Hell by Yasutaka Tsutsui, tranlated by Evan Emswiler (Alma Books) ~Ernie Hoyt

Yusataka Tsutsui is a Japanese writer who is mostly known for his science fiction novels. One of his earliest novels - 時をかける少女 (Toki o Kakeru Shojo), known in English as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was adapted into a feature length movie in 1983, 1997, and 2010. It was also made into a full length animation movie directed by Mamoru Hosoda in 2006. 

Hell is an altogether different kind of book. It was originally published in the Japanese language as ヘル (Heru, which is just romaji for Hell) and not 地獄 (Jigoku) which is Japanese for hell, in 2003 by Bungei Shunju Ltd. 

Nobuteru and his friends, Yuzo and Takeshi, were playing on a school-yard platform about five feet off the ground. However, the boys weren’t thinking how dangerous the platform was. They were just goofing off. Unfortunately, one of the boys bumped into Takeshi, who fell to the ground and hurt his leg. The other two boys just laughed, jumped down, and began dragging around Takeshi by his oddly bent leg singing one of the songs that was popular on TV at the time. 

But then, Nobuteru thought, that’s kind of strange. The song was released after the war. They couldn’t possibly have sung that song. The more Nobuteru thought about it, an even stranger thing occurred to him. Nobuteru and his family moved to a different city when he was in the fifth grade. After the war was over, Takeshi and Yuzo had never returned to school. In fact, Nobuteru had no idea what had happened to either one of them. 

Nobuteru was in his seventies and often thought about Takeshi and how he and Yuzo crippled had crippled him. While at university, Nobuteru had heard from one of his classmates that Yuzo became a yakuza and was killed by a rival gang member when he was in his twenties.  He also heard through the grapevine that Takeshi graduated with honors from a top university and was working up the ladder in a large corporation. Nobuteru was happy and relieved but still felt a little uneasy, thinking that one day, Takeshi might want to take revenge on him and Yuzo for what they did to him.  

However, Takeshi died in an automobile accident when he was fifty-seven years old. When he awoke, he was in a dimly lit bar. He was no longer crippled and his damaged organs were all repaired. The other people he met in the bar called this place “Hell”. Takeshi wasn’t perturbed about being there. He remembered what a man once told him when he first arrived, “You know what Hell is? It’s just a place without God. The Japanese don’t believe in God to begin with, so what’s the difference between this world and the world of the living?”

The same man who had told Takeshi that Hell is no different from the world of the living also told him, “Most Japanese have no religious faith, and they have no one, including their parents, who can serve in God’s stead. So if they get even a little power, they start to think of themselves as gods. You might say that Hell exists solely for the purpose of ridding ourselves of that illusion. After all, there’s no place that can do that in the world of the living.”

So, what exactly is Hell? In Tsutsui’s world, it certainly isn’t a “fiery place of torment” or “an outer darkness and separation from God”. People don’t suffer eternal damnation in Tsutsui’s hell. He does get the reader thinking about what happens to us after we die. Do we go to heaven or do we go to hell? Is Tsutsui’s Hell more akin to purgatory? It will up to you, the reader, to decide.

The Unveiling by Quan Barry (Grove Press) ~Janet Brown

I couldn’t fall asleep last night and I blame Quan Barry.

Long before climate change became a global preoccupation, Antarctica fascinated me. A place colder and less populated than my part of the world? As an Alaskan child, I knew what winter was. Learning about a continent where the landscape was composed of ice, all year round, was horrifying and compelling.

Now I’m much older and that horror has taken on more resonance as Antarctica melts. Photographs of icebergs, only partially visible, looming in the seas of the Southern Ocean hold threats and mysteries that are impossible to ignore. 

It’s one of those photographs that make The Unveiling irresistible and for an entire day I failed to resist, even though horror novels aren’t my genre of choice. It hooked me from its first page, where Striker, a Black location scout for a film company, is in the middle of Antarctica’s Drake Passage, seated in a zodiac, in the company of wealthy white adventure tourists. When an unnamed disaster hits, she and a handful of other passengers manage to find shelter in a little cabin built as a shelter for past explorers. Suddenly the novel becomes a version of Lord of the Flies, with a wildly diverse cast of characters, one of whom is a murderer.

He isn’t the most bloodcurdling aspect of the book (nor is it the graphically described effects of advanced scurvy on scars from cosmetic surgery.) That’s reserved for Striker, who’s beset with auditory hallucinations and extended periods of blackouts, her medication that prevents this from happening still aboard the vanished cruise ship. She’s a woman haunted by her childhood, when she and her sister were adopted as a pair by a white couple in a small New England town. She grew up with a visceral understanding of Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece of horror, The Lottery, and Jackson’s lesser known account of blossoming madness, Hangsaman. She’s now haunted by memories of her dead sister and a group of weird specters who come to her without warning in the Antarctic ice.

As a perpetual outsider, Striker is a pitiless observer and what she sees in the other passengers is innate savagery and racism glossed over by education and social class. In the frozen darkness, surrounded by murderous skua and staying alive by eating scavenged penguin eggs, they debate slavery, affirmative action, critical race theory, while ignoring the central issue. They’re alone and nobody is coming to their rescue. 

“We are dead,” a Russian crewmember, a veteran of the war in Ukraine who carries his own ghosts, tells Striker, “We just need to believe we are.”

The Unveiling is an allegory, which makes it true horror. There are no saviors, there is no triumph in its ending. We are all in that cabin.

Quan Barry is a poet, an academic, as well as a novelist. Her poetry is scathing, not lyrical, dipping deep into her personal history without being personal. Barry was born in Saigon, two years before it became Ho Chi Minh City. Brought to the U.S. by Operation Babylift, she was adopted by a New England couple and grew up in a town that was once known as Salem Village, home of the Witch Trials. Her history is steeped in horror on every side and her writing explores all of these facets.

“Half-Black, half-Vietnamese, I’m transracially adopted—I just don’t believe in that idea that you have to stay in your lane,” and nobody is as skillful as she when it comes to forcing us out of ours.

Intemperance by Sonora Jha (HarperCollins) ~Janet Brown

Nobody is too old for a fairy tale. Just look at the success of the classic movie Pretty Woman or the undying allure of Pride and Prejudice whether it’s presented in print, in a movie theater, or on streaming video. Now Intemperance gives the fairy tale a new twist, putting it on social media with a dip into Hindu ritual, and help from various Indian goddesses.

“I am fifty-five years of age, own my own home but am otherwise modest of income, am twenty pounds overweight and face increasing disability in my legs as my age advances.” This is hardly the sort of post that’s likely to go viral except for one key factor. The writer plans to select her own husband from a host of contenders that will compete for her hand in marriage, in a ritual known as a swayamvar, once practiced in ancient India and now known largely through Bollywood musicals. 

The unnamed narrator, a Seattle university professor, expects outraged reactions from the Sociology department where she works, especially from the branch that concentrates on Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. To her surprise, she’s heralded as a feminist beacon for assuming agency in mate selection and is suddenly a subject on The View and Oprah. Drew Barrymore and the mayor of Seattle provide moral support and a successful wedding planner offers her services for free. The opposition comes from India, where strangers and family members excoriate her for brazenly bringing shame to her native culture.

The professor’s “quiet life of books and bookstores…in this soggy little town of Seattle” becomes besieged with media attention and unsettling encounters with mysterious women whom she’s never seen before, all of them eager to offer their wisdom and advice. At night her dreams become cinematic nightmares as she relives a scandalous portion of her family history, recently told to her in letters from a “distant cousin-brother” in New Delhi. Worst of all, she has a feeling that her “goddesses are coming after her.”

But the swayamvar takes on a life of its own, as the wedding planner enlists the help of a renowned culinary artist to make the wedding cake and a sought-after stylist who provides the perfect bridal outfit, traditionally Indian in blazing red. When the day finally arrives, twelve men show up at the beachside park where they may or may not be chosen. Is this fate or the launching of a public disaster?

Although this may sound like an average rom-com scenario with a dash of kohl and mythology to liven things up a bit, Intemperance is a chocolate bonbon laced with a satirical sense of humor, an unflinching examination of female desire in midlife, and a look at the way physical disability can shape a woman’s life as she develops attractions to compensate, increasing her power.

Under the guise of a modern day Cinderella story, Sonora Jha has written a smart, sensual, and mildly scathing look at the way we live now. The absurdity of dating apps, the power of the algorithm, the invisibility of aging women are all dissected cleverly within a framework of an impossible dream--or is it?

Abroad In Japan by Chris Broad (Penguin) ~Janet Brown

Chris Broad is a real-life incarnation of Forrest Gump. Looking for his first job after leaving his university, he applies to Japan’s JET program that supplies native speakers of English to Japanese schools, despite having no interest in teaching, no knowledge of Japan, and absolutely no proficiency in Japanese. He has one thing going for him. He’s savvy enough to know that few applicants will voice their preference for a rural assignment and this gets him a job.

He arrives in a city in decline where boarded-up windows are a common sight and the bordering mountain range makes the place isolated in winter. The most flourishing feature of Sakata is Chris’s workplace, a high school with 1200 students and 120 teachers. In this area with a population of 100,000, Chris is one of fewer than ten Westerners, one of whom is the only other gaijin in his school.

To anyone who’s ever taught in Asia, it looks as if Chris has fallen into a rather cushy gig. He’s never in a classroom without a Japanese co-worker and his workload consists of lessons taught straight out of the supplied textbooks. His apartment is ready for him upon arrival and costs a mere $110 a month. On the other hand, he’s had only three days of training, he’s given a workload of thirty classes with forty students in each, his Japanese colleagues who are seasoned English teachers speak minimal amounts of that language with maximum amounts of errors, and they’re the ones who have written the textbooks.

His sole compatriot in the school is a hard-drinking chainsmoker, the only affordable nightlife is found in a local tavern, and the winter brings two feet of snow every night, burying cars in drifts and making the mountain roads impassable. Out of boredom and in competition with his colleague who’s one of the few gaijin who has passed the Kanji Kentei, an examination that demands the knowledge of 3000 characters, Chris sets himself a goal of learning the basic requirement of 2200 characters, memorizing 25 of them every day.

His luck continues, first with a group of middle-aged adults who ask him to tutor them in English and who become his social safety net. But he hits the jackpot when he’s approached by a convivial passerby who insists on becoming his friend. Natsuki is a fearless English speaker who loves nothing better than sprinkling his usage with the f-bomb. He quickly becomes Chris’s mainstay and eventually his video co-star.

His biggest stroke of Gumpian luck comes through Youtube. Chris once had dreams of making movies so this becomes his way to stay in touch with family and friends while amusing himself in the evenings. Youtube is still a novelty back in 2012 and Chris becomes a version of Mr. Bean, bumbling his way through Japanese culture as he strives to assimilate. When he goes to the public baths and finds he’s meant to be in the nude, armed only with a modesty towel; when he ventures into the rarified atmosphere of a hostess club where a night out can easily cost $240; when he’s thrown out of a love hotel; when he samples McDonald’s fries drizzled with chocolate sauce, Chris begins to clock up views, sometimes a quarter of a million in a night. In a fit of daring that’s perilously close to madness, he decides to make Youtube his primary occupation--and it works. 

A friend in Sakato knows a man in a nearby city who works in “in-bound tourism,” went to school in Seattle and London, worked for years in Frankfurt and Sydney, speaks fluent British English, and has adopted a Western mindset. Ryotaro hires Chris as a videographer who explores Japan via Youtube.

By this expansion of his territory, Chris’s luck continues. A video of him leaping from his bed when a nation-wide alarm system announces an incoming North Korean missile makes him famous. A visit to an island recovering from the disaster of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami puts him up close and personal with his idol, Ken Watanabe. Even an earthquake that destroys his filming studio proves to be a bit of good fortune.

The same convivial charm that has made him a Youtube star makes this memoir irresistible. He’s a clever phrasemaker, describing his first breath in Japan as “so despicably humid, each breath was like inhaling a mouthful of steam.” On his first visit to a Tokyo sushi bar, he decides “The sushi I’d experienced in the U.K. felt like a hate crime compared to this.” Unlike far too many other expats in Asia, he reserves his ridicule for himself rather than a culture that is frequently confusing.

There’s little in his memoir that can’t be read in every book ever written about Japan but only this one is told by Forrest Gump. For a distraction from the bleak and the dispiriting literature that’s all too easy to find,  Abroad in Japan is hard to beat.

The Human Scale by Lawrence Wright (Knopf) ~Janet Brown

Anthony Malik is the only survivor of a terrorist bomb blast, one that cost him his right eye, his memory, his relationship, and quite possibly his job. As a member of the FBI, he is given medical leave but this is running out and he’s still not back to the man he used to be. To fill up a barren stretch of time, he turns to Facebook in search of his father’s roots in Palestine and discovers family members whom he never knew existed. One of his cousins is getting married and she invites Malik to come to the West Bank for the wedding.

The Bureau tosses Malik a simple job that will give him a professional reason to be in Palestine, a meeting with an Israeli policeman who has asked for help. But soon after Malik arrives in Hebron, this man is brutally murdered. Malik comes under Israeli scrutiny as “Moishe Dayan,” since he shares an eyepatch with this national icon.

Because he’s an unknown quantity who appears to be Palestinian, the attention becomes intense, especially after all of Malik’s identification is stolen. Only a phone call to Jerusalem that verifies his status as a U.S. government employee keeps him from rigorous interrogation. Although Malik’s mother was a white girl from the South, his father’s genes are uppermost, which make him an asset and a liability in the West Bank.

From there, the plot devolves into a boilerplate thriller with a large cast of characters and a predictable ending. What saves it from being just another page-turner is its author. 

Lawrence Wright is a journalist and author who won the Pulitzer Prize for his account of 9-11 and its causes. Since writing The Looming Tower, he’s decided to cloak his discoveries in novels, books that convey valuable facts within lackluster fiction. In the spring of 2020, when Covid-19 sent most of the world into isolation, Wright came out with The End of October (Asia by the Book, May 2020). Using his considerable talents as a journalist, he presented a carefully researched account that detailed the causes and effects of a global pandemic and conveyed that information through a number of stereotypical characters. His timing was impeccable but his release date was unfortunate since at that stage, most of the world’s bookstores were closed. For those who read a digital copy, his information was chilling and illuminating--and uncomfortably familiar. Still Wright found his winning formula, which he uses once again in The Human Scale.

Since October 2023, Gaza has dominated headlines and polarized opinions around the world. Clearly Wright has taken James Reston’s observation about Latin America to heart, “The people of the United States will do anything for Latin America except read about it,” and adapted it to the Middle East. Realizing all the current discourse about Palestine and Israel came from a vast swamp of passionate ignorance, Wright took everything he’s learned about the region and sprinkled this knowledge over the course of 425 pages. For most of his audience, this will be the only reason to keep reading until the end.

By the time the final page is turned, the history and background of Israel, Palestine, Zionism, and Hamas have been revealed, along with different voices from both sides. Contemporary factors are brought into play, ones that seem at first to be wild twists demanded by a thriller but that prove true when they are researched. The U.N. has issued reports of rampant drug traffic in the Middle East, with Syria supplying Captagon, a form of amphetamine laced with caffeine, and the Taliban providing heroin and cocaine. Fentanyl comes from the Sinaloa Cartel, channeled through Turkey.  “The Middle East was a carnival of crooks and terrorists and smugglers…the dark matter of civilization,” Wright claims and the U.N.’s World Drug Report backs this up. Captagon, the report says, has been called the Jihadi pill since it was found to be used by “perpetrators of some terrorist attacks.” The U.N. has pinpointed Gaza’s tunnels as drug corridors as well as conduits for food and medical supplies.

Wright fleshes out his cardboard characters by giving texture to their activities. Through them he shows the halal method of killing a chicken, the proper way to mount and ride a camel, and an effective way to build a bomb. He uses them to give voice to their allegiance to ideologies, words that seem to have come directly from various interviews. Above all, he shows the tragic divergence from David Ben-Gurion’s belief that Israelis and Palestinians all descend from the same root and have historically been one people.

Skip over the fiction and go for the facts in a book that’s essentially a version of Israel and Palestine for Dummies. It’s a fine starting point.

Human Acts by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith (Hogarth) ~Ernie Hoyt

In May of 1980, I was still a junior in high school. Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States, MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers) was established, the second full length Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back was released, and on the 18th was the eruption of Mount St. Helens. I was looking forward to my summer vacation which I would be spending in Japan. 

Little did my teenage mind know what was happening halfway across the world. I did not follow current events, politics, or world news at the time. Looking back, I’m shocked by what happened on May 18, 1980 in a town called Gwangju in South Korea. 

Han Kang, author of The Vegetarian (Asia by the Book, September 2024), We Do Not Part (Asia by the Book, October 2024), Greek Lessons (Asia by the Book, October 2025), and The White Book (Asia by the Book, July 2025), has also written a book about the Gwangju Uprising titled Human Acts. 

Before reading the story, translator Deborah Smith, provides an introduction to the Gwangju Uprising. President Park Chung-hi who had ruled the country since 1961 was assassinated. He was assassinated by the director of his own security services. 

Park had “succumbed to the classic authoritarian temptation to institute increasingly repressive measures, including scrapping the old constitution and having a new one drawn up making his ruling a de facto dictatorship”. Unfortunately, Park’s assassination was “no victory for democracy”. 

Stepping into the void was Park’s right-hand man - Chun Doo-hwan. After he came into power, he implemented martial law on the entire country. He had opposition leaders arrested, closed universities, banned all political activities, and silenced the press. What is most disturbing is that today’s America seems to be reflecting South Korea’s past. 

Human Acts opens a few days after the South Korean army opened fire on unarmed citizens. The President had falsely claimed that the rebels in Gwangju are communists who are in league with North Korea. As students demonstrated against martial law, they were shot, beaten and tortured by the South Korean military. 

The book is written in chronological order starting with the Gwangju Uprising, also known as the Gwangju Democratization Movement and May 18 Democratization Movement. It follows a boy named Dong-ho, a middle-school student, during the incident and the people surrounding him. 

The first chapter of the book introduces Dong-ho and the people surrounding him. In subsequent chapters, the narrator is one of the people that either worked with or was related to Dong-ho in some way. He has been helping people keeping a ledger of the dead bodies that were killed in the uprising. His motivation was to find his friend Jeong-day who died at the massacre. 

The following chapter is told through the eyes of Dong-ho’s friend, Jeong-day. The story then jumps ahead to 1985 and is told in the first person by Eun-sok, a girl who helped Dong-ho collect dead bodies. She is now working as an editor for a publishing company. She has a clash with the police for keeping silent about the whereabouts of an author who the authorities are looking for. His play reminds her of Dong-ho who was killed by the South Korean Army. 

There are others who all have their story to tell - Kim Jin-soo, who was one of the survivors of the uprising. Seon-ju who was sexually abused during the uprising. Dong-ho’s mother and finally the author herself, who was six years old at the time of the Gwangju Uprising. 

This is not an easy book to stomach when you take into consideration that it was inspired by a true incident that took place less than fifty years ago. The story will stay with you long after you have finished reading it. It may interest you in learning more about how and why it happened.

When I did my own bit of research to find out what had happened to the man who instigated this crime - Chun Doo-hwan. In the 1996, August 27 issue of the Korean Times, an article wrote that the Seoul Distric Court sentenced him to Death. Later that same year, the Seoul High Court changed it to life imprisonment and a fine of 220 billion won. He was officially convicted of leading an insurrection, conspiracy to commit insurrection, taking part in an insurrection, illegal troop movement orders, dereliction of duty during martial law, murder of superior officers, attempted murder of superior officers, murder of subordinate troops, leading a rebellion, conspiracy to commit rebellion, taking part in a rebellion, and murder for the purpose of rebellion, as well as assorted crimes relating to bribery.

What I find most disturbing is that the current President of the United States is using some of the same tactics as Chun Doo-hwan such as spreading misinformation, firing anybody opposed to his views, trying to suppress the press, ordering the military to use force against American citizens. If there is something to be learned from Kang’s book Human Acts and the facts behind the Gwangju Uprising, then there should be no mistake that the man is to be ousted from office so the country will remain a democracy.

Kiki's Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono, translated by Emily Balistrieri (Yearling Books) ~Ernie Hoyt

Eiko Kadono is a Japanese children’s author and illustrator. She is also a nonfiction writer and essayist. One of her most popular books to be translated into English and which has also been adapted into a feature length animation film by Studio Ghibli is Kiki’s Delivery Service. 

The previously reviewed Kiki’s Delivery Service (Asia by the Book, September 2024) was the graphic novelization of the movie and was written and drawn by Hayao Miyazaki. As much as I enjoy watching the movie, I was interested in reading the original story. As a reminder, the story was originally written in the Japanese language with the title 魔女の宅急便 (Majo no Takkyubin) which translates to The Witch’s Delivery Service and was published in 1985. 

This English edition of Kadono’s story was published in 2021 by Yearling Books, a division of Random House Children’s Books. The book includes a note from the author. She tells her readers that the story was inspired by one of her daughter’s drawings. It was a picture of a witch flying in the sky while listening to a radio. The picture included musical notes that danced around the witch. 

Kiki’s Delivery Service is a young girl’s coming-of-age story. It is set in a world where witches still live among ordinary humans. The protagonist, Kiki, is the daughter of Kokiri and Okino. Kokiri is Kiki’s mother and comes from a long line of witches. Her father, Okino, is an ordinary human. Okino is a folklorist who studied legends and tales about spirits and magic. Kiki was about to turn thirteen years old. 

In Kadono’s world, when the daughter of witches and humans turn ten years old, they must decide if they want to follow in their mother’s footsteps and become a witch. If they chose this path, they would learn their mother’s magic and would have to choose a full-moon night of their thirteenth birthday to leave home. 

This meant that a young witch would have to search for a town of their own where there wasn’t a witch in residence. Over the years, the witches' powers have gotten weaker and their population has decreased. It is also difficult for young witches to find a witchless town or a town that will welcome a witch to their community. 

Kokiri had only two magic powers. One was to grow herbs to make sneeze medicine and the other was flying through the air on a broom. Kiki took to flying pretty well but would often get distracted and fall to the earth. She was never able to get the hang of growing herbs to make the sneeze medicine her mother perfected. Still, Kiki believes she can become anything she wants. 

Kiki would leave her home accompanied by her black cat Jiji. They would have all kinds of adventures, not only searching for a new town, but also in becoming a member of that town. As a young girl, Kiki will have her ups and downs as do all adolescents. She must also find a place to live and needs to find a way to make a living. It may seem like an impossible task for such a young girl but it’s a well known fact that girls mature faster than boys. I imagine a young female witch matures even faster!

A Year in Japan by Kate T. Williamson (Princeton Architectural Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Kate Williamson is a writer and illustrator who studied film at Harvard University. She is also fond of traveling. She was awarded the George Peady Gardner Travel Fellowship which grants post-graduate students an opportunity to further their education by immersing them in a foreign culture. Thanks to the grant, Williamson was able to spend a year in Kyoto, Japan. 

Her book, A Year in Japan, is full of illustrations and her musings about what she saw and thought while wandering the streets of Kyoto. It is a humorous travelogue with beautiful drawings. It is not a guide about where’s the best place to eat or where’s the best place to stay. The drawings are of the things that she saw and experienced. 

When Williamson got off the train at Kyoto station and was walking along the ground floor department store to the street,  the first thing that caught her eye was a display of colors and patterns next to some purses and scarves - “plaid, polka dots, orange and turquoise, , red and magenta, lime and navy”. When she took a closer look, she discovered it to be a display of washcloths or hand towels. She writes, “the washcloths were my first exposure to the attention to detail that characterizes much of Japan - both socially and visually”. 

She noticed that the wagashi shops, traditional Japanese confectionery shops, the colors of the shapes of the sweets would change with the seasons. The sweets are often sold in boxes and seem almost as if it would be a crime to eat since they are so beautifully displayed. 

Williamson immersed herself in Japanese culture. Not only did she eat wagashi, but she made a request to visit a Saihoji Temple, also known as Kokedera or the Moss Temple. At the temple, Williamson, along with a few other people, were taken to a large room set with small tables. Next to each table was a brush and ink set and a Buddhist sutra written in Japanese. It is the task of the visitors to copy the sutras with the materials at hand. 

Another thing, most visitors, Williamson included, like to do, is to travel on the Shinkansen. Many people still refer to the shinkansen as the “bullet train” due to its shape. Whenever Williamson took a trip on the shinkansen, she would treat herself to an ekiben, special bento boxed measl that are sold on trains and at train stations. 

In the spring, Japanese people have hanami or “flower viewing” parties. They gather with friends and family or co-workers and drink and eat while enjoying the cherry blossoms in full bloom. 

In the fall, when there is a full moon, Japanese also enjoy tsukimi or “moon-viewing” parties. It is a festival to celebrate the autumn moon. It is a tradition that dates back to the Heian era (794 - 1185). 

As a long time resident of Japan (over thirty years), I still enjoy reading the perspectives from newcomers to the nation.  Their wonderment at all they see and experience reminds me of my first days in the country as a resident. It really is one thing to visit a country but quite another when you decide to live there, be it three months, one year or even thirty years or more. There’s always something new to discover.

The Unencumbered Spirit : Reflections of a Chinese Sage by Hung Ying-ming, translated by William Scott Wilson (Kodansha International) ~Ernie Hoyt

Not much is known about Hung Ying-ming. What is known is that he was a Chinese sage who lived near the end of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). From his writing, most scholars agree that he was well-read and cultured. He was a follower of the Unity of Three Creeds - Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. 

Taosism, founded by Lao Tzu, emphasizes harmony with the Tao, often translated into English as the “way” or “path”. The belief focuses on the relationship between the natural world and the body. 

Confucianisism, founded by Confucious around 500 B.C.E., isn’t concerned with the natural world and the human body but is a philosophy on society and human relationships. Its main focus being virtue, social harmony, and familial responsibility. 

Buddhism was not about the natural world and the human body, nor was it about society and human relationships. This belief focused on the mind and the suffering that arises from its misuse. 

The Chinese did not see these three beliefs as conflicting traditions but as complementary. Even if a person chose to emphasize one over the other, they hardly ever dismissed the other beliefs. The Chinese believe that each belief focuses on a different aspect of the human condition. 

“Taoism seeks the harmony of the body, Confucianism seeks the harmony of society, and Buddhism seeks the harmony of the mind”. If only Christianity or Islam could follow the Chinese way of thinking, perhaps the world would be a better and safer place. 

Hung Ying-ming was believed to be a member of the Chinese literati who enjoyed a simple life, “a type of man who found fulfillment in simple pleasures: reading classic literature, contemplating the Three Creeds, strolling through nature, laughing and drinking with friends, and practicing various accomplishments from calligraphy to the martial arts”. 

The Unencumbered Spirit is a collection of Hung Ying-ming’s writings on how to live a simple and satisfying life. He talks about “good and evil, honesty and deception, wisdom and foolishness, heaven and hell” and more. Although he lived hundreds of years ago, many of his writings still hold true today. 

One of the sayings seems directly related to the current leader of the United States of America. “If a man of high rank uselessly indulges in his power or markets his position, he becomes in the end, only a titled beggar”. Unfortunately, the man in power still holds his position and there are many who blindly follow him. 

Another one of Ying-ming’s sayings rings true in the current state of American politics - “A person brought up closely surrounded by wealth and rank will have appetites like raging fires and wield power like violent flames”. We can only hope that the rest of the saying will come true as well - “If he cannot become cool and clear, if his flames do not actually burn someone else, they will surely scorch the man himself”. 

One final saying I thought related to those who thirst for power is, “Title and rank should not be elevated too high. Once a high elevation is reached, there is danger”. We’ve already seen the dangers set by the current President of the United States as he tries to become more like a dictator than a leader of a democracy. 

I would like to highlight those passages and send it to the man in the Oval Office at the White House. However, if I were to do that, I may become a target of his repressive administration.

Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls (Picador) ~Janet Brown

When Tessa Hulls was a child, in her mind, she “became a cowboy.” She dreamed of riding through landscapes “where space, silence, and independence were limitless” and where being an outsider is a heroic existence. 

She has been an outsider all her life. With a British father and a Eurasian mother in a small California town, in a house dominated by the presence of a Chinese grandmother who’s trapped in a morass of memories, Tessa lives far outside of any conception of normal. As soon as she can she runs away, bicycling across the US, deejaying in Antarctica, working in Alaska. Then her grandmother dies and Tessa returns home, facing her inheritance of ghosts.

With her mother, she travels to China, piecing together the turbulent history of her grandmother and the loneliness that engulfed her mother within the safety of an elite Hong Kong boarding school. 

Retracing her grandmother’s life, Tessa comes to know her as Sun Yi, a young journalist who was viciously targeted by the dictates of Chairman Mao. Sun Yi finds protection and betrayal in men who are ensnared by her beauty, .She has a daughter with a Swiss diplomat who leaves her with a baby and never contacts her again. Managing to escape to Hong Kong,  she places her daughter in one of the city’s best boarding schools before she falls into a gulf of mental illness that will claim her forever.

Tessa’s mother is saved by her brilliance but that survival is based upon jettisoning her feelings. When confronted by Tessa’s emotions, she interprets them as signs of the illness that erased Sun Yi. As Tessa struggles to gain her independence, her mother turns her over to therapists and medication. Parental love morphs into fear and rage that Tessa combats with her cowboy dreams.

Tessa Hulls has written a family history that sweeps over three generations, blending this into the cultural and political history that shaped Sun Yi, her daughter and her granddaughter. Drawing upon the bestselling memoir that Sun Yi wrote before she lost her mind, from fragments of letters and news articles, and from the accounts of Chinese relatives, Hulls gives her book a broad and chilling dimension as she unfolds the narrative in clear, crisp sentences.

It’s what she evokes in her drawings that conveys the darkness that destroyed her grandmother, crippled her mother, and sent her on journeys into the corners of the earth and the corners of her own being. Every sentence appears in its own frame with a picture. Every picture augments the words into something that comes close to being unbearable.

No matter how much history you have learned or how many books you have read, I’m certain you’ve never read anything like Feeding Ghosts. History, memoir, adventure all create a vast panorama that narrows into danger within its final pages. As Hulls fearlessly confronts her ghosts, she takes her readers into their own dark regions, places they may have always avoided. This isn’t an easy book to read. While it shows lives that few of us have known, it lures us into universal truths that have touched us, leaving their scars.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir and other awards, Feeding Ghosts is a masterpiece.

Across the Nightingale Floor : Tales of the Otori Book 1 by Lian Hearn (Riverhead Books) ~Ernie Hoyt

Lian Hearn is the pen name for Gillian Rubinstein, a British-born children’s writer and playwright. Across the Nightingale Floor is the first of three books in her adult-oriented series Tales of the Otori which continues with Grass for HIs Pillow and concludes with Brilliance of the Moon.

The story is set in a fictional country that’s modeled after feudal Japan. According to the author’s note, “Neither the setting nor the period is intended to correspond to any true historical era, though echoes of many Japanese customs and traditions will be found, and the landscape and seasons are those of Japan. 

Hearn has also used Japanese names for most of the cities and towns which are also mostly fictional except for the towns of Hagi and Matsue. In the story she has placed these two towns in their true geographical positions. Also, the only character based on a real person is Sesshu, a Japanese zen monk and artist who she felt was “impossible to replicate”. 

The story opens with a young boy named Tomasu picking mushrooms alone in the mountains near his rural home of Mino. He and the people he lives among are members of the Hidden, a reclusive and spiritual people who believe in the ways of peace. 

However, unbeknownst to Tomas, his father was a member of the Tribe, a group of well-trained assassins who also possess preternatural skills such as having the capacity to hear better than dogs and being able to make themselves appear in two places at one time. 

The day that Tomasu went picking mushrooms was the same day that the warlord Sadamu Iida of the Tohan and his men pillaged his village. Tomasu was the only surviving member of that massacre. Tomasu was rescued and later adopted by the Lord of the Otori, Shigeru Otori. As Tomasu was a name known among the Hidden, Lord Otori has Tomasu change his name to Takeo. 

Takeo later meets Kenji Muto of the Muto Clan. Muto tells Takeo that he knew Takeo’s father. He tells him that his father was the most skilled assassin of the Kikuta, the greatest family of the Tribe. Muto then trains Takeo in the ways of the Tribe. Takeo is able to hone his hearing skills and has listened in on a conversation between Shigeru’s two older brothers who are plotting to ally themselves with Iida.

The elder brothers tell Shigeru that they will let him adopt Takeo on the condition that he marries Kaede Shirakawa, a beautiful girl of fifteen who has been held prisoner by the Noguchi, one of the families of the Tohan, since she was seven. 

Lord Shigeru Otori has two older brothers who want to make peace with the Tohan but Shgeru does not trust Iida. He has already seen the cruelty of the Tohan firsthand. He is also aware of his brother’s plans thanks to the listening powers of Takeo. However, Shigeru decides to placate his brother and says he will accept their condition. He also tells his brothers that since Takeo is soon to be his adopted son, that Takeo should come with him. 

It’s one plot twist after another as Shigeru has no intention of marrying Kaede and has a totally different reason for bringing Takeo with him. Shigeru and Takeo know they are going into the lion’s den, but will their gamble pay off. And what will become of Kaede Shirakawa?

If you love stories like James Clavell’s Shogun and Eric van Lustbader’s The Sunset Warrior Cycle then you will be sure to enjoy the action, romance, and intrigue in Tales of the Otori.

Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood (Europa Editions)~Janet Brown

Sara Byrne plunges into Gaza with wit and dash. She’s still smarting from a disastrous love affair, mourning her father’s death, armed with a degree in International Relations and a brief stint of writing for the women’s pages of a Sunday supplement. After an expensive and fortuitous encounter with a renowned journalist in a Jerusalem hotel bar, she’s been hired to file stories that he can’t be bothered to write. 

Gaza is old news in 2012 . “Compared to Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s child’s play,” one reporter tells Sara, “this war was won in ‘67.” 

Sara doesn’t care. She’s out to make a name for herself, one that the man who spurned her will see on the front pages of the morning paper. Ensconced in Gaza’s best hotel with an expense account, surrounded by a phalanx of experienced journalists, and assisted by one of the top three fixers in the area, she brings her gift of observation and her knack for apt descriptions into a war-wracked city. She’s aided by her naive fearlessness that leads her to “risk the air-struck night,” with the belief that journalists “didn’t die in Gaza,”  and her eerie lack of emotion as she visits morgues that hold the bodies of children and blood-drenched hospital wards where there are no empty beds and few medical supplies.

She pours herself into phrases that are as funny as they are vicious, describing her fixer, who becomes tougher and thinner by the day, as “a man raisin.” The child of a hotel worker has “the gait and expression of a middle-aged Glaswegian nightclub bouncer.” A spokesperson for Hamas has “facial hair so precise it could have been styled with a diamond cutter.” 

Being shepherded along with other reporters to scenes of destruction and violence wreaked by drones that guide bombers “like psycho robot cicadas” isn’t enough for Sara. Her goal is to get into Gaza’s “terror tunnels” and interview the commander who’s feared even by Hamas, and as rumors of a peace treaty begin to surface, she becomes ruthless in achieving this. Then she tumbles into a nervous breakdown that’s akin to madness and Vulture turns away from war into a version of Bridget Jones Cracks Up, told in excruciating detail for the final half of the book.

Phoebe Greenwood was a freelance correspondent in the Middle East from 2010 to 2013 and she knows precisely what she’s doing. She makes the war in Gaza vividly real through Sara’s eyes and then allows her to lapse into maudlin self-pity and demented self-interest. As readers condemn Sara for letting her very ordinary life obscure the horrors of war, we realize this is precisely what we do every day, turning our attention from starvation and obliteration in Gaza. We all are sitting on an unmade bed, consoling ourselves with chocolate, consumed by our personal dramas.

“You watch us die, you watch us grieve…Do you help? No,” the mother of a dead child tells Sara and we recognize ourselves. While journalists are the vultures “who make a living from death and disaster,” we’re the vultures who feed ourselves on what they scavenge and toss to us in concise, colorful 500-word pieces in the daily paper. LIke Sara, we learn the facts, the reasons, the death counts and we turn away, going back to the lives we’re fortunate to live.

Vultures.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith (Hogarth Press)~Janet Brown

When Yeong-hye’s husband finds her standing transfixed in front of their open refrigerator during the middle of the night, she tells him only “I had a dream.” Since he chose her as his wife simply because she is unremarkable in every way, he gives this moment very little thought. Then he comes home from work to find her removing every bit of meat in the refrigerator and throwing it into garbage bags. The waste infuriates him, especially when he discovers the kitchen contains no eggs or milk, in addition to meat, and never will again. Yeong-hye, formerly a compliant wife who grew up a carnivore, has become a vegetarian who prepares only plant-based meals and turns away from her husband’s  touch because he reeks of meat. When she embarrasses him at a company dinner, he enlists the help of her parents in bringing her back to reason.

Now emaciated, Yeong-hye refuses all of her favorite dishes at a family dinner and a brutal scene with her father results in her attempt at suicide. Hospitalization does nothing to change her new eating habits and her quiet obstinacy leads to domestic upheavals. Her husband leaves her, her brother-in-law uses her in a shocking art project that destroys his marriage, and her sister finds her own life seems confining as Yeong-hye clings to the existence she has chosen on her own terms.

The novel is told from the points of view as seen by these three people. Just a few internal moments reveal what Yeong-hye has on her mind and these revelations are savage and enigmatic. Otherwise readers see only the obedient wife who inexplicably changes, the sister-in-law who becomes a passive sexual instrument with her body covered in painted flowers, the insane younger sibling whose older sister struggles with guilt because she failed to rescue Yeong-hye from a childhood of brutal physical abuse.

The Vegetarian veers from being disgusting and horrifying into scenes that are profoundly sad and astonishingly beautiful. Han Kang was haunted for years by a statement from another Korean writer, Yi Sang, who said “I believe that humans should be plants.” Pondering “questions about human violence and the (im)possibility of innocence,” she wrote a short story about a woman who became a plant. Then she created Yeong-hye.

Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Kang is an author who never writes the same book twice. We Do Not Part (Asia by the Book, October 2024), The White Book  (Asia by the Book, July 2025), Greek Lessons (Asia by the Book, August 2025) all fearlessly explore different facets of the human condition but each in ways that deviate from the others, similar only in her use of different voices to propel her narratives and her underpinning of modern Korean history. Her novels are emotionally difficult, told in unflinching yet poetic language. After encountering and finishing one of them, the other books all insist on being read, perhaps not in rapid succession but beckoning with an inexorable allure. Han Kang’s work becomes a benign addiction, one that’s fed by her prolific talent and her sharp dissection of what it is to be human in this period of history.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton (4th Estate) ~Ernie Hoyt

Asako Yuzuki is a Japanese writer who was born in Tokyo in 1981. In her childhood she read books by foreign authors such as Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gable series, and Judy Blume’s young adult novels. It was after reading Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen which got her interested in Japanese literature. 

Her first book was a collection of three short stories and was released as 終点のあの子 (Shuten no Ano Ko). Her first novel was 嘆きの美女 (Nageki no Bijou) was published in 2011 and was later adapted into an NHK cable television series. 

Butter is her first novel to be published in English. It was originally released in the Japanese language with the same title by Shinchosha in 2017. The book is translated by Polly Barton who has also translated Where the Wild Women Are by Aoto Matsuda (Asia by the Book, May 2022) and Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (Asia by the Book, August 2025). 

The story was inspired by the real-life serial murder case in Japan by Kanae Kijima, whom the mass media dubbed as the konkatsu killer. Konkatsu means “marriage-hunting”. She was convicted of poisoning three of her victims who were planning on marrying her. She was also suspected of killing four others. She is currently on death row and has been in prison since 2019. 

Manako Kajii is sitting in the Tokyo Detention Center serving a life sentence for killing three lonely businessmen. The mass media says she seduced the men by her delicious home cooking. She claims her innocence but refuses to discuss her case with any journalists. 

Rika Machida is a young reporter at a weekly magazine. She is interested in writing an article about Manako Kajii or “Kajimana” as she was known in the mass media. The woman who was convicted of killing three men and extorted money from them as well. What made the Kajimana story interesting to so many people was because of how she looked. 

Rika tells her boyfriend she’s not interested in rehashing old stories told from the same perspective. She wants to find a new lead into the case. Machida is interested in the “social background to it all”. She feels the whole case “is steeped in intense misogyny”, that “Everyone in it, from Kajimana herself to her victims and all the men involved, seems to have a deep-seated hatred of women”. 

Manako Kajii isn’t what you would call beautiful. She is a bit overweight. Rika's on and off boyfriend said to her, “I bet Kajimana eats an absolute ton! That’s why she’s that huge. It’s a miracle that someone that fat could con so many people into wanting to marry her”. However, the men who fell under spell all had the same thing to say - they were lonely and didn’t care what she looked like. 

It was Rika’s friend Reiko who gave her the idea that the next time she writes to Manako Kajii, to ask for the recipe of the beef stew she served her last victim. Her friend tells her, “Women who love to cook are so delighted when someone asks them for a recipe that they’ll tell you all kinds of things you haven’t asked for along with it”. Amazingly, Kajii responds to Rika’s latest request for an interview. When Rika goes to see Manako Kajii at the Tokyo Detention Center, the first thing Kajimana asks Rika is what’s in her fridge at home. 

Rika is caught off guard but answers politely. After Rika tells her, Kajimana reponds with, “Did you just say margarine?” As Rika tries to defend why she has margarine in her refrigerator, Kajimana tells her, “Your problem is you’ve decided that butter is bad without even understanding what it tastes like”. Before Rika can respond, Kajimana continues with her diatribe saying, “I learned from my late father that women should show generosity to everyone. But there are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine”. 

The interview didn’t go as Rika planned. It was all at Kajimana’s pace. Rika even promised to eat hot white rice topped with real butter and a bit of soy sauce. But she had to use an expensive brand of butter called Echire.

So begins Rika Machida’s interviews with Manako Kajii. But the more she interviews Kajii, the more her way of thinking is turned towards Kajii’s. Her friend Reiko believes that Kajimana has been manipulating Rika into her way of thinking and is not going about her job objectively. 

Not only is this story a mystery about whether or not Manako Kajii killed her would-be husbands, but it is also a criticism of the different standards set by men for women. In the story, all of Kajimana’s victims say they don’t care what she looks like, however, whenever they’re speaking to their peers or colleagues, they denounce her and say terrible things about her. 

In modern day Japan, the posters and commercial ads still feature women who are slim and beautiful. In a line in the book that seems to have come right out of a feminist manifesto, Yuzuki writes, “From early childhood, everyone had it drummed into them that if a woman wasn’t slim, she wasn’t worth bothering with”. It appears to be a disturbing fact that this still holds true today.

Sukh's White Horse retold by Yuzo Otsuka, English text by Sarah Ann Nishie (Labo Teaching Information Center, Tokyo) ~Ernie Hoyt

Sukh’s White Horse is a Mongolian folktale. I believe one of the best ways to learn about another country’s culture is by reading or listening to their folktales. In this tale, the story focuses on the origin of a musical instrument called the morin khuur or horsehead fiddle. It is retold by Yuzo Otsuka and was translated into English by Sarah Ann Nishie. It is illustrated by Suekichi Akaba.

The morin khuur is a Mongolian stringed instrument. It is one of Mongolia’s most significant cultural heritage items. In 2001, UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) designated the morin khuur as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. 

The morin khuur or horsehead fiddle is so called because the upper part of the instrument is shaped like a horse’s head. This book tells the story of how the instrument was invented

As with  most fairytales and folk tales, the story starts long, long ago. On the plains of Mongolia lived a shepherd boy called Sukh. He lived with his grandmother. It was just the two of them. He worked as hard as any adult - he got up early in the morning and helped his grandmother cook breakfast, then he would take their more than twenty sheep out onto the plains. 

Sukh was known for his great singing voice. He was often asked by other shepherds to sing for them. “His beautiful singing voice would ring out across the plain and far into the distance”. 

One day, Sukh did not come home. It was already dark. His grandmother became very worried about him. Even the other shepherds started to wonder what happened to him. They were all distraught and wondering what they should do when Sukh came running home holding something white in his arms. It was a foal.

Sukh took care of the foal which grew into a beautiful white horse. Sukh loved this horse with all of his heart. One  night Sukh woke up to hear his horse in distress. When he went to check, he saw the horse trying to protect his herd of sheep from a big wolf. Sukh was so grateful to the horse for protecting his herd. 

During the spring of one year, the noyon, or local ruler, was having a horse race in town. He said the winner would get to marry his daughters. Sukh’s fellow shepherds told him he should join the race. Sukh decided to join the race and he won! 

However, when the noyon saw that the rider of the white horse was a poor shepherd, he reneged on his promise to give his daughter away in marriage and gave Sukh three pieces of silver and told him to leave the white horse as well. 

Sukh got angry and yelled back at the King, “I came to race, not to sell him”. This made the King angry. He ordered his men to attack and beat Sukh and also took Sukh’s white horse away. Sukh’s friends managed to get him home and with the help of his grandmother, he eventually recovered. Unfortunately, he was still suffering from the loss of his white horse. 

The noyon was so proud of the horse that he wanted to show it off to everyone. He had a party and was planning to ride the horse in front of everyone for the first time at the party. He had his men bring the horse and mounted the horse. 

Then it happened - “The white horse leaped up with fearsome energy. The ruler rolled off of him, down onto the ground. The white shore shook the reins out of his hands and began to run like the wind through the screeching crowd”.

The noyon was furious. He ordered his men to catch the horse. Or if they couldn’t catch him, then shoot him to death. The white horse had run back to Sukh with its body full of arrows. Sukh tried to save the horse but alas, it was to no avail. The next day the horse died. 

For many nights, Sukh couldn’t sleep. When he finally did fall asleep, he had a dream. In the dream the horse spoke to him softly. The horse said, “Don’t mourn so. It would be better to make a musical instrument out of my bones, hide, sinews and hair. That way, I can always be beside you. I can comfort you”. 

The next day Sukh  began to work on making the instrument, following the instructions from the horse in his dreams. When the musical instrument was finished - it was the birth of the morin khuur.

Once you finish reading the story, you can enjoy listening to the story again in English and Japanese on the CD that comes with the book. The CD also includes a bit of background music with sounds from the morin khuur. 

The story is sad but uplifting at the same time. It’s a story of love and trust between a boy and his horse. It always strikes me as rather strange why many folktales have tragic endings. I for one, would like to know what happened to the noyon after the horse threw him off.

Wanting by Claire Jia (Tin House) ~Janet Brown

Lian and Wenyu are unlikely friends. When they first met, Lian was the good girl, carefully dressed and diligently scholastic. Wenyu was the rebel, the one who shoplifted for kicks, rarely wore the school uniform, and chose the most dangerous guy in her class as her boyfriend. Lian read the Harry Potter books in English. Wenyu cut class and was frequently suspended from school. Lian’s goal was Harvard. Wenyu had no goals but her father had a friend in California whose guest room would soon be hers. When she left Beijing, the two girls lost touch. 

Now Wenyu is coming home, a glamorous social media influencer with a rich American fiance. Lian, who never made it to her dream schools in America, has a promising career that’s the result of going to one of Beijing’s top universities. She and her boyfriend are looking at high-rise apartments in the capitol’s finest neighborhoods. Her life is good. Wenyu’s is fabulous. 

As the women rekindle their friendship, Lian finds Wenyu is still the same predatory thrill-seeker she was as a teenager, with her wealth giving her the freedom to do whatever she likes. When she begins a clandestine flirtation with her old high school boyfriend, Lian develops an illicit diversion of her own. 

But this isn’t a Beijing version of Gossip Girl. Claire Jia changes her focus mid-novel by introducing the architect who’s supervising the building of Wenyu’s mansion. Song Chen lives a universe away from the Beijing that Lian and Wenyu have made their own. He and his wife are successful but their standard of living reflects the frugality of 20th Century China. Educated in the U.S., they never succumbed to its culture. Now their primary goal is to buy a luxurious apartment for their only child and his prospective bride.

The contrast between the life led by Chen and his wife as it’s juxtaposed against those of Lian and Wenyu is shocking. One of Lian’s friends, who returned to Beijing with her American degree and a Power Point presentation for the start-up that’s launched her wealth, recently purchased an apartment for 9 million renminbi (over a million U.S. dollars). Another friend stands at a party with her husband, who holds “her Chanel purse like it was a crying baby.” At Wenyu’s engagement party in a Beijing speakeasy, the banquet tables are brimming with hors d’oeuvres that are as chic and decadent as any in the most fashionable restaurants in Manhattan. “Romance was dead and replaced with a BMW and a lifetime membership to Space Cycle.”

Meanwhile Chen curries favor with a low-level bureaucrat by bringing a bottle of whiskey and a bag of dates to the man’s office. He drives a Mazda that’s far from new and his apartment is filled with cooking odors and traffic noises. His marriage is on the rocks and when his wife leaves on a trip to see old college friends in America, he falls into a guilt-ridden affair with a woman who works in the low-level bureaucrat’s office. 

The contrasts turn sharp and cruel as Wanting reaches its conclusion. While lies are pretty little soap bubbles to Wenyu and Lian, to Chen and his wife, they’re butcher knives, brutal and destructive. 

Claire Jia’s first book takes on the form of an old-fashioned novel, one that mingles a comedy of modern manners, a domestic tragedy, the perils of online fame, and more than a few almost improbable coincidences that come together in ways that evoke Dickens, if not Shakespeare. She’s cleverly and concisely revealed Beijing, with all of its glittering wealth and dark anomalies, and sets a high standard for future debut fiction.

The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani, translated by Sam Bett (Faber & Faber) ~Ernie Hoyt

Akira Otani is a Japanese writer who got her start by writing for video games. She is a self-proclaimed lesbian and her first literary work was a collection of short stories in a book titled Nobody Said We’re Perfect which was about relationships between women. 

The Night of Baba Yaga is her first book to be published in English. It was originally published in Japanese in 2020 by Kawade Shobo Shinsha with the title ババヤガの夜 (Baba Yaga no Yoru). The English version was translated by Sam Bett. He was the co-translator for three of Mieko Kawakami’s books - Breasts and Eggs (Asia by the Book, November 2021), Heaven (Asia by the Book, July 2022), and All the Lovers in the Night (Asia by the Book, December 2022).

Yoriko Shindo was just getting off work and thought she would catch a movie at the local cinema. As she was walking through Kabukicho in Shinjuku, she ran into a group of young guys who were obviously drunk and bumped into her on purpose. One guy slapped her backside. She turned around and grabbed the guy's lapels and kicked his feet from under him. 

The fallen guy’s buddy then took a swing at her. She took him down as well after she had taken a fist to the face. The second fighter may have been drunk or just didn’t know how to fight well. Shindo dislocated his shoulder and was hoping to walk away before the police arrived but three more bad guys stepped out of the building and blocked her way. 

Unfortunately for Shindo, she was knocked out with a thick-glassed beer bottle. When she came to, she found herself at a large home in a nice part of Setagaya Ward in Tokyo. Shindo wasn’t done fighting though. “Faced with all this rage and consternation, the woman showed her teeth and smiled. She was covered in their blood. She laughed out loud and doled out punch after punch, kick after kick”. 

This is how Yoriko Shindo found herself being recruited by the boss of the Naiki Yakuza family. The boss had a special job in mind for her. She was to become the full-time bodyguard of the boss’s only daughter, Shoko. 

To Shindo, Shoko seemed really out of place in a Yakuza den, “like a crane perched in a landfill”. Naiki gave Shindo a simple job description - “Any shady character comes near her, break his neck”. Shindo still didn’t understand why a Yakuza boss would trust his daughter with a total stranger. However, he tells Shindo what happened to the last bodyguard. One of his lackeys brought in a lacquer box. Shindo opened it and saw that it contained a man' s right hand. “Severed through the wrist , where you might wear a wristwatch”. 

Shindo thought Shoko was a spoiled and naive rich girl. “She looked so delicate even a gentle prod might shatter her to pieces”. However, the more time Shindo spends with Shoko, she becomes more protective of her. When she sees Shoko in front of a bank on the verge of tears while a stranger is holding her by the wrists, Shindo goes into animal mode - “she charged, winding up, and drove her fist between his eyes”. 

After the man went down, the doors of a Mercedes opened and out came more well-built guys - Yakuza! Shindo thought, “Not again”. However, Shoko screamed for Shindo to stop. The man she had knocked out was Shoko’s future husband - promised to him by Shoko’s father. 

Will Shindo ever be able to extricate herself from this life? Will she be able to protect Shoko from this life where violence begets violence?

Otani has created an action-packed story that will keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish. Unfortunately, the latter half of the book, not only does the action dwindle down, but the timeline jumps from two years later to ten years later to twenty years later and makes you wonder what happened in between those times. Still, I believe this would be a great book to be adapted into a feature length movie!

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton Mifflin) ~Ernie Hoyt

Jhumpa Lahiri is a British-American novelist of Indian descent who currently lives in Rhode Island in the United States. Her first novel was The Namesake which was published in 2003 and adapted into a movie in 2006. Some of her other works include Whereabouts (Asia by the Book, October 23) and In Other Words (Asia by the Book, July 2022). 

Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of her short stories and was first published in 1999 by Houghton Mifflin. The book won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award.It includes nine stories about the lives and experiences of Indians and Indian-Americans. The titles of the stories including Interpreter of Maladies are A Temporary Matter, When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, A Real Durwin, Sexy, Mrs. Sen’s, This Blessed House, The Treatment of Bibi Haldar, The Third and Final Continent. 

The title story, Interpreter of Maladies, originally published in Agni Review, is about a man who works as a tour guide on the weekend. He was taking an Indian-American couple and their two children to see the Sun Temple in Konorak. Although it is located only fifty-two miles away, the trip takes approximately two and half hours. The man tells the family that being a tour guide is not his main job. He says he works as an interpreter at a doctor’s office. Although the husband and kids did not seem interested, the wife continued to ply the driver with questions about his other job. Near the end of the tour, the wife makes an amazing confession that shocks the driver. 

When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, originally published in the Louiville Review, is told through the eyes of a young girl. The time was August of 1971. A man named Mr. Pirzada used to come visit the home of the narrator “bearing confections in his pockets and hopes of ascertaining the life or death of his family”. He was from Dacca, which is now the capital of Bangladesh, but used to be a part of Pakistan. However, the country was in the midst of a civil war. 

The narrator’s parents were from India but the family was now living in Boston. The narrator had always thought that Mr. Pirzada was Indian like her parents but was shocked when her father stated, “Mr. Pirzada won’t  be coming today. More importantly Mr. Pirzada is no longer considered Indian”. 

It was confusing for the narrator. To her, Mr. Pirzada and her parents were almost the same. They spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes and even looked rather similar. Mr. Pirzada had the same habits as her parents as well - eating dinner with their hands, taking their shoes off before entering a room but her father “insisted that I understand the difference”. 

Each story is unique and original. All the stories were originally included in a variety of literary publications. Some of the stories will make you laugh, some of them will make you cry, and some of them may even make you angry but one thing you can be certain of, you will not be bored. Although the stories are fiction, it is a great introduction to the culture of India and its people.

Capitalist Colonial by Matan Kaminer (Stanford University Press) ~Janet Brown

In October 2023, 39 Thai farm workers were murdered in the Hamas massacre and 31 of them were taken hostage. Three of them died in captivity and not until early 2025 were all of the surviving Thai prisoners finally returned to their home country.

Although many were surprised at the presence of Thai laborers in Israel, this has been a reality since the early 1990s, with 20,000 Thai people employed in Israel by the middle of that decade. Most of them come from the impoverished northeast of Thailand, Isaan, which has been exporting labor to the Middle East and other countries in Asia as a way of keeping that region alive.

Israel maintains its imperiled borders by using agriculture. Kibbutz, cooperative farms, attracted volunteer labor in the 60s (probably as a result of the romantic ideal presented in Exodus, both the novel and the movie). When this source flagged, Palestinian labor took up the slack, until politics made this a hazardous move. 

As Israel expanded its borders, more agriculture came into play and the southern wasteland of the area known as Arabah (“Wilderness” in local parlance) became an essential keynote of this policy. In their quest for cheap labor, Israeli politicians found allies in Thai employment brokers who began their export of workers from Isaan to another harsh corner of the world, the desert of Arabah.

Intrigued by this addition to his country, Israeli anthropologist Matan Kaminer quite literally began fieldwork to explore the world of Thai labor in Arabah. Diving first into the history of Israel’s agricultural movement and then into the economic disaster that exists in Isaan, Kaminer persuades a moshavim, a farm owner, to let him join the workers, all of whom are Thai except for Kaminer and an Israeli who is nominally the manager., although a Thai man is the actual foreman, due to linguistic and cultural barriers. With this team, Kaminer begins a workday that starts at sunrise and winds down at sunset, both in the fields and inside sweltering greenhouses. What he learns is limited by two factors: his coworkers’ lack of English or Hebrew and the Thai ingrained etiquette that keeps them from criticizing their superiors to outsiders.  As an educated Israeli, with privileged access to his employer’s household, Kaminer faces an insurmountable barrier that is indelibly Thai.

Turning to interviews with former laborers who have returned to Thailand, Kaminer tríes to flesh out a picture of Thai workers on the Arabah’s moshav.

For Israeli farmers, Thai employees are close to perfect. Skilled farmworkers who also live on a frontier, accustomed to low wages and a low standard of living, they are deferential to authority and they arrive with a heavy debt to pay off to the brokers who have made their jobs possible. That, coupled with the traditional obligations to their parents, make them hard workers, desperate to keep their jobs.

Without an awareness of Israel’s labor laws, Thai workers receive less than the country’s minimum wage and are without the protection of health and safety regulations. While they make not much more than they would at home, they work under a contract that guarantees them five years and three months of a steady job. Although their contract keeps them from finding more lucrative employment, it also protects them from an early dismissal. Once they complete their contracts, Thailand gives them an easy route to return to their Israeli jobs by changing their names and receiving new passports. Job security and family pressure is the impetus for coming back, while the foreign exchange that comes from remittance payments keeps Isaan villages thriving communities.

Anyone looking for deep insights into Thai labor in Israel will be disappointed. Kaminer’s time in the field lasted for less than eight months. Much of his information comes from interviews within Thailand, through an interpreter. Although he hints at changes that take place in Thai labor behavior after years of being in Israel, while mentioning the difference between Thai behavior at work and during leisure hours at night, these are swiftly skirted over. His 269 pages consist of 75 pages of historical background and 92 pages of footnotes, bibliography, and an exhaustive index. Capitalist Colonial begins with promise but it remains a book that still waits to be written.

The Bomb by Makoto Oda, translated by D. H. Whitaker (Kodansha) ~Ernie Hoyt

Makoto Oda is a Japanese writer who was born in 1932 and died in 2007. He was also a political activist and was the founder of the Citizens’ Coalition for Peace in Vietnam and one of the founders of the Article 9 Association of Japan. Article 9 is a clause in the Japanese constitution which outlaws war as a means to settling international disputes of state. 

The Bomb is his first book to be translated into English. It was first published as Hiroshima in the Japanese language by Kodansha. This new edition was translated by D.H. Whitaker, who at the time of publication, worked as lecturer in Japanese Studies at Cambridge University. 

This book is not your average story about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It does not focus on the destruction of the city. It is not about the making and dropping of the bomb and is ethical usage. It is about how war affects everyone - those abroad and those at home. 

Oda presents a collage of stories and people that are interconnected - a young man working in a small town near White Sands, New Mexico, the testing ground of the atomic bomb. Japanese emigrants and their internment, the legends of the Hopi and how the U.S. government forced them off their own land. 

When the story shifts to Japan, Oda focuses on the problems that face returnees from the U.S., the plight of the Koreans forced into labor, the portrait of the Emperor and Empress of Japan, and of course, the devastation caused by the bomb. 

Joe was a ranch hand who worked for a man named Will, the owner of the ranch. Joe often ran in the desert gaining him the nickname of “the runner” by the locals. Joe had left home when he was seventeen to find work and a place to live on his own. His parents were already dead and he felt he was becoming a burden on his brother’s family. 

Will had introduced Joe to Chuck, an Indian who was famous among his tribe. Chuck was also a runner and had won the bronze medal in the marathon at the Olympics some thirty years ago. He was famous, even in the white man’s world. 

Joe had a secret admirer. Her name was Peggy. Laura, an Indian who worked as a maid at Peggy’s house, had told Peggy about Chuck. Of course, Peggy didn’t believe her. Her mother had said to her, “Indians are liars”. Her mother also said, “you never knew what those people were thinking”. Those people included “Indians, Negroes, Chinese and especially Japs”. 

The Hopi, the tribe which Chuck belonged to, are a peaceful tribe. It was against the tribe’s tradition and culture to take up arms against another race. Chuck was given the choice of joining the army or going to prison. He decided to join the army. 

The Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor and it’s only a matter of time before Joe would be called up to service. After the bombing, the U.S. government issued Executive Order 9066 and Public Law 77-503. These laws authorized the forced interment of over 120,000 Japanese-American citizens during World War II. 

Many nisei or second generation Japanese - people who were born and raised in the United States, chose to move to Japan even though they couldn’t speak the language. They were as unwelcome in their parent’s home country as they were in their own. 

Oda sheds light on many aspects of the bombing of Hiroshima that a lot of Americans may be unaware of. If I remember my U.S. history classes, we were taught that the U.S. tried to remain neutral but joined the war after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. 

What we are not taught is why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor (it had something to do with the oil embargo the U.S. placed on Japan). We were not taught that the U.S. governments forcibly removed Native Americans from their lands so the government could build and test a new weapon they were working on. The classes also didn’t teach us about the Americans who worked in the uranium mines and suffered the same fate as the bombing victims of Hiroshima. 

The Bomb may be a fictional account of actual incidents but it makes its point quite clear - “In war, there are no winners!”. We, as humans, have a long way to go before we can achieve world peace but it’s a goal worth attaining.