the essence of naked realty while the West was cushioned by “a madhouse of abstractions.” Without that cushion, Westerners would “disintegrate in India.”

Gita Mehta, born in Delhi, educated at Cambridge, a documentary filmmaker and a war correspondent for NBC who covered the war in Bangladesh, was fascinated and amused by this influx of privileged Westerners who eagerly gave up all privileges in search of whatever truth was offered to them. Mehta, herself a product of privilege, brought her cynicism and sharp wit to what she termed “entering a haunted house on a dare,” an ashram in Poona where God presides and his future successor is embodied in a smaller God, a Swiss five-year-old who runs in feral splendor with the neglected offspring of the acolytes. Two thousand followers give all their attention to absorbing God’s wisdom, taking on Hindu names that they’re unable to pronounce properly. 

“Sacred knowledge in the hands of fools destroys,” Mehta quotes from the Upanishads. She’s told by a young woman who left India in a state of diagnosed insanity, “I should never have trusted gurus who wear Adidas running shoes.” Others happily divulge their past lives to her--”the Buddha’s charioteer,” a woman who in another realm of existence was the mother of her own husband. A young French woman who still nurses a daughter who boasts a full set of teeth, idly speculates that she could become the next Mother of the utopian world of Auroville, since she and the present leader share a nationality--”famous, like a Pope!” In the sacred city of Benares, spiritual enlightenment is enhanced by hypodermic needles. “Everywhere now,” Mehta is told by a German photographer, “you find morphine.” 

Mehta’s breezy gallows humor and anecdotal narrative may lead to questions of exaggerated quasi-fiction. However everything she’s written in Karma Cola is backed up by Akash Kapur’s Better to Have Gone (Asia by the Book, 3/24/2022). He and his wife both grew up in Auroville as its utopia was being formed. His account of this community is as harrowing as Mehta’s depiction of 20th century enlightenment. Even so, he and his family have returned to what seems to have become a successful experiment, embodying every goal longed for by the spiritual seekers whom Mehta has pilloried. This may be the ideal conclusion to her satirical dissection--that a new city has been created in India, one that flouts every form of Indian reality that the spiritual seekers once embraced.~Janet Brown

Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe (HarperCollins)

When Emerald goes broke while living a wild life in New York, her request for help is refused by her wealthy sister, Bai Suzhen. Still, after Emerald’s venture into the world of escort services goes dangerously awry, Suzhen flies from Singapore to rescue Emerald and bring her to the safety of the island republic.

Since Emerald is as unconventional as Su is prudent, Singapore’s sterility isn’t where she belongs. Swiftly she uncovers the hidden side of the Lion City, hanging out with lesbians and eating at street stalls, while horrifying Su’s husband, a native-born Singaporean with political ambitions.

Sister Snake might seem as if Crazy Rich Asians has collided with the 21st century version of Sex in the City if it wasn’t for its opening sentence. “Before they had legs, they had tails.” 

Dipping deep into the Chinese Legend of the White Snake and her green counterpart,  Amanda Lee Koe has brought the story of shape-shifters into the modern world. Su and Emerald left the West Lake of Hangzhou as beautiful women, transformed from snakes after seizing the lotus seeds of immortality and meditating for eight hundred years upon self-cultivation, an art that allows them to take on a human form. Sworn sisters since they first met when the green viper saved the life of the white krait, Su’s desire to become human only took place because of Emerald’s love of risk. Once they became women, immortal, beautiful, and able to move from reptilian to human form at will, Su’s pragmatic and goal-driven nature continues to collide with Emerald’s restless hedonism. “Moderation was too human for her,” while Su believes this is the key to success. Throughout the centuries, the sisters alternately co-exist and clash, with Emerald’s feral nature always lurking at her surface, while Su represses her own, to the point that she undergoes plastic surgery to put the beginning of wrinkles into her perfect and unaging face.

A trophy wife in Singapore who brought her own wealth to her marriage, Su is horrified to discover she’s pregnant, a fact that she confirms when she comes to rescue Emerald. In her fear that the life within her may be a snake, not a human fetus, she kills the person who might reveal her pregnancy, a man who is Emerald’s best friend, whom she murders with the instinctive and deadly skills of her inborn nature.

Suddenly the shape-shifters change into each other’s human emotional states, with Emerald’s deep and compassionate links with human friends and Su’s release of her innate savagery. Although separated by their new transformations, they are still sisters and they are, under their glamorous exteriors, still viper and krait.

When the story of the White Snake first came into being in the Tang Dynasty, it was, Koe says, intended as “a cautionary morality tale.” In her retelling, she was guided by the vision of “a hot snake queen with an existential crisis,” which she turned into a pair. Throughout Sister Snake, Koe gives glimpses of who these women have been in their reptilian lives, gradually enlarging and deepening these views of the snake sisters before their human lives threaten to drive them apart. The ending that closes this novel is startling, satisfying, and a lovely surprise, taking the story from a guise of romance and fantasy into something that’s completely fresh and new.

With Sister Snake, Amanda Lee Koe joins a new wave of novelists from Singapore, taking her place beside Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation (Asia by the Book, January 2022) and Kirsten Chen’s Counterfeit (Asia by the Book, June 2022). These powerful voices give vibrancy to fiction, with novels that take conventional forms and give them unexpected twists.~Janet Brown

Since Fukushima by Wago Ryoichi, translated by Jody Halebsky & Takahashi Ayako (Vagabond Press)

Wago Ryoichi is from Fukushima City in Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. He is a poet and also taught Japanese literature at a high school in Minami Soma, a city located just thirty kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. 

His book, Since Fukushima, is not just a book of poetry. The catastrophe changed his way of thinking. Since March 2011, his poetry focuses on the devastation and ecological disaster caused by 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, known in Japan as 3-11 or the Great East Japan Earthquake. 

The earthquake had a magnitude of 9.0 and the epicenter was about 80 miles east of Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture’s largest city. The quake triggered a tsunami that measured over forty feet in some areas of the Tohoku region. The hardest hit areas were Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima Prefectures. A fifty-foot tsunami wave hit the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant causing a nuclear meltdown. It is one of the worst nuclear accidents in history.

Pebbles of Poetry Part 1 and Party were compiled from Wago’s tweets on his Twitter account he started posting five days after the quake. He tweeted his feelings, his thoughts, and what he saw. His first sets of tweets were from March 16, 2001 from 4:23 am to March 17, 12:24 am. His second set of tweets were from March 27 from 10:00pm to 10:44pm. 

At the time of the disaster, he was still conflicted. Should he evacuate with his wife and children, could he abandon his home and his parents. Wago tried persuading his parents to leave but they refused so he also decided to stay in Fukushima. His wife and his children had evacuated to a safer zone. 

The event not only changed his way of thinking, it changed his style of writing. His poems not only focus on the human toll of the disaster, but the destruction and the ruination of the land, the pets and livestock that were left behind, and also about the people who decided to remain, such as he and his parents. 

There are poems that are told from the perspective of a cow abandoned by its farmer, a poem about how contaminated soil was dug up, placed in plastic bags, only to be reburied in the same ground. 

Following the series of poems, there is a conversation with American poet and teacher Brenda Hillman and Wago Ryoichi discussing Activism and Poetry. The interview was conducted at Hillman's home by the translators of the book, Ayako Takahashi and Judy Halebsky.

The two poets discuss the role of poetry in activism and also in teaching. Wago says, “Much of what I learned through teaching connects directly to writing poetry”. On the other hand, Hillman says she writes her poetry in a “very strange dream world”. She says, “The world inside and the world of my brain and imagination are very separate from the outer practical world”. 

Hellman says most of her poems are very political so she sees teaching as “a bridge between these inner metaphoric states of the poet, and the outside world which is sometimes very numb to poetry and art”. 

It’s a very interesting discussion on how natural disasters can be taught through the use of poetry. I was living in Japan at the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake and I watched the breaking news on television and constantly checked updates on Twitter. Although I was living in Tokyo at the time, the disaster affected the entire country. One of my friends mentioned that people I’ve never met were willing to pay for my plane ticket home to the U.S. However, I can relate more to Wago as Japan is my adopted home and there was no way I was going to abandon my new home or leave my wife alone in the country. ~Ernie Hoyt

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob (New World, Random House)

Barack Obama, America’s first biracial president, is nearing the end of his second term in office when Mira Jacob’s six-year-old son Z becomes aware of differences in skin color. Discovering that Michael Jackson, his idol, wasn’t born with fair skin, he wonders if his own white father had once been brown, as he and his mother are. When Michael Brown is killed in Ferguson, Z asks his mother if white people are afraid of those who are brown and follows it up with “Is Daddy afraid of us?”

Mira has been aware of skin color all her life. Her parents left India soon after they were married and made their home in New Mexico where “they were the third Indian family to move into the state.” Their son and daughter were born in Albuquerque, where they grew up assailed by questions and opinions about their brown skin. While their classmates want to know if they’re “Indian like feathers or Indian like dots,” when they go to meet their relatives in India, Mira, browner than her brother or parents is characterized as “a darkie.” 

“It makes you seem like a servant,” a cousin explains, “ and the good boys only want to marry wheatish girls so everyone is just feeling bad for your parents.”

“I’d been the wrong color in America my whole life but it hurt worse somehow, knowing it was the same in a country full of people who (I had thought) looked like me.”

Mira’s parents had never had a conversation together until after their arranged marriage. A happily-wedded couple, they’re certain the same solution will work for their daughter. Instead while living in New York City, Mira meets a man who had been her classmate in elementary school. When they marry, both Mira’s Christian parents and Jed’s Jewish ones are “warm and welcoming.”

Then in 2016 politics begins to divide them. Clinton versus Trump draws lines between people who love each other .Muslims face deportation and bigotry comes out into the open. What once were “microaggressions” flare into racial attacks. Mira is assaulted on a subway and none of the other passengers come to her aid. At a party given by her mother-in-law, some of the guests look at her skin and assume she’s one of the household help. And for Z’s new questions, Mira struggles to find answers.

Published in 2019, Good Talk is as painful now as it was when it was written. When one of Mira’s friends asks in 2016, “Damn. What are we doing to the babies,” the question scalds with fresh urgency. When Mira tells her husband how she has copied his confidence in order to walk into a room alone but now the rooms are harder to get into, her pain echoes with renewed clarity.

Written as graphic literature, illustrated by Mira Jacobs, Good Talk conveys emotions and behavior through its drawings as vividly as it does in its honest and thoughtful conversations. This is a book that needs to be read and reread, staying in print and placed front and center on shelves in libraries and bookstores. It offers no easy answers but a thousand avenues for discussions, now more than ever.~Janet Brown

Masquerade by Mike Fu (Tin House)

Anyone who has made a round-trip flight across the Pacific knows the price exacted by these hours on a plane. Suddenly the traveler has lost control of ordinary life at the end of these journeys, sleeping and waking at times far from one’s normal schedule, feeling ravenous hunger at four in the morning, finding the world at large has taken on an unfamiliar, almost hallucinatory, cast. “A legal drug,” Pico Iyer has called jet lag and when it’s mixed with illegal ones or even alcohol, it removes even more controls.

Meadow Liu is well acquainted with jet lag. He’s been flying back and forth between the U.S. and Shanghai once or twice a year, ever since he was ten years old. Even so he’s always felt that “he’s lost a piece of himself on these journeys” and on this latest one he has the feeling that not only is he “intensely disconnected” from everything he knows, he’s become “31 going on 13”.

He has many reasons to feel this way because his entire life has become a liminal space. He was given a job as bartender in a hip Brooklyn hangout after he abandoned his academic career. He was forced to move from a small apartment and is now plant-sitting for Selma, an artist who is so perfect she seems like a “splendid illusion.” He was recently ghosted by a man who seemed to be the perfect boyfriend until he vanished without a word of explanation. To cope with his floating existence, Meadow drinks a lot and takes every drug that comes his way.

To complicate things even more, while searching for his passport several hours before his flight, he comes across an old book on Selma’s shelves. Drawn to it because the author and he have the same name, he’s intrigued that the story takes place in Shanghai, where he himself is going. Tossing it into his carry-on, he forgets about it in the flurry of living as a temporary guest with his parents and making contact with Selma who is here to launch an art show of her work.

When he dips into this borrowed novel, he’s surprised that he and the narrator seem to be living parallel lives, with each of them attending decadent Shanghai parties. Things become stranger when he returns to Brooklyn. The book disappears and resurfaces at odd intervals. A man who shows up at closing time in Meadow’s workplace warns him to “pay attention to symbols,” an admonition that he later finds is also given to the narrator of the peculiar book.  Before this warning is given, Meadow finds a white switchblade that’s been left behind on one of the bar’s tables. The same knife is given to the narrator in the novel.

Selma has mysteriously vanished from Shanghai so Meadow is unable to ask her about the eerie coincidences that he’s found in the book that she owns. Meanwhile his life becomes increasingly bizarre, with a bedroom mirror almost liquefying as he stands before it one sleepless night. He’s followed by strangers as he makes his way through New York. Awakened by pounding on the apartment door one night, he looks out through the peephole and sees Selma standing there, only to have her disappear from view. Confronted with someone who looks disturbingly like him, Meadow follows his double who leads him to an off-off-Broadway theater. A poster near the theater’s entrance has photos of the actors. One of them is the man who ghosted Meadow.

And as his life becomes increasingly unhinged, Meadow finds it’s being replicated, page by page,  in the novel written by the man who shares his name.

Is this being scripted and manipulated by Selma, a woman who has always been elusive or is Meadow immersed in a form of psychosis that he’s nourished with cocktails, drugs, and jet lag? Is this a puzzle he’s meant to solve or is it a temporary state, a “translucent jelly,” that will eventually fade away?

Mike Fu is a translator based in Japan who translated Sanmao’s classic travelogue, Stories of the Sahara (Asia by the Book, April 2021)  into English in 2019. Masquerade is his first novel, one into which he seems to have poured everything he’s ever observed and experienced. A smart write and a skillful observer, Fu’s gift of creating atmosphere along with his well-turned phrases (“thunder purred with the malice of a sleeping cat”) make this book a compelling one—with an annoying ending.  As the narrator of the novel within this novel concludes, “If any trace of doubt remains--then write this story anew.” Every reader of Masquerade is given a chance to create their own explanation, their own end to the story.~Janet Brown

Landbridge: life in fragments by Y-Dang Troeng (Duke University Press)

Y-Dang Troeng was born in the safety of a refugee camp, to parents who had made the perilous journey over the Thai border to escape from the Samay-a-Pot, the Pol Pot Time. With their daughter’s birth coming a month after they had arrived in the camp called Khao-I-Dang, they gave their baby that name. This meant that Y-Dang carried a story before she could talk, both a burden and a gift.

Eleven months later her parents were given asylum in Canada and Y-Dang grew up in “Alice Munro country,” in the shadow of a writer who brought grim stories under an unsparing light. But when Y-Dang was old enough to tell her own story and that of her parents who had lived under “the ruination of wartime,” she finds other people have told it already. Many of these people have researched it, studied it, and given it an academic cast. But they haven’t lived it.

Those who have lived it write about their history in a particular form, in memoir that tears at the heart and carries a narrative. Y-Dang, who is herself an academic, an Associate Professor of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, finds that her voice demands a different form of expression, her writing is rejected.

When she tells her own story, “theory, fiction, autobiography blur through allusive fragments.” When she attends an international conference on genocide studies in Phnom Penh, she listens to Western intellectuals explain “Cambodia’s history to me and to other Cambodians.” When she goes to the trial of Cambodian war criminals and hears the verdict that states the Khmer Rouge leaders are “guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide,’ she wonders if the Americans who sent bombers to her country will ever be brought to justice. When she hears a Western speaker discuss “who gets to decide who gets to be a victim,” with the faces of three girls who died in the Khmer Rouge prison of Tuol Sleng and whose faces have been copied from the photographic record of those who died in that place, she’s sickened that these faces are being used as “background wallpaper for this woman’s presentation.” When she and her mother go to Tuol Sleng, her mother finds her brother’s picture hanging on the wall, taken before his death,  by a Khmer Rouge photographer who was given the job of documenting who the prisoners were.

Her parents and others who came to Canada were also photographed as they got off the plane, “smiling in the blistering cold.” They had to smile. They were being met by smiling politicians who welcomed them without ever acknowledging what the Cambodians had lost in their decision to leave their own country. They were people who smiled in spite of baksbat, broken courage or broken form, their smiles made possible by kamleang chet, the strength of the heart. 

When Y-Dang approaches their histories and their lives as refugees, the pain of it forces her to write it in fragments. When her own story becomes consumed by a cancer diagnosis, she charts it through letters to her young son. She refuses “to be silenced, letting other people tell your story.”  She wonders “if I would ever find the level of stability of body and mind required to write my family’s own story?” She reflects on the word “asylum,” “a word that evokes “comfort as much as it does madness,” “a sanctuary for the displaced and a ward for the mentally ill.” It is, she says, the “one English word that I rely upon to understand my family’s history…It is so precise.”

Precision is what governs Landbridge, in its short and brilliant essays that were written in haste but with extreme care.  The book is Y-Dang’s legacy. Diagnosed with cancer in 2021, she died in 2022. Landbridge was published in 2023.

Y-Dang Troeng wasn’t able to hold her own story in her hands but she triumphed. She told it in her own way, on her own terms.~Janet Brown

Rental House by Weike Wang ( Riverhead Books)

On their way to Martha’s Vineyard where they’ll be steps away from the ocean in a cottage that has an extra bedroom for visitors, Nate and Keru have the sort of marriage everyone dreams of. Young professionals who live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, they’ve emerged from the isolation of the pandemic ready for a vacation. There’s only one glitch--their parents.

Both Nate and Keru are “first-gen” graduates of Yale. Nate is the son of rural parents who marvel that he’s made it “from Appalachia to the Ivy League,” or as Nate puts it “from white trash to the White House.” Keru is the only child of successful parents who immigrated from rural China when she was still a baby and who regard her as their “built-in translator.” While Nate’s parents feel dubious about Keru’s US citizenship, Keru’s parents treat Nate like “the store clerk at their favorite TJ Maxx, a person they recognized and smiled at.” 

Within the framework of this marriage, Weike Wang has created a scathing comedy of manners. Keru’s parents visit with their Chinese cultural standards unassailed by their American lives. Nate is told by his father-in-law that using a dishwasher is fine for him but not for Keru. “To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat.” Keru’s mother, while watching a TV program about upscale real estate transactions, remarks that “they make deals look too easy. Where’s the suffering?” 

When the votes are finally counted in the 2016 election, Nate is crushed by his parents’ choice of candidate while Keru’s mother points out that having a president in office for eight years is nothing compared to “an entire childhood spent under Chairman Mao.” 

When Keru first meets Nate’s parents, it’s at a Yale gathering where almost all of the mothers are garbed in floral print dresses and wearing floppy sun hats. “How do you tell any of them apart?” Keru asks Nate as they approach her future mother-in-law. She’s amazed at “how innocuous the conversation can get” and wonders if all white families chirp at each other “like a set of affable birds.”

As their parents age, Nate and Keru no longer have them as part of their vacation. Instead they meet a couple at an Adirondacks retreat who have come to New York from Romania. An affluent expat, the husband immediately offers up his Brooklyn zip code as a status marker and nods approvingly when Nate provides the one in which he and Keru live. Swiftly the Romanian couple establish their point of view--napping schedules are scrupulously adhered to when the wife is ovulating—and they identify Nate and Keru as DINKs, Double Income No Kids. The epithet becomes an attack on Nate and Keru’s enviable life as the Romanian husband advises them to become expats themselves. “Even a few months will give you a better perspective.”

If Jane Austen were alive in the 21st Century, this is the book that she might well have written. Satirical without carrying a vicious bite, Rental House is a novel that evokes startled laughter on one page and uncomfortable squirming on the next. Under Wang’s lens, marriage, families, race, and class are artfully dissected and recast in a different light, one that’s sometimes uncomfortable but been needed for a very long time.~Janet Brown

Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka, translated by Sam Melissa (Vintage)

Bullet Train is the third book in Kotaro Isaka’s Hitman series which includes Three Assassins, Mantis (Asia by the Book, Sept.2, 2024), and Hotel Lucky Seven. It was originally published as マリアビートル (Maria Beetle) in 2010 by Kadokawa Shoten. It was adapted into a stage play in Japan in 2018 and also adapted into a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt. 

I had watched the Hollywood movie and was excited to read the book in English which was translated by Sam Melissa who also translated Mantis. I wanted to see how closely the movie adaptation was of Isaka’s book. 

A former hitman boards the Tohoku Shinkansen “Hayate” at Tokyo Station which is bound for Morioko in Iwate Prefecture. He is determined to take revenge against a teenager named Satoshi Oji whose nickname is the Prince.  The Prince had pushed Kimura’s son, Wataru, off the roof of a department just for fun. 

Unknown to Kimura, the Prince has lured him onto the shinkansen knowing full well that Kimura wants to take revenge. Fourteen-year-old Satoshi is no ordinary teenager. He is a sociopath who enjoys manipulating people. Before Kimura can shoot the boy, he is tasered and when he wakes up, he is bound hand and foot. 

The Prince tells Kimura that he has an acquaintance watching over Wataru and if anything should happen to him, Kimura’s son will be in danger. Kimura has no choice but to do the Prince’s bidding. 

On the same train are two professional hitmen, Lemon and Tangerine. Tangerine loves books and is well read while Lemon is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends. They’ve been hired by a ruthless Yakuza boss named Yoshio Minegishi, to rescue his kidnapped son and to bring back the suitcase full of ransom money to Morioka.  

Lemon had stashed the suitcase away but when we went to retrieve it, the suitcase was missing. As Lemon was taking his time coming back to the seat, Tangerine goes to check on his partner. When the pair come back to their seat, they discover Minegishi’s son to be dead!

Also boarding the train is yet another hitman. His name is Nanao but has the codename “Ladybug”. Although his last few assignments have been successful, something always goes awry. His handler, Maria, decided to get him an easy job. All he has to do is steal a suitcase of money and get off at the next station. 

The job seems simple enough. Ladybug finds the suitcase, which happens to be the suitcase that Lemon and Tangerine were to return to Minegishi. Just as he was about to step off the train, he is confronted by another hitman, “The Wolf” who has a vendetta against Ladybug. 

In a scuffle between Ladybug and the Wolf, Ladybug gains the upper hand and has the Wolf in a chokehold. Unfortunately, the train jerks and Ladybug unintentionally breaks the Wolf’s neck. Now he has to hide a dead body and must try to get off at the next station. 

The Prince notices something odd about some of the other passengers and decides to see how he can manipulate them as well. 

Although I enjoyed the Hollywood adaption of the movie, I found the book to have more substance. The movie was one action scene after another, including heavy doses of humor. The book is not only full of action but it’s a psychological thriller as well. Isaka has created one of the most evil characters with Satoshi Oji, the Prince. A very intelligent young boy who is also a total psychopath. 

The book goes into more detail about how Kimura gets acquainted with the Prince and the events that lead to him boarding the train at Tokyo Station with the intent to kill. What really lures in the reader though is trying to decide who is going to survive. The other mystery is why are they all on the same train? Will anybody be left alive by the time the train pulls into Morioka? And who killed Minegishi’s son? You will just have to read the book to find out. ~Ernie Hoyt

My Humorous Japan Part 3 by Brian W. Powle (NHK Shuppan)

Brian W. Powle is a British citizen and teacher who taught at Aoyama Gakuin in Tokyo for many years. He has published a number of textbooks for high schools and universities and has also appeared on NHK radio and television as well as contributing articles to newspapers. He says that he tries to be an entertainer as well as a teacher. It’s his belief that “If students can laugh and enjoy themselves while learning English, so much the better”.

My Humorous Japan Part 3 is Powle’s third book on what he finds amusing and humorous about living in Japan. As much as I would have liked to feature Parts 1 and 2, only Part 3 was available at my local library. 

Part 3 was first published in 1997 so some of the content that was current at the time of publication may seem a bit dated now. However, many of the topics are still relevant today such as school bullying and train pests, more commonly known in Japan as chikan which is usually translated as pervert and refers to people, mostly men, who molest women on crowded trains. 

As a long time resident of Japan myself, I find Powle’s experience quite similar to my own. His first essay in this collection is about the obatalian. The term isn’t used as often now but the actions of the obatalian haven't changed. 

So who and what are obatalians. They’re usually middle-aged women from about forty to elderly women in their eighties and nineties. Powle points out that there are many theories about the origin of the word and how some people think it should be spelt obattalion as the word combines “obasan” (aunt or older woman) and “battalion” and “we get an aggressive middle-aged lady who looks something like a fighting soldier”. 

They’re the kind of woman who rushes on to the train to grab the last available seat. They talk loudly in public complaining about their daughter-in-laws. They often stand and talk to their other obatalian friends in the pool getting in the way of others who actually want to swim. They may also be tight with their husbands’ allowance. Thankfully, my wife doesn’t fit into the description of an obatalian. 

One of my favorite essays of Powles is titled My Strange Experience at a Hot Spring Resort. Japan is famous for its hot springs and ryokans (traditional Japanese inns). There’s nothing better than soaking in a hot bath to get rid of all your anxieties. Some baths may be located near a natural river or waterfall. 

Powle was telling the proprietor of the inn about how much he enjoyed the nice sound of the waterfall that made him fall blissfully asleep. However, the woman told him “that was not the sound of the waterfall. The toilet next door is out of order. The water won’t stop running. That’s what you heard”. Needless to say, Powle could not fall asleep the next evening as his perception of a nice waterfall was replaced by the image of a broken toilet!

Even today, many visitors to Japan are not sure what to make of the Japanese toilet. The old traditional squat toilets have been replaced by washlets, toilets with a computer console that some people find as confusing as the cockpit of an airplane. Imagine if you’re a man and press the button for bidet instead of oshiri (the Japanese term for your backside). 

Aside from the two essays mentioned above, the book includes sixteen other stories of Powles’ experience in Japan with titles like Why Do Foreigners Get Angry in Japanese Barbershops and A Fortune Teller Who Couldn’t Predict Her Own Death. 

It’s very light reading for the Japanophile and will give you a glimpse of what it’s like to live in Japan as seen through the eyes of a foreigner. Also, it’s just entertaining. ~Ernie Hoyt

Koan Khmer by Bunkong Tuon (Northwestern University Press)

A little boy and his extended family make their way out of Pol Pot’s Cambodian horror, going from a refugee camp to life in the U.S. where the boy grows up to become a university professor. This affirms that the American Dream is still possible, right? Not according to Samnang Sok, the leading protagonist of Koan Khmer who asserts at the end of this novel that “my American dream was more of an American nightmare,’ one that didn’t end until after he leaves adolescence. 

A child who never knew the date of his true birthday, Samnang’s first memory is of his mother’s death when he was three. Born into a peasant family in a rural village, his Pol Pot years were spent as a naked boy in the woods,” surrounded by the natural world. Although his family were relatively unscathed by the Khmer Rouge, unlike urban, educated Cambodians whose privilege made them targets of Angkar’s rage, Samnang’s uncle and grandparents decided it would be wise to head for the Thai border and the safety of a U.N. refugee camp. The family will live in three different camps before they’re sponsored by an American minister and board a plane for the United States.

At first they’re dazed and delighted by the wonders of a washing machine, a dishwasher, a bathtub, and a television. Then slowly they begin to realize what they’ve lost. Samnang’s uncle is disheartened by the lack of farmland in this small city in Massachusetts. There’s no place for him to fish and he despairs over how he will feed his family. 

When Samnang accepts the minister’s invitation to go with him to church, he begins to realize the difference between his family and the parishioners sitting near him on a pew. When the congregation begins to pray, Samnang mutters curses in Khmer under his breath and is later praised for his piety.

Finding an apartment in an Italian neighborhood, the Sok family finds no welcome there. People whose own origins stemmed from immigrants resent the new inhabitants who evoke memories of the Vietnam War. Other boys attack Samnang for being a “gook” and he takes refuge in his schoolwork, gaining English fluency through ESL classes and TV programs. Skipping a grade, he enters high school before he enters puberty, an accomplishment that guarantees he’ll continue to be a social pariah. He stops caring about academic achievements and then stops caring about anything at all. All that he’s found in America is a state of permanent displacement.

What saves him is a chance to move to Long Beach, a city with a large and established Cambodian community. For the first time since his introduction to the U.S he hears his own language, eats his own food, moves among crowds of people who are Khmer. He walks into a library and discovers the poems of Charles Bukowski. He begins to write his own poetry, mining his own experience, and slowly his education begins, with a hunger to learn everything.

It takes years for him to recover from “growing up Cambodian in the 1980s on the East Coast.”

His story is “based loosely” on the life of Bunkong Tuon and the stories of his family. The details that unfold in Koan Khmer are often cruel and unsparing: the physical examinations before coming to the US when modest Cambodians stand naked before strange doctors, feeling powerless and humiliated; the day Samnang is spat at by a boy while he’s taking a walk with his grandfather who stares in shock at the child’s parents and is met only with a hostile gaze; the terror felt by every Asian in the Los Angeles area when Koreans are attacked during the chaos after the Rodney King verdict. If this is what comes with the American dream, then it’s long past time for us all to wake up.~Janet Brown

Woman of Interest by Tracy O’Neill

Tracy O’Neill grew up Irish a few miles out of  Boston. A frequent refrain throughout her years at home was “I’m your real mother,” stated by a woman who has been Tracy’s parent almost from birth. Knowing that she and her younger brother had both been adopted from Korea has given rise to Tracy’s understandable curiosity about the woman who gave birth to her, but this is crowded out by getting two Master’s degrees and a PhD from Columbia, while learning how to live on her own in Brooklyn.

“I read and I wrote,” she says--but then Covid comes to town. Reading and writing in isolation begins to pall and Tracy starts a serious search for her birth mother.

Armed only with scanty facts from the adoption agency who placed her, Tracy resorts to a 21st Century solution, DNA analysis. She spits in a vial six different times and after the sixth try, she’s matched with a girl who’s her third cousin and is put in contact with that cousin’s father.

“She’s alive,” her uncle tells her. With Covid travel restrictions lifted, Tracy buys a round-trip ticket to Korea that will give her 22 days with her birth mother and her newly-discovered Korean family. Suddenly Tracy has three blood siblings, a sister and two brothers. All four of them, she’s told, have different fathers.

“Don’t give her anything all,” her uncle says of Tracy’s mother. “Never forget,” another man tells her, “These guys are strangers.”  

Armed with Google Translate, she’s met in Korea by her sister, her cousin, and the aunt who witnessed her birth. She’s also faced with ten days of quarantine that she spends in a bedroom of her aunt’s apartment and she begins a life in translation. Every question, every answer is conveyed in the dubious accuracy of telephone apps--Kakao Talk and Navur Papago, as well as the version offered by Google.

Tracy is back in isolation again, in the home of a cousin and an aunt who are obsessed with feeding her. “You’re too skinny,” they tell her on a phone screen.

This is the way facts emerge, skeletal and often contradictory. Her uncle in America tells her she’s being lied to because her relatives want “everyone to be happy.” When Tracy is at last able to meet her birth mother, she hires a phone interpreter to make certain the translations aren’t tarnished by family feelings. However the phone interpreter is as resolute in striving for a happy conclusion as the relatives have been.

Embraced by her mother, she fails to feel “the inimitable bond of mothers and children.” “I was nothing but a stone-cold cardboard cutout,,,in the iron clench of a shuddering old woman.”

When Tracy goes to her mother’s apartment, she is handed a drawstring bag that holds one million won, which is around $8000 U.S dollars. Then she learns she can’t meet her youngest brother because he has never been, nor never will be, told about her existence.

Covid, cultural shock, no common language, and a stay in a foreign country that’s shortened from twenty-two to only seventeen days, ten of which were spent in quarantine--this expedition is doomed from the outset. But Tracy O’Neill is a novelist and she knows how to tell a gripping story. A fan of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels, she cleverly drapes her narrative in noir, even coming up with the requisite hard-boiled PI whom she hires at the beginning of her quest. A man who provides no vital information, he remains part of the plot up to the very end, and real or not, he’s an enticing addition. So is the Serbian boyfriend who speaks in broken English. Another plot device? What’s real? Who knows the true usefulness of a common language?

What is true, Tracy concludes, is this. “I twice met a stranger…” The stranger who was her eomma remains an unexplored enigma to the daughter who was given away and to that daughter’s readers. “I hate endings,” Tracy says and this story remains shrouded in a haunting mist that’s skillfully reported—or perhaps created— in Woman of Interest. ~Janet Brown 

Cruising the Anime City : An Otaku's Guide to Neo Tokyo by Patrick Macias and Tomohiro Machiyama (Stone Bridge Press)

Any book on pop culture is sure to go out of date almost as soon as it’s published. It is no different with Patrick Macias and Tomohiro Machiyama’s book Cruising the Anime City which was first published twenty years ago. A lot has changed since then. 

Even the word otaku, which was once used as a euphemism for young males who were seriously into games and anime. What we in the States would call “nerds”. Geeky boys who couldn’t get a girl to talk to them if they tried. 

In 1989, Tomohiro Machiyama wrote a book called おたくの本 (Otaku no Hon) and would like to take credit for popularizing the term. Unfortunately、 a young man named Tsutomu Miyazaki was arrested the same year. He kidnapped and raped three little girls. 

Machiyama describes Miyazaki as a “walking worst-case scenario otaku. With messy long hair, a pale face, and geeky glasses”. He was twenty-seven at the time of his arrest and was still living with his parents and was unemployed. 

The police found a large number of anime videos and Lolicon (Lolita Complex) manga. Machiyama also states that “because the case was so sensational, many Japanese people began to wonder what kind of lifestyle had created such a monster. 

Otaku no Hon just came out and people “connected the dots and came to the conclusion that otaku were dangerous perverts”. It would be many years later that the astigmatism attached to otaku would be reversed. 

The change came about due to a former anime creator who became a social critic. He was a self-proclaimed “Ota-king” and would explain otaku culture in layman’s terms to economists and academics. He championed the otaku subculture as it was the otaku who “through their purchasing power, supported technological advances in Japan”. 

Macias and Machiyama’s book on pop culture covers manga, the Japanese comic, toys, idols, anime, games, movies, cosplay (people who dress up like their favorite anime or game character), Comiket (comic market), and pla-mo (plastic models). 

Although manga was still popular when I first moved to Japan in 1995, the market had changed in just a few years. When Macias made his first trip to Japan in 1999, he didn’t see people reading mangas on the trains or the buses. By 2004, when this book came out, people were reading manga on their smartphones. 

That doesn’t mean the manga has lost its popularity. The print production of the omnibus comics may have gone down but manga is alive and well in Japan. Just go to any Mandarake or Yorozuya shops and you will find manga and other manga and anime-related goods for sale. 

The Comiket or Comic Market is still a strong event as ever too. It is held twice a year at Tokyo Big Sight and draws millions of comic and anime fans. It is also an event where you will see many cosplayers as well. 

Another interesting aspect of Japanese pop culture are idols. Idols mostly being cute young girls who dance and sing and are commercialized through merchandise and endorsements by talent agencies. When Cruising the Anime City came out, at the top of the idol chain was a group called Morning Musume. 

Tsunku, the vocalist of Japanese rock band Sharan-Q was looking for a new singer and held auditions on a televised program called [Asayan]. Morning Musume was formed by five of the candidates who were dropped. Tsunku produced a single for them on an independent label and gave them the task of selling 50,000 copies in five days or they would have to go back to their ordinary lives. 

The five members were able to accomplish the mission and debuted on a major label in January of 1998. Their rise to fame was quick and the group grew from five members, to eight, to eleven to who knows how many now. The group is still going strong even today but has been shadowed by another idol group that emerged in 2005, called AKB48. 

Although the subject of the book is quite dated now, it still makes for an entertaining read. I mean, how many of us old-timers remember what it was like to buy our first record or LP, or cassette tape for that matter. If you’ve lived in Japan through the nineties or if you’re just interested in Japanese pop culture of the past, you will be sure to enjoy this nostalgic trip into the past. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Little House by Kyoko Nakajima, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Darf Publishers)

Kyoko Nakajima worked at a publishing firm and as a freelance writer before becoming a novelist in 2003 with her book Futon. Her novel The Little House was originally published as 小さなおうち (Chisai Ouchi) in 2010 by Bungei Shunju and won the 178th Annual Naoki Prize. The book was adapted into a major motion picture in 2014, starring Takako Matsu and directed by Kyoji Yamamoto. The book was translated into English by Ginny Tapley Takemori who also translated Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (Asia by the Book, March 31, 2018). 

The Little House is narrated by an elderly woman in her nineties named Taki who lives on her own in Ibaraki Prefecture. Her nephew and his family live nearby and they sometimes have dinner together. She has some savings and has her nephew invest in stocks on her behalf so she’s not hurting for money. She also lives frugally on her pension. 

Taki’s life changed two years ago when the daughter of her former employer’s daughter  introduced her to a publisher she worked for and they produced Granny Taki’s Super Housework Book. Now an editor from the publisher has come to see Taki to discuss Taki’s next book. Taki says from the start that she doesn’t want to write about more household tips as she’s already covered that subject. 

The editor also says that they don’t want her to write about more household tips. She says, “We’d like you to talk about Tokyo in the old days, things that only you know about - your sense of the four seasons, your favorite dishes, social niceties, that sort of thing”. Taki doesn’t think it’s a bad idea, but from Taki’s perspective, “It’s just not quite what I’ve got in mind”. 

Taki feels she has more important things to write about. As a child, she lived in the Tohoku region of Japan, in Yamagata Prefecture. In the spring of 1930, Taki graduated from elementary school and immediately went into the service of a well-renowned author who lived in Tokyo. In the Showa era, it was not unusual for young girls from the country to move to Tokyo to work for people as maids.

Taki was the youngest of five siblings and all her elder sisters had already gone into service somewhere or other, the final destination not always being Tokyo. Although Taki didn’t see eye to eye with the young editor, she decided to keep a note of her experience of working in Tokyo before the outbreak of World War 2

Taki never married and was a maid her whole life. She says her job “was effectively domestic training for young women pre-marriage”. Taki first worked for a well renowned author but her employment with him was rather short-lived. 

Her most vivid memories of working in Tokyo were with the well-to-do Hirai family. She developed a close bond with her employer’s wife, Mistress Tokiko. Taki was also a nursemaid to their little son, Kyoichi.

As Taki continues to write about her time in Tokyo as best as her memory serves her, the book begins to read more like a diary than a personal biography. Most of her memories are happy ones but at times her nephew scoffs at what she writes.

Although she was writing about her experiences for herself, she soon realized that she had a reader - her nephew. She becomes a little embarrassed but decides to continue writing and leaves her notebook where her nephew is bound to find it. 

The core of the story is about Taki’s life in Tokyo as a maid but Kyoko Nakajima makes it more interesting by blending the present with the past. Taki’s nephew seems to think he knows more about the history of pre and post-war Japan than his aunt. The interaction between Taki and her nephew draws the reader in until you are also lost in the nostalgia of the “good old days”. 

There is something comforting about listening to an elderly person speak of Japan at a time that we can only imagine. If only my Japanese skills were as good as they are now when my grandmother on my mother’s side was still alive, I would have loved to hear her stories about living in pre and post-war Japan even though she lived quite a distance away from Tokyo. ~Ernie Hoyt