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

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 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 and how Austin defined the four types of good luck - 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 which 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 of Japan. Most Americans probably pray for good luck but how many Americans do you know that carry a rabbit’s foot or a four-leaf clover? ~Ernie Hoyt

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

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.~Janet Brown

Imposter Syndrome by Kathy Wang (HarperCollins)

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.

Pulled from 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?)~Janet Brown

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

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. ~Ernie Hoyt

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

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.~Janet Brown

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books)

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.~Janet Brown

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

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. ~Ernie Hoyt

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

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.~Janet Brown

The Reason I Jump : One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism by Naoki Higashida, translated by KA Yoshida & David Mitchell (Scepter)

I recently read a news article that I found to be unbelievable. However, after checking a number of different sources, it is no falsehood that the head of the United States Department of Health and Human Services once again made a speech which drew the anger of many citizens who listened to it. 

He said and I quote, “Autism destroys families.”. He went on to say, “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”. This is one of the most absurd things I’ve ever heard a government official say. 

Unfortunately, it’s not surprising, as these falsehoods were said by a known conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer. It’s a mystery why the current President of the United States appointed someone who is totally unqualified for the position. In my humble opinion, I find Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be an embarrassment to the Kennedy family legacy. 

I desperately wish to send R.F.K. Jr. this book. The Reason I Jump was written by Naoki Higashida. It is the account of “One boy’s voice from the silence of autism”. Higashida was only thirteen years old when he wrote this book. He tells his readers he has learned a method to communicate via writing. 

The book was originally published in the Japanese language with the title 自閉症の僕が跳びはねる理由 (Jiheisho no Boku ga Tobi Haneru Ryu) in 2007 by Escor. The direct translation of the title would be Why the Autistic Me Jumps. The English version was translated by KA Yoshida and David Mitchell who have a close association with autism as their son was diagnosed with the condition when he was three years old. 

Higashida tells his readers that he learned how to communicate via writing by using the “Alphabet Grid”, a method used for non-vocal communication. Higashida says, “You might think that speech is the only way to get your points and intentions across, but there is another way to say what you want without using the vocal nervous system”. 

Higashida gives normal people (people who don’t suffer from autism), an inside look at how an autistic person thinks and why they do things the way they do. He uses a question and answer format to try to answer many of the more common questions people have about autism and what it’s like to be autistic. 

At the end of the book, Higashida includes a short story he wrote titled I’m Right Here. It is an inspirational story about a special needs boy who is killed in a car accident but doesn’t know that he’s dead. However, when he sees his mother suffering because of his accident, he feels even more frustrated because there isn’t anything he can do to help his mother. I believe the story is a metaphor for his own condition. There are things he wants to say and wants to do but his condition makes him unable to do those things. 

There are also criticisms about the book. There are many in the scientific community who question the authenticity of authorship. They cite that Higashida’s use of a “facilitated finger writing” shows remarkable similarities to facilitate communication which was discredited as a pseudoscience by the American Academy of Pediatrics and American Psychological Communication. However, Mitchell is adamant that the book was written by Higashida and says there is video proof that Higashida pointed to the characters on his own to write the book. 

There is still an ongoing debate about who actually wrote the book. However, even surrounding the controversy, it sheds light on one of the most misunderstood conditions affecting millions of people—autism. Whether you believe in its validity or not shouldn’t matter. You can browse the Internet and you will find that there are a lot of autistic people who are fully functional in “normal society”. ~Ernie Hoyt

Ishibumi by Hiroshima Television Corporation, tranlated by Yasuko Claremont and Roman Rosenbaum (POPLAR Publishing)

It is my belief that almost everyone in the world has knowledge of the atomic bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9, respectively. We also know from our history classes and history books that an estimated 140,000 to 200,000 people were killed. What we weren’t taught in our history classes though was that ninety-percent of the victims were civilians and a number of them were school-age children. 

Ishibumi tells the story of what happened to the three hundred and twenty-one students who were enrolled in Hiroshima Middle School. The story was first aired as an hour documentary in 1969 on Hiroshima Television. An estimated one-third of the class is believed to have died instantly. The rest of the students died slow and painful deaths. 

We know this to be true as the stories compiled here are from the reflections and letters from the students’ parents, relatives, and friends. All the students were between the ages of twelve and fourteen. It is based on eyewitness accounts as well. 

The title, Ishibumi, written as 碑 in kanji characters, means “stone monument”. The title is taken from the last character of the cenotaph, written in Japanese as 慰霊碑 (ireihi). It is dedicated to the three hundred twenty-one students who perished after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Students, faculty, and other non-military citizens were gathered on the banks of the Honkawa River when the bomb exploded. They were only 600 meters away from the hypocenter. 

Many of the students' parents went looking for their kids amidst the fire and rubble. Some were fortunate enough to find them and help them to safety, only to see them die shortly afterwards. Some of the children survived but died a day or two after the bombing. 

The father of a boy named Fumio Katayama wrote, “Since I was burned as well I could not carry him on my back and had to make him walk. We returned to our house in Hijiyama. We had to make a two-hour detour to avoid the city districts that were ablaze. Three days later on the ninth at four o’clock in the morning he died.”

The reader will also learn that many of the parents’ recollections of severely burned children who made it to make it home or to one of the numerous first-aid stations called out to their mothers and fathers, and asked about their friends while they lay dying. What’s really significant and some readers may find hard to understand is that although these children knew they were going to die, they continued to sing military songs, the Japan and national anthem and shouted out, “Long live the Emperor!”.

It’s heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time. Their pride for their country and the Emperor is impressive because you have to remember that these kids were only twelve or thirteen at the time. The book also includes many pictures of the students who died. It is a reminder to the world that, “In war, no one wins.” Even today, the debate still continues—was it necessary to drop the atomic bomb to end the war? Was it a crime against humanity? And will we ever be able to live in a world without atomic or nuclear weapons? ~Ernie Hoyt

A Separation by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books)

When a mother worries about her son Christopher who has gone silent during his lengthy Greek vacation, she naturally calls the man’s wife. Not so naturally, the wife doesn’t tell her mother-in-law that she hasn’t spoken to her husband in weeks. In fact, they’ve been separated six months. Instead she accepts the offer of a ticket to Greece and sets off to find the hotel address that her husband had given his mother.

In the wife’s last conversation with Christopher, he had asked her to tell no one that they were separated and she is bound to that promise, almost as if it’s an extension of the wedding vows that the two of them have broken. She has moved in with her husband’s best friend and Christopher is a “careless flirt” who long ago had blithely discarded any thoughts of marital fidelity. Still, the wife says, “It was no small thing, dismantling the edifice of a marriage.” Going to Greece and confronting Christopher with her decision to divorce him is the way to end to their failed attempt at monogamy.

When she reaches the spot where her husband stays, she finds a gated resort property, surrounded by a herd of stray dogs in a scorched landscape. The area still smolders from recent wildfires, the nearby village is charmless, the sea seems designed for suicides rather than swimmers, and Christopher is nowhere to be found. The only person who seems to care about this is the hotel receptionist with whom he has had an affair and the only trace of him is uncovered just as his wife is preparing to leave Greece--he was seen the day before with another woman in another town. 

Then his body is found, dead and bleeding in a charred ditch. Since his wallet is missing and recent charges to his credit cards have been made after he died, it’s an easy matter to declare him a victim of a mugging. However when Christopher’s parents arrive, they demand more closure than that. So, in an unexpected change of heart, does his wife.

This is a mystery novel but the mystery lies in the marriage, not the murder. For five years Christopher and his wife lived in “a good and optimistic marriage” that was finally shaken by his inability to remain faithful. As the wife examines the facts of her husband’s life and death, she realizes that “between two people, there is always room for failures of imagination.” In Christopher’s “empty and ridiculous death,” she discovers that the mystery of how he died makes a mockery of “till death do us part.” That she might never know the reason why her husband was killed prevents their parting. It leaves the killer and the killed locked in an intimate relationship while husband and wife are stuck in a bond of “instability and turbulence.”

Katie Kitamura, as she did in Audition (Asia by the Book, April 2025), gives A Separation a narrator who is nameless, “foreign,” and diamantine, with sharp, bright thoughts in an enigmatic setting. It seems impossible to finish either of these novels in the customary fashion, by turning the last page. Kitamura’s ideas and puzzles refuse to go away, seeping into the lives of those who encounter them.~Janet Brown

Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books, Penguin Random House)

When an actress in her mid-years is approached by a “presentable” young man who asks her to have coffee with him in a nearby cafe, she never expects he’s going to tell her that he believes she’s his birth mother. Although he bears a strong resemblance to her and is of the same racial background, she quickly tells him she has never had a successful pregnancy. That, she thinks, is the end of the matter but two weeks later the man asks her to have lunch with him because he has something to tell her. Perhaps since he is “handsome, perhaps even excessively so,” on a whim the actress says yes.

She is forty-nine. Xavier is twenty-five. Because she is still attractive, the actress is convinced that everyone who sees the two of them together assumes they are having an affair. This feeling makes her end the lunch abruptly when she sees her husband enter the restaurant, stand still for a moment or two, and then walk out 

But Xavier remains in her life. He’s taken a job as assistant to Anne, the director of the play the actress is rehearsing. Slowly she and this stranger achieve an eerie closeness that the actress keeps to herself. Xavier is a diversion that her carefully ordered life has needed, her placid existence in a Manhattan apartment with Tomas, her handsome and devoted husband to whom she had been unfaithful in the past. Now they have a peaceful ritualistic marriage that Xavier, she decides, will never threaten. 

Then “an impossible inversion” takes place. In the second part of Audition, the actress and Tomas sit in the same restaurant that appeared in the novel’s beginning. Now, however, they’re having dinner with their son, Xavier, who has taken a break from getting his master’s degree to work as Anne’s assistant. The position has been extended to include a film that will be shot in the spring and Xavier asks to move in with his parents for a month or two to stay in his childhood bedroom.

At this point, everything in the narrative changes. The sentences, which are all delivered in the first person by the actress, are now without the cold precision that she gave them in the opening section. Tomas loses his elegant allure and begins to slump into the figure of an old man. The comfortable rituals of the marriage become a ways that make “ people grow old without noticing.” 

Much of what the actress disclosed in the first part of this novel is reversed to the point that her entire story now becomes a lie. Not only has the structure of their marriage been shared with a child, it’s Tomas, not the actress, who has been unfaithful. A scarf that was mentioned often when the actress wore it to lunch in the opening scene is now turned into one that was worn by Xavier. When Xavier brings “a friend” to stay with him in his room, this new house guest is a woman so young that “everything about her was perfect.” Confronted with this youthful perfection, the actress’s life begins to unravel into horror.

Katie Kitamura has created a puzzle, a mystery in which every word is important. The two halves of Audition seem to contradict each other but the clues exist in asides, hidden underneath brilliant clarity. Not only does the book need to be read at least twice, every comma calls for the consideration that’s given to a legal document, and every sentence demands more than a quick glance. Each one of them cuts like a stiletto, with a subtle sharpness that conceals the truth of the novel, that is if its truth actually exists at all. What is positively certain is that, while there may only be a limited number of plots in fiction, this plot has been turned and twisted into something that’s quite possibly never been written before.

Which section of this book holds the audition? Read it and argue.~Janet Brown

The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon (Simon & Schuster)

In a world full of displaced people who search for home, Paul Yoon creates one for them in his universe of words. Whether he writes about an imaginary Korean island where war and progress have turned its inhabitants into exiles in Once the Shore (Asia by the Book, November 2023), about orphans in Laos who live in a derelict hospital and carry messages through a maze of landmines in Run Me to Earth (Asia by the Book, December 2020), or a Korean newly released from a POW camp in what was once his country and finds a tentative life in Brazil in Snow Hunters, he evokes heartbreak and hope as he unfolds his characters.

Yoon is a novelist even when he writes short stories, perhaps especially in his latest book, The Hive and the Honey. Each of the seven stories that fill this collection gives full measure to the glimpses of the lives revealed in them. Each feels as if it’s a chapter in a story that will never be fully told, but will remain alive in the imaginations of those who read them.

The stories range from rural New York to the coast of Spain, from 17th Century Japan to a dusty shop in a 20th Century English town, from a Korean mountainside to Siberian prison camps, tracing a pitiless diaspora. In each of them is a boy, all of them in different stages of development, all far from any home they’ve ever known. The worlds they inhabit are brutal and the currency they use to survive is pain and loneliness. Only one of them seems to be on the brink of happiness as he stands in a hayfield with a farm girl, “light on his heels.” The others are adrift in sadness, running, fighting, surviving.

A boxer with a broken nose and hands as “thick as mallets” clings to the hope of finding his Korean birth mother.  A boy who has known only the companionship of Japanese soldiers is turned over to his Korean countrymen whose language he no longer speaks. A Korean couple have the stillness of their lives disrupted when a young Korean boy bursts into their little corner shop, bleeding and confused. A man who has made a tentative sanctuary alone on a deserted mountain is threatened by the appearance of strangers who change him in ways that cling to him like scars. Near a Russian penal colony on an island, a boy is forced by starvation to search for the father who left him years ago while in another lifetime a Russian cossack who is barely out of his teens is steeped in the supernatural as he guards a Korean prison settlement.

All of these stories exist like spiderwebs in the rain, their intricate patterns glowing in an evanescent light. With brilliant words and unforgettable characters, Paul Yoon has created worlds of abstract expressionism, elusive, enthralling, and everlasting. The Hive and the Honey is a book for our time, when those who have homes in the world need to understand what it is to have none.~Janet Brown

Momoko's Illustrated Book of Living Things by Momoko Sakura, translated by James M. Vardaman, Jr. (Shueisha)

Momoko Sakura is a Japanese manga artist. She is the creator of one of Japan's longest running anime series titled Chibi Maruko-chan whose exploits are based on Sakura’s own experiences as an elementary school girl growing up in Shimizu, Japan in Shizuoka Prefecture. She is also the author of a number of essays and Momoko’s Story (Asia by the Book, January 2025)

Momoko’s Illustrated Book of Living Things or いきもの図鑑,as it was originally titled, was first published as a series of essays in the fashion magazine an an. When she was first approached to write a column in the magazine, she decided, “I’ll write about my memories of various living things. On a subject like this, I could write forever.”

However, she found that writing about “living things” every week wasn’t as easy as she first thought. She found that there were times when she had no special memories about a creature which made it hard for her to write. She says in her Afterword, “Memories are not something that can be forcibly manufactured and they do have to be related to the subject.” She takes her argument one step further saying, “Even if I had wanted to write about anteaters, for example, I couldn’t write an essay unless I had actually something to do with one.”

She has classified the animals she talks about into five separate categories—insects, fish, birds, animals, and everything else. As her family ran a vegetable shop, one of her earliest memories of “living things” is about the green caterpillar. Momoko writes, “Whenever my older sister’s shriek was followed by a head of cabbage rolling across the floor, it was the sign that she had found a caterpillar.”

Momoko liked bugs and she would collect the caterpillars. She liked to keep many of them in a box. She liked watching the caterpillars turn to pupa but wondered how wings could be growing under the thin skin and how the caterpillar would turn into a butterfly. 

Another “living thing” Momoko writes about is earthworms. When she was in the second grade, her family used to keep some small fish called guppies as pets. The guppies fed on the earthworms. She used to go out with her father to any ditch nearby and would find lots of earthworms. 

One day while she was out looking for earthworms with her father, a boy about her own age asked her what she was doing. She was too embarrassed to tell him that she was looking for earthworms and just replied, “Nothing.” What shocked her though was that the boy said, “If you aren’t doing anything, do you want to play.” It never occurred to her to play with a boy before. She was a little flustered and told him, “I won’t.” The boy was insistent until Momoko’s father’s voice could be heard saying, “Hey, there are worms over here!” The boy left without a word. 

Every memory Momoko has about a “living thing” may seem ordinary but the way she talks about each and every one of them makes the readers feel as if each and every “living thing” is special. I’m sure we all have our own memories of “living things”—that pet dog or hamster, the family cat or even an aquarium full of tropical fish, but Momoko has a way of making each “living thing” larger than life. ~Ernie Hoyt

毎日は冒険 (Mainichi ga Boken) by 高橋歩 (Ayumu Takahashi) Japanese Text Only

Ayumu Takahashi was born in Tokyo on August 26, 1972. He is an entrepreneur, writer, and the founder of Sanctuary Publishing. His book 毎日が冒険 (Mainichi ga Boken) translates into English as Everyday is an Adventure. 

In this book, Takahashi relates seven different life experiences he has had. His adventure starts when he is still a senior in high school. All of his friends and classmates are either studying for the university exams or at least have a general idea of what they want to do after graduating from high school. 

Takahashi has no idea what he’s going to do with his life after high school. He’s a little envious of his friends and peers. Some of them say, “I’m going to go to design school and become a famous designer” or “I’m going to university in Aomori to study to become a veterinarian”. It isn’t until Takahashi sees a commercial for the “Marlboro Man” that he’s inspired. 

When he sees the commercial advertising Marlboro cigarettes featuring the “Marlboro Man” (cigarette ads were still very common in Japan in the seventies), Takahashi decides then and there to go to America and become an American cowboy! Although he can’t speak English very well, his mother says she has friends who will let him stay at their house for his time in the U.S.

For his first three days in Los Angeles, his hosts take him through Beverly Hills. They go on a drive to Santa Monica Beach. He nervously watches Terminator 2 at a small movie theater while a number of Black people are making noise. His hosts also take him to Universal Studios. Before he knows it, three days have passed. He reminds himself that he came to America to work as a cowboy. He certainly won’t find them in Los Angeles. 

Takahashi believes he will find “real” cowboys in Texas. He books a flight to Dallas to go in search of some. His host tells him the best way to gather information is to go to a church whose members also speak his own language. 

Takahashi manages to find a church where there are people who speak Japanese. One of the people he meets is kind enough to drive him to Fort Worth where a cattle auction is being held. Takahashi thinks, “Real cowboys!”. Now he needs to have the courage to speak to one of them to see if they would take him on as an apprentice. It’s easier said than done. However, he does meet a cowboy who takes him in for the night. The following day, Takahashi asks if he could work at the ranch to become a cowboy, the cowboy gives him a flat-out no and that’s the end of Takahashi’s dream of becoming a cowboy. 

Takahashi goes back to Japan. He enrolls in a community college and also works part time as a delivery person for a pizza restaurant, since his dream of becoming a cowboy did not come to fruition, At the pizza joint where he makes more friends, one of his coworkers tells him that he’s going to take part in a “Hellish Success Philosophy Training Camp” and that Takahashi should join. 

Takahashi manages to complete the course but he still doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. As he is thinking about his future, he watches the Tom Cruise movie Cocktail and is inspired once again! “That’s it! I’ll open my own bar!”. In order to run a bar, you need to know how to make drinks. Aside from working part-time at the pizza place and going to college, Takahashi takes another part time job, working at a bar to learn more about the trade. 

He also finds that starting your own business costs a lot of money. He talks to three of his friends who also had taken part in the “Hellish Success Philosophy Training Camp” to become his partners, which sparks Takahashi’s next major adventure. The four entrepreneurs borrow money from friends, family, acquaintances, ex-girlfriends, and old classmates. They manage to raise enough money to buy the bar where Takahashi works part-time. 

Takahashi’s drive and enthusiasm for this new project encourages his partners as well. In a short amount of time, they re-open the bar under new ownership and call it Rockwells, named after Norman Rockwell, the American painter and also because they all like rock music. 

Once the bar is successful, Takahashi becomes restless again. He wants to start something new. His next idea is to write a book and get it published. However he can’t find a publisher willing to take on an unknown author who doesn’t even have a manuscript yet. So, Takahashi comes upon a new idea. He will start his own publishing company and publish his own books. He will start from scratch once again to challenge himself to another adventure. 

Takahashi’s story is inspiring. However, there are times when his actions seem to go against the grain of common sense. But with determination and perseverance, he overcomes the obstacles he is faced with. After successfully starting a publishing company, Takahashi is already planning for his next adventure. Where will life take him next???　~Ernie Hoyt

World Class by Teru Clavel (Simon & Schuster)

When Teru Clavel’s husband is transferred from New York to Hong Kong in 2006, she’s relieved. The oldest of her two young sons is approaching the age where preschool is in his future and in Manhattan, this is no trivial landmark. The right preschool will determine his future education, right up to his choice of university, and the application process is almost a blood sport. Parents begin this rigorous journey even before the future student emerges on a delivery table, moving to the right neighborhood, joining the right church, and finding the right consultants in tandem with “preschool prep” classes. 

The Clavel family falls into the category of “moderately to extremely wealthy” and both parents were educated at all the right schools but Teru had an additional advantage. Her Japanese mother sent her to public school in Japan every summer. With that background, she’s eager to give that same sort of opportunity to her children--and for the next ten years, she does.

At first her two-year-old son James is enrolled in a prestigious, private preschool but his mother begins to chafe against the affluent bubble that Hong Kong provides to wealthy expatriates. With her Japanese public school experience, she finds the same thing for James by the time he’s three and is delighted that by the time he’s four, he’s given homework and is a confident speaker of Chinese--or Mandarin as Teru terms it throughout her book.

When her husband is transferred to Shanghai, they all leave any form of expat lifestyle behind in Hong Kong and enter what Teru calls “family detox.” Their apartment is inhabited by rats, roaches, and termites and James, at six, becomes his mother’ s interpreter when they go to stores and markets. But Teru’s determination gets her sons into public schools, where James is the sole foreigner in his class and Charles is only one of several  in his preschool. There the family discovers that Shanghai invests in teachers’ salaries and continuing professional development, with generous resources given to English language instruction and education for students with special needs. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, schools don’t spend money on technology, attractive classrooms, or elaborate playgrounds. 

In  her sons’ schools, Teru finds, teachers concentrate on mastery of a subject for every student and they will stay after school with anyone who needs help to reach that point. “There is no ‘bad at math,’ Teru says, “any grade below 95 is considered a failure.” First grade students begin to learn the rudiments of algebra. While classes concentrate on rote memorization, speed drills, and repeating what a teacher has just said, this pays off. In an international test administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) that focuses on math, science, and reading, Shanghai was at the top in all three in 2009 and “ranked three full grade levels above the average score overall” in 2010. 

At the same time, James and Charles found a sense of community in their schools, to the point that when Charles was briefly hospitalized, his teacher, several of his classmates, and their parents visited him.

By the time the Clavels are transferred to Tokyo, a new addition to their family, Victoria, is almost ready for preschool. While James and Charles have learned discipline and self-control in their Shanghai school, Victoria at the age of three barely squeaks into a Tokyo preschool. “Make sure Victoria understands social norms here before she starts school,” the principal warns Teru. Her older brothers are given a crash course in Japanese before beginning their four years of public school.

Perhaps because Teru received a generous helping of Japanese education as a child, she spends less time describing the experience that her children underwent. She stresses the importance Japan places on educating “the whole child,” fostering independence and giving a thorough grounding in nutrition as well as providing curriculum that is stable and carefully planned system-wide. In Japan, she says, textbooks are written and approved by teachers. A parent-teacher journal comes home with each child every night and families are encouraged to come into their student’s classroom for observation days. “It was an efficient, transparent system that had stood the test of time.”

Returning to U.S. schools in 2016 is a shock to everyone. Although the Clavel children attend public school in the wealthy area of Palo Alto, the best ranked school district in California, they find sports are stressed above academic subjects. In James’s English class, seventh-graders are required to read no more than three books all year and their teacher will critique only three essays “because there’s not enough time.” Charles is delighted that he watched “ten movies in full” during his year of fifth grade. Both boys are two years ahead of their grade level in math.

The solution? Go full circle. Move to Manhattan and put the children in private school. 

Although World Class is a more cursory examination of education overseas than Little Soldiers (Asia by the Book, December 2022), Teru Clavel gives a surprising and often shocking comparison of U.S. education during a time when we need to hear this more than ever.~Janet Brown

The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok (HarperCollins)

A leftover woman, as a Chinese saying goes, is one that nobody wants, “leftover, like scraps on a table.” Jean Kwok presents two women from different continents, each one feeling like a leftover for different reasons.

Jasmine has come to New York from China after paying a group of snakeheads to smuggle her into the U.S. Now, faced with a balloon payment, she’s looking for work that will keep her from the threat of prostitution. She’s also here to find her daughter, a child whom she was told died at birth but whom her husband had given up for adoption to a couple from Manhattan. Jasmine’s willing to do anything to succeed in her quest, even working as a cocktail waitress in a Chinese-owned strip joint. She’s in flight from her rich and powerful husband and has no friends--except for a boy she grew up with in her village who now works in a martial arts school near Chinatown. She ignores him out of an excess of caution, concentrating only on recovering her lost child.

Rebecca is a highly placed editor in a publishing house founded by her father. Dogged by a scandal that almost scuttled her career, she’s frantically trying to regain her professional reputation to the exclusion of the two people she loves--her husband, a professor who’s fluent in Chinese and four other languages, and the daughter they have adopted through an agency in China. Rebecca has turned over her daughter’s life to a Chinese nanny who speaks limited English. Although Lily is unpolished and clumsy, she adores Fiona, the little girl who is under her care.When it becomes obvious that Rebecca, who’s the only one in her household who can’t speak Chinese, is taking second place in her daughter’s affections, she begins to hate the woman who has supplanted her.

The way Jasmine and Rebecca find each other is a dizzying story with twists that come without warning. Although Kwok at first seems to be following in the footsteps of Jackie Collins, she’s much too smart to take that route. Yes, she cloaks this novel in heavy scenes that reek of romance, but she’s done her research and that gives her book a whole other dimension.

In her portrayal of Jasmine, Kwok explores the dilemma of undocumented immigration and the gaping differences between fresh-off-the-boat Chinese and Chinese Americans. In a Chinatown cafe, Jasmine notes the confidence that radiates from women who look like her but who exude a sense of belonging--”their fearlessness, the way they’d seized their genetic peculiarities…and decided to wield them.” “Remember,” one of them tells her later, “appearances are everything.” When Jasmine follows up on an employment tip this women has given her, she discovers “Asians exploiting Asians,” in a club where a Chinese American woman hires women from China who have no other job options. In this place Jasmine and other immigrants satisfy “every cliche of male desire.” There is, Jasmine learns, “no room for subtlety in a strip club.”

Through Rebecca, Kwok glances upon issues of “race, feminism, and identity,” and the way both “women and immigrants need to split themselves into different personas and roles.” As Rebecca, Lily, and Jasmine come to a shocking intersection, questions of economic class arise in a conclusion that’s filled with violence and heartbreak.

The Leftover Woman confronts a multitude of stereotypes, including the ones that cling to genre fiction. Kwok, whose parents brought her to the U.S. from Hong Kong when she was five and who spent a large part of her childhood working in a sweatshop, earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard and an MFA from Columbia. In her fourth novel she draws skillfully from every part of her background to create a book filled with constant surprises and provocative points of view, one that belongs in an academic seminar as much as it does under a beach umbrella.~Janet Brown

The Peking Express by James M. Zimmerman ( Hachette Publishing Group)

Shanghai had a community of 35,000 foreigners in 1923 with many of them eager to travel on the newly launched express train to Peking. “A luxury hotel on wheels,” with its silk sheets and and its five-course banquets, the four-month-old train could make the 892-mile overnight journey in thirty-eight hours and attracted a multinational collection of affluent passengers.

On the morning of May 5, 1923, among those who boarded the train was an Italian attorney who represented the Shanghai Opium Combine, the owner of the Chinese Motors Federal Company who had left Romania penniless years before, a honeymooning couple from Mexico, a number of journalists, a couple of military families with their young children, and the aging sister-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr, heir to the Standard Oil Company.

At 2 am on May 6, over 100 passengers were kidnapped by 1000 bandits, who attacked and derailed the train. Although the victims were stripped of all their possessions, that wasn’t the goal of the man who was their leader. 

Sun Mei-yao was a twenty-five-year-old former soldier who had amassed a large company of bandits and planned to use them in an “economic insurgency” against China’s warlords and the corrupt military general who governed the region. Shrewdly he decided that the best way to gain attention and achieve his goal of becoming a general himself, leading a brigade of former bandits, was to take hostages. The Peking Express, filled with wealthy Chinese and important foreign figures, was his ticket to success and he grabbed it.

Marching his captives to his stronghold on Paotzuku Mountain, Sun knew the grueling trek that would take several days was beyond the abilities of the women and children in the party. He gradually released them all--except for the Mexican bride who was from a country where banditry was commonplace and refused to leave her husband. (Eventually Sun lost patience and told a group of negotiators “And take the Mexican lady with you!”)

As released prisoners made their way to safety, they provided the necessary details that would capture the imaginations of newspaper readers all over the world.  When Lucy Aldrich, the Rockefeller relative who was on her second journey around the world, emerged from captivity, her greatest fear was that her family would never let her travel again. She described her ordeal as “most dangerous,” yet “thrilling” and extremely amusing at times,” which probably launched 1000 headlines.

The remaining captives reached the bandits’ fortress and found “a beautiful quiet place with caves and the Temple of the Clouds.” “Our view is like an artist’s map,” one hostage wrote to his family.  However it certainly wasn’t summer camp.

Their treatment was far from idyllic; beatings were not uncommon and three of the strongest men were separated from the others and isolated as bargaining chips on the least accessible part of the mountain. There these men found a group of 23 kidnapped children huddled in misery, like “hopeless hungry little old men.” Sick and near starvation, the group of boys and one girl were like a subscription service; their parents sent money each month to keep them alive. (The 47 children whose parents stopped sending ransom were thrown over the side of a cliff.)

Although foreign governments chose not to directly intervene in freeing the hostages because it was a matter for China to resolve, they sent doctors and supplies to the mountain and instituted an improvised postal system. Letters from the captives and replies from their families, 50-100 letters a day, were carried by visitors and the bandits, along with newspapers and cameras. 

The hostages realized their only strength came from standing together, which kept Sun from using executions as a negotiation tactic. When they were finally released after five excruciating weeks, they made sure that the Chinese who had become part of their group were freed with them. Later all of the Chinese were brought to safety along with the imprisoned children.

Sun Mei-yao got what he wanted for a very brief time. When international attention veered away from the newly appointed brigadier general, he was beheaded, much to the rage of the men he had held hostage. The conditions of their release had been based on Sun’s safety and the violation of that infuriated his former prisoners, many of whom had come to respect him. So had Mao Tse-tung, who “admired Sun Mei-yao’s ability to mobilize the people.”

What came to be known as the Licheng Incident was perhaps the first use of international media to engineer worldwide public opinion. That it ended with much less bloodshed than the recent highjacking of a train in Pakistan is a sad commentary on current politics. 

Later the Peking Express would become the Shanghai Express in a 1932 movie starring Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong. The screenwriter? None other than Harry Hervey, the pulp novelist and author of Where Strange Gods Call (Asia by the Book, April 2024).

The site of their captivity is now part of the Baodugo National Forest Park where a “rickety cable car” takes hikers to the foot of Paotzuku Mountain. If they can manage the ascent, they can sit where Peking Express hostages once waited to be released.~Janet Brown

City of Fiction by Yu Hua, translated by Todd Foley (Europa, April 8, 2025)

Strangers are unusual in the town of Xizhen so everyone knows about the tall Northerner who has shown up for no apparent reason. The man arrives carrying an infant so young that he has to pay women who are nursing their babies to give milk to his motherless child. Although it’s difficult for the townsfolk to understand his dialect, his love for his daughter and his friendly demeanor wins them over, especially when he reveals a talent for carpentry that he offers for free. 

Li Xiangfu and his little daughter become an integral part of Xizhen, although his origins are still a mystery. He takes on the task of teaching, telling his students to “sit upright and walk straight,” words that he embodies in his own life. His daughter becomes the most beautiful girl in town, with people saying she’s as “lovely as Xishi,” the first of China’s legendary Four Beauties.

Nobody knows that Li Xiangfu had once fallen in love and married a woman whose dialect was identical to the people of Xizhen. She had run away with part of his fortune, leaving him with their newborn child, and he has devoted his life to finding the woman he still loves. Settling in Xizhen only because the town his wife said was her own seemed to be a place nobody has ever heard of, Li Xiangfu hopes that someday she might appear in this town where everyone speaks her language.

Life is idyllic in this prosperous farming region until the political instability that takes place after the fall of the Qing Dynasty leads to terrorism. Bandits roam unchecked, stripping crops and wealth from people who have never learned how to fight. With unspeakable cruelty, they murder and pillage, taking hostages who may yield substantial ransoms--or die slow and terrible deaths. After the leading citizen of Xizhen is captured, Li Xiangfu is the one who volunteers to buy his friend’s freedom.

What begins as a story of love and devotion turns into stories of stomach-turning torture, graphically described, with an abrupt ending that brings no feelings of hope or redemption. Much as Yu Hua did in Brothers (Asia by the Book, January 2010), he has written City of Fiction in what feels as if it should be in two separate volumes. The first has sweetness while the second has none at all. Even the beautiful daughter, the guiding hope of Li Xuangfu’s life, disappears from the second half of the narrative, safely ensconced in a Shanghai boarding school.

Beginning with fascinating descriptions of village ceremonies and wildly humorous episodes of magic realism, Yu Hua’s immediate plunge into sadism and grueling battle scenes is viciously jarring. Even when he brings his novel into a circular structure that gives the story of Li Xuangfu’s faithless wife and retells the events that began this novel in a way that offers another dimension, this brings no brightness to the book’s conclusion.

Still it’s impossible to stop reading City of Fiction, even as it swerves into brutality that is rarely leavened with any sort of mercy.  Yu Hua has brilliantly recreated life in China during the beginning of the last century, stunning readers with how much has changed in the past hundred years.~Janet Brown 

A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang (St. Martin's Press)

“Beauty is not so different from destruction.” Xishi has been shielded from what her beauty could inflict upon her since she was very young. Each time she leaves the house, her mother veils her face to ward off the attention that comes from being the most beautiful girl in the village. 

But beauty has its uses and in a region where two kings vie for power, the weaker monarch needs a weapon to defeat the man who has taken over his kingdom. Sending Fanli, his trusted political and military advisor, to find the loveliest girl in the area, he’s certain that great beauty will cause the downfall of his enemy. 

Fanli is a man who seems impervious to female charms but he knows how to assess them. He chooses Xishi to accomplish what the King of Yue has planned--to marry the King of Wu and charm that ruler into doing exactly what she wishes, leading her husband to unwittingly lower his defences and lose his kingdom.

Xishi is a peasant girl without refinement or sophistication so before she begins this project, she needs extensive training under the watchful gaze of Fanli. She falls in love with him but is bound to accomplish her goal. She hates the King of Wu almost as much as his rival does because she had watched Wu soldiers kill her sister. Revenge propels her away from the man she loves and into the treacherous life of a royal court. 

The King of Wu is seduced by her beauty and fulfills every wish she voices, wishes that weaken his kingdom, provide a gateway for the Yue invasion, and ensure that Xishi might eventually regain a life of freedom. But politics is a dangerous game and beauty can lead to destruction as well as cause it.

Ann Liang wrote A Song to Drown Rivers when she was twenty-one, basing it upon the legend of China’s Four Beauties, of whom Xishi was the first. Although the novel is being marketed as fantasy, it’s actually a carefully researched work of historical fiction. Its first sentence is crafted from the Chinese saying that great beauty causes the fish to sink, the geese to fall from the sky, eclipsing the moon and shaming the flowers. It recreates a turbulent chapter in Chinese history, when the state of Wu came into power and threatened neighboring kingdoms. The story of how a beautiful girl was used as a pawn by the King of Yue to eradicate this threat is told in the Spring and Autumn Annals which supposedly were collected and compiled by Confucius.

Often retold legends become cumbersome and ungainly, with language that weighs down the story. Luckily that isn’t the case with this version of Xishi’s life. Although Liang carefully describes the opulence and luxury of the royal lives and the intricacy of political plots, she never turns her heroine into “someone barely even human, a creature of myth.” She gives Xishi a spirit that resonates and enthralls through the centuries, telling her story in a fluid, fast-paced style that never flags or falters, while giving it the delicate grace of a fairy tale. 

Although she has written four novels for young adults, this is Ann Liang’s debut foray into adult fiction. Let’s hope it won’t be her last.~Janet Brown