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

Between this World and the Next by Praveen Herat (Restless Books)

Song and Sovanna are two halves of an exquisite whole, twin sisters whose beauty is perfectly mirrored in each other’s faces, until a misplaced attack leaves Song with only half of her face unscarred. Disfigured, Song works as an enslaved housemaid in a Phnom Penh guesthouse while Sovanna is imprisoned as a sex slave. 

A war photographer with the nickname of Fearless comes to Phnom Penh at the invitation of an old friend, a man who once was his “fixer” in Bosnia. Recently widowed when his wife died in a car crash, Fearless is certain he has nothing left to lose. His friend Federenko has put him up in a guesthouse, a place where a young housemaid has half of her face deformed by scars. 

Song has a single goal, to find her twin and return with her to their home in rural Cambodia. In her attempt to achieve this, she finds an unlikely ally in the guest who has recently arrived. While Fearless agrees to help her, he’s puzzled by Song’s warning, “Don’t tell your friend.”

Fearless has known Federenko since he hired the boy long ago. The two of them have a battle-tested friendship that has bred the kind of trust that lies between brothers. But Song has evidence that this trust is misplaced. She has found a videotape that implicates Federenko in the cruelest form of sexual atrocities and although Fearless tries to deny the evidence, he’s told by his friend’s bodyguard in a veiled hint that Federenko’s help will lead to a trap.

This is not an easy book to read. It begins with a rape, continues with the murder of children, and lapses into torture. “Our ability to exterminate makes us who we are,” Fearless observes at the beginning of this novel and this seems to be the underlying theme. It’s Song who gives the plot a twist that somehow lights it with hope and love which carries through to the end.

Every detail in this intricate story is important. Vicious acts that seem random are all connected in a story that ranges from Cambodia to Liberia and is ensnared in the devious machinations of Dark Money. Characters who are drenched in violence become saviors and friends become enemies. 

Praveen Herat lived in Phnom Penh for years. Plot elements that may seem melodramatic to some readers are ones that are much too true. Parents have sold their daughters in an effort to keep their families from starving to death. Young beauties have had their faces destroyed by jealous wives hurling acid. Methamphetamine addiction is common among those who are exploited and poor in Southeast Asia. Russian mafioso have been a feature in Cambodia for decades with money laundering as one of their essential tools across continents. And Fearless isn’t the only Westerner who “did his best to make the facts do his bidding.” Innocence has been a liability and a danger long before Graham Greene pinpointed that in The Quiet American.

Herat has written a thriller that zeroes in on truths and reveals dark secrets held by those who are irreparably damaged and those who manage to survive. It’s going to hurt you and haunt you. Read it if you dare.~Janet Brown

What you are looking for is in the library by Michiko Aoyama, translated by Alison Watts (Penguin Books)

People go to the library for all sorts of reasons. To work on a research paper, to borrow the latest CD or DVD, to read the latest issue of certain magazines, and of course to check out books to read for pleasure. But what if you can’t find what you’re looking for? What if you don’t know what it is that you’re looking for. To answer those last two questions, you could consult with the resident reference librarian. 

In Michiko Aoyama’s book What you are looking for is in the library is set in in a neighborhood community center called Hattori Community House. It is located next to an elementary school and offers an array of classes and holds a number of events - “shogi, haiku, hula dancing, exercise classes, lots of flower-arranging classes and lectures on different topics”. 

Each chapter introduces the reader to a character who all have one thing in common. They find themselves going to Hattori Community House in Hattori Ward for one reason or another. They will also have one more thing in common. They are all introduced to the resident reference librarian, Sayuri Komachi. 

We are first introduced to Tomoka, a twenty-one year old woman who works as a sales assistant in the womenswear section in a general merchandise store called Eden. She moved to Tokyo from the country. The only reason she’s working at Eden is because it was the only place that accepted her. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to live and work in Tokyo, she just doesn’t want to go back to the country. 

She decides to take a computer class at the Hattori Community House, a community center in the ward where she lives. After class, the instructor tells Tomoko that there are no set books for learning how to use different programs but gives her a list of recommended books to check out. The instructor tells her she might enjoy looking in the library.

Tomoko goes over to the sign that reads “Reference” and peaks around the corner and gets quite a shock! “The librarian is huge…I mean, like, really huge. But huge as in big, not fat. Her skin is super pale and you can’t even see where her chin ends and neck begins”. The librarian’s name is Sayuri Komachi.

We then meet Ryo, a thirty-five-year old accountant whose ambition is to run his own antiques shop. His girlfriend is Hina, she was one of the other students at the computer class who wants to open her own online store. We also meet Natsumi, a former magazine editor. She was a career woman who decided to have a child and thought she would be able to return to her former job and position only to find the reality was much different that what she imagined. 

We also meet Hiroya, a thirty-five-year old NEET (Not in Employment, Education, or Training). In other words, a slacker. And finally there is Masao, a sixty-five year old retired gentleman who doesn’t know what to do with his life now that he has more time on his hands. 

All of these people find their calling at the library with the help of Ms. Komachi. However, Ms. Komachi never takes credit for their successes or happiness. Ms. Komachi seems to have some innate sense of what the people need and she often recommends books that do not seem to have any relation to the reader’s search.  

Libraries and bookstores are two places that I can spend hours in and never get bored. I don’t even have to be looking for anything in particular. Of course the big difference is you can borrow books for free at the library but if you find a title you want to read at the bookstore, you must buy it. 

I think it would be great if there were more people like Ms Komachi. She doesn’t judge anyone, she listens, then she hands the person a list of books that she believes might help them, even if some titles seem totally unrelated to what the person was searching for. 

If you’re an avid reader and love bookstores and libraries, this book will not disappoint. It will make you want to visit your local library at your earliest convenience. You may not find what you’re looking for but perhaps there will be a librarian like Ms. Komachi to guide you to some other worthwhile titles. ~Ernie Hoyt

Dallergut Dream Department Store by Miye Lee, translated by Sandy Joosun Lee (Wildfire)

Miye Lee is a South Korean writer who was born in Busan in 1990. After graduating from university she worked for Samsung Electronics as a semiconductor engineer. Dallergut Dream Department Store is her first novel and was entirely financed by a crowdfunding service in Korea and was translated by Sandy Joosun Lee. 

Lee says and most people know, we spend a third of our lives sleeping. “Dreams of wonder and bizarre events, recurring dreams about a particular person, and dreams of places we’ve never been”. 

Dallergut Dream Department Store is a story about a mysterious shopping village you can only go to when you’re asleep. “It’s full of interesting people and places that capture the hearts of the sleeping customers, like a food truck that sells snacks to ensure a good night’s sleep”. 

Penny has always dreamed of working at the Dallergut Dream Department Store. Her application has passed the screening and she has an interview scheduled for the following week. The DallerGut family is well known in Penny’s town. In fact, “the family is the origin of the city”. 

Penny was interviewed by Mr. DallerGut himself. Although she was unsure of herself, Mr. DallerGut asked Penny if she could start tomorrow. The Dallergut Dream Department Store is five-stories high. Each floor sells different genres of dreams. On her first day, Penny meets a veteran employee named Weather who is also the manager of the first floor. She tells Penny to check in with the manager of each floor before she decides on which floor she wants to work in. 

The first floor sells high-end, popular or limited dreams, Penny discovers that the second floor sells generic dreams and is managed by a man named Vigo Myers.  The third floor manager is a woman named Mogberry. On this floor, the staff sells groundbreaking and fun activity dreams. The fourth floor sells nap-exclusive dreams and is managed by Speedo. The top floor, the fifth floor, only sells leftover dreams from the first, second, third, and fourth floors. She also discovers there is no manager for the fifth floor. 

Mr. DallerGut was talking to Weather when Penny returned from her floor tour. They were discussing the need for a new face to help run the front desk on the first floor. Penny overhears them and when DallerGut asks which floor whe would like to work on, she immediately says that she would like to work at the front desk. 

And so begins Penny’s adventure of working at her dream job in the DallerGut Dream Department Store. A store that sells dreams of all kinds. But Penny also discovers there is an entirely separate business that the department store deals with - the store’s supply of dreams are created by dreammakers. Penny is a fan of many of them who have names like Kick Slumber, Yasnooz Otra, Wawa Sleepland, Doje, and Babynap Rockabye. They all specialize in the type of dreams they make. There are even dreammakers who make nightmares. 

The dreams are bought on a deferred payment system and the currency used is emotion. However, none of the customers remember that they bought their dreams as when they wake up, they forget that they were even in a store. 

Penny also learns that Mr. DallerGut doesn’t sell dreams to just anybody and everybody. He always has a reason why he does or doesn’t sell a dream to a customer. Mr. DallerGut tells Penny it is only with time and experience to learn all the nuances of selling a dream. 

Lee’s story is a nice escape from reality. If we really could buy our dreams, I’m sure many of us would do so at a moment’s notice - a dream about becoming rich and famous, a dream about meeting a lost love and rekindling a relationship. It makes you think as well, what kind of dream would you buy? Readers will also be happy to know that a sequel has already been published as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Border by Erika Fatland, translated by Kari Dickson (Pegasus Books)

Erika Fatland begins her 584-page tome in a spritely fashion that’s as alluring as it is deceptive. Starting at the end of her 259-day journey around the edges of Russia, one that she spread out over the course of three years, she’s at the edge of Eurasia, where Alaska is only about 50 miles away. She’s concluding a mammoth odyssey along Russia’s border, the longest in the world, extending for almost 38,000 miles along the edge of fourteen countries. 

Propelled by the question of what does it mean to have the world’s largest country as your neighbor, Fatland’s concluding journey is on an old Soviet research vessel that will take her through the Northeast Passage. For four weeks she is in the company of 47 other passengers, “a bevy of wrinkly stooped men and women,” all of whom have paid $20,000 to notch up yet another exotic destination on their bucket lists. Their conversations consist of travel talk and Fatlander soon learns she’s the only one who hasn’t been to Antarctica. When she tells an 85-year-old Dutchwoman that she’s excited to make a trip in a Zodiac (a rigid, inflatable boat used in rough seas), the response she receives is “Why?’ Her aged companion has been on hundreds of Zodiac excursions and this is a matter of routine for her.

Tracing the journey of the fur trade that gave Russia a firm toehold on the Western part of the US, Fatland vividly recreates the history of explorers and Cossacks while experiencing dismay at the condition of the islands she visits--”so much rubbish” creating environmental catastrophes. In a hut on one of their ports of call, an abandoned cabin bears evidence of a recent occupation. “Mammoth tusk collectors,” she’s told by her guide, “There is a lot of money to be made--we’re talking millions.”

This is the last portion of The Border to reveal humor or any form of delight. Moving swiftly into her time in North Korea, Fatland finds obfuscation, bleakness, and eerie contradictions. In Pyongyang, apartment buildings routinely soar to 20 storeys or more but their elevators are so flawed that residents clamor for spots near the ground floor. A hotel that’s over 1000 feet high dominates the city skyline but has never been opened. Her guides all carry expensive Chinese mobile phones in a place where coverage to other countries is only available on mountain tops. The DMZ at the division line between North and South Korea holds no human residents while providing “a haven for threatened species.” The beaches in the North are “as beautiful as Vietnam’s” but remain untouristed.

On a tour of Chernobyl at one point of her journey, Flatland is disconcerted that it feels “like a package holiday.” Thirty years after the disaster, people still come to a local hospital with dire after-effects. “It takes time for the isotopes to break down,” a senior staff member says.

Fatland is a historian and this is the focus of The Border. As she makes her way through Asia, the Caucasus, and Europe, there are only vague hints of the current relationship between Russia and its fourteen neighbors. It feels as if this is two separate books, a skimpy travel narrative and an overwhelming torrent of history from past centuries. When she ends her book with time in Ukraine, Poland, Finland, and her native country, Norway, history has fully taken over. Not even a camping trip to the final borderline with her father cuts through Erika’s daunting knowledge of the past.

Does she find the answer to her question of what effects come with being a neighbor to Russia? Perhaps, but if she did, it’s lost in translation.~Janet Brown

Lost Cities of Asia by Wim Swaan (Elek London, out of print)

Once upon a time, travel was a luxury and Asia was an unexplored continent for many Westerners. The very wealthy might go to Tokyo or Hong Kong but Beijing was still Peking, with the entire city forbidden to tourists. Southeast Asia teetered in and out of being a war zone and Korea was a bad memory to most of the Western world. In those days, even European travel was still beyond the reach of many unless they submitted to package tours--”If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium.” It wasn’t until the late 1960s that Iceland Air introduced the concept of budget flights to the masses and Lonely Planet launched the era of the backpacker.

It seems vaguely ludicrous now to open a book called Lost Cities of Asia and find one of its topics is Angkor Wat, which is now one of the heavily visited sites on our planet. But the age of this book is obvious when readers find another “lost” region is called Ceylon, not Sri Lanka. Of the three corners of the world that are explored by the South African writer, Wim Swaan, the only one which now might be considered “lost” is Pagan, which still remains off the tourist circuit.

Although Swaan was also known as a photographer, the more than a hundred plates that fill this coffee-table book seem almost crude by 21st Century standards. Most of them are black and white, while the ones that are in color lack depth and look like antique postcards.Many of the black and white photographs are marred by heavy shadows, taken by a man who was unused to working in tropical sunlight. However since there were few glimpses of Ceylon, Pagan, and Angkor Wat in 1966, when this book was published, few people would criticize Swaan’s technique. They would have been fascinated by the flawed images that showed places few people had ever seen.

It’s Swaan’s scholarship that makes this book a valuable resource half a century after it was first published. The man was not a travel writer and there are no lyrical descriptions or charming anecdotes. The most diverting passages are ones he quotes from travelers who viewed these places in distant centuries. Swaan instead employs his academic expertise as an architect and a historian which makes this book heavy going for the casual reader. It’s unfortunate that it’s literally too heavy to accompany the casual traveler as they explore the sites upon which he elucidates, because Swaan’s knowledge would expand what they see.

Since Swaan’s early background was far from Europe or America, this may have given him a perspective unshared by writers from these continents who were his contemporaries. While most accounts of Southeast Asian sites that were written in the mid-20th Century compare them to “the glory that was Greece and the splendor that was Rome,” Swaan immediately pinpoints India as the primary influence upon Southeast Asia, one that influenced its architecture, its irrigation techniques that enabled the existence of its legendary cities, and its religion. Long before China exacted tribute from this part of the world, India shaped it.

However the process of “Hinduization” often clashed heavily with the indigenous cultures of the region. In the kingdom of Angkor, “both descent and inheritance were in the female line…so deeply ingrained that the subjugation of women prescribed by Hindu custom was flatly rejected.” At Pagan, the ancient gods, the Nats, were joined by the Buddha, not supplanted by him. 

Although India has placed its stamp firmly upon Southeast Asia, (to the point that Pico Iyer took his mother to visit Angkor Wat, she viewed it as an ancient Indian colony) its past history has been written by Chinese monks and merchants, whose quoted accounts bring life to Lost Cities of Asia. Perhaps one of the most invaluable portions of Swaan’s book is its bibliography which provides a springboard for future exploration. Yet even so, he offers a time capsule that evokes not only Asian history, but our own.~Janet Brown

Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda, translated by Alison Watts (Bitter Lemon Press)

Riku Onda is the pen name for Nanae Kumagai, a Japanese writer whose novels The Aosawa Murders (Asia by the Book, January 12, 2023) and Honeybees and Distant Thunder (Asia by the Book, July 4, 2024) have been published in English in 2020 and 2023, respectively. 

Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight was originally published in the Japanese language with the title 木漏れ日に泳ぐ魚 (Komorebi ni Oyagu Sakana) in 2007 by Chuo-Koron Shinsha. It is a psychological thriller. The book was translated by Alison Watts who also translated her novel The Aosawa Murders. Watts has also translated Spark (Asia by the Book, April 15, 2021) by Naoki Matayoshi and The Boy and the Dog (Asia by the Book, January 22, 2024) by Seishu Hase. 

Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight is set in a small apartment in Tokyo over the course of one night. The main characters, Aki and Hiro, have decided to spend one last night together before going their separate ways. Their relationship had been going on a downhill slide since an incident that happened one year ago. They talk about it as if there is someone else listening to their thoughts and worries, as if they’re telling their stories directly to the reader. 

Aki and Hiro went on a hiking trip in the Japanese Alps in Nagano Prefecture along with an experienced mountain guide. However, on that trip, the guide mysteriously died. Aki believes that it was Hiro who killed him. Hiro believes that it was Aki who killed him. They are both going to try to get a confession before the night is over. Who is the murderer and why was he killed? 

Each chapter is told in the first person by Aki and Hiro and begins with Hiro talking about a photograph. What he’s about to share “is the story of a photo”. He says it’s also about “the mystery surrounding the death of a certain man, and a mountain tale as well. Plus, there’s the relationship aspect : the break-up of a couple. But the photo is at the heart of it”. 

Aki is also nervous about this evening. Ever since the incident happened, things haven’t been the same with either one of them. As Aki looks back on their life together in this apartment, she says, “That trip, and the death of that man, changed things forever for us”. Aki feels that for the past year, both of them had been walking on eggshells. She shares her thoughts about the two of them. 

“We were so close until that point, but those few days tore us apart”. It’s still hard to decipher why they drifted apart so much. Is it because they both suspect the other of having a hand in killing that man. Or was it something about the man that led them to the predicament they’re in. 

What really keeps the reader interested is the way Onda has Aki and Hiro taking turns talking about the incident. We learn when and where they met, and then we discover something much more surprising than the death of the mountain guide and why the man’s death had led to this evening. ~Ernie Hoyt

Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien (W.W. Norton & Company)

Within the devastation that swept over Cambodia during the Pol Pot years, names become irrelevant, hazardous, and disposable. Who cares what name was given at birth when nobody is left alive to remember what it once was? “Names were empty syllables, lost as easily as an entire world.” 

A Red Cross physician becomes Kwan instead of James when that name gives him the only chance to stay alive and find his child. A young boy whose brothers are blown apart by landmines as they draw close to a border of safety only knows his nickname, Nuong, which he will keep for the rest of his life. Another little boy tells his captors he is Rithy, not Sopham, and survives to learn which parts of the human body will yield a confession under interrogation, becoming a killer by the time he’s nine. His sister never tells what her name used to be; she becomes Mei in one of Angkar’s labor camps and then Janie when she’s sent by a refugee organization to the safety of a home in Canada. 

“If you want to be strong,” a boy says in the labor camp, “you have to become someone else. You have to take a new name.” 

“Inside us,” Janie’s mother tells her back in the days when the family lived in peace, “from the beginning, we were entrusted with many lives…we try to carry them until the end.” But thirty years later, Janie discovers she “knows too much” and has “too many selves.” Laden with memories that shadow her present life, she’s haunted by her little brother, Sopham. Not able to maintain her grip on him in the middle of an empty sea, she watched as “the ocean breathed him in.” 

Now her memories endanger her son. She no longer can trust herself to live with her husband and child because when remembered violence engulfs her, she strikes out. When her colleague and mentor disappears in search of his lost brother, James, who vanished in the horror of Cambodia in 1975, Janie seizes a chance that will let her find the man who has become the only parent left to her. She returns to the country where she was born, where people who once were told to rid themselves of “memory sickness” and to forget their past history, live with ghosts who will “never be put to rest.”

“The soul is a slippery thing,” Janie’s mother told her, “but in darkness it can be returned to you.” In the darkness of what remains in Cambodia, Janie’s soul remembers the love and the beauty she once knew, in a time when that was as profuse and ordinary as air or water. She learns the necessity of guarding what’s precious and vital by placing dogs at the perimeter to safeguard what’s essential to keep. When she makes a phone call to her Canadian family, her son begs her, “Promise me. Don’t disappear,” and Janie makes that promise.

“The Khmer Rouge had taught us how to survive, walking alone, carrying nothing in our hands.” Piece by piece, Madeleine Thien shows how the Khmer people lost their names, lost their families, but survived to learn other names, other lives, other ways to love. Her novel recreates terrible damage and the agonizing process of recovery, with images that are unforgettable: ”tiny sequins of snow,” “light [that] spins over us like quiet laughter,” two children adrift at sea who are “caught on broken glass,” a prisoner feeling “his heart solidify in mute fear.” Normalcy and madness, the destruction of war and the confusion of peace, people who have the privilege of longing to keep their memories and those who wish they could lose their own--in an astounding act of literary alchemy, Thien makes these juxtapositions alive and agonizing and ultimately steeped in hope.~Janet Brown

Cannibals by Shinya Tanaka, translated by Kalau Almony (Honford Star)

Shinya Tanaka is a Japanese writer who won Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Award for his novel 共食い (Tomogui), which has been translated into English as Cannibals. The story is set in 1989 and the main character, Toma Shinogaki, just turned seventeen. 

He lives with his father Madoka and his father’s partner Kotoko-san. His father is a philanderer, an alcoholic, and often beats the women he has sex with. Toma’s birth mother, Jinko-san, lives close by and runs a fish shop. 

They all live in a community called the Riverside, a place where not much happens and where people down on their luck seemed to have converged. The place also smells of raw sewage as the sewer system has not yet been completed. 

Jinko-san, the fishmonger was almost sixty and her right arm from the wrist down was gone. It was during the war when she lost it. She got pinned under her burning and collapsed house during an air raid. The riverside was an ocean of fire. “I traded one hand to keep my life,” she once told Toma.

The riverside was one of the places that didn’t get developed after the war “and the people who gathered there, intending only to temporarily avoid dire poverty, ended up stuck”. Toma’s father, Madoka, was one of those people.

His father met Kotoko-san at a bar where she worked and she came to live with the Shinogaki’s about a year earlier. It wasn’t until Kotoko-san started living with them that Madoka would start to hit her. 

Toma once asked, “Why don’t you break up with him? You scared of him?”. He was shocked and surprised at her response. She said to him, “He tells me I got a great body, and when he hits me he says it gets even more better. To Toma, she looked like “an incredibly stupid woman”. 

Toma had a girlfriend named Chigusa. At this point in the story, it’s actually hard to tell if Chigusa is really his girlfriend or just some girl that he has sex with. They have known each other since childhood as Chigusa also grew up in the Riverside. 

Lately, Toma has been thinking how much he is like his Dad. She tells him he’s not like his Dad, that he doesn’t hit her. However, Toma responds by saying, “It’s too late if I realize I’m like him after I hit you”. 

Recently, Toma’s father has been searching for a young man as he believes Kotoko-san is being unfaithful to him. The double standard of if’s okay for men to play around but a woman must stand by his man is alive and well in Japan in 1989. 

One day, Kotoko-san tells Toma that she’s pregnant with his father’s baby. This gets Toma thinking about his future. Will his father kick him out so Madoka can live with Kotoko-san and their baby? But Kotoko-san tells Toma that she plans to leave the Riverside. Toma has never thought about leaving and wonders if his father will try to find Kotoko-san if she really does leave. He also wonders if his father will come back. 

Chigusa and Toma also have a falling out after a sex bout where Toma starts choking her before he climaxes. He really believes he’s becoming like his father. Then one day, something happens that changes everything on the Riverside. 

Kotoko-san is gone. Chigusa has been waiting for Toma at the local shrine. And the children run to tell Toma that he must go see her. His father comes home and tells Toma that he’s sorry, that he couldn’t help himself, that he couldn’t find Kotoko-san and Chigusa just happen to be close by and he couldn’t control his urges…

Tanaka brings to life the gritty reality of living near poverty. His characters are far from likable, especially the father and son. The women are all treated as objects to have sex with and hurt. It’s a very disturbing reality but one that’s hard to ignore.

Thank God that this story is fiction. People like Madoka and Toma are the worst breed of humans. How some women can stay with abusive men is still a problem that plagues society today. In the end, Madoka gets what he deserves and Toma…well, that would be up to the reader to decide. ~Ernie Hoyt