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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before leaving he composed the following poem: 

Kusa no to mo Even a thatched hut

sumikawaru yo zo May change with a new owner

hina no ie Into a doll’s house

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (Random House ) ~ Janet Brown

In a large house by a river, an extended family that has been warped by cruelty live together. The patriarch of the household is dead but his behavior has sent his relatives in random directions, searching for what they never had. His wife, who bore the brunt of his rages and bears scars from the beatings he gave, has never recovered from the loss he dealt when he smashed her beloved violin into splinters. His sister fell in love with a Catholic priest when she was young, an unrequited passion that she still nurtures as an aging spinster. His beautiful daughter, Ammu, fled from her father’s brutality into a hopeless marriage that sent her back into the family home with two young children, a boy and a girl, fraternal twins. His son, Chacko, married an English girl when he was receiving a British education, a union that disintegrated after they had a daughter. All of them have in some way, transgressed against India’s Love Laws, “the laws that laid down who should be loved and how. And how much.”

The story begins with hints of a tragedy, the funeral of Sophie Mol, the child of Chacko and his English wife. Slowly and inexorably the threads tighten, weaving back and forth through time, setting the scene for death and separation in a way that is unstoppable and inevitable.

Estha and Rahel, the twins, are linked from birth, not by appearance but by mind and spirit. Each can taste what is in the other’s mouth. They feel each other’s pain and know each other’s memories, until the death of their young cousin severs them from each other. When Estha returns as an adult, he has stopped speaking. When Rahel returns, she is desperate to find the connection that once made them a single entity that lived within two bodies. 

More than anyone in their family, the twins still live with the death of Sophie Mol. What they don’t know is this was propelled by their mother, a woman who fell in love with  Velutha, the one man who showed her children true kindness, a man who was born a Paravan, an Untouchable.

In India, in 1969, caste rules were a keynote of society. Even when The God of Small Things was published in 1997, a relative told Arundhati Roy that the sexual relationship between the Christian Ammu and the Paravan Velutha was a “physical impossibility” since the two of them belonged to different species. Roy and her novel were taken to court with charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” 

Meanwhile Roy’s uncle gleefully introduced himself by saying, “Hello. I’m Chacko,” and her mother, when asked if she had experienced the affair that Ammu had embarked upon, countered with “Don’t you think I’m sexy enough?”  Roy’s brother, amused, told his sister, “All of them want to be the people in the book…You’ve turned all the monsters into nice people.”

However none of this background information is why Roy won the Booker Prize with her first novel nor is it why it’s still in print and sought after almost thirty years after it was published. Her descriptions are richly lush, her characters are ones we all have known, in different countries and under different guises. Their tragedies are ones that in some degree have touched every living human, who in these pages find their own histories clothed in unforgettable words, in a story that lives on “like jet-streaks in a church-blue sky.”

Maneki Neko : The Secret to Good Luck and Happiness by Nobuo Suzuki, translated from Spanish by Russell Andrew Calvert (Tuttle) ~Ernie Hoyt

Nobuo Suzuki is a Japanese writer and philosopher. He studied art and literature in Europe before focusing on zen buddhism, creativity, and personal development. His first book was Wabi Sabi : The Wisdom in Imperfection in which he “considers the beauty of imperfection and how understanding this concept can deeply transform our lives”. 

In Maneki Neko, Suzuki writes about good luck": “lucky symbols, lucky numbers, lucky charms and luck-creating rituals”. He asks himself, “How is it that a disciplined and hard-working people like the Japanese are so invested in the idea of luck? And what exactly does “good luck” mean?” (The book was first published in Spanish as Maneki Neko : il Libros Japones de la Buena Fortuna in 2023 by Ediciones Obelisco.)

Anyone new to Japan will be surprised at how seriously the Japanese rely on luck and good fortune. They go to shrines and temples and buy amulets and good luck charms, known as omamori, for a variety of reasons—good health, wealth, traffic safety, a safe birth, and success in education and business. 

In his preface, Suzuki says, “Luck is not a question of chance.” He has always been fascinated by the concept of good luck and bad luck. When he was a child, he often thought, “Why are there some people for whom nothing ever goes right, while others always achieve their objectives?”

Suzuki introduces the Western reader to some of Japan’s most common icons of good luck: the maneki neko, known in English as the “beckoning cat”, the daruma or “lucky Buddha”, the senzaburu or “thousand cranes”, the seven lucky gods of fortune, and explains how the Japanese people use these items to improve their lives. Before delving into the history of the lucky charms, he talks about the four types of good luck. 

Suzuki references James A. Austin’s book Chase, Chance and Creativity : The Lucky Art of Novelty, describing how Austin defined the four types of good luck as blind luck which is out of our control, luck through perseverance and action which is partly under our control, luck through opportunity hunting and luck through invitation which are also partly under our control. 

Out of the four types of good luck, only blind luck is completely out of our control. Some examples would be being born into a wealthy family, winning the lottery, having good or bad weather on a trip. The other types of luck require a bit of effort on our part. Suzuki says, “In these pages, we’ll meet a concept of luck that is not a question of chance, but is gently simmered with three ingredients essential to Japanese culture—effort, wisdom, and confidence”.

The Japanese have a word for effort. Ganbatte roughly translates in English to “do your best”. It’s about perseverance. It is “the basic ingredient for progressing and achieving good results”. 

Wisdom is about knowing the key to success, “what makes money flow and what makes you lose it”. Suzuki believes it is the second keystone to good luck. For confidence, Suzuki refers to a popular saying - “If you believe it, you create it”.

Although the book is more of a self-help book about improving your life through good luck, it is a great introduction to the mysteries surrounding the icons and symbols of good luck in Japan. Most Americans probably pray for good luck but how many Americans do you know who carry a rabbit’s foot or a four-leaf clover?

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Scribner, release date September 2025) ~Janet Brown

Being the daughter of a hero isn’t easy. Just ask Arundhati Roy. Her mother Mary gave her the childhood that nightmares are made of, while pursuing dreams that verged on the impossible. Taking an enduring form of revenge, Arundhati took those nightmares and turned them into a Booker Prize winner, her debut novel, The God of Small Things, which Mary Roy embraced as a tribute.

With 89 turbulent and fearless years to her credit, Arundhati’s mother created a life that defied any form of epic fiction, one that breathes pure fire throughout her daughter’s memoir. With two small children, a Bachelor’s degree in education, and no family fortune to support her, Mary Roy left her feckless husband and began to fight for her dreams. She took on the inheritance laws of the state of Kerala, battled them in court, and won a victory for all the women who had been left penniless in favor of their brothers. She met an eccentric architect who agreed to work with her in building a school on a hillside that was deemed unusable and she turned that school into one that is still in existence today, famed for its progressive and creative form of education.

Pallikoodam School was, according to Mary Roy’s daughter, an achievement that took precedence over her two children and became the youngest child in the family. Arundhati’s early years are overshadowed by her mother’s ambition and overwhelmed by her mother’s asthma. As Mary struggles to breathe, her daughter does her best to become her third lung, “one of her valiant organs…breathing my life into hers.” In return she is the primary focus of her mother’s relentless rage and cruelty. 

Running away is the only way for Arundhati to claim her own separate life. As a child  she finds sanctuary on the banks of a nearby river, where for those hours she lives a free and feral existence. At sixteen she leaves home for Delhi where she studies architecture and “gradually, deliberately, transformed myself into somebody else.” By the time she’s eighteen, she stops going home, changing her relationship with her mother from loving her “Irrationally, helplessly, fearfully, completely” to viewing her “coolly, rationally, and from a safe distance--I often failed.”

In the process of detachment, Arundhati creates a life that is less obsessive but as transformative as her mother’s. Famous for her fiction, she has nine works of nonfiction that illuminate her country, her politics, and what she calls in a book title her “seditious heart.”  Unflinchingly she looks at environmental depredation, politically spawned massacres, and the suffering caused by the military occupation of Kashmir. “In the process, like a suicide bomber, I had blown myself to smithereens…I could actually, physically, feel my heart breaking.” In doing this, she receives an accolade from Mary Roy, an expression of love in the words, “baby girl.”

“Wrecked and heart-smashed” when Mary Roy died, Arundhati Roy shows the immense power of her mother’s life as it gives her the impetus for  the achievements of her own. Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati says at the outset, was written so “my mother, my gangster, shall live.” She does indeed. So does her daughter in a work of brutal honesty and blazing love.

Imposter Syndrome by Kathy Wang (HarperCollins) )~Janet Brown

Julia is the second highest executive in one of the most prominent tech companies in the world. Alice Liu works in tech support, one of the lowest echelons of this company. Julia is famous, rich, and intimidating. Alice is remarkably easy to ignore. Julia, her picture-perfect husband, and their new baby are prominently  featured in expensive magazines. Alice puts on sweats the minute she comes home to the apartment she shares with her cousin Cherie, whose only connection to the world of tech comes from the CEOs and VPS she dates. Alice is a graduate of MIT. Julia’s education has come from the SPB, the best intelligence agency in Russia.

Noticed in a Moscow orphanage by Leo, a recruiter who is now her handler, Julia is given stolen facial recognition software purloined from a company so gigantic that its loss is inconsequential. “Something to remember about America,” Leo tells her, “waste is part of their culture.”

After her launch of VisionMatch, Julia becomes an integral part of Tangerine, the social network that is used all over the world. Her power is unassailable to the point that she even challenges Leo. Unfortunately, the SPB never gave her a grounding in Greek mythology and the dangers of hubris.

Silicon Valley is a place where status and position reign and the plebian principles of democracy are as ignored as Alice Liu. However meritocracy extends even to Alice’s level. She would never have been hired without her prestigious degree, which she has only achieved because of her intelligence. Behind her drab exterior lurks a very proficient brain that’s bored with her daily tasks. Crawling under the desks of tech magnates as she fixes their phones isn’t the way to network, although it does give her access to unguarded conversations. Alice hears a lot but doesn’t realize the importance of this until the evening she notices unusually high activity in a server in a data center. “There’s a lot of data being transferred,” she remarks to a coworker, “Does that seem off to you?” Her colleague dismisses this but Alice is intrigued by the amount of data being transferred at the end of the day.  She pursues the matter and discovers God Mode, through which a handful of elite users are able to see anything that appears on Tangerine: browsing, messaging, and posting, anywhere in the world. Through God Mode, Alice finds out the name of the user who has downloaded all of the data that first sparked her curiosity. It’s Julia. But why?

This is only the beginning of Imposter Syndrome, a novel that owes a lot to the Aesop fable of the Turtle and the Hare, with flash and flare pitted against dogged brainpower. It’s a book that dazzles with so many facets that it’s hard to keep track of them all: the subterfuge of the intelligence community, the cut-throat world of high tech, the juggling act of successful women who struggle to balance career, marriage, and motherhood, and the debilitating effects of sexism and racism on women of color as they work within a system that’s rigged against them. Kathy Wang dissects all of this with a sharp blade of satire, taking no prisoners, leaving no victors. Everybody has something to prove and a lot to lose. As Alice says in her last words, “But this isn’t the end of anything.” (AI, anyone?

Jungle Emperor Leo : Leo Edition by Osamu Tezuka (Jitsugyono Nihon-sha) ~Ernie Hoyt

After reading Mighty Atom : Best Selection, I decided to read one other manga by Osamu Tezuka which was published in the same format. I chose Jungle Emperor Leo : Leo Edition. The original manga and anime series is titled ジャングル大帝 (Jungle Taitei). “Taitei” is a Japanese word for “Great Emperor”. 

Jungle Emperor Leo : Leo Edition is a coming-of-age story of a young white lion who is born on a ship en route to London. Leo is the son of Panja, a fierce lion who was also known as the King of the Jungle. It was Panja who fought against the humans to keep the animals in the jungle safe. 

After Panja is killed by humans, the killers capture Panja’s mate and plan on taking her to a zoo in London. Leo is born while the ship is in transit and is discovered by a member of the ship’s crew. The Captain says they only need to take the mother lion to London and that they should just toss the infant lion into the ocean. However, the crew member suggests another plan. The ship is full of mice and as lions are also felines, he suggests to the Captain that the cub could get rid of the mice on the ship. 

The Captain thinks it’s a good idea but doesn’t know the lion cub will befriend all the mice instead. During the trip, Leo’s mother says to him, “You are the son of Panja. You must go back to Africa and become a great leader, like your father.” Leo doesn’t want to leave his mother but she is adamant that Leo shouldn’t stay on board. And since Leo didn’t get rid of the mice, the Captain is angry and shouts for the crew to throw him overboard. 

Fortunately for Leo and one of the mice, a kind-hearted crewman sets them on a little raft and leaves them to drift in the ocean. While the two are adrift, they are attacked by a large shark. However, Leo’s instincts take over and he overpowers the shark. The defeated shark says to Leo, “You’re such a strong one. I thought you were just a child, but you’re more than that”. The shark then asks, “Where will you be heading now?”.

Leo says he’s headed for Africa and asks if it’s far. The shark says, “If you keep floating around here, you’ll never reach her shores. Not unless you swim there yourself”. Swim? To Africa?

The sharks says, “Just move your body like me, and you can swim”. Leo asks the shark if it could teach him. However, the shark says he can’t, he knows his end is near. He tells Leo to see the fish attached to his bellies. He tells Leo that they are called sharksuckers, a type of fish that have a symbiotic relationship with sharks.

The shark tells Leo to “detach them from my belly and put them on yours. They will swim for you”. Leo and his companion attach the sharksuckers to their bellies. The mouse also spots a kaleidoscope of tiger butterflies and says their in luck. He explains that the tiger butterflies migrate from continent to continent so if they follow them, they will find land.

Unfortunately, they don’t land in Africa. They find themselves in a place full of people and cars—and people fear animals—especially wild animals, even when the animal happens to be a white lion. One human, a young boy, does befriend the lion and convinces his schoolmaster to let the white lion stay in the school. 

Follow Leo and his adventures with humans and animals alike in a story of friendship and survival. Leo does make it back to Africa eventually after a few other episodes among his human hosts. However, he has become more of a house pet than a wild animal. Will Leo be able to survive in the real jungle? Will he be able to follow in his father’s footsteps and become “King of the Jungle”? You will have to read this book to find out.

The Satisfaction Cafe by Kathy Wang (Simon & Schuster, release date July 2025) ~Janet Brown

Joan Liang “was married for only six weeks before she stabbed her husband.” 

She had never expected to do that but then she had never expected that, in the pornography section of their local video store, her husband would hit her when she refuses to bestow sexual favors upon him under the eyes of his best friend. After the second blow strikes her face, Joan pulls out a pair of calipers that she had just purchased at an art store, rakes her husband across the cheek, and announces “I want a divorce.”

While growing up in Taiwan, before she came to Palo Alto to get a master’s at Stanford, Joan had encountered married women, including her mother, who “were melancholy, if not outright miserable.” When she calls her parents to tell them her marriage has ended, they see this as confirmation of the disappointment Joan has been to them since the day she was born a girl. After her mother hangs up on her, Joan realizes the punitive power of what her parents think of her has been “blurred by distance.” She resumes her life of studying, working as a hostess at a Chinese restaurant, and doing light housekeeping for an elderly woman in exchange for an attic room. 

Then one afternoon in a park, while listening to a raving man who appears so regularly that she’s given him a name, The Screamer, she meets Bill. Although he’s been married three times and is 51 years old to her 25, with adult children who are 24, Bill is “cultured, smart, and kind.” When he falls in love with her, Joan accepts his proposal.

She’s briefly taken aback when he sets up a prenuptial meeting for her with his attorney but Joan does her research and calmly sets her terms. For each year of the marriage she will receive a percentage of ownership in the architectural showcase that is Bill’s home, with it becoming legally hers in joint ownership after ten years of marriage. When Bill dies, they’ve been wedded for thirteen years and the house is Joan’s--but only for a short period. On the night of his father’s funeral, her stepson, enraged by losing his childhood home, finds a can of gasoline.

Joan takes refuge in another dream, one of opening a restaurant where people are nourished by conversation as well as food. When she finds that a building is for sale, the place that once held the video store where she had stabbed her husband and ended her first marriage, that dream begins to unfold.

Kathy Wang masterfully burnishes the writing class cliche “Show, don’t tell.” Readers are never given a description of Joan, not of her background, her looks, or her accomplishments. Bill tells her she is “beautiful, just absolutely lovely.” His attorney assesses her as “pretty enough,” but “would not do well at, say, a charity lunch.” When early in their relationship, Bill asks Joan how she mastered English, her response is that’s true of anyone in Taipei who goes to “a good school.” She attains her master’s degree in mathematics with this feat mentioned only in passing, and when she has children, she reveals her love for them by admitting to herself that if either were to die, “This was how God would break her heart.” Her equanimity is unshattered when Bill resumes his lifelong habit of infidelity and she realizes “No one gets perfect.”

Her one “shimmering bubble of fantasy” is revealed when she falls in love with Bill’s magnificent house, where she feels a warmth, as if the place was wrapping her in a hug. 

What makes this woman unforgettable is her straightforward behavior, rooted in kindness, which turns her into a character who is lovable, yet never saccharine. From her Jane Eyre-like beginning, when she’s almost an orphan, living in an attic, to the final order she directs at her children, written on an index card: “BE NICE To EACH OTHER,” Joan’s life spins out with a well-considered cleanliness of action that is absolutely wonderful, in the truest sense of that word.

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books) ~Janet Brown

Everyone who moves to a new city in another country feels this: “We live in a state of I know but I do not know.” 

Leaving New York after the death of her father when she “no longer knew how to be at home there,” a young woman takes a job as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Equipped with the English and Japanese languages that were the mother tongues of her parents, she learned French as a child in Paris and learned Spanish and German “to the point of professional proficiency.” As an interpreter, her job is to “bridge the chasms between words,” with nuance and intention as important as accuracy and clarity. 

Concealed in a small booth, isolated from “the high theatrics” of the court, she focuses so heavily on interpreting that “language loses its meaning” while she translates words that describe “the unspeakable.”

“More than susceptible to the promise of intimacy” in a city that is “almost strenuously civilized,” she eavesdrops on conversations as she begins to learn Dutch. She makes friends with an American museum curator and starts a relationship with a man with whom she has “an intrinsic ease.”

Then she becomes engulfed in “uncertainty, blooming like mold.” Her American friend becomes obsessed by the lack of safety in her neighborhood after a man is attacked and badly beaten near her doorstep. At a cocktail party, a stranger reveals intimate details of her lover’s past, a marriage with children that is still in place. Soon after that, her nascent relationship takes a lonely twist when the man she’s involved with leaves to ask his wife for a divorce. Within a week he goes silent.

Her job, which has been impersonal, takes on a weird dimension when she’s sent to the Court’s Detention Center, to interpret for a jihadist when he enters the Center. The closeness demanded by this is physical, during which she sits beside the accused man and speaks quietly into his ear. He fosters this by requesting her as an interpreter during meetings with his defense attorneys and she becomes “the only company he could now bear.”

Lines blur. Work loses its anonymity and holds emotional demands. The relationship that had “a deep familiarity superseding our many differences” fades into a void. The social rules of this new community become more baffling when the interpreter begins to meet local residents. She suspects that the “docile surface” of The Hague conceals “a more complex and contradictory nature.” At the same time she begins to understand the damning gulf that lies between morality and legality, and experiences the danger that’s bred when false intimacy is combined with brutal truth.

As in her other novels, Katie Kitamura has created a nameless narrator of unrevealed origins. In Intimacies however, she has given this narrator a plot that is more grounded in detail than the figures in her other novels received. Interpreting the state of loneliness and disorientation with precision and brilliance , Kitamura concludes with her narrator no longer feeling that “equanimity was either tenable or desirable,” a thought that bears the resonance of truth in our uncertain century.

Mighty Atom : Best Selection by Osamu Tezuka (Jitsugyono Nihon-sha) ~Ernie Hoyt

Osamu Tezuka was a Japanese manga artist, movie producer, and animator. He was appointed President of Toei Company, Ltd. in 2020, one of Japan’s largest movie production companies. He held the position until his death from pulmonary artery thrombosis in 2023. 

He is the creator of Mighty Atom, Phoenix, Jungle Emperor Leo, Black Jack, and a number of other mangas. Many of them have been adapted into an anime series. Mighty Atom, known in the United States as Atom Boy is probably his most popular.

Mighty Atom : Best Selection is an English-Japanese bilingual edition and is a compilation of the manga’s best stories. Although the main comic is written in English, as with a typical Japanese manga, you read the book from the right to left and the panels all read from right to left and top to bottom. The English is written in the panels while the Japanese is written right outside of the panels. 

At the end of each episode, Japanese translations of words that may be a little difficult for beginners of English are provided (some upon request). The Japanese translation of the manga is exactly as it is in the original manga. At the end of the book, there is a section that features colloquial expressions in English which could be very useful in English conversation. 

Mighty Atom : Best Selection features eight popular episodes. The opening story is The Birth of Atom. Also included in this volume are Giant Uran, Atom’s First Love, Touch and Go for a Slippery Snake, Atom the Second, and The Story of Foolish Ivan. 

The Birth of Atom introduces us to Mighty Atom or Atom Boy. Atom Boy is a robot with human emotions. He was created by Doctor Tenma, the Director of the Science Ministry, to replace his son Tobio, who died in an automobile accident. At first the doctor seemed very happy to have his son back but he discovered a fatal flaw in his creation—as a robot, Tobio would never grow up. Tobio was eventually sold to a circus. Another scientist, Doctor Ochanomizu, realized the boy was no ordinary robot and took him away from the circus to become his guardian. 

Thanks to Doctor Ochanomizu, Tobio, the boy robot, “soars through the sky on jet boosters and becomes a rocket in space. He knows sixty languages and can sense the good and evil in others. He has super-human hearing and has sarchlights in his eyes. He has machine guns in his bottom, and is as strong as 100,000 horses. Thus, young Tobio is reborn…as MIGHTY ATOM!”. 

Darling Uran introduces the readers to Mighty Atom’s siblings, Cobalt and Uran. Cobalt is Mighty Atom’s younger brother and Uran is his younger sister. Mighty Atom decides to show his siblings around Tokyo but finds that their understanding of the human world is still a bit limited. He then takes his siblings to a robot tournament. He explains to them, “it’s a tournament where robots duel each other once a year””. After the three find seats to watch the tournament, the two boy robots realize Uran is missing. They spot her in the middle of the ring. People cannot believe she is a competitor but she defeats the reigning champion easily and becomes fond of taking part in the tournament which highly troubles Mighty Atom. 

Atom vs. Atlas pits Mighty Atom against another robot who was built to defeat Mighty Atom. Unfortunately for Atlas’s creators, Atlas befriends Mighty Atom and helps him to defeat evil in the world. 

As this publication is a compilation of some of the best episodes, the stories do not follow a linear pattern. The introduction of Cobalt and Uran was quite sudden as it was the second episode to be featured in this book. However, if you read each episode as a separate story, you can still enjoy Mighty Atom and his adventures. The stories are timeless and fun. They can be enjoyed by both adults and children alike.

White Tears by Hari Kunzru (Vintage Contemporaries, Random House) ~Janet Brown

Seth is obsessed with finding “hidden sounds below the every day” and wanders New York’s streets capturing everything he hears on a portable recorder. His ambition is to “store the world and play it, without change or addition.” His college friend, Carter, is obsessed with collecting vinyl recorded by obscure Black blues musicians from the past. A man with a healthy trust fund, he recognizes that Seth’s daily discoveries can be incorporated into music and sets up a sophisticated recording studio that makes this happen. Seth, believing “the old world was dissolving in digital rain” and “the future is reflective, metallic,” wants to turn sounds into art while Carter wants to turn them into wealth.

While walking through Washington Square, Seth watches two old chess players. When the game is over, the victor walks away, singing a scrap of the blues. Later when Seth replays his discoveries of that day, he finds what he has recorded is an entire song, one that captures him, and Carter too.

Carter, as a collector and connoisseur, can’t resist playing with this song in the studio. He finds some ragged, weird guitar playing that Seth picked up on the street, incorporates it into the chess player’s blues, scans “an authentic-looking label,” and gives the singer a made-up name. Then he puts the audio file sung by “Charlie Shaw” on an Internet site frequented by collectors.

It’s an experiment, a joke, one that might possibly get enough hits to become profitable. Instead the posted song attracts a viewer who demands to hear the record’s flip side. “I haven’t heard Charlie Shaw since 1959.”

Out of curiosity, Seth agrees to meet the man who calls himself Jumpjim and through this encounter is drawn into a miasma of death, dark-ops, and prison work camps, where time and racial identity shift without warning. Generational wealth, Carter’s family money, is based upon slavery that has morphed into international “Correctional Services.” Seth, who wanted most of all to avoid slippage, is pulled into a reality so slippery that it has no definition and no borders.

“It’s a post-racial America. All you got to do is get them into the system…Speeding tickets. Public nuisance. Once they’re in, your boot is on their neck.”

White Tears begins as a mystery. It quickly becomes as unsettling and revelatory as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Rocketing through New York, Mississippi, rural shacks where the blues were born, the madness of collectors, and the cruelty of unchecked greed, this is a novel that is bizarre, scathing, and a clear mirror of our times.

Born in England with a father from Kashmir and a British mother, parents who endowed him with a classical education, journalist and novelist Hari Kunzru came to Brooklyn well equipped to observe the effects of 9/11 on New York and on the world. “Toilet blocks in Afghanistan.” “The Occupy crowd.” “A behemoth of tentacles” that turn pain into money.

Back in the 20th Century, people talked about The Great American Novel--was it written by Twain, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck? The contenders were all male and all white. Almost 100 years later, this may well have been written by a man who is neither American or white, one with the distance that’s needed to see America without blinders.