Greek Lessons by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith and E. Yaewon (Penguin) ~Ernie Hoyt

Han Kang is a South Korean writer who debuted with her novel The Vegetarian in 2007. She is also the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. Greek Lessons is her seventh novel which was originally published in the Korean language by Munhakdongne in 2011. The English edition was translated by Deborah Smith and E. Yaewon was published in 2023.

The book centers on two main characters. A university lecturer who is nearly blind and a woman who has lost the ability of speech. The lecturer teaches Ancient Greek and the woman is one of the few students enrolled in his class.  

All the chapters of the book are written in the first person. Sometimes it’s the lecturer and sometimes it is the woman who cannot speak. The author doesn’t give a hint to whose point of view is spoken and the reader must infer from the context to determine if it is the lecturer or the woman who cannot speak.

We learn that the woman was also a teacher until the spring of the previous year. One day she was at the front of the class writing something on the blackboard but then froze for about a minute or so. One of her students asked if she was okay. She tried to smile back at the student but “her eyelids spasmed for a while”. “She muttered to herself from somewhere deeper than her tongue and throat: It’s come back!”. 

When she was a young girl, her mother always told her how bright she was. She was able to learn Hangul (Korean script) when she was only four years old. When she started primary school, she used to write new words at the back of her diary “with neither purpose nor context, merely a list of words that had made a deep impression on her”. 

However, “the words she’d jotted down in the back of her diary wriggled about of their own volition to form unfamiliar sentences”. The words would shoot at her in the middle of the night, waking her up a number of times. For her, “the most agonizing thing was how horrifyingly distinct the words sounded when she opened her mouth and pushed them out one by one”. 

It was when she was sixteen when “the language that had pricked and confined her…abruptly disappeared”. Now here she was - a middle-aged woman who once again could not find the words to speak. 

As for the lecturer, he lived in a town called Suruyi in the southern part of South Korea until he was fifteen. One Sunday, his mother informed them that the family would be moving to Germany in two months. He spent the next seventeen years of his life in Germany. It was in Germany when the lecturer learned of his condition. He knew we would be losing his vision. 

The lecturer decided to move back to his home country before losing his sight permanently. He was able to get a job teaching Ancient Greek at a local college. He did not admit the severity of his condition to his employers. 

The core of the story is how these two unlikely individuals begin to find solace in each other. One who could not see and one who could not speak. Would their relationship flourish or is it destined to be a disaster? 

Kang’s prose will grip the reader. It is not only a story of loneliness and solitude, but it’s also about love, compassion, and intimacy. It is sure to stir your heart.

Teo’s Durumi by Elaine V. Cho (Hillman Grad Books) ~Janet Brown

Back in the middle of the last century, there were serials, a clever marketing device that instilled customer loyalty. Magazines, radio stations, and movie theaters all produced stories that ended with cliffhangers, to be continued in the next installment. Still to be found on streaming sites (Game of Thrones anyone?), this gimmick dissolved in other arenas--until Elaine V. Cho resurrected it in Ocean’s Godori, (Asia by the Book, May 2024).

This science fiction adventure ended so abruptly that some readers were infuriated. Clearly they had never gone to a movie matinee where a weekly Saturday serial ended with the invitation to return for  “another installment in this thrilling drama.” For those of us who had, we knew there would be a sequel. Unfortunately we had to wait longer than a week to discover what would happen next.

It’s been over a year since the characters of Ocean’s Godori escaped death by crash-landing their spacecraft on a distant moon. Although its sequel, Teo’s Darumi, begins at the exact point where its predecessor ended, memories fade and not everyone will have a copy of the first installment in their bookcases for quick reference.

Luckily Elaine V. Cho offers a brief refresher course given by one of the minor characters, providing thumbnail sketches of the multitudes who propel the plots of both books. It would have been helpful to have included the glossary of Korean vocabulary that came at the end of Ocean’s Godori, adding the new words that appear in Teo’s Darumi. Still careful readers will find clues to their meanings through context and quick explanations given when the words first show up. 

For those who have come to this sequel without having read its predecessor, Cho has constructed it so cleverly that it works as a stand-alone novel. While those who read the first might miss the focus on Ocean, that prickly daredevil loner, the characters in this new book soon flourish under their newly acquired spotlights and the plot swiftly moves into new dangers and fresh horrors.

Teo, the only survivor of the massacre that killed off the rest of his family’s wealthy dynasty; Sasani, a pariah, shunned for his knowledge of funeral arts, who has found hopes for a new community as the spacecraft’s medical officer; Phoenix, the dashing space raider who’s attracted to Teo’s fortune and Ocean’s skills as a pilot; Ocean who finds a kinship with Sasani, since she is also a pariah of sorts, band together in ways that surprise them all.

Cho has given alarming depths to Corvus, one of the most hideous villains in any galaxy, giving him accessories that can suck the souls and memories from his victims, an activity to which he has become addicted, with dreams of interplanetary domination. As a counterpoint, she gives her main characters whopping helpings of romance, so much of it that only the grisly violence of the final battle can submerge the affairs of the heart. 

The violence goes on for fifty horrendous pages in which nobody is sure that goodness will triumph--squeamish readers, be warned. Since Cho has given new dimensions to Ocean and her colleagues, their bloody struggles to survive are close to unbearable and will be absolutely impossible to abandon.

Once again, room is left for another installment but these new conclusions will leave readers satisfied. Too bad. As a person who grew up in the mid-20th century, I miss that cliffhanger.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda (Soft Skull Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Hiromi Kawakam is a Japanese writer from Tokyo. She started her career writing and editing for a science-fiction magazine called NW-SF after graduating from college. She also taught science in middle school and high school. She debuted as a writer in 1994 when she was thirty-six. Her first book was a collection of short stories titled 神様 (Kamisama) which translates to God in English. 

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a speculative fiction novel. It was originally published in the Japanese language in 2016 by Kodansha as 大きな鳥にさらわれないよう (Okina na tori ni sarawarenai yo). The title literally translates to To Avoid Being Carried Away by Big Birds. The English edition was translated by Asa Yoneda, who also translated Rin Usami’s Idol, Burning (Asia by the Book, December 2023). 

The book is written as a collection of connected short stories. It’s the distant future and humans are on the verge of extinction. Those who are left live in small, isolated communities. They are under the protection and care of “Mothers” who are not really considered human. The “Mothers” all share one memory and consciousness and are very kind to humans. 

Some children are made in factories, others are clones from the original copy of themselves, while some children grow by photosynthesis, similar to plants. They also have a slight green hue to their complexion.

There are also a number of “Watchers” who may or may not be human. They can live for thousands of years as their consciousnesses can be transferred to their clones. It is their job to oversee the community of humans in the hopes that mankind will survive. It was the “Watchers”, Ian and Jakob who came up with the current system to preserve the last remaining humans and hope for evolution to occur to ensure mankind’s survival. 

Near the end of the book, mankind’s quest for progress and ultimate decline is described by one of the final living “Mother”. She uses “you” to collectively refer to humans as she describes her emergence, how she came into being. 

She tells one of the last living humans, “At a certain point in the past, you came up with the technology to produce learning machines whose capacity to process information was extremely close to your own”. This new technology was called Artificial Intelligence or AI for short. The mother further explains, “But before you could use what you created as a result of your success, you first had to consider the implications - legal, moral, philosophical and so on”. 

What really hits home and is true even today is how the “Mother” describes the fear humans feel towards their own creation. The “Mother” says, “what you feared, to put it bluntly, was the possibility that the powers AI had would grow far to surpass yours, such that AI would take over human society as result”.

Can we really leave the future to humanity to humans or will they make the same mistakes they made in the past over and over again? Are humans leading the way to their own extinction? Will there be such a thing as “hope” left in the future? 

It is my opinion that this book will haunt your mind long after you have finished reading it.

One Hundred Sacks of Rice by Yuzo Yamamoto, translated by Donald Keene (Nagaoka City Kome Hyappyo Foundation) ~Ernie Hoyt

One Hudred Sacks of Rice is an English translation of a stage play based on the fictionalized story of Torasaburo Kobayashi, the Grand Council of the Nagaoka Domain in feudal Japan. The play titled 米百袋 (Kome Hyappyo) was written by Yuzo Yamato. This English edition was translated by Japanese scholar and permanent Japan resident, Donald Keene. 

The story is set in the city of Nagaoka in Echigo Province, present-day Niigata Prefecture. Currently, the  city is famous for its summer fireworks display. The time is the third year of the Meiji era (1870) at the end of May. There were still many domains throughout the country and the order for men to cut their hair and give up their swords had not yet been issued. Many of the policies of the new government had yet to take effect and a lot of old customs still lingered. 

During the Boshin War, Japan’s Civil War, Nagaoka had sided with the Tokugawa Shogunate who fought against the domains for the Imperial Court who wanted to “revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians”. To put down the rebellion, the Shogunate forces literally wiped Nagaoka off the map. After the war, Nagaoka was impoverished and the people were starving. A neighboring province gifted the city with one hundred sacks of rice. 

In feudal Japan, rice was the equivalent of hard currency. When the lower ranked samurai of Nagaoka learned that the city would be getting one hundred sacks of rice, they felt they would be relieved from their suffering. However, when they learned that the Grand Councillor was going to sell the rice so he could build a school.

This decision angered the samurai and they decided to take action against the Great Councillor. They went to Grand Councillor Torasaburo Kobayashi’s home, brandished their swords and demanded that he divide up the rice and comply with their wishes immediately.

Torasaburo Kobayashi doesn’t answer them. The samurai ask Torasaburo, “Why don’t you answer?”, “What’s the matter? Why are you silent?”. He finally responds by saying, “Nothing can be done to help”. One of the samurai says, “No, there is something. Don’t we have the hundred sacks of rice given to us for relife. If you distribute it, that will settle everything”. 

Kobayashi is not taken in by their threats. He admonishes them, saying, “Have you nothing better in mind? Why do you suggest anything to picayune? ‘A hundred sacks of rice’, ‘a hundred sacks of rice’. He asks the samurai, “just how much do you think this represents?”. He tells them if he were to divide up the rice for everybody, they would have enough to eat for two days. What will the samurai do after that?

Kobayashi tells them it’s because there were no capable men in the government. What the nation needs are capable men, and the only way to get capable men is by education. “Whether a town flourishes or decays, the answer relies in every instance with the people” - “as long as people continue to appeary and they are educated, no matter how badly a country has declined, they will restore it”. 

What really shames the samurai is Torasaburo Kobayashi’s final trump card. He shows the samurai a scroll written by Shozan (Sakuma Shoza, aka Sakuma Zozan), a scholar and teacher that every samurai is familiar with. Written on the scroll is “Always on the Battlefied!”. Kobayashi reminds the samurai that these words have been instilled in every samurai of the Mikawa clan (which includes Nagaoka) and has been observed as a particarly important principle. He explains, “To say ‘We are always on the battlefield’ means that even in times of peace, we must endure every hardship and privation in the same spirit as on the battlefield”. 

Although the script for the stage play is rather short, falling around less than one hundred pages, this book includes a lot of extra material that will help the reader appreciate the story even more. 

First, Keene says to better understand the story, you need to know about the writer, Yuzu Yamamoto, as well. Although the play is based on an actual incident and Torasaburo Kobayashi did exist, the rest of the characters were from the imagination of Yamamoto. The story is not presented as a mere history lesson but is an entertaining piece of literature as well. 

Keene also provides background on the “Spirit of Bushido”, the “Way of the Warrior”, a short history of the Boshin War and the true story of the “The Hundred Sacks of Rice”, followed by a profile of Torasaburo Kobayashi. 

Torasaburo Kobayahi may not be as well known Ieyasu Tokugawa, Japan’s first Shogun” or Nobunaga Oda, Takamori Saigo, or Ryoma Sakamoto but he is an integral part of the modernification of Japan. The story still holds true today - “Whether a country rises or falls, whether a town flourishes or decays, the answer lies in every case with the people” - educated ones at that!

Moderation by Elaine Castillo (Viking) ~Janet Brown

Girlie is “a 24-karat hottie” who works in America’s capitol of sleaze, Las Vegas. In her workplace, she is “by any conceivable metric, one of the very best.”  Like the majority of her co-workers, she’s Filipina, in an occupation where “none of the white people survived.” Girlie works for one of the world’s leading social media sites as a content moderator. For eight hours a day, five days a week, she watches a screen, viewing and removing the posts that are unspeakably and horribly obscene, before they can go online. Girlie is known as a Subject Matter Specialist whose expertise lies in ferreting out child sex abuse online, with a success rate of 99.5 %.

This seems as if it’s leading into the sort of dark and cruel satire that was popular in the 1970’s. Girlie is the sort of character who could easily become the 21st Century version of Candy by Terry Southern. For the first thirty pages of Moderation, Elaine Castillo presents her in a merciless light that threatens to make this novel nobody’s idea of a good time. Nevertheless, the smart and scathing observations that leap out of nowhere are enough of a reason to keep reading--and then they come from the sharp and sardonic brain of Girlie. 

Girlie Delmundo is the pseudonym she chose when she began to work as a content moderator, a job she took when her mother went broke flipping houses in the red-hot real estate market that preceded the crash of 2008. Since then Girlie has paid off her mother’s sizable debt to the IRS and has bought her parent a Tesla. She’s the mainstay of her two-family household that lives together in a “copy-paste Spanish-tiled dreamer’s monstrosity” in a gated community far from the glitz of Las Vegas. She’s a graduate of Berkeley, a classicist with a penchant for medieval French. 

When she’s given a promotion that will take her from the dregs of social media to the world of virtual reality, Girlie isn’t intimidated by the man who offers it to her. She recognizes him, a Chinese man in a well-cut suit who speaks with “careful…faintly Hong Kong- inflected British English.” William has the “British talent of making a thank you sound like a death wish” but Girlie knows how to counter that “in her affable little killer’s voice.”

Moderation specializes in twists of a kaleidoscope. What begins as a satirical examination of social media and social aspirations becomes an examination of the world of virtual reality and the international players who are parlaying that into unbelievable fortunes. Tinges of romance flare up in the verbal duels that Girlie and William are fond of, reminiscent of the sophisticated badinage of movies from the 1930’s, carrying a degree of sexual tension that moves on to some rather steamy fantasies. An undertone of a thriller emerges with the disclosure of a convenient death and political scandals appear in a flurry of headlines near the novel’s end. 

Elaine Castillo blends all of these elements together in a brilliant pastiche that often seems to give nods to writers who have recently preceded her. While this book has been compared to Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, there are portions that bring to mind Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time (Asia by the Book, November 2023) and Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej (Asia by the Book, May 2022). Still even with these little pieces of homage to fellow-authors, Elaine Castillo has written a highly original and wildly entertaining novel that’s the perfect book for summer’s end.

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton (Penguin) ~Ernie Hoyt

Hunchback is the debut novel by Japanese writer Saou Ichikawa. It won the 128th Bungakukai Prize for New Writers and the 169th Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, in 2023. She is Japan’s first disabled writer to receive the Akutagawa Award.

The book was originally published in the Japanese language as ハンチバック (Hunchback) by Bungeisha in 2023. The English edition, translated by Polly Barton, was published in 2025. Barton is also an author in her own right and has published two non-fiction books. She has translated a number of titles of Japanese books including Where the Wild Ladies Are (Asia by the Book, May 2021). 

Ichikawa was born in 1979. She has congenital myopathy, a muscle disorder which confines her to a wheelchair. She has also been on a respirator since she was thirteen years old. She decided to become a writer at twenty as she felt her job opportunities were very limited due to her handicap. 

The protagonist of Hunchback is also born with a congenital muscle disorder. Shaka Ishizawa has a severe curvature of her spine and must use a wheelchair and ventilator. She lives in a nursing home and makes a living by freelancing, contributing stories and articles to erotic online websites. 

After writing Part 1 of her story, My Steamy Threesome with Super-Sexy Students in One of Tokyo’s Most Sought After-Swingers’ Club, she had to turn her attention to her body. She explains, “mucus had built up in my windpipe, and the alarm on my Trilogy ventilator was chirruping furiously”. 

Ishazawa says that she’s been living in Nirvana for twenty-nine years, “ever since the day my underdeveloped muscles had prevented my heart and lungs from maintaining a normal level of oxygen saturation, and I’d grown faint and passed out by the classroom window in my second year of middle school”. 

Ishizawa also spends a lot of time tweeting on Twitter. However, she says she has hardly any followers and never got any “likes”. She assumed that people didn’t know how to respond to a bed-bound woman who would tweet things like - “In another life, I’d like to work as a high class prostitute” or “I’d have liked to try working at McDonald’s”, “I’d have liked to see what it was like to be a high-school student”. 

Another tweet she saved in her drafts on her iPhone was “I’d like to know what it’s like to have an abortion”. She says this is one of her tools to organize her thoughts. She has also saved tweets such as “I want to get pregnant, then have an abortion” and continues with “I can’t imagine a foetus growing properly inside this crooked body of mine”. She ends this line of thought with “My ultimate dream is to get pregnant and have an abortion, just like a normal woman”. 

One day, one of the male carers at the facility she lives in tells her that he has read all of the material she’s written. He has read her sexploints on the erotic websites, he has read her tweets on Twitter. 

Ishizawa then makes a proposal to the man. She would pay him one hundred fifty-five million yen to have a sex with her. Will the carer take Ishikawa up on her offer? Is this really what Shaka Ishikawa wants? 

Only someone who suffers the same condition as Shaka Ishizawa could concoct a story so out of the ordinary that it may make a normal, healthy person think about the things they take for granted - being able to read a book, walking to the neighborhood convenience store, riding on trains. Everyday, ordinary things. Ichikawa shows the world that disabled people have the same hopes and dreams as normal people and that they can be successful as well. 

Japan is still far behind the times where it comes to caring for the disabled. The handicapped are still shunned and are prone to be victims of prejudice. Perhaps if people like that were to read this book, they would learn what empathy means.

The End of August by Yu Miri, tranlated by Morgan Giles (Tilted Axis Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Yu Miri is a Zainichi Korean novelist. Zainichi Koreans are ethnic Koreans who immigrated to Japan before 1945 and are citizens or permanent residents of Japan, or who are children of those immigrants. Her native language is Japanese but she is a citizen of South Korea. She writes her books in Japanese. 

She is the author of Tokyo Ueno Station (Asia by the Book, May 2021). The End of August is her latest novel. It was originally published by Shinchosha in 2007 in the Japanese language as 八月の果て (Hachigatsu no Hate). The English edition, translated by Morgan Giles, was published in 2023. 

The End of August is a semi-biographical family epic. The tome is over seven hundred pages and focuses on several generations of Yu Miri’s family. The story takes place in Japanese-occupied Korea in the mid-1920’s. The reader should be warned that they should study Yu Miri’s family tree, provided at the beginning of the book,  before taking on the immense task of reading this saga.

Here is a short summary of Yu Miri’s family, starting with her great grandfather, Lee Young-Ha. He was married to Park Hee-Hyang and had five children with her. They had four sons and one daughter. The eldest son was Lee Woo-Seon, followed by their daughter, Lee So-Won. Lee Woo-Cheol was the second son. His two younger brothers were Lee Woo-Gun and Lee Su-Yong. 

Lee Yong-Ha also had a mistress named Mi-Ryeong. They had a daughter named So-Jin, a girl who would never meet her father. The only thing she would know about him is that he gave her her name.

Lee Woo-Cheol is married to Chee In-Hye and has four children with her. Their daughter’s names are Mi-Ok, Shin-Ja, and Ja-Ok. They named their son Shin-Tae and like his father before him, Lee Woo-Cheol has a son with his mistress, Kim Me-Yeong, who the name’s Shin-Cheol. 

Chee In-Hye is Lee Woo-Cheol’s first wife. After she leaves him, Woo-Cheol marries An Jeong-Hye and has four children with her. They have three daughters and a son. Their daughter’s names are Shin-Ho, Shin-Myeong, and Shin-Hee. Their son is named Shin-Hwa. Shin-Hee marries a Japanese citizen named Yu, against her parent’s wishes. Shin-Hee and her husband are the parents of Yu Miri. 

As the country becomes more unstable, Lee Woo-Cheol runs away to Japan. His brother becomes the leader of a resistance movement against the Japanese forces. Their stories are both hopeful and tragic. After running away to Japan, Lee Woo-Cheol marries a Japanese woman named Nemoto Fusako and has a son with her who he names Shin-Il. Fusako only discovers that Woo-Cheol was married and has children when his second wife, Jeong-Hee appears at their door with children in tow causing more family turmoil.

As interesting and entertaining as the story is, the book has many flaws as well. My first and foremost complaint is the Morgan Giles translation. Although the book was originally written in Japanese, the characters often speak in Korean and most of the Korean words and phrases are not translated and the translator does not provide a glossary forcing the reader to look up the words and phrases on their own or they must infer meaning from the context of what’s being said. 

The writing style is also quite difficult to follow especially when Lee Woo-Cheol or Yu Miri are running. The sentences are mostly fragmented and interspersed with “inhale-exhale” making it very difficult to understand what the character is thinking. 

On the positive side, the book sheds light on the atrocity and experiences of the “comfort women” - young women, sometimes as young as thirteen, who were tricked and made to serve as sexual slaves for the Japanese army. It also sheds light on the treatment of Zainichi Koreans who are still oppressed even today. 

A remarkable book but a very difficult read. Be sure to invest a lot of time if you plan to challenge yourself to the task of reading it.

The South by Tash Aw (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) ~Janet Brown

Just when it seems as if the coming-of-age novel is threadbare and ready for a decent burial, Tash Aw brings it back to new life in The South. Placing this at the southern edge of Malaysia at the time of the Asian financial meltdown of 1997, when even Singapore teetered on the edge of disaster, Aw puts his young protagonist’s growing pains squarely against the challenges brought to the world by globalization and climate change, making potential cliches turn fresh and poignant in this juxtaposition.

When Jay’s mother inherits a farm from her father-in-law, she packs up her entire family and takes them to a part of Malaysia that her urban children have never known. Her husband, a taciturn and stern academic, isn’t enchanted by this odyssey. He’s never understood why his father bought this piece of land that becomes less productive every year. Although he grew up with the farm’s manager, he has never established a true friendship with Fong and is uncomfortable with his wife’s inheritance. 

Jay, however, is immediately drawn to Fong’s son, Chuan, a boy several years his senior who is doing his best to construct a future that doesn’t include his father’s rural existence. He’s an attractive rebel and Jay, who has realized years ago that he is sexually drawn to his own gender, spends as much time with Chuan as he can.

Jay’s two sisters, on the threshold of adulthood, have chosen their separate strongholds. Lina has cut her hair painfully short, smokes cigarettes, sports a tattoo, and disdains any thought of romance. Yin has patterned herself after her mother, whom she resembles and has fallen in love. Unfortunately the man she has chosen is Malay and Muslim which guarantees the opposition of her Malaysian-Chinese parents, should they ever learn about this relationship.

With the parents preoccupied with what seems to be a failing marriage and with the problems of owning a failing farm, each member of the family carves out their own personal territory. Nobody notices the intimacy that is burgeoning between Jay and Chuan, with Jay taking on the status of a quasi-adult both on the farm and in the neighboring towns. He’s developing an attachment to the land that he thinks may become his home, along with a detached passion for Chuan. Although they’re physically close, Jay is aware that their future lives will diverge and he brings that lens to this love affair, savoring it while knowing it will be only his introduction to a life of intimacy with men.

Aw brings a lyrical sensibility to a vanishing way of life when he describes the farm. As Jay learns to love this harsh and deteriorating landscape, so do the readers. When it’s betrayed by its new owner, this is a tragedy that’s painful, an aching loss that’s as haunting as the expulsion at the end of Genesis. 

Aw prefigures his conclusion with a number of clues: the holiday chalets built on land that had once been part of the farm but which remain unfinished when the Southeast Asian economies collapse, the Burmese woman in a rural Malaysian market who speaks Cantonese and sells smuggled goods that are made in Thailand and embossed with the logos of multinational brands, a recent rush on the banks that drained ATMs across the country, the demonization of the IMF and George Soros.

Chuan reveals his ambitions, “to get a big TV and a karaoke set and a huge stereo,” disregarding his father’s struggle to keep the farm alive, even though its greatest value lies in its proximity to Singapore. 

“You can’t call it an orchard if it no longer bears fruit--we agreed on that.” “When a piece of land that was once a farm is no longer a farm,” what is it going to become?

“It’s called El NIno,” Jay tells Chuan, describing the drought that is killing the land as “a cyclical weather system.” But who has the patience to wait out a cycle when there’s money to be made? How can a boyhood love affair prevail when one of them is slated for a university education while the other had failed all his subjects and left school at seventeen? It’s a tribute to Aw’s artistry that he brings grief to these endings by linking them to a loss of innocence that, without warning, will soon strike the entire world.

The White Book by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith (Hogarth) ~Janet Brown

White is an enigma. Is it a color or is it an absence of color? This makes it an appropriate preoccupation for this enigmatic little book, which at first reveals no gender for its narrator, no name for the city in which it is set, and no plot. Instead it begins with a list of things that are white and a few spoken words that are repeated throughout The White Book: “Don’t die. For God’s sake don’t die.”

White is the color of purity and the color of death. Death is the prevailing theme for the narrator. Her mother at the age of twenty-two gave birth to her first child, alone.  She dressed the baby girl in a white gown she had made while racked with labor pains and wrapped the newborn in ribbons of cloth cut from a white quilt to serve as swaddling bands. The baby, born two months early, her “face as white as a crescent-moon rice cake,” lived for only a couple of hours. That night her father buried her on a mountainside. Her “gown became her shroud. Her swaddling bands became a coffin.” Her death made way for the narrator’s own life and this fact haunts the white view of a book that the author describes as “a kind of essay-cum-prose poem.” “My life means yours is impossible.”

Snowfall obscures the novel’s setting, a “white city” which was so thoroughly destroyed by Hitler, “literally pulverized,” that before it was rebuilt, “the white glow of stone ruins” was all that remained. Walking through it brings the knowledge that every part of the landscape was once dead and was “painstakingly reconstructed.” The wings of a solitary white butterfly loses their  whiteness as they slowly freeze on the outskirts of the city, becoming “close to transparent…something other, no longer wings,” and snow falls “with an equal absence of joy or sorrow.”

The narrator turns into “she” with a view of whiteness that is less apocalyptic. A “white cloud of escaping breath is proof that we are living.” A white pebble found on a beach is seen as what silence would be if “it were condensed into the smallest, most solid object.” “Black writing through white paper” makes her understand that “learning to love life again is a long and complicated process.” She explores the art of “laughing whitely…laughter that is faint, cheerless.”

Han Kung has admitted that The White Book is somewhat autobiographical. She was born after a sister who died before she had taken three hours of breath and that dead infant lives within these pages, as “she,” who sees the beauty and promise that lies within whiteness. Kung wrote this novel while living within this “city of severe winters,” that sprang into new life after all but a tiny fraction was demolished in warfare, when she was given a writer’s residency in Warsaw. 

In sixty-five short pieces, Kang examines grief, guilt, and the life that lies within whiteness. Presented as a novel, its essence is poetry, imagist language clad in thought, showing the perfection of a sugar cube, a glacier…sacred, unsullied by life,” “the impossibility of forever.”

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (Vintage Books) ~Janet Brown

Kathy is a caregiver, or as she calls herself, a carer, driving around England to nurse a select group, the donors. Coming from a privileged background, she prefers to work with donors who also grew up at Hailsham, a place that fascinates others who didn’t have that as their past history. 

In a matter-of-fact voice, Kathy explains why Hailsham is enviable. Not a school, not an orphanage, it blends elements of both on a large estate where the children live, taught and are brought up from early childhood until late adolescence. The estate is presided over by a number of instructors who give their young charges an education laced with freedom, medical attention,  and meticulous care. 

The children have known no other home. They know they are special and that they will become donors when they reach adulthood, but beyond that they’re consumed by childhood games, adventures, and friendships. Only one teacher breaks into this idyllic world, telling them “we weren’t being taught enough about donations and all that.” When she hears two boys discussing how they plan to move to America when they grow up, she intervenes. “You’re special. Your lives are set out for you. None of you will go to America..you’ll become adults and you’ll start to donate your vital organs.”

Slowly the children realize who they are. They are clones, without families. As they get older, they begin to search through magazines, hoping to find their “possibles,” their replicas, the people from whom they were cloned. Friends become family and Hailsham holds their only history. 

As a carer, Kathy sees the lifespan of the donors, with them when they reach “completion” after their fourth donation, or even before that. It’s her job to keep her donors happy, well-healed, and ready for their next step. But among those who grew up at Hailsham, there’s a belief that there could be another chapter. If a relationship passes a test administered by Hailsham’s headmistress, the couple could be given time to be together, a break from their fates, before their donations bring them to completion.

Reading Never Let Me Go twenty years after it was first published is an eerie experience. Enshrined as one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the 21st Century, it’s taken on the hallowed glow of a classic. Over the past two decades, AI and humanoid robots have made the idea of human clones almost quaint. And yet unlike Orwell and Huxley in their bleak, dispassionate visions of the future, Kazuo Ishiguro has given his characters warmth, depth, and an enduring humanity that makes their fates tragic, although they don’t see them in that light. For these children, this is the normal progression of a life. Raised in isolation, they’re have a vague awareness of how humans live and die, but their only reality is donation and completion. 

However, when Kathy and Tommy, a boy she grew up with at Hailsham, fall in love as adults, they yearn for more time together and begin to pursue the childhood rumor that this might be allowed to happen. Even though Kathy will soon become a donor and Tommy is nearing completion, they allow themselves dreams of a future, for the first time.

“We gave you your childhoods.” With that statement comes a horrible reality that will strike at the soul of every living parent. We have given our offspring that. Now what will be their futures?

May You Have Delicious Meals by Junko Takase, translated by Morgan Giles (Hutchinson) ~Ernie Hoyt

Junko Takase is a Japanese writer whose first novel was 犬のかたちをしてるもの (Inu no Katachi wo Shiteru Mono) (Things with the Shape of a Dog), won the Subaru Literary Prize, a literature prize sponsored by the publisher Shueisha. The book was published the following year. 

Takase was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, along with the Naoki Prize, for her book 水たまりでいきをする (Mizutamari de Iki o Suru) (Breathing in a Puddle) in 2021 and won the Akutagawa Prize the following year for May You Have Delicious Meals.

May You Have Delicous Meals which was originally published in the Japanese language as おいしいごはんをたべられるますように (Oishii Gohan wo Taberareru masu yo ni) and was serialized in the magazine 群像 (Gunzo) in 2020. The English edition was translated by Morgan Giles who also translated Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station (Asia by the Book, May 2021).

The story centers around three main characters - Oshio, Nitani, and Ashikawa. They all work for the same company in Saitama Prefecture. Their company produces labels and packaging for food and beverage products. Oshio was hired right out of university five years ago. Ashikawa was hired a year before and Nitani was hired a year before Ashikawa although he worked at a different branch for six years before being transferred to the Saitama branch. 

The story is narrated by Oshio. She and Nitani were heading back to the office after taking part in an off-site training course. It was already five thirty in the evening so they decided to grab a bite to eat and have some drinks at a local izakaya. Once the booze starts flowing, Oshio says to Nitani, “Do you know who I can’t stand? Ashikawa.”

As Oshio explains why she doesn’t really like Ashikawa, Nitani discovers that it wasn’t anything Ashikawa did or said to Oshio. He surmises, “you don’t like her because she’s not competent?”. Oshio’s response is, “More like, because everyone knows she isn’t, I guess.” 

When Nitani joined the Saitama office, Ashikawa was supposed to show him the ropes. But after two weeks, Nitani had the thought, “I’m gonna overtake her in no time at all, easy. It’s hard to respect someone after that”. 

Nitani gave up respecting Ashikawa “the moment the thought she lacked a backbone came to the surface of his mind”. However, he is attracted to her weakness and they begin dating. However, there is one thing that really annoys him - it is her love of eating proper food. Nitani is happy with instant pot noodles. He wished he could “eat pot noodles three meals a day and still meet all the dietary requirements for a healthy life”. 

The story is an interesting take on office dynamics. I’m sure many people can relate to disliking a co-worker either because they are incompetent or because they have annoying habits or maybe a bit of both and yet they tolerate their presence to keep harmony in the office.. I’m no different. There are co-workers in the past I did not particularly enjoy working with but I didn’t go out of my way to get them fired. 

You can’t help but wonder what will become of the trio. Will Nitani end up marrying Ashikawa? And what will happen to Oshio? Was she also in love with Nitani? You’ll just have to read and find out.

Invisible Helix by Keigo Higashino, translated by Giles Murray (Abacus Books) ~Ernie Hoyt

Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s most prominent mystery writers. Many of his books have been adapted into movies and television series. One of the most popular is the adaptation of his Detective Galileo series starring popular actor and singer-songwriter Masaharu Fukuyama. The book series includes The Devotion of Suspect X (Asia by the Book, December 2020), Salvation of a Saint, A Midsummer’s Equation, and Silent Parade.

Invisible Helix is the latest addition to the Detective Galileo series. It was originally published in the Japanese language as 透明の螺旋 (Tomei no Rasen) in 2021 by Bungeishunju Ltd. The English edition was translated by Giles Murray who has translated a number of Japanese books, from business biographies to history, fiction and essays and even manga. 

The body of a young man is found floating in Tokyo Bay off the coast of Chiba Prefecture. The corpse’s body was so decomposed that it was hard to determine the victim’s age. There were no clues to his identity either; however, the police did discover something very important - the man had a small wound that looked similar to a bullet wound. The autopsy confirmed that it was indeed a bullet wound, turning this into a homicide case. 

After making a number of inquiries, the police were able to determine that the dead body was most likely a man from Adachi Ward in Tokyo named Ryota Uetsuji and was currently living with his girlfriend Sonoka Shimauchi. It was his girlfriend who filed a missing persons report. When the officer who took her report tried to contact her, he had no response and went to her apartment  but she wasn’t home. 

The detectives called her employer and found that she had suddenly taken time off from work only three days after filing the report. When the detectives investigated the couple’s apartment, they found clothes and other items were missing as well. It also came to the light that Sonoko was a victim of sexual abuse and the police assumed she must be the killer since she disappeared shortly after his  body was found. 

However, Shimauchi has an airtight alibi. She can prove that she was miles away, in Kyoto, when Ryota Uetsuji disappeared. Now the two detectives on the case, Detective Kusanagi and Detective Utsumi have to restart their investigation. If Sonoko Shimauchi didn’t kill her boyfriend, then who did?

They found that before her boyfriend moved in with her, she was living with her mother Chizuko. Chizuko had died a year and half earlier.  The detectives discover that Chizuko became good friends with a children’s book author named Nana Asahi who writes unusual stories usually related to science. The detectives managed to talk to her editor and learned a little more about her. One of her books was titled Little Lonely Monopo. It was a story about a monopole. In physics it is a single electric charge or a magnetic pole. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it is a “hypothetical north or south magnetic pole existing alone”. 

The detectives were able to contact Ms. Asahi’s editor and they discovered that was a pseudonym she used. Her real name is Nae Matsunaga. However, what really caputured Detective Kusanagi’s interest was the bibliography where he saw the following entry: Yukawa Manabu, If I Ever Met a Monopole, Teito University. 

Manabu Yukawa is a physics professor and an old friend of Kusanagi’s. He has also helped the police department solve difficult cases in the past. Once Yukawa gets involved, another name is added to the list of suspects. The owner and mama-san of a high-class hostess bar called VOWM. This woman seemed determined to recruit Sonoko to work at her club even though Sonoko wasn’t as beautiful as most of her other employees. 

As Manuba Yukawa, nicknamed “Galileo” helps the police in the investigation, he must confront his own past as well. Will he help the police to solve the case? Will he be able to find Sonoko Shimauchi? And will he be able to find out who exactly murdered Ryota Uetsuji and why…

Strangers in the Land by Michael Luo (Penguin Random House) ~Janet Brown

Expulsion. Detention centers. Separation of children from their parents. Battles over birthright citizenship. Legislation banning  immigration. Vilification of targeted ethnicities. 2025? No. This happened at the  end of the 19th century and well into the 20th, directed at what we now call the “Model Minority.” The parallels between that time and our own are as horrifying as they are ignored. 

The end of the Civil War in 1865 that brought a stop to slavery in the U.S. gave rise to a labor crisis and a demand for cheap labor. Households needed servants, mines and factories needed workers, and the most difficult portion of the transcontinental railway was yet to be built. In parts of the nation where slaves were not in use, immigration provided essential workers who would work more cheaply than native citizens, and while the East Coast was the entryway for European immigrants, San Francisco was the gateway for the Chinese. 

The first recorded Chinese arrival to that city was in 1848. Within two years there were 800 Chinese and by 1852, the number of arrivals from China that disembarked in San Francisco swelled to over 20,000, which was deemed “a frightening number.”

However these immigrants were almost all male, looking for work, and were found to be “as efficient as white laborers.” While Irish workers were apt to strike for higher pay, the Chinese didn’t and for that they faced retaliation. The first expulsion of Chinese labor from a mine site took place in 1849 and over the years this happened repeatedly and violently. Houses were set on fire, lynchings took place, and vigilante mobs assaulted and murdered Chinese workers with impunity, joined by the Ku Klux Klan under the guise of “The Order of Caucasians.” Cities in the Pacific Northwest fell prey to vigilantism with a three-day  spree of violence driving out Chinese residents in Tacoma and mobs in Seattle forcing residents of Chinatown onto waiting ships, leaving a “small contingent” within the city.

With a smaller number of Chinese arrivals, the East Coast had to bring Chinese workers from San Francisco to serve as strike breakers and to staff factories. When immigration battles were waged in Congress, it was Easterners against the West, with the lawmakers who defended Chinese rights coming from eastern states with smaller Chinese populations. The Chinatown in New York City grew along with a professional class that became politically active, while in San Francisco a detention shed that served as an immigration station was a national disgrace for twelve years.

Michael Luo, an editor at the New Yorker, has painstakingly given an overview of the Chinese presence in America, an account that dwells as heavily upon battles among U.S lawmakers as it does upon the bigotry and violence that assailed Chinese, no matter what their immigration status might be. His account is vivid and detailed, but he gives this history a staccato presentation rather than a linear one. By focusing on issues thematically rather than as an ordered number of events, he brings an element of confusion that is daunting to the average reader, who will find themselves wishing for a timeline. He ignores the history of the Chinese in places other than San Francisco and New York, except for the massacre in Rock Springs, Wyoming and the expulsions in Tacoma and Seattle, while the Chinese migration from the Southwest into Mexico is nowhere to be seen. Still this mammoth accomplishment is important, relevant, and needs to be read.

Things In Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) ~Janet Brown

When Yiyun Li’s first son committed suicide while he was still in high school, Li didn’t have the luxury of succumbing to her feelings. Her youngest son needed her strength. Six years later he killed himself. 

Immediately Li “began to feel that sensation for which there is no name.” Her life became an abyss. This state of being was a concrete fact, against which her feelings were useless. Trained in science before she became a novelist who wrote eleven books that preceded this one, among them The Vagrants (Asia by the Book, March 2009) and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Asia by the Book, April 2020), Li turned to facts, “the harshest and hardest part of life.”

Facts bring “order and logic,” while feelings encourage “the inexplicable and the illogical”where “words take on a flabbiness and staleness.” “I have only this abyss, which is my life,” a state that is permanent. It can slip into Greek tragedy or it can find a different form of existence, one that is stripped of narrative.

Li chooses Radical Acceptance, living with unchangeable facts without bringing judgement  to them, recognizing distress without excessive feelings but with keen attention. 

The death of her children is a fact. Suppositions, intuitions, and searches for reasons why offer nothing that will change this. Instead Li follows a path that she was taught by Marsha Linehan, author of Building a Life Worth Living and the creator of dialectical behavior therapy with its tools of acceptance, mindfulness and shaping. “Do things that work,” is a tenet of Linehan’s and Li adapts this to “Do things that make sense to me.” 

How to survive in the dark hole of an abyss with its threat of timelessness is to “mark time..by doing anything that keeps the body moving and the mind focused.” Marking time is done only by those who are “in the realm of the living,” and provides a structure for a life.

Cooking and gardening are activities that require the discipline of “order and logic” and “keen attention” upon facts. Writing draws upon a practice in which “everything is relevant and noticed” and facts are never ignored. 

Li learned as an abused child to “keep my body still and my mind clear.” Born in Beijing near the close of the Cultural Revolution, with a mother who was badly scarred by modern Chinese history, Li had an aversion to emotional indulgence from her earliest years. As a student of science, she abhors sloppiness of thought. “Cliches,” she believes, “corrode the mind” and “any adjective is an irrelevance.” She repudiates the Western idea of grief with its progression toward an end point and is equally dismissive of the criticism that comes from readers in China, reviling her for using the words “death” and “die” instead of softened euphemisms. 

Refusing to evade or soften facts and unflinchingly observing emotions while letting them pass seem to echo the Chinese practice of “eating bitterness.” Certainly Marsha Linehan was deeply influenced by Buddhist thought, which she has freely acknowledged. Li, who was hospitalized for mental illness when she was younger, lives with the knowledge that “reality and unreality remain permeable.” To remain within the borders of reality, her sense of time is focused upon “now and now and now.” The verb ‘to be” is “undyable” and her sons are now and forever her children.

“Things in nature merely grow, until it’s time for them to die,” she says, “There is no shared abyss. We each dwell in our own.” Although nobody can be with Yiyun Li within hers, she has reached out from it to give signposts for how this state can be survived.

Inside and Other Short Fiction edited by Ruth Ozeki (Kodansha America) ~Ernie Hoyt

Editor Ruth Ozeki, a half-Japanese woman who grew up in rural New England, writes in the Forward to this anthology of how she feels the perception of Japanese women has been transformed over the years. She says when she was a little girl, an older gentleman who worked in a feed store used to call her “Suzy”. It wasn't until she was older when she discovered the old guy was an army veteran who served in the Pacific Theater and that the name “Suzy” came from a Chinese prostitute Suzy Wong from a 1960 movie, The World of Suzy Wong.

Not too long ago, Ozeki saw an ad for a California-based skateboard company, which gave a different impression of Japanese women. Their boards featured an “anime-style image of a saucer-eyed, knock-kneed schoolgirl, dressed in a blood-spattered, miniskirted school uniform and sailor blouse, carrying a chain saw and dragging a severed head.”

Ozeki finds it fascinating that the perception of Japanese women has gone from the “docile submissive Madame Butterfly of the early 1900s, or the docile, submissive pan-pan or geisha-girl of the post-World War II Occupation, or the docile, submissive office lady or salaryman’s wife of the ‘80s and ‘90s.”

According to Ozeki, the image of Japanese women today has transformed into something different. She says, “The new Japanese woman is not only redefining her sexual prowess; she is even acquiring supernatural powers: the demure schoolgirl has morphed into a superheroine, or antiheroine, out to save or to destroy the world.”

Ozeki introduces the eight writers whose stories are collected in this anthology. Many of them are prizewinning popular Japanese novelists who have never before been published in English. Their stories portray a different type of Japanese woman in today’s modern society. 

Inside and Other Short Fiction is a collection of short stories by contemporary Japanese women writers whose main protagonists are all women. There are a total of eight stories featuring works by Tamaki Daido, Rio Shimamoto, Yazuki Muroi, Shungkiku Uehida, Chiya Fujino, Amy Yamada, Junko Hasegawa, and Nobuko Takagi. 

Three of the stories are written from the point of view of a teenager. Three other stories are told through the voice of working women. The final two stories are told by a divorced woman and a woman who is married to a doctor. 

Milk is about a teenage girl who takes us into her world where she and her three close friends date older men for money. It examines how close friendships change when teenagers become high school students, and about a girl faced with the choice of whether to have sex with her boyfriend or not. 

Inside focuses on another teenage girl whose boyfriend wants to become more intimate but is unaware of his girlfriend’s home life. It’s a story about love, friendship, and trust. 

Piss is not a story for the faint of heart. It is the story of a sex worker in Kabukicho who is about to turn twenty. One of her regular customers doesn’t have sex with her. All he wants to do is drink her urine. Although the story is quite graphic, its main theme is about love and betrayal and having the courage to go on when things look bleak. 

Other stories included in this anthology are My Son’s Lips, Her Room, Fiesta, The Unfertilized Egg, and The Shadow of the Orchid. 

The subjects of the stories range from love, sex, marriage and even the supernatural. The stories are diverse and innovative. It is a great introduction to modern Japanese women writers and will most likely make you a fan of Japanese fiction.

Dirty Kitchen by Jill Damatac (Simon & Schuster) ~Janet Brown

By all standards, Jill Damatac’s parents were prime candidates for achieving the American Dream. Both had earned university degrees and were fluent in English. Both were from a country that had strong ties with the United States, who had dominated the Philippines for almost half a century. Filipino men who had fought with U.S. troops in World War Two were allowed legal immigration. Damatic’s parents were not.

Her father had been trained as an architect. Her mother had left a successful career as a banker in Manila. Neither are allowed entry on H-1B visas, which are given only to Filipinos who arrived as doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, or domestic workers.

Entering the U.S. on tourist visas, the Damatac family swiftly fell into the category of illegal immigrants. When they applied for Social Security cards, only Jill’s mother benefited from a careless mistake. She receives a “clean” card that isn’t stamped with the words, “Not Valid for Employment.” Jill’s father erases that statement from the other three cards with skillfully transformed photocopies. 

This gives him no advantage in the U.S job market, where he finds menial jobs in small grocery stores. Jill’s mother, after many unsuccessful interviews, eventually is hired as a management trainee at a bank and once again carves out a place for herself that befits her skills and experience.

Humiliated, her husband becomes violent and his daughter often bears bruises from his brutality. Finding that academic success alleviated his cruelty toward her, she excels. However her wage-earning potential is more important to her father and he forces her into the workplace. Years later, as an adult working the sort of dead-end jobs that are available to those without college diplomas, she finds that he has used her Social Security number to open credit cards in her name and has plunged her into insurmountable debt. 

In one of those stranger-than-fiction moments, Damatac falls in love with a man from England and her life changes forever. 

She is, she asserts, a woman with three countries: “a country of birth, a country of death, and a country of rebirth.” “I wrote this book to document myself into existence,” after growing up in America, who persistently refused to allow her existence.

Damatac vividly and terribly explores the hellish lives of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. But threaded through this is her inheritance given to her by the Philippines. When she left at the age of nine, her grandfather gave her three komik books filled with mythic gods and goddesses from her native country. When she arrives, she is accompanied by the memories of the food that has nourished her, the flavors that her mother and aunts do their best to recreate in America.

Throughout her account of cruelty and deprivation, a girl assailed by beatings and sexual assaults never loses sight of the heritage that is hers. Linking her life to the myths of her homeland and learning how to make the food that is her country’s legacy, Jill Damatac places the “dirty kitchens” of the Philippines with their fresh, flavorful  ingredients and their outdoor settings against the gleaming sterility of refrigerators and microwaves that characterize American kitchens. These threads are what gave her the strength to discover “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness despite the United States.”

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (HarperCollins) ~ Janet Brown

Some books exist as intellectual challenges: War and Peace, Moby-Dick, anything written by Thomas Pyncheon.  Others appear to be constructed with only a word count in mind, bizarre exercises that sprawl and meander without discipline. And then there are noble efforts that demand attention, even when readers know this adventure will end badly, leaving them in a state of rage and frustration, mutterings things like “Where was its editor?”

It took Vikram Seth six years to write his 800.000-word novel, A Suitable Boy. A writer who became known for his poetry, he composed his first novel entirely in verse. Even its front cover rhymed: Golden Gate by Vikram Seth. To follow up that literary groundbreaker, Seth essentially broke the art of the novel into jagged little pieces, creating a work that follows an 18th century construct in length while dashing itself to bits against the sheer unwieldiness of 20th century historical events.

Beginning with an ambitious mother and a rebellious daughter, the first sentence promises the sparkle of Jane Austen. “You too shall marry a boy I choose,” the matriarch announces at a lavish family wedding. However Seth is much too original to stick with this overused trope. Setting his novel in 1950, when India is still struggling with the wound dealt by Partition and the dilemma of uniting a feudal society of princely states into a cohesive government, Seth has a multiplicity of competing threads clashing within the first hundred pages, with 1373 more to go. (In its paperback edition, it weighs in at 1473 pages and is around six inches thick. Surprisingly, the binding holds it all together after days of reading.) 

Grappling with the intricacies of the caste system, the inevitable clash between Muslims and Hindus, the need for land reform that will strip the Rajas and Nawabs of their fiefdoms, the clash between Westernized “brown sahibs” and rural populists, the transformation of localized economies into a national globalized whole is dizzying enough. Throw in a cast of characters that burgeon into a mob scene and suddenly there are several books in play, all jostling for their own spotlight. 

Seth provides a family tree that gives a helpful map for forty-three of his characters, while leaving readers to flounder through at least another sixty. Be warned. Falling in love with any of them is a recipe for a headache that will defy any analgesic. This novel demands its own spreadsheet, or perhaps several. That it was published In 1993, long before Microsoft became a household staple, only proves the thoroughly diabolical nature of Seth’s creative genius.

His characters are enticing, his descriptions vivid, his ear for dialogue is unmatched and untrammeled. In one portion a family that converses in rhymed couplets takes over, in the next there’s a satirical rendition of pompous courtroom speeches. No interchange is too trivial. All of the characters, even a couple of very young children, are allowed full spate. 

Somewhere around the nine hundredth page, the clashing plots and the prolix characters blur together into a muddle that defies any form of intelligibility. Early on, Seth compares writing a novel to composing a raag (or raga as it’s known in English), with musical improvisations deviating from the main theme and at last increasing to a climax. Within another hundred pages this process becomes a banyan tree that sprouts and grows and spreads with branches that become trunks or intertwine with other branches. When finally, one hundred pages from the end, a character declares, “I hate long books: the better, the worse,” anyone who has reached this point is ready to stand up and cheer.

For decades, Seth promised a sequel to A Suitable Boy, based upon one of its concluding sentences that echoes the first one of this book. A Suitable Girl proved to be unpublishable and it’s hard not to wish that the same thing had been decided of its predecessor. What began as a suitable novel should have been turned into several slimmer and more digestible pieces of fiction.

The Narrow Road to Oku by Matsuo Basho, translated by Donald Keene, illustrations by Masayuki Miyata (Kodansha International) ~ Ernie Hoyt

Matsuo Basho is probably the most famous Japanese poet from the Edo era. He is recognized as a master of haiku, a short form of poetry. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of seventeen morae, known as on in Japanese and are very similar to syllables, in a five-seven-five pattern. 

The Narrow Road to Oku is a book written as a haibun, a poetic diary that combines prose with haiku. It has also been translated as The Narrow Road to the Deep North and The Narrow Road to the Interior. The original title of the book in Japanese is 奥の細道 (Oku no Hosomichi). It was written by Basho over three hundred years ago. He wrote it while traveling from Edo (modern day Tokyo) to the northern interior of Japan, known as Oku. He traveled over one hundred fifty days and covered about 1,500 miles or almost 2.400 kilometers, mostly on foot.

He was joined by his friend Sora Kawaii. to visit places that were mentioned by ancient poets whom Basho admired and who he references quite often in his diaries. Their journey took them to the Toshogu Shrine in Nikko in present day Tochigi Prefecture, the Shirakawa Barrier in present day Fukushima Prefecture, the islands of Matsushima, Hiraizumi in present day Miyagi Prefecture, Sakata in present day Yamagata Prefecture, Kisakata in present Akita Prefecture, and present day Toyama Prefecture which was known in Basho’s time as Etchu.

This modern English edition was translated by Donald Keene, an American who was well known for being a Japanese scholar, historian, teacher, and writer. He has also translated many works of Japanese literature. The book also includes illustrations by papercutting artist Masayuki Miyata, who took on the task of creating images related to Basho’s haiku. Miyata said, “If you misread that one point, the work will instantly become something that has nothing to do with Basho’s spirituality and will end up being just an illustration to accompany a haiku poem”. He further expounds, “I couldn’t let a single word of the seventeen characters go unmentioned”. 

The book begins with Basho’s prose before he even starts his journey. He writes, “the months and days are the travellers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers. Those who float away their lives on ships or who grow old leading horses are forever journeying, and their homes are wherever their travels take them”. 

Before leaving he composed the following poem: 

Kusa no to mo Even a thatched hut

sumikawaru yo zo May change with a new owner

hina no ie Into a doll’s house

Before leaving on his journey, it is believed that Basho sold his house to a man with small daughters. At the time of the Momo no Sekku (Peach Festiva)l, currently known as the Hina Matsuri known in English as “Girl’s Day” or “Dolls Festival”, the dolls would be displayed in the house. As Basho was a life-long bachelor, dolls had never been displayed in the house. 

Keene’s translation of Basho’s travel diary and haiku make it easier for the modern reader to understand the deeper meaning of each haiku poem as it relates to Basho’s travels. It also helps the reader to have the footnotes explaining in more detail about many of the poets and poems that Basho makes references to. He often cites Confucius, Saigyo, Du Fu, ancient Chinese poetry, and The Tale of the Heike. 

This book has inspired many people to follow in Basho’s footsteps and perhaps it will inspire you to as well, although I don’t recommend going on foot as the journey would take you approximately four and half months.

Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri (New York Review of Books) ~ Janet Brown

Two aspects of the city that he still calls Bombay are what dominates the attention of a writer who grew up in this place but left it long ago. His visit is one that takes place only because of his work, drawn here for a public reading of his latest novel. Choosing to stay in the neighborhood of his childhood, he finds his focus is concentrated upon the legendary Taj Mahal Hotel and his friend Ramu. 

Both the building and the friend are being reconstructed after going through violent destruction. The Taj was the site of a massacre when Pakistani terrorists descended upon it in 2008. The palatial hotel became a scene of slaughter and destruction over a period of three days. Two years later, the writer finds portions of it are off-limits. Its damage is still being repaired.

Ramu is off-limits as well. After decades of going “in and out of addiction,” he’s committed himself to a two-year program of detox, rehab, and isolation. He can have no visitors nor telephone conversations. 

When the writer visits the Taj, he looks at it with an unfamiliar point of view. In discussions of the attack with shop owners and hotel staff, he frequently hears “I closed the shop early that evening” or “I was not here that day.” These words strike him harder than the description of the attackers. “Terrorist …through sheer repetition has lost all meaning,”  while ‘Muslim’ has taken on a whole new weight. As he makes his way through the city, the writer looks for traces of Islam in taxi drivers, journalists, passersby on the street. When he satisfies his yearning for dishes that originally came from the Middle East, he often stresses that this is Parsi cuisine, made and sold by Zoroastrian Christians.

Although he clings to his childhood home by refusing to call it Mumbai, he recognizes it as “Bombay, least changeless of all cities!” Still, he says, “I long to visit the city I grew up in.”

But this time he roams through it without Ramu and that absence overwhelms what he sees. “I’ve always expected to see him again, whether or not I wanted to.” There’s a veil over this visit. “Behind the veil is Ramu,” and caught in memories of their friendship, the writer moves in and out of time, a kind of living ghost, feeling “no nostalgia,”only an “impossibility.” In Ramu’s absence, Bombay is closed to him.

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist who feels “a surge of bile” against that form of writing, who says, “when I can, (I) undermine the genre I work with.” Although he and the writer in this book share the same name, the same background, the same literary creations, he claims it’s a novel because “the author and the narrator are not one.” 

However Friend of My Youth has no characters and no plot, deficiencies which keep it from reaching even the status of a novella. What Chaudhuri gives readers is a malnourished travel memoir, with an old friendship serving as a Proustian madeleine, calling up a patchwork of memories. It floats through 164 pages without emotion or engagement, laboring under a title that Chaudhuri has stolen, without shame, from the Canadian writer, Alice Munroe. 

Even after a second reading, this book feels as if it’s an elaborate practical joke, witless and lazy, by a man who is clearly smart enough to have done much, much better than this.

It's a Shodo World by Gakusho Furuya, illustrated by Shoko Matsui (Taiseido) ~Ernie Hoyt

It’s a Shodo World is a great introduction to the world of Japanese calligraphy. The subtitle is 日本の伝統 墨のこころ (Nihon no Dento : Sumi no Kokoro) whichtranslates in English to Japanese Tradition : The Heart of Ink. It is the author’s hope that this book “will give its readers Japanese true aesthetic pleasure by looking at intensely expressive and beautiful Japanese writing symbols and fascinating sumi paintings”. 

Shodo written in kanji characters is 書道. It translates to the Way of Writing in English. It is “an art to draw characters on hanshi (Japanese paper for calligraphy) with a Japanese brush in sumi (India ink)”.  It is a form of Japanese calligraphy that originated in China during the Tang dynasty (618-690). 

There are many different scripts that are used in shodo. Three of the basic styles are kaisho, gyosho, and sosho. Kaisho is a square style, gyosho is a semi cursive style, and sosho is a cursive style.

The calligrapher controls the thickness and shading of the characters with every stroke of the brush. It is an art form “to express one’s spirit and ideas”. A great calligrapher not only has to train to master the brush techniques but they must also train their mind.

I had the chance to speak to a calligraphy artist who told me that the most difficult style to write is the kaisho script. As a novice to calligraphy, I thought the square style would be the simplest to write. The artist told me that sosho script is the easiest. As it’s the fastest form of writing, the calligrapher said artists writing in that script often cover up their mistakes. 

After talking to the calligraphy artist, I went through the book a second time to see the different styles the book’s artist used. I could now understand how the kaisho script is the most difficult to master. Although the characters look simple, the artist controls the thickness of the character and also controls the flow of the brush. 

The accompanying sumi-e or ink-paintings give more meaning to each character or characters that are written. The sume-e next to the kanji character for sky (空) is of some koinobori (carp streamers) which are displayed on Children’s Day (May 5th).  Although the holiday is called “Children’s Day”, it is a festival for boys. Legend has it that a courageous carp managed to climb a waterfall.The koinoboriare cloth streamers have an open mouth which the wind can blow through, making the carp appear to swim in the sky. Koinobori  “symbolize parents’ hope that their sons will have a splendid physique and a courageous spirit”.

The latter part of the book include haiku written in the gyosho script. Haiku is a short poetic form which includes three phrases composed in seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern and includes a kigo or seasonal word or phrase. 

Reading and taking the time to look at how the characters were written and how the sume-e relate to the characters will give the reader a new appreciation for the art of calligraphy.  Some readers may even be tempted into writing calligraphy for themselves.

I don’t think I have the discipline to study calligraphy but I still enjoy looking at it as art. I even collect calligraphy written by monks and priests from temples and shrines. They are called goshuin and include stamps of the temple or shrine. Then the priest or monk writes calligraphy on top of the stamp and writes the name of the place of worship, the date of the visit and sometimes the name of the deity housed in that particular place.