Tales from Siam by Germaine Krull and Dorothea Melchers (Robert Hale, London, out of print) ~Janet Brown

When Germaine Krull invites two friends to go with her to her house on a Chiang Mai mountain, they probably feel they were on a great adventure. The 500-mile trip from Bangkok takes a full day and frequently involves guiding Germaine's Mercedes Benz over two logs set at parallel distances that served as bridges along the way. The journey is "sticky and not too pleasant,"  although the perils are faced by a driver, and a cook has come along to provide meals during this weekend interlude. 

After the first night, a monsoon storm settles in, bringing with it "a drifting white vapour" that is all that could be seen when the ladies look out the windows. The torrent of rain has washed out the mountainside road, leaving Germaine's driver, who had gone to Chiang Mai for a few supplies the day before, unable to return. A bulldozer arrives to rebuild the road but for now the house party is marooned.

Since Germaine has a well-stocked pantry of canned food, a garden provides fresh vegetables, and they have enough cigarettes, whiskey, and gin, there's no reason to panic. Her only neighbors are members of a hill tribe who recently made their living by growing opium and still do at times despite the laws against that, and monks at the area's most revered temple which is a strenuous climb away. Isolation and boredom are the only perils facing the visitors but luckily Germaine has stories that fill the long, dark evenings.

In Bangkok, Germaine is the proprietor of the Oriental Hotel, a place that suffered from Japanese occupation during World War Two but one that she's brought back into luxury. It's a hub for travelers and expatriates, all who come with colorful histories, and Germaine knows them all.

Over the next ten days, she entertains her guests with tales of tropical indiscretions. There's the stolid French businessman who falls under the spell of black magic, losing his fortune, his family, and eventually his memory. There's the man of undistinguished looks but with a "scintillating mind and encyclopedic knowledge" who manages to be friends with both Ho Chi Minh and Emperor Bao Dai, making him a valuable architect of Indo-Chinese diplomacy and eventually the husband of a Burmese princess. She has stories of unscrupulous monks and a near-tragedy involving a naive British aristocrat who took on the vows of a Buddhist nun.

But this book is no mere rehashing of The Canterbury Tales, set in Thailand. Germaine is an historian who has read contemporary histories of Siam written by French Jesuits in the days when Ayutthaya was a capitol of incredible wealth and sophistication, with forty different international settlements within its borders. She is friends with one of the last Chiang Mai princesses who grew up in the palace of a queen of Thailand. She has studied the ill-fated history of Phaulkon, the Greek adventurer who became a confidential advisor to King Narai and was murdered by a group of jealous noblemen.

Even more fascinating is Germaine's own story. Born in Germany, she took up photography and Communism with equal enthusiasm. Communism landed her in a Russian prison for being "anti-Bolshevik" and photography took her to Paris, where she became friends with Jean Cocteau, Colette, Andre Kertesz, and Man Ray. Although she became known for her portraits and fashion photography, she made her name with a portfolio of 64 black-and-white industrial photographs, Métal.

Turning to photo-journalism, she spent much of World War II in Africa, then went to Southeast Asia as a war correspondent. She lived in Thailand for twenty years, then went on to India where she converted to Tibetan Buddhism and published Tibetans in India in 1968.

She died in 1985 in a German nursing home, taking 88 years of stories with her.

Under Water by Tara Menon (Riverhead Books) ~Janet Brown

Marissa lives on an island in the Andaman Sea. She and Arielle are closer than sisters because theirs is a bond of choice, not of blood. Together they grow up in a world of mangrove trees, a garden of coral reefs, and the constant presence of manta rays, benign sea creatures who must stay in constant motion or die.   

Now Marissa lives alone in Manhattan where she's accompanied by a ghost. She's submerged by the peculiar kind of grief that can't be expressed in a single English word. When she tries to describe it, her listeners can't understand the depth of what she feels for someone who was neither a relative nor a lover. 

While running from the tsunami of 2004, Marissa turns back and sees her friend vanish, as "the sea swallows her whole." Haunted by Arielle and obsessed with natural cataclysms, she waits for the hurricane that's approaching New York, "wanting to be where the earth convulses again." Alive and filled with survivor's guilt, Marissa is certain that Arielle's death is her fault. Now on a darker, colder island, she welcomes and invites this new disaster to come and sweep her away.

The Boxing Day Tsunami that devastated much of the South East Asian coast has been recorded in histories and memoirs. In Under Water, Tara Menon cloaks it in fiction but with details that evoke the stories of those who survived the wave. 

Scorning the usual opening sentence of "It was a beautiful day," Menon tells of a holiday morning when dogs howl, spinning in circles, and an elephant trumpets as it escapes the control of its handler. Nobody understands why the birds go silent and few know what it means when the water recedes, "leaving the bay almost drained," until the "sea on the horizon lifts into the sky and slingshots back toward us as a black wall." Everybody begins to run except for Arielle, who stands still, watching the wave approach.

People, beach lounge chairs, motorcycles, an ice cream truck, twist, turn, and "corkscrew" in onslaughts of darkness and surging water. When the wave recedes at last, it leaves a surreal landscape of "a sofa resting on top of a car," "a back half of a bus sticking out of a shop," broken bodies, and the dead. 

Within a day, the hospitals are filled beyond capacity. Dentists come to bring identities to the nameless corpses. Many of those bodies are very small; "estimates suggest that between a third and a half are children."

Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tsunamis come with such mythic force and destruction that they take on the power of myth. Menon mingles an earthly paradise that seems mythical with the brutal facts of what happens when humans are erased from it. The tragedies pass. The natural world heals itself and goes on.

Under Water is a cautionary fable, one that’s more essay than novel. Its beauty and its horror are both inescapably haunting. While Marissa and Arielle swiftly fade, the manta rays and the brilliant life of the coral reefs refuse to go away.

Severance by Ling Ma (Picador) ~Janet Brown

"The end begins before you are ever aware of it. It passes as ordinary...like a West Nile thing." By the time masks and gloves are doled out, it's already too late. What's classified as an outbreak is blooming into a pandemic. Before the year's up, there's no answer at the suicide hotline and the ones who haven't succumbed to Shen fever feel ashamed of being survivors.

Candace works for a company that packages books, guiding publishing projects through overseas production. She hoped to work with art books but instead she handles "the bestseller of the year, every year." She oversees different editions of the Bible, the ones that will become sumptuous family heirlooms, the ones that come with a cheap gemstone on a chain for the teenage market. Her chosen New York life is one of "insulated enjoyment," not quite part of what she sees, with a laugh that's "a social liability." 

Still she, seen as "capable but fragile" is chosen to stay in the office with a sizable pay increase, when everyone else begins to shelter in place. She watches New York become a ghost town, taking photographs of an empty city until the day she leaves the office and realizes she's locked herself out. 

She's found, unconscious and dehydrated, alone in a Yellow Cab, by a group of disparate people, headed by a short, stout man who once worked in IT. Bob claims he owns a building, somewhere near Chicago, where they all can take shelter. When he discovers that Candace is pregnant, she becomes an integral part of his tribe.

Candace has no family. She came from Suzhou when she was six when her parents had made enough money to send for her. When they died in an automobile accident after she became an adult, her only blood ties are people she barely remembers, voices over a phone line, voices that have gone silent. Now, in this new group, she's still the outsider.

Severance suffers under two handicaps. One is a confusion with an Apple drama that began streaming under the same name and became wildly popular. And it had the bad fortune of being seen as a  Covid novel, piggybacking on that time of death and terror, a time that nobody cares to relive.

However Ling Ma's debut novel was published two years before Covid changed the world. Even if she's an extraordinarily swift writer, she created this book at least four years before the most recent pandemic, drawing upon a speculative theme based on SARS. Because of this, she approaches the idea of an America decimated by unstoppable illness with gallows humor and emotional distance. Her few scenes of horror and her portrayal of a desolate New York are works of imagination. 

Severance is another victim of Covid, overlooked and misunderstood. Within the framework of a horror novel, it explores freedom, its limits and meaning. 

"When you wake up in a fictitious world, your only frame of reference is fiction." Perhaps after being immersed in a fictitious world for far too long, it's only natural that we would reject the frame of reference that Ling Ma created long before her fiction became real. And that's a shame.

The Deer King ~Returners~ by Nahoko Uehashi, translated by Cathy Hirano (Yen On) ~Ernie Hoyt

The Deer King ~Returners~ is the sequel to The Deer King ~Survivors~ by Japanese fantasy and science fiction writer Nahoko Uehashi. The plot thickens as the story picks up where the previous book ends. The main character, Van of the Gansa, the leader and sole survivor of the Lone Antlers, a band of warriors who fought against the Zolians,  was captured and enslaved in a salt mine by the conquering army. He is also the only survivor of the attack at the mine by wild dogs called ossams which are a cross between a dog and a wolf.

The follow up to the first novel is just as exciting as its predecessor. Van had saved a small child who was also at the mine when during the ossam attack. Her mother protected her by placing her in the oven and defended her only daughter with her life. Van used to be a family man so he could not in good conscience leave the little girl on her own and let her die, so he decides to take her with him and they both travel to a big trading city called Kazan. 

On their way to the city, they encounter an injured young boy named Tohma. Tohma is from the Oki region, a land north of Aquafa where Van is from. Tohma’s mother is a Zolian who emigrated to Oki so Van does not trust the boy at first. However, they become good friends and Tohma guides Van to Kazan. 

Before I continue, I must confess that I only focused on the going ons of Van and his adopted daughter. However, in the first book, there was a secondary character whose actions would intertwine with Van’s as the story progresses. The character is a man named Hohsalle.

Hohsalle is a physician and a descendant of the Ancient Kingdom of Otawalle, which fell to ruin over two hundred years ago. He has been studying the people who died after being bitten by the ossam at the salt mines. The wild dogs did not only attack the slaves, they attacked everyone and almost everyone, except for Van, did not survive.

Hohsalle believes the ossam are carriers of Black Wolf Fever, an invisible disease that is fatal and contagious. In order to stop a pandemic, he is studying the corpses of those who died from the disease. He also believes that people are dying from an enemy they can’t see. 

In order to truly appreciate this epic, I would recommend to the reader to study the cast of characters, the map of the land, and the people who inhabit this world. There are three main domains - the Empire of Zol, the former Kingdom of Aquafa, and the Kingdom of Mukonia.

The Aquafaese were driven from their own lands or were forced to live as subjects of the Zolian Empire with Zolian immigrants. Another land the Zolians had taken over and whose people were forced to leave their land were the Ahfal Oma, the People of the Fire Horse, on the Yukata Plains, which is located in southern Aquafa. 

Kenoi, the former leader of the Ahfal Oma, is currently known as the Dog King. He has trained wild dogs to attack people with precision. He has never forgiven the Zolians for taking over their land and making them exiles. It is Kenoi who plans to use the dog to spread Black Wolf Fever among the Zolians as the disease does not seem to affect either the Ahfal Oma or Aquafaese. 

It is Van’s quest to save his adopted daughter and to stop Kenoi and his followers. He is of the same thinking as Hohsalle - diseases cannot be controlled by man. Will Van be able to stop Kenoi and his followers? Will Kenoi’s plot wipe out the Zolians? And will Hohsalle find a vaccination to stop the pandemic before it’s too late?

In the current state of the real world, contagious diseases are no laughing matter. We already saw the effects of the coronavirus and now the world is fighting against an outbreak of the hantavirus virus. People may have laughed at Laurie Garrett after she published her book The Coming Plague in 2005, but her warnings had come to fruition. Uehashi’s world in The Deer King deals with this subject in an entertaining but informative way. Who knows what other “coming plagues” there may be but we must be prepared to detail with them when they appear.

In the Valley of the Mekong by Matt J. Menger (St. Anthony Guild Press, out of print) ~Janet Brown

When I found this book in a New York used bookstore that's primarily devoted to baseball, I was so excited I didn't realize until I got back home to Seattle that it was written by a priest. Not to be bigoted, but I've only met one priest that I liked. Now I've met two.

Before Matt Menger went to Laos in 1957, he knew his education and his stint in the Vatican City had a couple of gaps that needed to be filled. He volunteered at one of America's leading medical centers on a six-month crash course in basic medical tasks like taking blood tests and picking up urine specimens. Then he shocked a surgeon he'd worked with by rolling out from under the doctor's car after completing its tune-up at Wagner's Garage.  ("I'll be damned," the surgeon said, unaware of Menger’s primary vocation, "An intern working as a mechanic. Garage business must be good.")

This sets the tone for Menger's account of thirteen years in Laos, in the days before that country was completely racked by war, although hints of that were on the way. He arrives in Vientiane when the capital city still consists of "dirt paths, bamboo huts, and water buffalo" and is almost immediately sent off to a language school in the countryside on a rickety old Army truck that now serves as public transportation for "passengers, screaming babies and snapping ducks."

After two months of struggle with the multitoned Laos language, Menger is deemed ready to go to a nearby mission station and give a sermon in Lao. He gets through his memorized five-minute speech and ends with a request that all able-bodied men in the congregation come to help with "planting posts for the new church." The response is almost overwhelming and Menger feels proud of his language proficiency until he finds that his request actually asked for men to come and help steal the young girls.

Menger is a hands-on prelate whose energy is matched by his sense of humor, his observation skills, and his lack of moralization. When he needs men for a dangerous stint of well-digging, he finds his workers in an opium den. Without flinching, he watches a shaman administer an herbal remedy by expectorating it on a patient that Menger has just treated with a shot of penicillin. On a walk through the Plain of Jars, "a quiet sanctuary of beauty," he meets the denizens of the Bungalow, soldiers of fortune who fly cargos of opium to drop zones near Saigon, Phnom Penh and the Gulf of Siam and then relax over booze and opium. "But," Menger says, "these men were good to me."

He persuades American members of the International Voluntary Service to help him "launch Operation Red Island Red" and with the six roosters from the IVS, Menger's villagers are in the egg business. 

"In Laos, he says, "I quickly learned that a priest must also be the village medicine man: general practitioner, pediatrician, surgeon, obstetrician, and dentist." He also needs to keep a rifle handy to dispatch visiting cobras and he learns to live with wild elephants. Human life, he discovers, is quite literally cheap. In a marketplace he watches an old woman assess the value of a new baby at four thousand kip or eight US dollars. 

Menger is blessed with the gift of cultural relativism and acceptance, and has more than the usual abundance of courage, even as war advances and bombers smash 110 windows in the newly built but not yet opened orphanage. 

His one bit of judgementalism is reserved for spirit houses, which he believes are harbors of witchcraft, saying "The burning of a spirit house is always a victorious moment.” His other flaw is a passion for exclamation marks which appear on almost every page of his book. However if readers exercise the same forbearance that Matt Menger displays throughout In The Valley of The Mekong, they're in for an adventure that few books will provide and they're going to have a rollicking good time.

Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu (Flatiron Books) ~Janet Brown

What would you do if you knew you were faced with swift and inescapable annihilation? Who would you attempt to save? Who would you reach out to? What last words would you say? And what would you do, if you were given a second chance at being alive? 

An alert tears through a suburban town, bringing eighteen minutes of terror before another announcement proclaims it was a false alarm. Eighteen minutes, over quarter of an hour, is long enough to change a life and all over Beckitt, lives are changed.

In interlocking chapters, Vincent Yu strips away the facades of people who have believed that in Beckitt, "the only change was cyclic--the seasons, the school years." But now, after facing certain death for eighteen interminable minutes, nine people confront hidden disappointments, subterranean secrets, unwelcome discoveries, the nature of mortality. Changes are born from panic-fueled abandonment, from text messaging sent without consideration, from a piece of gossip that illuminates a teenage girl's view of her parents, from unexpected heroic clarity emerging in an addicted brain. 

What begins in the guise of a thriller becomes nine little novels, filled with fear, beauty, and redemption. Yu's characters are New England Chinese American (with one exception--the woman who discovers after her husband's fatal heart attack in the midst of the false alarm that he had fathered a son with a woman named Emma Chou). Beckitt is small enough that these lives intersect in ways that are sometimes incidental, sometimes life-changing. 

Yu shows these links with subtlety, in quiet surprises, letting readers make those discoveries on their own. The true revelations are in his portrayals of his characters, the details that make them and their stories shine. He offers a man whose parents "were fully assimilated...for whom culture was more hobby than identity," a woman who shows her loss of tension as "her cheeks were loosening like sails," a wife whose "soul was a sky."  A widower backs away from a new friendship because of the woman's "swaying anchor of her need.” A man with a broken heart finds comfort in the irresistible seduction of fentanyl, "astonishing in its comprehensive pleasure."

A catalogue of what a marriage consists of when a couple is "old enough to know how silly it was to make blanket declarations, and old enough to make them, regardless" shows monogamy in all of its "expansive sweetness." A quick sentence near the novel's end gives a happy ending to a man who had been buried by "some inner brokenness." A dissolution of humanity in a nursing home as the alert unites employees in anarchy evokes The Lord of the Flies.  "A thundering sickening shock" is supplanted by "a warm flicker of hope," even though the blaring alert says death is on its way, coming through a "ripped-open procession of clouds."

Seek Immediate Shelter is a book that made at least one reader fall in love with its flawed and frightened characters going through reentry, facing revelations and truths, loss and discovery. It's a reminder of the untapped resilience that everyone contains without realizing it's there. It's a book written for our time, not easy but restorative, showing up when we need it most.

The Deer King ~Survivors~ by Nahoko Uehashi, translated by Cathy Hirano (Yen On) ~Ernie Hoyt

Nahoko Uehashi is a Japanese writer of fantasy fiction. Her two books in The Beast Player series - The Beast Player (Asia by the Book, May 2023) and The Beast Warrior (Asia by the Book, (Asia by the Book, August 2023) were translated into English and were published by Pushkin Press.

The Deer King ~Survivors~ is the first book in her new series, The Deer King. It was originally published in the Japanese language as 鹿の王：生き残った者 (Shika no O : Iki Nokotta Mono). The English title is a direct translation of the Japanese title. It was published by Kadokawa in 2014. 

The story is set on a fictional world and comprises three main regions. The largest being the Empire of Zol. To the west of the Empire of Zol is the former Kingdom of Aquafa. Their king pleaded allegiance to the Zolian Empire and is now under the rule of Zol. Far to the west of Zol, lies the Kingdom of Mukonia. The Mukonians also want to expand their kingdom into Aquafa, however Aquafa is protected by the Toga Mountain range. 

The main character is Van. He is the leader and sole survivor of the Lone Antlers, a band of warriors who resisted the Zolian invasion. He was captured and sent to be a slave at a salt mine in Aquafa. It had been two months since he was sent to this mine where the survival rate for slaves was three months at the most. This wouldn’t be the first time Van would face his mortality and it also wouldn’t be his last. 

Mine slaves “toiled like ants, descending deep into the earth to fill their baskets with rock salt. Then they trudged back to the surface with the load biting into their shoulders, continuing the process all day. At night, they slept shackled to iron pegs buried deep in the rock wall. Come morning, the routine began again.”

However, this morning would be different. He heard a scream from somewhere in the mine. It appears an ossam had entered the mine. An ossam being a vicious mountain dog, indigenous to Van’s home. It wasn’t just one ossam. A pack of black beasts with golden eyes were in the mine. 

The slave next to Van was speaking quickly but Van couldn’t understand a word he said. Van appeared to be the only Aquafaese that was imprisoned here. All the others were either Zolians sentenced to death or slaves from other conquered lands to the south.

The mountain dogs had bitten and attacked everyone in the salt mine. Even Van was bitten. Afterwards, they left as suddenly as they appeared. But why? Van was familiar with the habits of ossam and wolves. He knew they would only attack people if they were starving or to protect their young. 

One week after the attack, the slave chained next to him was silent and his body was cold. The following morning, four more slaves lay dead. As he was made to go to work, Van noticed that there were even more corpses spread throughout the mine. Van surmised that a fatal disease was spreading. 

On the eighth day after Van was bitten, he suddenly had a massive headache, his body shivered from chills and his teeth chattered. His fever continued to rise and he started to have a nightmare and was experiencing excruciating pain. 

Van awoke to a world of silence. Everywhere around him were corpses. He tried to get up and run only to find his foot still bound to a chain stuck in the rock. Van does not know where he found the strength but he managed to pull the chain from the rock wall. Then he started running. 

Once Van climbed out the mine, he discovered there wasn’t anyone about. He thought back to the black beasts and wondered what kind of animal they were. They bit each slave as if ordered to do so. Van was beginning to wonder if they were really wild or if someone had trained them. 

Before leaving the mine, Van heard a cry from inside an oven in a now abandoned kitchen. He found a small girl there. He couldn’t leave her on her own so decides to take her with him. He names her Yuna. Van and Yuna decide to head for Kazan, a large trading center and the former capital of the Kingdom of Aquafa. It now seats the Zolian governor who rules Aquafa. 

On their travels, Van and Yuna meet an injured man named Tohma. They help him back to his home. Van and Yuna are welcomed into the community. Van hopes that he and Yuna will be able to lead a peaceful life. However, the disease the animals brought to the salt mine are spreading throughout the land. 

The book closes with unknown forces kidnapping Yuna, forcing Van to follow them. He has no idea why they took her. He also wonders about the sudden appearance of those same animals he saw in the salt mine. He had no doubt in his mind - they were trained to do what they did…but why.

This is another exciting fantasy epic by Nahoko Uehashi who has a great imagination for creating new worlds and the people who populate it. It is a strange coincidence that the corona pandemic started only five years after her book was published. Fortunately, the corona virus wasn’t used as a weapon as the virus for “black wolf fever” is in this tale. Let’s hope something like that never comes to pass.

Discontent and Its Civilizations by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead Books) ~Janet Brown

When he was two years old, Mohsin Hamid often entertained his family by standing on a table and repeating the words of a prominent Pakistani politician. A year later he was silent, surrounded by American children who asked "Why can't he talk?" "He can," his mother told them, "He just doesn't know English." Six years later when Hamid''s family returned to Pakistan, he no longer remembered how to speak Urdu.

Now Urdu is his second language while his English reflects his personal history, "fractured," he says, "coming in distinct California and Pakistani varieties, with Mid-Atlantic and British English "added to the mix."

His novels, each shatteringly different from each other, might be, he says, "a divided man's conversation with himself." His essays, collected under the rather snarky title of Discontent and Its Civilizations, are a divided man's view of the contemporary world, written with a perspective that comes from a life spent on three continents.

Hamid came to Princeton when he was nineteen and lived in America for seventeen years. At thirty he moved to London. After eight years there he and his wife chose to come back to Pakistan where he lives with the perspective of "two notional civilizations," one that he terms "Muslim" and the other that's shaped by "Westerners." 

From there he dissects just what these notions actually contain, while concentrating on Pakistan and the political realities that have beset the United States since 2001. While America struggles with the "war on terror" and immigration policies, Pakistan, he claims, "is a test bed for pluralism on a globalizing planet." Predominantly Muslim, its citizens are also Christians, Hindus, Amadis, secularists, and those of no religion."

"The self we create is fiction," Hamid states, and then proves this is perhaps most true when applied to how nations are perceived. Pakistan is a Muslim country but "Islam is not a monolith." Barack Obama may have understood this crucial truth when he spoke in Cairo, asserting that "Muslims and Americans overlap in seven million Muslim Americans." But is the same value placed on a Muslim life as it is on an American one? 

This question echoes when Hamid writes about the killing of Osama Bin Laden, a man responsible for nearly 3000 American deaths. Americans celebrated when they heard Bin Laden was dead. Pakistanis shut their country down for fear of paying "a blood price," since the death took place within their borders. They had good reason for this. In the years since 2001, terrorism and acts of war have killed Pakistanis because their country became a staging ground for America's war in Afghanistan. "America's 9/11 has given way to Pakistan's 24/7/365."

And yet this is where Hamid has chosen to bring up his children in "a multi-generational daily existence...three generations at one address." In Pakistan "the personal and the political intertwined," as they do in this essay collection.

An autobiography, an examination of a writer's life, a stern and clear-eyed look at geopolitical realities in the two countries that Hamid calls home, this is a book that can easily induce mental vertigo. Don't read it in a linear fashion. Pick and choose and contemplate. Watch your own perspective change and be grateful.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) ~Janet Brown

Many travelers are familiar with this scenario. In a country where foreigners are easily spotted, someone who knows their language will strike up a conversation. Whether it's with another traveler or a local resident, this encounter can become surprisingly intimate. After all, two strangers in passing are perfect vessels for confidences since they will move on, never to meet again.

When Changez comes across an American in a Lahore cafe, he's happy to have a chance to use his English, which is flawless, and to tell his American story, which would be incomprehensible to his family and friends in Pakistan. Changez had an enviable grip on the American dream which he has turned his back upon without regret.

He is one of two Pakistani students who have been admitted with full financial aid to Princeton, where he "never received a single B." With the bearing and manners bestowed upon him by his well-bred family and with his impeccable GPA, he's recruited by one of the country’s leading valuation firms, given a job that comes with a hefty salary and that "virtually guaranteed admission to Harvard Business School" after working several years as an analyst. He's fallen in love with a WASP princess, "more to the camp of Paltrow than... Spears," and once he takes up residence in Manhattan, he becomes "Immediately a New Yorker."

But small moments of unease make him realize he isn't seen as one. When he meets the father of the girl he loves, the man announces "I like Pakistan. But you guys have got some serious problems with fundamentalism." When he's sent to Manila with a team of analysts, his American facade is pierced by a jeepney driver who glares at him as he sits in a limousine with his white co-workers. Then as the team prepares to return to New York, the World Trade Center topples and Changez is shocked to find himself smiling as he watches this alone in his hotel room. "I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, that someone had so visibly brought America to its knees."

The cracks in his perfect life widen as war engulfs Afghanistan and imperils Pakistan. Changez begins to marvel that America could "wreak havoc" so thoroughly while suffering "so few apparent consequences at home."

"My blinders were coming off" and while Changez is on a business trip to Brazil, an elderly man tears those blinders away by telling him about the janissaries, the Christians captured by Muslims who then "fought to erase their own civilization." 

"I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire," Changez realizes, a man whose work is based upon "a focus on the fundamentals," and "a pursuit of those fundamentals" with a single-minded obsession on determining value. But after this fateful encounter, he realizes that his "days of focusing on fundamentalism were done."

As he concludes the story that he tells to an American stranger who has no apparent reason to be in Lahore, threats are hinted at without defining against whom those threats might be directed. Changez's monologue takes on a desperate speed and ends with an enigma.

This novel, Mohsin Hamid says, took him seven years to write. Daring and original, it races through history that we all still remember and still are living through, no matter where in the world this novel is read. There are no heroes, no villains, only people trapped in their separate worlds, people who are clearly recognizable, capable of breaking hearts and changing perceptions.

店長がバカすぎて (Tencho ga Baka sugite) by 早見和真 (Kazumasa Hayami) (Kadokawa Haruki Corporation) *Japanese Text Only ~Ernie Hoyt

Kazumasa Hayami is a Japanese writer from Yokohama in Kanagawa Prefecture. When he was still a student at Kogakuin University majoring in literature, he went to door-to-door to various publishers to offer his services and eventually was hired by the weekly magazine AERA and wrote for the column titled 現代の肖像 (Gendai no Shozo) which translates to A Portrait of Our Times in English. It was a column dedicated to reporting on prominent people of the time. 

He made his literary debut in 2008 with his novel ひゃくはち (Hyakuhachi) based on his own experience as being a bench warmer on a prestigious high school baseball team. The book was later adapted into a movie. His novel ザ・ロイヤルファミリー (The Royal Family) was published in 2019 and was later adapted into a television drama series. 

The book 店長はバカすぎて (Tencho wa Bakasugite) which currently doesn’t have an English translation was published in 2020 by Kadokawa Haruki Corporation. To be honest, this was my third attempt at reading this book. Reading books in another language is a very daunting task. The first time I tried to read this book, I only got as far as two pages. The second time, I only managed ten. However, I persevered and was finally able to read the novel until the end. 

店長はバカすぎてroughly translates into English as [The Store Manager is So Stupid]. The novel is written from the point of view of a contract employee, twenty-eight year old Kyoko Tanihara who is single and lives alone and whose father runs a sushi shop in Kagurazaka. She works at a small bookstore called Musashino Shoten in Kichijoji, a neighborhood in the western part of Tokyo.

The story begins with Kyoko having to listen to her boss at the daily morning meeting before the store opens. This is a common practice in Japanese companies. It is called 朝礼 (chorei) which means morning assembly. Kyoko has a headache and isn’t really listening to her boss until he calls her by her full name. That’s another one of her boss’s habits that annoys her. He calls everybody by their full name. 

Kyoko doesn’t mind the morning assembly but believes they could be much shorter. She is really annoyed that she has to stand there and listen to her boss’s longwinded monologue. Lately, he seems to be hooked on self-help books and is always encouraging his employees to read them. 

It really isn’t the morning assembly that has given Kyoko a headache. The cause of her pain is one of the bookstore’s regular customers. A middle-aged man who always comes in on the morning that his favorite fishing magazine is released. Unlike the U.S., all the magazines in Japan have a specific release date. They are not delivered around the first or second week of the month as most U.S. publications are, excluding the weeklies. The computer shows that there are three copies in stock but they are not where they are supposed to be.

She asked the person in charge of shelving magazines if she had seen the fishing magazine. The part-time staff took offense thinking that Kyoko was accusing her of not doing her job. She then asked her boss who also said he was not the one who shelved it either. 

One of the bookstore’s full-time employees and Kyoko’s superior and friend, calls her over to the counter. They are looking at the security camera which shows the manager holding in his hands something that definitely looks like the fishing magazine the regular customer was looking for. It shows him setting them down in the self-help section as he picks up a self-help book to recommend to his employees at today’s morning meeting. 

The above is just one of the examples of what Kyoko Tanihara has to deal with. She also has to deal with hard to please writers, editors who seem to look down on small and mid-size bookstores, and a load of problem customers such as one that insists Kyoko order a book for her even though the book has been out of print for years, or the customer that wants to make small talk about things that do not have anything to do with books or publishing. 

As someone who has worked in the book industry for a number of years in both the United States and in Japan, I could relate to so much of what Kyoko Tanihara goes through every day at the bookstore. 

Kyoko Tanihara loves working in a bookstore. It has always been a dream of hers. She loves talking to people about books, recommending books, reviewing books, and talking to authors about their books as well. But she also has to deal with a lot of negatives - annoying customers, a stupid boss, and even stupider president of the company and yet she perseveres in being a bookseller. 

I’ve had to deal with different bosses, annoying co-workers and problem customers as well but like Kyoko, I also love the book industry. I really didn’t want to leave it but I had no other recourse at the time of my retirement from the bookstore. I hope this book gets translated into English in the future. I would be one of the first ones to read it. If I was even more confident about my language abilities, I’d like to translate it myself so I can share it with other English readers and book lovers. 

A sequel has already been published but I’m going to take a short break from trying to read another Japanese novel. For me, the sequel will just have to wait.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead Books) ~Janet Brown

Ever since Dale Carnegie launched the publishing phenomenon known as self-help by writing How to Win Friends and Influence People, "How To" titles have dominated best-seller lists for the past ninety years. Well aware of this, Mohsin Hamid used this form as a peg from which he's hung this novel, exploring and lampooning self-help books, while exploiting them with his title, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. 

Hamid begins by addressing "you" the reader, as every self-help book does. "But," he says, "the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one" and "you" swiftly becomes a small boy, "huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother's cot." Confused? Get used to it, as Hamid frequently swerves from You the reader to You the protagonist all throughout the novel.

You the protagonist is a plot device and one that many readers have encountered before. "You" is never given a name, but then no one in his story has one, not the parents nor the master nor the pretty girl. They are all specimens under the lens of a microscope.

You the reader watches You the protagonist move to a city when he's very young. You see him go to school, fall hopelessly in love with the pretty girl, leave the university to go to work after his mother dies. You see him achieve success after working in sales with "the master" who by example teaches him how to maneuver in the business world. You watch him develop a thriving bottled water business that might have become an empire if he weren't felled by a faulty heart and an unscrupulous partner. You observe how his life develops in tandem with that of the pretty girl and you appreciate how both of them find a peaceful old age.

What keeps You the reader from yawning and tossing the book aside is Hamid's sly sense of humor and his bursts of brilliance. When You the protagonist's parents take him and his two siblings from the village to the city, the "few hours on a bus...appear to span millennia," leaving "nature's pantry" and a clan of villagers to enter "layers of marvels and visions," where "now there are five." The family sits in the evening in front of a "sign of urban prosperity," a little black-and-white TV, with only You the protagonist given the ability to understand the credits that roll across the screen. He as the youngest son goes to school up to university level because his father has "recognized that in the city manliness is caught up in education." He learns to work the system in a city that’s “enormous, home to more people than half the countries in the world.”

When he meets the pretty girl, "her jaunty strut sticking out in your neighborhood like a bikini in a seminary," she becomes his beacon, a lantern in a lighthouse, blinking on and off, who disappears and returns. Both of them are propelled by ambition, both achieve what they want, and both of them find satisfaction when they lose what they've spent their lives chasing, in a city that’s become “part of a change-scented urban archipelago, spanning not just rising Asia but the entire planet.”.

Suddenly the self-help story becomes a tender fable with its last sentence giving the final lesson. "So may all of us confront the end."

As You the reader confronts the end, you realize the self that has been helped is the writer’s, taking a threadbare plot, adding discursions into the realm of self-help, and sparking it all with intelligence and perhaps a dash of desperation too. The readers who are writers will understand and sympathize while those who read but don't write will take consolation in Hamid's next novel, The Last White Man (Asia by the Book, August 2022). Although since Hamid claims that all books are self-help manuals, even fiction, maybe this won’t provide them with a huge difference.

All the World Can Hold by Jung Yun (Simon & Schuster) ~Janet Brown

The most effective horror literature unfolds gradually. Daphne du Maurier knew that, which is why her short story, The Birds, is still being read and was enshrined in a movie by another expert in the genre, Alfred Hitchcock. 

Jung Yun knows that too. In her latest novel, All the World Can Hold, she makes her readers grasp the true horror of September 11, 2001, beginning with unobtrusive details that bloom into world-changing magnitude.

When cruise ship passengers make their way from New York to the changed embarkation point in Boston on September 16, 2001, most of them are relieved to learn the satellite signal that provides TV coverage has stopped working. Franny and Tom are perhaps the only New Yorkers on board and Tom is distraught when he discovers the news blackout. Franny has a traditional celebration planned for her mother's seventieth birthday, a significant milestone in Korean culture, and her attention is riveted upon making that a success. However both she and Tom are concealing secrets from each other. Tom has a highly personal reason to monitor the news from New York while Franny was so close to the World Trade Center that she heard the cracking of the South Tower before it collapsed. Still in shock, she has told this to nobody in her family, not wanting to spoil her mother's chilsun ceremonial banquet.

Doug, an over-the-hill Hollywood star, is an essential part of the ship's entertainment, which is centered around the cruise ship series that made him famous. Many of the passengers have signed up for this voyage simply because it gives them the chance to relive what they watched and enjoyed for years. When one of his costars fails to show up because of a brother who seems to have vanished in 9/11 rescue efforts, Doug breaks character during an introductory speech and pays homage to the tragedy. He's sternly warned never to do that again. Instead he begins to focus on his own secret, one that ruined his career and damaged his life.

Lucy shows up aboard ship incongruously dressed in business attire, since she came straight from a job interview. Invited by a roommate at the last minute to take the place of a no-show, she accepted on a whim and now regrets it. She's waiting for follow-up phone interviews with tech firms, ones that may never happen, thanks to the errant satellite signal. She has to get those calls to justify her expensive education and to surpass the Black working class life of her parents.

At a time when America’s individual concerns are being overtaken by shock and grief, the passengers are enclosed in a bubble of privilege and isolation, with their private lives taking center stage. It's not until they reach their destination that Yun strips them of their individuality, in an essay that turns the passengers into "them." "Their desire to explore...is at odds with their growing awareness of what they left behind." TV images, news reports, and "strange, uncanny stories" take control of their vacation and when they begin their voyage home, their private lives turn into cases of dynamite. 

Jung Yun has once again transformed what feels like ordinary life into the places that usually go unexplored. In O Beautiful, her previous novel (Asia by the Book, December 2021) she unwrapped the racism and misogyny that lurks in the American heartland. In All the World Can Hold, she makes it stunningly clear what 9/11 took from America and what its legacy has been, "about the beauty lost and the chances that would never be taken." She follows her closing chapter that gives a glimpse of Manhattan's southern edge, where "a thin spire of smoke" punctuates "the faint amber glow of morning," with another essay where the passengers again become "them" as they confront the aftermath of 9/11 that will follow them into this new century.

Harlequin Butterfly by Toh Enjoe, translated by David Boyd (Pushkin Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Toh Enjoe is a Japanese writer from Sapporo City in Hokkaido. Most of his books are either literary fiction or science-fiction. Or speculative fiction as Harlan Ellison would say. He has won a number of awards including the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award for his book 道化師の蝶 (Dokeshi no Cho).

Harlequin Butterfly is the English translation of 道化師の蝶 (Dokeshi no Cho) which was first published in the Japanese language in 2011 by Kodansha. This English edition was translated by David Boyd, an assistant professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. He has also translated books by Hiroko Oyamada - The Hole (Asia by the Book, March 2026) and along with Sam Betts has translated books by Mieko Kawakami including Heaven, (Asia by the Book, July 2022), Breasts and Eggs (Asia by the Book, November 2021) and All the Lovers in the Night (Asia by the Book, December 2022). 

You would be hard put to describe this book as science fiction or even speculative fiction.  The term “surreal” or “surrealistic fiction” would be more apt in my opinion. The book opens with an unnamed character on a flight from Tokyo to Seattle. She has a book in her lap but is thinking, “What about a book that can only be read when traveling?”. 

She believes “there’s nothing exciting about a book you can also read when traveling. There’s a right time and place for everything, and anything that claims to work everywhere can only be subpar, some kind of sham”. The book in her lap is titled Untold Tales with Those with Three Arms. 

Although she tries to read the book, nothing sticks in her head. She feels like “the words are struggling to hold on to the page, lagging behind and racing to catch up”. She continues to think about why it is that she can’t read while flying on an airplane. All she sees on the page is “a blur of words”. I concur with her thoughts when she says, “I can never read when I’m traveling. I’ll pack a couple of books, or maybe even buy one during the journey, but I can’t think of a single time that I actually got anywhere with one.”

She believes that the ability to collect stray thoughts and make money out of them is the key to success. Sitting next to her is such a man who made his fortune in doing such a thing. His name is A.A. Abrams. He’s a man who virtually spends all his time on airplanes. His business is always conducted on a flight but he never has a destination in mind. When he’s kept on the ground, he stays in a hotel near the airport, and tries to return on a flight as soon as the opportunity arises. “He’s no flight attendant. Not a pilot, either. Just a passenger with nowhere to go”. 

A.A. Abrams is in pursuit of a prolific writer named Tomoyuki Tomoyuki. This man appears to have the ability to write expertly in the language of any place he goes. However, Tomoyuki Tomoyuki always seems to be one step ahead of Abrams. 

Will Abrams eventually catch up to the ever elusive Tomoyuki Tomoyuki? Is Tomoyuki Tomoyuki an actual person? Is Abrams endeavor a complete waste of time? My head is still spinning after finishing this book. What was this story really about? It’s very hard to say. The editing could use a little work as in the beginning A.A. Abrams is introduced as a man but in later chapters, Abrams turns out to be a businesswoman who was diagnosed with uterine cancer long before her death. 

I’m still at odds to know if I enjoyed this book or not. I may have to give it another read for a better understanding of what exactly it was all about.

Holy Cow! by Sarah MacDonald (Random House) ~Janet Brown

Few things reveal how much social behavior has changed over time like travel literature written by Westerners in the distant past. And nothing shows the accelerated pace of modern time like Holy Cow!, published twenty-four years ago, with observations that can make readers cringe in 2026.

To be fair, Sarah MacDonald was only 21 when she first encountered India and her graphic, nauseating descriptions were undoubtedly a defence mechanism against severe culture shock. She loathes the place and when an itinerant fortuneteller tells her she will come back to the country for love, she knows she's been bilked.

Eleven years later, she returns, in love with a foreign correspondent who's based in New Delhi. Leaving a job she adores for a country she hates seems a dubious proposition. Not even domestic bliss with her boyfriend distracts her from noticing everything that set her teeth on edge and her stomach into turmoil during her first visit. But her boyfriend's journalism instincts for a good story make him take Sarah to yet another soothsayer, one who tells her "You will search India's land of gods and find faith."

What she finds is a full-blown case of double pneumonia, bestowed upon her by New Delhi's thick and toxic smog. Suddenly Sarah's engulfed in total immersion, flat on her back in a "private hospital with first-world facilities" that's bordered by a Hindu temple, a "wasteland full of rubbish and cows," and a slum. Her boyfriend stays with her for the week she's there because popular belief has it that women in Indian hospitals are often raped. When she's finally released she's "in a different body…gray, scrawny, and sickly...without a job or a focus." She realizes she has a choice: "live out an Asian Jane Austen existence"  or "find peace of mind, body, and soul."

Sarah sets off with her usual snark, calling her Vipassana meditation retreat "a brain enema." After making it through what she terms “a TV episode of Survivor Spiritualists,” going without speaking, reading, or writing for ten days, she returns to the world with a feeling of greater acceptance until she discovers her hair’s falling out. Advice from a gang of Sikh street toughs sends her away from New Delhi, alone, on her way to the Golden Temple of Amritsar, and beyond.

By now it becomes clear to anyone who's read this far that Sarah's own journalism instincts have kicked in, courtesy of her latest fortune-telling experience. She's bound and determined to search for, even if she fails to find, faith within "India's spiritual supermarket." 

And does she ever, rocketing from the center of Sikhism in Amritsar to exploring Islam in the war-torn paradise of Kashmir. On her honeymoon, she forays into the "biggest spiritual festival on earth," a time when Hindus come from all over India to bathe in the Ganges and holy men who have turned their backs on the world unite in "a devotional disco alley" where dancing and ganja smoking breed a kind of "bamboo Las Vegas." Journeying to Dharamsala, she hears the Dalai Lama giggle and explain Tibetan Buddhism. Then she meets the woman who once was Diane Perry and now is famous as Tenzin Palmo, founder of a nunnery where women are given an education that's both practical and spiritual.

As Sarah wanders, her observations move from sarcasm and disgust into an appreciation for an ancient culture, until her quest is derailed by 9/11 and the geopolitical horrors of a new century. Although Holy Cow! is a survey course, the progression of a smart-aleck into an informed and respectful investigator is entertaining and illuminating, showing how the world, as well as one person, has changed.

Belgrave Road by Manish Chauhan (William Morrow) ~Janet Brown

When Mira and Tahliil fall in love, they come together as strangers in the most profound way. Not only are they from different continents, they're both submerged in a liminal state on a cold and gloomy island, in a city that contains a multiplicity of cultures. Leicester, England is one of the world's most diverse metropolises, one in which those whose families have known no other country for generations are in the minority. 

"Where are all the English people?" When Mira disembarks from the first airplane journey of her life to begin her life in an arranged marriage, this is her predominate thought as she's driven to her new home. The "chaotic jumbles" of shops are "familiar in ways she hasn't anticipated" with women scurrying past wearing saris and Punjabi suits. She's taken to a house that she and her husband will share with his parents, one that's much smaller than her family's home in Ahmedabad. Yet within its walls, domestic life is completely Indian, with her mother-in-law and Mira herself cooking food from the Subcontinent and performing all the domestic tasks. Mira plans to put her diploma in "beauty therapy" to use until a neighbor tells her every girl who arrives from India has one of those. Bored, she finds a job in an Indian dessert shop where she repeatedly encounters a man who works in the adjacent grocery store. Without friends and married to a husband whom she barely knows and rarely sees, Mira welcomes the possibility of making a friend of her own,

Tahliil is in Leicester because his mother lives there, although she's a woman he hasn't seen for fifteen years. Political turmoil in Somalia has brought him and his sister to England, in a journey by boat that’s left both of them with memories they struggle to bury. Making their way through the process of gaining political asylum, they're forbidden to work. While his sister stays home, Tahliil has three part-time “under the table” jobs and no life of his own. His English is flawed and he's lonely. Then he meets a young woman who works in an Indian dessert shop, someone whom he runs into often. at first by accident, then by design.

Both Mira and Tahliil are caged by family obligations. Not only does Mira's husband refuse to leave his parents' home, her visa status is linked to her marriage. If she leaves her husband, she loses her right to live in England. Tahliil is the primary support for his mother and sister, financially and emotionally. Still he and Mira take refuge in a friendship through text messages, falling into an attraction and then a love affair that's as inexorable as it is impossible.

Immigration is an issue that's often discussed and rarely understood. On one side, there's the old Leicester resident who tells Tahliil "These days when you look around, it's hard to tell that we're in England at all." On the other, homesick strangers have "given themselves over to a foreign land, foreign people," fighting loneliness any way they can.

Manish Chauhan says, "I grew up in Leicester – one of the first “super diverse” cities in England where minorities make up the majority. My school photographs show a sea of brown faces, and for many years I believed Leicester to be a blueprint of England, perhaps even the wider world." 

Perhaps someday it shall be.

The Expatriates by Janice Y.K. Lee (Penguin Books) ~Janet Brown

Margaret, Mercy, and Hilary, three Americans of disparate backgrounds who live in Hong Kong, form the sort of Venn diagram that's usually found in the domestic tragedies of soap operas. Margaret is an affluent mother of three, happily married to a man who was transferred to Hong Kong. Hilary is childless with an indifferent husband who married into money. Mercy has escaped from Queens and her Korean parents by getting a degree from Columbia and an invitation to visit a wealthy classmate in Hong Kong. 

All three have reached crisis points. Mercy has become notorious for losing a child who was in her care. Margaret, the mother of the missing child, is untethered from everyone she loves and has "developed a taste for being alone." Hilary has found a child at an orphanage that her money and connections has allowed her to take on "a test-drive," while her husband has moved out. He's found someone else, a pretty young Korean American woman from Queens with a degree from Columbia and a talent for making "so many bad decisions," Mercy.

All that keeps this from being a Jackie Collins novel transplanted to Hong kong is Janice K.Y. Lee's dissection of the lives of expatriate women in Hong Kong. With the skill of a cultural anthropologist, she anchors her plot with what seems to be a separate essay, cleverly woven into the lives of her characters. 

"The new expatriates arrive practically on the hour, every day of the week." Lee quickly establishes the class differences of these arrivals by what they carry as they leave the plane, where they go after they leave the airport, what they will do while living in Hong Kong. Whether they carry a baby or a briefcase, whether they've sat in coach, business, or first class, whether they will make their new home in Chungking Mansions, a serviced apartment, or a house on the Peak, they've all "come to find their future selves." They're all in a place that "can contain some version of yourself that you can finally imagine." 

It's easy for the affluent expats. They make temporary friends based on similar "social signifiers," secure in a world they’ll inhabit in three-year increments, moving on to other cities with other tribal affiliations that they'll nurture and then leave behind.

Lee conducts her examination with care and with kindness, rarely leaving the confines of her chosen subject. When she does, her descriptions are precise and evocative. "In spring the odors come...a sharp moldy tinge to the air" that announces the impending arrival of summer's heat. She gives quick sketches of "the vivid tapestry of Hong Kong," with its profusion of small shops in crowded areas and she knows the dismal qualities of rooms rented by the week, "a random slice out of a normal living space" that holds an iron bed, a derelict mattress, and a toilet hidden behind a piece of painted plywood. She knows the familiar sales pitch of wandering fortune tellers: "You are very lucky, sister," and, as she did in her first novel, The Piano Teacher, she shows that life in a furnished room, alone, just might be the best way to learn the complexities of living in Hong Kong.

The Clock House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji, translated by Ho-Ling Wong (Pushkin Vertigo) ~Ernie Hoyt

Yukito Ayatsuji is a Japanese mystery writer from Kyoto. He made his literary debut in 1987 with his book, 十角館の殺人（Jukakukan no Satsujin) which was translated into English in 2015 as The Decagon House Murders by Locked Room International and again in 2020 by Pushkin Press. The story was adapted into a streaming drama for Hulu Japan in 2024.

This book would also be the first in Ayatsuji’s House series which includes a total of ten books. Kodansha Publishers categorizes Ayatsuji’s House series as a honkaku mystery, a subgenre of the mystery fiction that was inspired by the Golden Age of Detective Fiction which includes writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh.

The Clock House Murders is the fifth book in the House series and was originally published in the Japanese language as 時計館の殺人 (Tokeikan no Satsujin) in 1991 by Kodansha. The book had won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Best Novel in 1992. It was translated into English by Ho-Ling Wong, who also translated The Decagon House Murders, The Mill House Murders, and Labyrinthine House Murders for Pushkin Press. This book was also adapted into a streaming series for Hulu Japan in 2026. 

One of the main characters in this novel is Takaaki Kawaminami. He currently works as an editor for a magazine called Chaos which focuses on articles about the occult and supernatural. He is meeting with Kiyoshi Shimada, an up and coming mystery novelist who writes under the pen name of Kadomi Shishiya. The two had met three years ago in Oita Prefecture where Kawaminami was a third year university student. 

Kawaminami remembers making Shimada’s acquaintance quite well. It all started when he received a letter that was signed by Seiji Nakamura. Nakamura was a well renowned architect and had designed two curious buildings on the island of Tsunojima in Oita Prefecture in Kyushu. One was the Blue Mansion and the other was the Decagon House. However, Kawaminami received the letter after Nakamura’s death. 

In order to solve the mystery of the letter from beyond the grave, Kawaminami was visiting the home of Seiji Nakamura’s younger brother Kojiro. This is where Kawaminami first meets Shimada. They would become friends and work together to try to solve the mystery of the lette, but during their investigation, a series of murders would occur. The events from that time kept Kawaminami from contacting his friend.

Kawaminimi asks his friend if he has ever heard of the Clock Mansion in Kamakura. When he mentions the building, Kadomi gives his friend a questioning look and says, “Do you mean to say…” and Kawaminami answers, “Yes, it is exactly what you think. The house, which is also known as Clock House, is one of the buildings designed by Seiji Nakamura”.

As the editor of Chaos, Kawaminami tells his friend that the magazine is working on a special feature - “Confronting the Ghost of the Kamakura Clock House”. He tells his friend that the house used to belong to a man named Michinori Koga. Koga died nine years ago and around the same time, a lot of other people died as well. The deaths lead to the rumor that the house is haunted. “The most repeated one is about the ghost of a girl that manifests at the house and roams around the surrounding forest. And that apparition is said to be none other than Michinori’s daughter, who died long ago…”

Kawaminami then fills Koga in on what the magazine has planned. He and a few others will be locked inside the Clock House for three days. A well-known psychic named Mikoto Komyoji, will also be a part of the team. She will hold seances and try to contact the ghost. Kadomi has a bad feeling about his friend staying in that house for three days. He says to his friend, “It doesn’t feel right somehow. It would be a different story if it were any other haunted house, but this is one of Seiji Nakamura’s creations we’re talking about…”

In the past, horrible events had transpired in the Decagon House, the Mill House, and the Labyrinthine House - all of them being creations of Seiji Nakamura. Kawaminami suggests that Kadomi should join them and that he will try to get permission from the current caretaker of the house. Although Kadomi would like to join, he says he will check out the place on his own at his own leisure. 

For the magazine project, aside from Kawaminami, the others chosen to stay in the house are Shigeo Kobayakawa, the deputy editor-in-chief at Chaos and Kawaminami’s boss. Atsushi Utsumi, photographer for Kintasha, the company that publishes Chaos. The psychic, Makoto Komyoji. There will also be five members from W–University’s Mystery Club. Four of the members had camped near the Clock House about ten years ago, the same year when Michinori’s daughter is said to have died. 

Once all the members are gathered, then the real story begins. The medium told all the participants that they would have to change clothes and leave anything synthetic behind - necklaces, wristwatches, cell-phones, etc. She tells the group, “Spirits bound to a building are extremely sensitive to anything that is brought in from outside”. 

In the evening, the seance appears to have been a success but shortly afterwards, one of the members is grisly murdered. Soon, another murder takes place, then another. The team is being picked off one by one. Will the ones that are still alive be able to find the killer? Is the killer one of them? Will they get any help from the outside? 

Although I have not read the previous novels that precede this story, it indeed feels as if you are reading a novel from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, think Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie. The novel had me guessing all the way through until the end and I still couldn’t figure out who the murderer was until I read the book to the very end. Very satisfying indeed!

The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd (New Directions) ~Ernie Hoyt

Hiroko Oyamada is a Japanese writer from Hiroshima. After graduating from university, she worked in a factory that manufactured cars. Her experience there would lead her to write her first novel, 工場 (Kojo) which would also be first book to be translated into English as Factory.

The Hole is her second book to be published in English. It was originally published in the Japanese language as 穴 (Ana) which means “hole” in Japanese. It was published in 2014 by Shinchosha. It won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award, in 2013. 

The story is about a woman named Asa, short for Asahi, who moves to the countryside due to her husband’s job transfer. She also narrates the story. They would move to her husband’s home town and would be living in the house next door to her husband’s mother. A house which his parents own.

Asa was having a hard time picturing the second house. She thought to herself, “it was strange how I couldn’t seem to picture this house - how big it was, what color it was, what the yard was like”. She told herself, ‘my inability to conjure any memory of the place meant it couldn’t have been remarkably large or small”. Then again, she couldn’t even recall what her husband’s house was like. 

The husband, whose name is never mentioned in the book, says that will be able to stay at the house rent-free. Asa has no qualms about quitting her job and hopes she will be able to find a new one close to their new home. Her mother-in-law, Tomiko, tells 

One day as Asa was doing an errand for her mother-in-law, she spotted a big black animal. However, she couldn’t make out what kind of animal it was. She knew it wasn’t a weasel and it wasn’t a raccoon. It has “wide shoulders, slender and muscular thighs, but from the knees down, its legs were as thin as sticks”. It didn’t seem dangerous, so Asa decided to follow it.

That’s when she falls into a hole. The hole was about four to five feet deep. As Asa tried to get out of the hole, she then realized how narrow it was. She felt the hole was “exactly my size - a trap made for just me”. This would be the beginning of her surreal encounters with other people in the town. 

She first meets one of her neighbors. A woman named Sera. Sera already knows who Asa is but only refers to her as “the bride”. It was Sera who helped Asa out of the hole. In fact, many people in town referred to Asa as “the bride”.

This would be the beginning of a sequence of surreal incidents which would take place in Asa’s life. She can’t be sure if what she sees is real or if she’s hallucinating. Did she hallucinate the black animal? Why has her husband never mentioned that he had a brother? A person she would meet while out wandering in the field full of holes. 

Is Asa the “Alice in Wonderland” in her new surroundings? Is her husband’s brother the “rabbit” she follows down the hole? The book even makes a reference to the Lewis Carroll novel. The story is quirky and irrelevant while also being serious and mysterious. Oyamada makes the reader feel like Asa herself, is what we’re reading true or is it a fantasy of some sort? If you, as the reader, will be puzzled.

Nails and Eyes by Kaori Fujino, translated by Kendall Heitzman (Pushkin Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Kaori Fujino is a Japanese writer from Kyoto. She made her literary debut with a story titled いやしい鳥 (Iiyashi torii) which won the 2006 Bungakukai Prize and was later published into a book of the same name. The title roughly translates to Pleasant Bird in English.

Nails and Eyes is her first book to be published in English. It was first published in the Japanese language in 2013 by Shinchosha with the title 爪と目 (Tsume to Me), which directly translates to Nails and Eyes. It also won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award.

The book is a collection of three short stories, the first being the Nails and Eyes. The other stories that follow the Nails and Eyes are What Shoko Forgets and Minute Fears. It is difficult to categorize the stories as they all include blends of science fiction, thrillers, and horror. 

Nails and Eyes is narrated by a young girl who had just lost her mother. Her father invites the woman he’s been having an affair with to come live in their home and to take care of his daughter. The daughter relates the story of how the woman became a part of their lives. It is hard to tell if the daughter is talking to the woman or just sharing her observations of the interaction between her father and the young woman. 

“I can’t marry you.” That’s what her father had told the woman on the first day of their affair. She was so surprised that she could only respond by saying, “Oh.” The father continues to explain why he can’t marry her. He says, “I have a child. She’s still a little girl.”. The woman could care less if the man had a child or not and just nods and answers, “OK, I understand.”

However, things would change a year and a half later. It was the father who found his wife’s body. He had come home one day to find his three-year old daughter sleeping in the middle of the bed in their bedroom. When he prodded her awake and asked where Mommy was, the daughter only replied, “I don’t know” and drifted back to sleep.

The father called his wife’s cellphone and was surprised to hear the ringtone nearby. He then went out on the balcony where he found his wife, frozen stiff and lying on her side. The police could find no evidence of foul play and the fingerprints they found on the patio door was of the mother, the man, and the daughter. When questioned by the police, the daughter said she could open and close the latch. Her mother’s death was ruled as an accident. 

The woman does move in but she’s indifferent to the man’s daughter. The daughter seems rather indifferent to the woman as well but the daughter follows the woman’s every move. The ending may leave the reader surprised, shocked, and confused as well. 

What Shoko Forgets is about a woman who had a stroke about six months ago and now finds herself living in different facilities. Shoko is currently sharing a room with three other patients but there seems to be one extra person in the room tonight - a man. He whispers in her ear, “Shoko, you always pretend you’re asleep”. Shoko thinks to herself, “Always?”. Shoko then remembers that they go through this every night. However, it appears none of the other patients are aware of the man’s visits. Shoko is not even her name. Who is this woman and what is she going through?

The final story, Minute Fears is a modern tale of an urban legend. A young boy named Daiki doesn’t want to be left at home alone even though he had no problems staying alone in the past. However, he wouldn’t tell his mother what’s wrong. He could only mumble, “Mum, don’t leave me!”. He tells his mom that she could leave after Dad gets home. The Mom still wanted to know why but he wouldn’t tell her. It would be the father who would finally get the words out of Daiki. 

Daiki was at a pocket park in the afternoon. The story of this particular park is that if you don’t leave it by 4:44pm in the afternoon, you will be cursed. Even if you were with a group of people, you had to get out of there by 4.44pm“and anyone who happened to be the only kid in the park at 4:44pm would definitely be cursed. Today, Daiki found himself alone at the park at 4:44pm!

The kids believe the curse was coming from a little girl. Unfortunately, no one knew what her story was. What was the curse like? The girl would call the victim at home at night. If they pick up the phone, she would say, “Hey, come out to the pocket playground and play.” The kid would say, ”No way!” then hang up. There would be another call, the same voice, the same line - “Come out to the pocket playground”. 

The ghost of the girl would call again and say, “Come out to the pocket playground. I’ll pick you up and we can go together”, “Come out to the pocket playground. I’m almost at your door”, “Come out to the pocket playground. Come on, open up, come on”, and the last time she speaks, she says, “Now let’s go over to the pocket playground together.”

The mother had been calling her husband but Daiki wouldn’t let him answer the phone. After the mother gets home and talks to Daiki, she discovers that he still believes he’s cursed. Even though it’s in the middle of the night, the mother says to Daiki, “Now let’s go over to the pocket playground together”....

Three stories, three different genres. Each story is unique in its own way. Each story gets the reader thinking about what happens next. Fujino does not provide the answers. It is all left to your own imagination.

Red Roulette by Desmond Shum (Scribner) ~Janet Brown

When Desmond Shum was six years old, a Shanghai bureaucrat decided, after a cursory glance, that he would become a swimmer. This decision sparked Shum's subsequent success, with his athletic prowess giving him access to an education in Hong Kong and in the U.S. It also gave him a personal motto, forged in childhood and carrying him through a life of perilous achievement: "Things may seem insurmountable but you'll always get out of the pool." And he always does.

In spite of his years in the States and in Hong Kong, Shum's roots are in the People's Republic of China and when the investment firm that he works for transfers him to Beijing, he feels as if he's coming home. But even before his arrival in China's capitol, the way his native country does business has shaken his naivete, when he discovers that Heineken avoids Chinese import duties by being smuggled on a Chinese warship. Shum has never learned how to clinch a deal with a discreet presentation of envelopes filled with bribes. He can't even keep up at banquets by drinking huge amounts of Moutai. He's in pursuit of a career while his Chinese colleagues are in it for the money.

Shum flounders until he meets Duan Zong, "The Lady Chairman Whitney Duan," who heads a company that's negotiating a merger with Shum's.

Whitney quickly sees the advantage of linking her Chinese business acumen with Shum's Western education and knowledge of finance. She becomes his mentor or, as Shum puts it, the Henry Higgins to Shum's Eliza Doolittle, and the two of them form a pragmatic, unromantic coupledom and partnership that’s propelled by business.

Whitney has become close to a woman she calls Auntie Zhang, someone who needs to approve her new relationship before she and Shum can be married. Only after the approval has been given does Shum learn "Auntie Zhang" is the wife of the man who would soon become the premier of China, Wen Jiabao.

Clearly Whitney envisions having the sort of marriage that her mentor enjoys. Auntie Zhang is the business head of the household while her husband achieves political success. Following this example, Whitney exercises her financial genius in her own name as Shum serves as a guide to the Western world of business transactions. 

However Whitney doesn't count on her husband's rapid learning curve or his prevailing good luck. When Shum saves the life of a local Chinese leader on a trip to the U.S., he takes a leading role in developing the Beijing Airport Cargo Terminal, thanks in part to that official's gratitude. When he and Whitney decide to build Beijing's most luxurious hotel, it's Shum's knowledge and Westernized taste that makes this a success. 

However their sizable fortune is held in Whitney's name and when a loan of thirty million dollars goes unpaid by one of Shum's Hong Kong business associates, Whitney refuses to release the money that would save the deal. Their marriage, based upon their business partnership. begins to weaken--and then founders into disaster when Whitney decides to take responsibility for the dubious gains of Auntie Zhang and her husband.

Red Roulette makes Succession look like Sesame Street. The political machinations are headspinning, with missteps resulting in executions and disappearances. Wealth is power and an essential fulcrum, until it no longer is. This is a book that needs to be studied, a primer to China in this century, written by a man who swam in the deep end, yet was able to "get out of the pool.”