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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Spoonful of Promises by T. Susan Chang (Lyons Press) ~Janet Brown

One of the best ways to approach food is during those moments when you talk about it with a good friend. This is exactly what happens while you read A Spoonful of Promises by T. Susan Chang (or Susie as she introduces herself to readers at the book’s beginning)-—if your good friend happens to be the granddaughter of a Chinese financier, millionaire, and “mobster (probably),” the daughter of the man who practically invented the coffee table book in all of its sumptuous glory, and an adventurous eater who enjoys every cuisine on the planet.

Approach this book with the advice Susie gives her children. “Try one bite.” Whether it’s paella or phad thai, scallion pancakes or stroopwafels, you’re going to find something that you’ve never tasted before and certainly never dreamed of cooking, or drinking either. No matter if it’s a Basil Mojito, a Lavender Vodka tonic, or the non-alcoholic Longest Day Tea, this lady is going to convince you to make and sip a “Garden in a Glass.” 

At times Susie seems formidable. She’s often spent half an hour making steamed eggs or a soufflé omelet for a very young son who would eat eggs in no other form until she introduced him to egg crepes with truffle oil. But she becomes less terrifying when she provides easy recipes for apple sauce, pumpkin bread, or a cold mixed-berry soup for those summer days when cooking is the last thing on anybody’s mind. She admits to almost committing arson with a funnel cake and confesses that she once stole chanterelles to cook with roasted monkfish and garlic chives. “It was good enough to be a last meal on Death Row … amorally delectable.”

She assumes nothing and tells all, how to clean a monkfish, how to use a knife, how to cook rice, how to make a simple syrup, and how to roll “jiao zie,” the traditional New Year’s dumpling, in three easy steps, with photographs. And she doesn’t ignore her single friends. There are six recipes that will launch an assortment of meals for a solitary eater, including a chocolate mousse that “serves one on a bad day.” 

Hungry for Braised Chinese-Restaurant-Style Spareribs? Daunted by the thought of tracking down ‘the Elusive Red Bean Curd?” Look for it in “the Scary Inscrutable Jars section” of an Asian grocery, and if you “just can’t find it, make the recipe anyway.” Want Thai food without leaving the house? Yam Neua is worth the “tearful complications” of slicing those lethal little bird chiles and the four or five shallots. “Mere flickers of agitation,” Susie Chang warns, “could prove incendiary," which is probably why her recipe for yam neua calls for a paltry  ½  of a Thai chile, or perhaps one for the daring cook.

A Spoonful of Promises offers more than recipes. It's studded with wit —“There’s nothing wrong with canned pumpkin puree, other than it lacks poetry.” An essay about saffron leads to an insightful examination of living with an aging father, The unfading presence of a mother who died young pervades the page of this book, evoked in tender stories and the fragrance of baked apples. “We are dreamed of by our parents and remembered by our children,” Susie says. Dream and remember as you read her "food autobiography."

Retrograde by Osamu Dazai, translated by Leo Elizabeth Takada (One Peace Books) ~Ernie Hoyt

Retrograde is a collection of three early stories written by one of Japan’s literary legends, Osamu Dazai. Although he never won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, and he ended his own life at an early age, he left behind a legacy of written works. His most famous being No Longer Human (Asia by the Book, August 2022).

Osamu Dazai was born in Kanagi in Aomori Prefecture. He wrote 逆行(Gyakko) in 1936 after moving to Tokyo. Although Dazai was a nominee for the Akutagawa Prize for his story, he was disheartened when we didn’t win. 

Dazai’s literary ambitions almost ended before it even began when he learned about the death of his favorite writer and idol Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who took his own life in 1927. After that Dazai’s life would be”marked by alcohol, prostitutes, and Marxism”. 

Author and translator and Japanese native Leo Elizabeth Takada “received the honor of translating Osamu Dazai into English”. Before proceeding with her translations, Takada decided to read Retrograde in its original language. However, she had a hard time deciding what edition to buy. She was also confused by her friend’s response when she told her, “I’m looking for 逆行 (Gyakko) to which her friend responded, “Ah, from his final years?”

Takada corrected her friend saying, “No, it’s one of his early short stories”. Her friend was aware of that and told her, “Yeah, from The Final Years.” Takada was at a bookstore when she ran into one of her writer friends, Akutagawa Prize nominee Megumi Kawano, who immediately pulled a book from the shelf and handed it to her.

Takada said to Kuwano, “I thought you said it’s from his final years?”. Kawano explained that the story was part of his collection of short stories in a book titled The Final Years. He was “intending it as a subtitle for his own suicide note”. 

In the same year that Dazai wrote 逆行 (Gyakko), he also wrote two other short stories - ダス・ゲマイネ (Das Gemeine) and 葉桜と魔笛 (Hazakura to Mateki) which are both included in this collection as well. In the English translation, Das Gemeine retains its original title. It is German for “common”. The final story is translated into English as Blossom-Leaves and the Spirit Whistle. 

As with Dazai’s later writings all three of these short stories are filled with torment and anguish. They are told in the first-person and you feel if Dazai is speaking to you personally. Dazai also inserts his own characters in the stories. In Das Gemeine, he introduces a character named…”Osamu Dazai”. The character who meets “Dazai” says he is “terribly annoying” and “he’s adorned with bad taste, head to toe”. It’s hard to tell if Dazai is mocking himself or if he truly despises his life. 

If you are interested in classical Japanese literature but are not sure where to start, Leo Elizabeth Takada’s translation of Osamu Dazai’s Gyakko is a good place to start. His stories may seem dark and dreary but his writing will keep you interested in his characters. There is not a dull moment in any of the stories that are collected in Retrograde and as Takada says in her Afterword, “It’s my humble hope that this collection will serve as nourishment for fans of Japanese literature in the English-speaking world”, I share those same sentiments.

Anima by Kapka Kassabova (Greywolf Press) ~Janet Brown

There are things and places and states of being that are neither this nor that, the space between sleep and wakefulness, the passage between birth and life, the moments between life and death, the gender that exists between male and female, the indefinable territory that lies along borders. Academics define these states of being as liminal spaces. Kapka Kassabova offers no definitions. Instead she inhabits them. 

In Border (Asia by the book, January 2024) Kassabova explored the region where "Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey converge...where something like Europe begins and something else that is not quite Asia."

"We are not Europe and we are not Asia," an Eastern Orthodox priest said in Border.

"This is not even Europe," Kassabova is told by the man who will give her entry to the world of pastoralism that she lives in and describes in Anima, "this is the Balkans." However what Kassabova discovers goes deep into history and moves far beyond manmade labels. 

She is allowed to experience the life of the Balkan Karakachan herders, "the oldest nomads to have entered modernity with their animals." Their roots go back several millennia into Central Asia, when "a moving human-animal rug" brought a pastoral world into the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Almost stamped out by Communism and the Iron Curtain, it was revived by a couple of Karakachan boys who fell in love with a dog, one that was interrelated with their own history. Kitan was one of the last purebred Karachakan dogs who have the gait of wolves and "human eyes," who have one mission in life. They are guards, with a yearning for mountains and an appetite for predators.

The boys searched for more of Kitan's kind and became dog breeders, custodians of "an animal army" that had almost died out. But the dogs needed sheep, and raising sheep required the use of horses. The boys, now men with an obsession, found the sheep and horses that had been bred for moving across mountains, preserving the original Karakachan strain for both. They transform an abandoned village into "a metropolis of lost animals," bringing a strain that had almost been extinguished back to life and with it the pastoralism that the animals demanded.

"Pastoralism is the movement and grazing animals in search of pasture," and as the brothers practice this, it becomes "transhumance," a seasonal journey to high places with tender grass. This requires a particular kind of person who can withstand long periods of isolation and extreme weather, who can live without comfort, and who has not just an ability to work with the sheep and the dogs, but knows that everything is "connected by a living breath," that there "is no evil in animals." A shepherd is a man "walking through a beautiful world devoid of humans with just the clothes on his back."

In a time that "has no place for free-moving people and animals," the shepherds and the sheep, the dogs and the horses, continue to move, while knowing that "Everything has a beginning and an end. And we're toward the end."

Spending a summer with eight dogs, five hundred sheep, "animals that would survive the apocalypse and not even notice," and their shepherd, Kassabova enters a life of poetry, beauty, and sadness. Alone with a man with whom she finds a surprising connection, she begins to "smell of sheep and smoke," she learns to "inhabit the round clock of the mountain," and begins to think of the world as a place divided between "above and below," where time and distance are circular,not linear. When she goes into the "lower world,"walking along the flat road doesn't feel like walking." She's gripped by "shepherd's syndrome" when "your body feels like cement" without slopes to climb.

The dark side of pastoralism emerges with the alcohol that the owners of the sheep provide as a way of keeping their shepherds under control. Darkness breeds darkness and the only act of violence is committed by Kassabova as a rebellion against her comrade's persistent bouts of drunkenness."Life here is a game of roulette," she tells him, "I can't take it anymore." Yet when she leaves, the life in the mountains follows her. Remembering its wind, she recognizes it as "the world's soul. Anima."

Owls in the Ginza (and other stories from a life in Japan) by Suzanne Kamata (ThingsAsian Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Suzanne Kamata is a permanent resident of Japan who lives in Tokushima City in Tokushima Prefecture which is located on the island of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four major islands. She was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan and came to Tokushima to teach English when she was twenty-two. Little did she know it would become her permanent home. 

Owls in the Ginza, as its subtitle suggests, is about Kamata’s experience of living in Japan. She is married to a Japanese man and has two children who are twins, a son and a daughter named Jio and Lilia. The children were born prematurely; her daughter is deaf and has cerebral palsy. 

The book is a collection of Kamata’s essays that have been previously published in a number of other periodicals and books such as Borderless Journal, Eye-Ai, and Traveller’s Tales 2017, just to name a few.

There are a total of twenty-four essays which also include full-color photos from the author’s collection and illustrations done by Martin Sedaghat. Although most of her adventures take place around Tokushima and Shikoku, she also writes about traveling to other areas in Japan and about a couple of experiences she has abroad. 

She goes to Akita in the Tohoku region of Japan where her son plans to go to university. She travels with her daughter and with a friend visits an owl cafe in Tokyo. She also takes a trip with her daughter and a friend to Naoshima, an island known for its large number of museums. 

Kamata had learned about a place called Okushima from one of her friend’s Facebook posts. It is also known as “Rabbit Island.” The place is famous for its cute and furry residents of which there are a large number, although the total number is unknown. The island also has a dark history as it is home to the Poison Gas Museum. 

Kamata and her daughter also go to Hawaii where they take an open-door helicopter ride for a “once-in-a life-time” mother-daughter experience. Another trip they take is to New York City where they made reservations to stay at the Algonquin Hotel in Times Square. 

Her daughter’s first question after they checked in was, “Do they have wi-fi here?”.  Kamata, as a published author, had a more profound reaction. As she “glanced around at the dark wooded tables of the Round Table Restaurant”, she was “eager to channel past visitors through less modern means”. 

“Perhaps the ghost of one-time resident legendary actor John Barrymore” or the spirit of “rapier-witted Dorothy Parker”. Maybe she will get a chance to see “Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber, who penned Showboat and Giant” here. 

Kamata’s essays are filled with wit and humor, whether the stories about fun activities she has taken part in such as going on a “Myster Dinner” tour or weeding with locals at neighborhood shrine or dealing with the tragedy of losing a family member and having to make a sudden trip to South Carolina in the United States. 

I really enjoy reading about people’s experience of visiting or living in Japan as I am also an expat who has lived in this country for more than thirty years. Going on vacation to a foreign country is a lot different than actually living for years in a different country. Japan may be a small country compared to the United States but reading essays from other expats about our adopted country only shows that there is so much more to see, visit, do and explore.

Japanese Yokai : Explore the Magical World of Monsters, Demons and Mythical Creatures by Fleur Daugey (Tuttle) ~Ernie Hoyt

I’m fascinated by Japanese yokai culture. They have previously been featured on this blog (Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide (Asia by the Blog, May 2024). Japanese Yokai is aimed more towards children and is a great introduction to the subject. It was originally published in the French language as Le Monde Etrange des Monstres Japonais in 2017 by Actes Sud. 

Fleur Daugey gives thanks to Japanese manga master Shigeru Mizuki whose works made her “dream of strange and mysterious yokai”. I am also a big fan of Mizuki and used to watch an animated series on television titled during my elementary school years when I lived in Japan. The title of the program was [Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro]. Every episode would feature a yokai.

There is no definite one to one word in English to translate yokai. It is often translated as a demon, creature, monster, or spirit. However, in Japanese, yokai can refer to shape-shifters, demons, and even haunted objects. They can help or harm, they can be nice and harmless or they can be violent and wrathful. They usually appear at dusk, the time between daylight and before it gets dark. They can move freely from the spirit world to the world of humans. “No matter what, they’re out there, living among us with their many shapes and forms.”

Pokemon is a popular anime series that has been distributed and translated into different languages throughout the world. The title means “pocket monster” and many of the characters were inspired by yokai. 

It is believed that yokai originated in the Heian period (794-1185) and blended Shinto beliefs influenced by Chinese Taoism to explain the unexplainable. The images of yokai became popular in the Edo period (1603-1868) as they were featured in Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, the most famous being Toriyama Seiken who drew the Hyakki Yagyo, translated into English as Night Parade of 100 Demons with a a yokai called Nurarihyon at the head of the procession.

Some of the most common yokai are animal or animal spirits. The kitsune is a fox. These yokai can take the shape of a beautiful woman and they live to trick people. “That piece of candy you’ve just been given? Look out, it’s been turned into a turd.” 

The tanuki is a raccoon dog. They also like to have fun and pull pranks. They can turn themselves into a human or even an object. They love to drink sake (Japanese rice win) and have very large testicles. 

One of the most common yokai in Japanese folklore is the kappa. They have a bird’s beak, a turtle shell, frog skin, and webbed feet. They also have a plate on top of their head that is filled with water. They love to live in water such as in rivers, lakes, swamps, and even rice fields. If the water spills from the plate on their head, they will die. 

The tengu is also a very common yokai you will see at shrines and temples. Their most prominent feature is their long red nose. Some of them may even have wings. If you come across a tengu and are kind to them, they may even help you, but if you make them angry, “they can be very nasty when they want to be!”. 

Japanese Yokai is beautifully illustrated by Sande Thommen. She gives thanks to the Ukiyo-e masters Toriyama Sekien, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, and Utagawa Hiroshige. Her thanks would not be complete without mentioning Shigeru Mizuki “whose fascinating images of the world of yokai influenced her while illustrating this book”. 

The next time you see a magical creature or if a prank has been pulled on you, don’t jump to conclusions and blame one of your friends or a human, you may just have been the victim of a yokai.

Writing and Enjoying Haiku : A Hands-on Guide by Jane Reichhold (Kodansha) ~Ernie Hoyt

What is haiku? I was exposed to this word when I was an elementary school student living in Japan. I learned a little more about it when I was in high school when one of my classes was covering poetry. What I remember from my class is that haiku is a traditional form of poetry in Japan consisting of three lines containing seventeen syllables in a 5-7-5 pattern. 

In my youth, I used to write poetry - mostly limericks or other poems whose first two verses would rhyme. I had never given any thought to writing haiku. Recently, I’ve been watching a television variety show called [ﾌﾟﾚﾊﾞｯﾄ！！] (Prebatto!) and one of the segments is dedicated to haiku. The title of the television show is a shortened form of “pressure battle”. Selected panelists are given a theme or shown a picture and they must write a haiku to describe the subject. A haiku master would then judge each haiku and a winner would be chosen. 

I could not understand how the haiku poems were judged by the haiku master. I decided to delve a little deeper into the subject by reading a book about haiku in English. Writing and Enjoying Haiku : A Hand’s-on Guide by Jane Rechhold would be my re-introduction to the genre. 

Jane Reichhold is an American author and translator whose specialty is haiku. She is a three-time winner of the Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award and has been a member of the Haiku Society of America, Haiku Poets of Northern California, Haiku Canada, Haiku International (Tokyo, Japan), and the Poetry Society of Japan. She also runs a website called Aha! Poetry (www.ahapoetry.com).

So, what exactly is haiku? It seems to be more than three lines of seventeen syllables in a 5-7-5 pattern. As this book is more about writing haiku, Reichhold says you must first be able to read haiku. She says, “That sounds fairly simple, but like everything else concerned with haiku, levels are buried under levels and archeology seems child’s play in warm sand”. 

Haiku is a short form of poetry that originated in Japan. The traditional Japanese haiku consists of three phrases composed of seventeen mora which is a small unit of timing that is equal to or shorter than a syllable. A haiku requires a kireji (cutting word) and a kigo (a word or phrase associated with a particular season). 

Reichhold also states that the traditional rules for haiku in Japanese are often difficult to follow in another language. She says if you want to start writing haiku, forget the technicalities of the Japanese language and follow these six basic rules. 

1. Write in three lines that are short, long, short without counting syllables

2. Make sure the haiku has a fragment and a phrase

3. Have some element of nature

4. Use verbs in the present tense

5. Avoid capital letters or punctuation

6. Avoid rhymes

It may seem difficult at first but once you understand how to read haiku, writing your own may be the next step. The rules may seem overwhelming at times all you have to do is remember what Reichhold said in her Foreword, “Let go of your preconceived ideas and simply do whatever brings you the most enjoyment.” Keeping that in mind, I might attempt to write my own haiku now.

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.