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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps someday it shall be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Roulette by Desmond Shum (Scribner) ~Janet Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki, translated by Polly Barton (Pushkin Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Tomoka Shibasaki is a Japanese writer from Osaka who started writing while she was still in high school. After she graduated from university、 she took a job as an office worker but continued to write. Her short story, レッド、イエロー、オレンジ、オレンジ、ブルー (Red, Yellow、 Orange、 Orange, Blue) was first published in 1999 in the literary magazine Bungei. Her first novel, きょうのできごと （Kyo no Dekigoto) was published the following year. It was also adapted into a feature length film, directed by Isao Yukisada and stars Rena Tanaka and Satoshi Tsumabuki.

Spring Garden was first published in the Japanese language as 春の庭 （Haru no Niwa) in 2014 by Bungei Shunju. It won the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s most prestigious literary prizes, the other being the Naoki Award. The English edition was translated by Polly Barton, who has also translated other works of Japanese writers including Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Asia by the Book, May 2022), Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (Asia by the Book, August 2025), and Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Asia by the Book, September 2025). 

The first English edition was published in 2017 by Pushkin Press. This trade edition was published in 2024. As Polly Barton is a British translator, the book was written in British English. I became aware of that fact when she mentions that one of the characters in the book was looking at the ground floor from her first story balcony. If you’re an American reader, once you realize the book is written in British English, it becomes a lot easier to understand. 

Spring Garden is the story about Taro, a divorced man living alone in an apartment complex that’s slated to be demolished.The block of apartments where Taro lived was View Palace Saeki III. It consisted of eight apartments - four on the first floor and four on the second. The rooms did not have any numbers, they were all named after an animal from the Chinese zodiac. 

Taro had noticed a woman standing on the balcony looking down at a house belonging to Mrs. Saeki, the owner of the apartment complex. Currently, the house was empty and Mrs Saeki was living in a retirement home. However, Taro realized that the woman wasn’t looking at Mrs. Saeki’s house, it was the house next to it, the sky-blue house.

Taro would get to know the woman and they would start a strange bond with her and the sky-blue house. He learns that she’s an artist and that her name is Nishi. Shehe had asked Taro if he could use his balcony to get a better look at the sky-blue house. She tells him it’s for her drawings. Taro learns that Nishi works as an illustrator and also draws manga under a pen name but she doesn’t tell him what her pen name is or what manga she draws. 

As a sign of gratitude, Nishi invites Taro out to dinner. While they are eating, she takes out a book from her bag. It is a photo book of the sky-blue house. Once she brings out the book, she begins to tell the story of how she became enamored of it and was hoping that one day she would be able to see its interior. 

Spring Garden is a rather strange story. It’s as if the sky-blue house is also one of the main characters, along with Taro and Nishi. They become obsessed with the house, researching its history and about the couple who lived in it when the book of the house was published. The house becomes a symbol for what they lost and what they hope to find in the future.

Ryu : Live, Love, Die in the Shadow of the Dragon by Akira Higashiyama, translated by Alison Watts (26 Letters) ~Ernie Hoyt

Akira Higashiyama was born in Taipei, Taiwan and currently lives in Fukuoka Prefecture in Japan. His father, Wang Xiao-lien was also a prominent writer in Taiwan and wrote novels, poetry and books about mythology. He writes many of his novels in Japanese. He also wrote novelizations of the popular Masashi Kishimoto manga series Naruto, including the screenplay for Naruto the Movie : Blood Prison. 

Ryu : Live, Love, Die in the Shadow of the Dragon is most easily characterized as a coming-of-age novel. Its protagonist is Yeh Chiu-sheng, a seventeen year old high school student living in Taipei during the seventies. One day his life is turned upside down. It was April 5, 1975 and the news was all about the death of Chiang Kai-shek, the President of Taiwan who was also the leader of the Kuomintang that fought the Communists in Mainland China. 

The death of Chiang Kai-shek shocked the nation who believed the Republic of China would take this opportunity to attack and reclaim Taiwan as its own. Tragic as Chiang Kai-shek’s death was, after a few months, the fervor and mourning of the nation’s leader dwindled - the President’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo became president, things settled down, and people went back to their normal lives. In the midst of all this, Yeh Chiu-sheng’s grandfather was murdered.

Chiu-sheng was close to his grandfather, an emigrant from Shandong Province in Mainland China. Yeh says his grandfather claimed to have seen foxfire when he was born, foxfire meaning a type of supernatural flame, often called “ghost lights”. The story goes that “all the adults looked at my grandfather and pronounced in turn that he was certainly not like other children”.

Chiu-sheng knew his grandfather to be a very superstitious old man. He also knew from his grandfather’s many stories that he did a lot of bad things when he was still living on the mainland and fighting Communists. Yeh would become obsessed with finding the murderer of his beloved grandpa. 

His best friend, Chao Chan-hsiung, also known as Hsiao-chan, is always getting into trouble but he is as loyal as can be. Hsaio-chan becomes involved with a gang leader named Kao Ying-hsiang, known in the streets as Brother Ying. Hsiao-chan is aware that Yeh Chiu-sheng is looking for the murderer of his grandfather and tells Yeh that Kao has already caught the culprit.

Chiu-sheng knows that the man Kao caught is not the murderer. However, Kao tells Chiu-sheng’s friend, Hsiaso-chan, that to become a proper member of his gang, he must kill this man. Chiu-sheng manages to escape with Hsiao-chan and tells his friend he needs to leave that life and not associate with people like that. Chiu-sheng saved his friend from murder but now the two have become marked targets of Brother Ying’s gang.

When he learns that Brother Ying caught his friend, he believes that Hsiao-chan’s life is in danger. Around the time that Yeh Chiu-sheng is determined to save his friend, his uncle, Yu-wen who is a sailor had just returned from sea and saw the look in Chiu-sheng’s eyes and goes with Chiu-sheng to save Hsiao-chan. 

Uncle Yu-wen is not a blood relative. He is the adopted son of Chiu-sheng’s grandfather. But in a series of coincidences or mishaps, Chiu-sheng is beginning to wonder what kind of man Uncle Yu-Wen really is. 

What really gets Chiu-sheng thinking about Uncle Yu-Wen is when he found an old photograph hidden with his grandfather’s old things. It was a picture of some villagers in Shandong. Chiu-sheng swore that it was his Uncle Yu-Wen, but others told him, the picture was the son of the village headman, Wang Ko-chiang - one of the men his grandfather had killed during the war when Japan occupied Taiwan.

This is a story about family ties, bonds that are tighter than family, and includes a bit of fantasy, action, and romance. The cast of characters may be a bit hard to keep up with at first but once you remember who is who, seemingly unrelated incidents all become intertwined in the end. You can’t help but follow in the steps of Chiu-sheng as he goes to Japan and finally makes the decision to go to his father’s hometown (when Taiwanese were still forbidden to travel to the mainland). But what will he find there? And will he be able to solve the mystery of his grandfather’s murder?

寿司屋の小太郎 (Sushi-ya no Kotaro) by 佐川芳恵 (Yoshie Sagawa) (Poplarsha) ~Ernie Hoyt *Japanese Text only

Yoshie Saga is a Japanese essayist and children’s book writer. She got married in 1975 to a man who was the owner of a sushi shop called Natori Sushi in Higashi Nakano in Tokyo’s Nakano Ward. In 1978, she became a professional cook and spent the next thirty years working with her husband at the shop.

She wrote about her experiences and her first book, 寿司屋のかみさん うちあげ話 (Sushi-ya no Kamisan : Uchiagebanashi) which roughly translates in English to Confessions of a Sushi Restaurant Owner’s Wife. The essay was later adapted into an irregular drama series and was aired between 1996 and 1997. 

Her experiences became the basis for the Wife of a Sushi Restaurant Owner series which includes a total of eight books. In 2011, she wrote her first children’s book, 寿司屋の小太郎 (Sushi-ya no Kotaro) which roughly translates to Sushi Restaurant’s Kotaro. This book would also develop into a series which consists of five volumes. 

The main character of this book is twelve-year old Kotaro. His father, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto, is a forty-year old sushi chef who has his own shop called [Masa Sushi]. His mother, Harumi is thirty-seven. Kotaro also has a younger sister named Mayuko who is only two years younger. 

Kotaro loves sushi. He thinks he may one day take over the shop from his father. Their shop, which is also their home, is located in the middle of Keyakidai Shotengai. Kotaro often helps his father in the shop and likes to brag that he knows how to make natto maki or natto roll. Natto is a traditional food item in Japan and is made by fermenting soybeans. It has a very strong smell and a slimy texture. Natto rolls consist of vinegared rice and natto and is wrapped in a sheet of toasted seaweed. 

Kotaro has many adventures. In his first adventure, a man claiming to be from Keiyakidai Elementary School came to the sushi shop and said he was talking to people working along the street to contribute to a safety poster for the community. However, one of Kotaro’s assignments, along with the rest of the sixth-graders was to draw a safety poster first and the best one would later be chosen and distributed to various places around town. Also, Kotaro did not recognize the man’s voice and had never seen him at school. 

The man was trying to swindle people out of 10,000 yen (approximately $80USD at the time the book was published). It was the shotengai’s tofu shop auntie who really got angry at the conman telling him, “Do you know how much tofu I have to make and sell to make a profit of 10,000yen?”. She gave the conman an earful. The adults were all proud of Kotaro for his actions. 

Kotaro has more adventures with his most dangerous and yet most intriguing was going to the large fish market with his father. As his father was busy talking with various fishermen and fish-sellers, Kotaro became bored and found himself walking around the pier where many boats were anchored. As he didn’t see anybody around, he boarded one. He found a nice spot to sit and became so relaxed he fell asleep. When he woke up, he was no longer at the pier. In fact, he was nowhere near any land. 

Poor Kotaro. What will become of him? Will he be lost at sea? Will the owners of the boat toss him overboard? Or will they say they will sell him in Hong Kong, when they get there. Of course, the boatowners were not evil men but they thought they would teach Kotaro a lesson for boarding a boat without permission. 

If you love sushi, then you will love 寿司屋の小太郎 (Sushi-ya no Kotaro). Unfortunately, there currenlty isn’t any English translations of any of the books in the series so you will have to learn how to read Japanese. Sagawa also provides simple recipes in the book and says you should be able to hold the book in one hand and make the dishes. She also mentions that the main character was based on the son of a couple of the shop’s regular customers. He would sit at the counter and ask for kohada (gizzard shad, a small herring-like fish) and aji (horse mackerel). The boy’s name was Kotaro! 

Sagawa also hopes that by reading this series, people will want to eat more fish and tell others that fish is not only healthy, but it’s delicious as well. I could go for some sushi right now!

The Devil Takes Bitcoin by Jake Adelstein (Scribe) ~Janet Brown

If ever a book needed a diagram, it's The Devil Takes Bitcoin because Jake Adelstein (author of Tokyo Vice, Asia by the Book, January 2010) has never met a detail he doesn't like. Admittedly I read this with no idea of what a Bitcoin is but after hours of reading and taking pages of notes, I now know how to dress if I'm faced with a Japanese arrest, where to find Tokyo's cafes where waitresses wear maid costumes while calling  their customers "Master," and that Adelstein has liver cancer. However I still have only a vague idea of what a Bitcoin is and I have absolutely no idea of what the theme of this book is meant to be. 

For anyone as ignorant as I am, Bitcoin was first mentioned in 2008 when it was registered by anonymousspeech.com as www.Bitcoin.org. Two months later a white paper appeared under the title Bitcoin: a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, written by an elusive and untraceable person who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto. 

Bitcoin, as explained by Nakamoto, would be an "unregulated, decentralized currency unshackled from the clutches of the state,” a monetary system operating over the internet as electronic money that was unconnected to banks. Every transaction would be logged in a public ledger and production would be capped at 21 million Bitcoins, protecting this against forgeries and inflation and increasing value as demand outstripped the supply.

This 9-page proposal was only a theory because Bitcoin needed to be generated through computer software which at this point didn't exist. Three months later in 2009, Satoshi had found the necessary software developers and created (or mined) the first Bitcoin, at a time when the financial debacle of 2008 made this new currency an enticing possibility. Distribution was handled by a man who had created an exchange for gamesters (often teenage boys) who were obsessed with Magic cards. He added Bitcoins as another commodity to exchange on this site which was then discovered and purchased by a French computer geek based in Tokyo.

Mark Karpeles turned mtgox.com into Mt. Gox, the world's leading Bitcoin exchange. It sold Bitcoin to purchasers who used "fiat currency" (money that's government-issued). It purchased Bitcoin through wire transfers or ACH (bank-to-bank payments). Purchases were sent to the buyer's Bitcoin address, which functioned like a bank account number. 

Buyers received the Bitcoins by using a "public key" and withdrew them with a "private key" that they were given through their Bitcoin address. All of this was recorded in the blockchain (ledger) that was updated six times an hour with the Bitcoin addresses used in each exchange. 

"Little to no personal identity was disclosed in Bitcoin transactions," which attracted the attention of a website that was launched in the same month as the first Bitcoin. Silk Road was the brainchild of a libertarian surfer and physicist who presented it as "an anonymous Amazon.com." Although Ross Albricht believed people were essentially good and that the more laws, the worse society became, his initial Silk Road offering of mushrooms was rapidly overrun by less benign products. And what better way to make illegal purchases than Bitcoin? Mt. Gox and Silk Road became intertwined and disaster was right around the corner as publicity became focused on the Dark Web.

At first the attention was welcome but it all came too fast and things got sloppy. Paper wallets were created, printed documents with the data needed to generate private keys. If the document was lost, so were the Bitcoins. Other Bitcoins were stored in safety deposit boxes where they could be withdrawn without being logged on the blockchain. The U.S. government went after Silk Road and hackers targeted Mt. Gox. 

By 2015, 850,000 Bitcoins (about $500 million) had gone missing and Mt. Gox went bankrupt. The founder of Silk Road was sentenced to life with no parole. Mark Karpeles was under arrest in Japan. Satoshi Nakamoto vanished from the internet.

Perhaps because Adelstein was given custody of Karpeles' two cats and wasn’t a lover of felines, he had a vested interest in finding the true culprit who got away with the fortune in Bitcoins. At this point, his book becomes even more convoluted, as impossible as that may seem.

Who did it? Who was Satoshi Nakamoto? Who was the Dark Lord of the Dark Web, Dread Pirate Roberts? Can it all be traced back to the Russians? Do we care?

At the time when The Devil Takes Bitcoin was published, a single Bitcoin was worth around $100,000. (Adelstein used his meager supply of twelve to finance his daughter's first year of college.) Apparently other exchanges are profiting from the dire example set by Mt. Gox and the game goes on. Perhaps we'll all be using cryptocurrency soon and paper money will be as dead as the Danish Postal Service.

Every Day I Read by Hwang Bo-Reum, translated by Shanna Tan (Bloomsbury) ~Janet Brown

Reading might be the most solitary action we undertake. We talk about what we read, why we read, and where we read, but how we read remains undiscussed. Book clubs, silent reading gatherings, and acknowledgements of reading as therapy are all places of common ground but when we sit with a book, whether it's in paper or on a screen, nothing comes in between our page-turning and the words on those pages. Perhaps someone comments on how rapidly or slowly we move on to the next book, but nobody knows how we absorb its words in the moment of reading. It's an action that's as private as prayer and as individual as grief.

Every Day I Read, Hwang Bo-Reum says and my first reaction was "So what?" That's like saying "Every Day I Breathe.” Even people who aren't bibliophiles are readers; my years of working in bookstores taught me that. Everybody reads: comic books, instruction manuals, cookbooks, the Bible, the Koran, first aid instructions. Books are part of everyone's lives even if they never read for pleasure.

But still I bought Hwang's book because of the incomprensible hubris of its subtitle: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books. What could she possibly tell me that would increase the intimate and essential relationship I've had with words on a page for the past 73 years?

She hooked me with her first paragraph because she asks the same questions I did as a bookseller. Tell me who you are and I'll tell you what you might want to read. Then she intrigued me by espousing the universal appeal of books on the bestseller lists. Clearly this reader was more democratic and pragmatic than my snobbish literary self.

As it turns out, she's a much more adventurous reader too. She's taught herself how to read translated literature that native speakers (and by that I mean me) shy away from after encountering the first sentence. 

"Don't we love a good challenge," a friend asks Hwang when she's surprised that a 600-page book on art history is one of the most popular offerings at a book exchange. Hwang certainly does. Her reading ranges from Anne Fadiman's delightful essay collection, Ex Libris to Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein. She quotes from a book written by a Korean bartender called How to Drink a Novel, and later admits "It was only after reading Aristotle that I've never sought out happiness." How did she achieve this wide-ranging and fearless approach to reading?

Although she chooses a book based on how it makes her feel when she first picks it up, Hwang is a fervent advocate of going beyond her comfort zone, be it emotionally or intellectually. She quotes Kafka's advice, "We ought to read only the books that wound or stab us," while refusing to be limited by those words, and when she's daunted by a book, she'll read a sentence over and over until she understands it. Only then will she move on to the next and the next, until she’s finally reached the last page. (She also espouses reading more than one book at a time. No wonder!)

While many of her essays concentrate on why she reads, the most compelling pieces tell us how she does this. Will I use her method and follow her into Nichomachean Ethics? Will I finally pick up Flaubert's Parrot? Only Hwang Bo-Reum has made me wonder "Why not?"

Where will she take you? Go beyond the cute cover filled with cats and bookshelves to find out.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan, translated by Jesse Kirkwood (Penguin) ~Ernie Hoyt

Rie Qudan is a Japanese writer who was born in the city of Urawa which is now part of Saitama in Saitama Prefecture. She made her debut as a writer in 2021 when her book 悪い音楽  (Bad Music) was published. Her first book and her novella Schoolgirl were published in English by Gazebo Books in 2025. The book won the 170th Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary prize for new writers.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo is her second novel to be published in English. It was originally published in the Japanese language with the title 東京都同情塔 (Tōkyō-to Dōjō Tō) by Shicho in 2023 and was translated by Jesse Kirkwood, a multilinguist who is proficient in French, Polish, and Japanese. 

Kudan’s novel is set in the city of Tokyo in the near future and is narrated by a woman architect named Sara Machina, her last name being pronounced as Makina, and her would-be biographer, Takt.

The story opens with Machina having a conversation with herself in her head. Her firm had been chosen to build what would become the centerpiece of Tokyo - Sympathy Tower Tokyo. What bothers her is the excessive use of katakana, a phonetic script in Japanese that is mainly used for writing foreign words, names, onomatopoeia, and scientific terms. Sympathy Tower Tokyo - シンパシータワートーキョー (In katakana English it would be pronounced shin・pa・shee tawa- tōkyō). 

So, what exactly is the Sympathy Tower Tokyo? It is the name for a prison that is to be built in the middle of Gyoen Gardens in Shinjuku, one of Tokyo’s most popular botanical gardens. 

For Machina, “-the sound of it, the katakana charactersused to approximate the English words, and what those words meant, and all the currents of power swirling around the project - started to bother me, and now there was no going back.” 

The more she thinks about it, the angrier she gets. She keeps asking herself, “Why this name?” and her own response to that question is, “Because the Japanese people are trying to abandon their own language”. She can’t understand why the Japanese want to use these foreign words - シングルマザー (shinuru maza / single mother), パートナー (patona / partner), ディファレントリー・エイブルド (diffarentori eiburudos / differently abled) when they have their equivalents in Japanese - 母子家庭の母親 (boshikatei no hahaoya), 配偶者 (haigusha), and 障害者 (shogaisha).

The tower would house homo miserabilis, the new word for 犯罪者 (hanzaisha), formerly “criminal” in English.  According to an AI-built, a fictictious chatbot that is similar in design and concept as ChatGPT, the concept was first proposed by the sociologist and happiness scholar Masaki Seto. 

Seto had written a book titled Homo Miserabilis : The New Subjects of Our Sympathy. Seto “sets out a caring attitude toward convicts and juvenile delinquents serving sentences in correctional facilities, urging us to consider their backgrounds, personal circumstances and personalities as deserving of pity, tenderness, and compassion”. 

Seto also created the term Homo Felix - a word for those who are “happy” or “fortunate”. He emphasizes the “need for Homo Felix to acknowledge their own privilege”. Of course there are those who oppose the building of the tower and argue that criminals, not homo miserabilis, do not deserve sympathy and should be punished for their crimes. 

Sympathy Tower Tokyo does get built but during its construction, Machina continually referred to it as the Tōkyō-to Dōjō Tō and the name became more popular in usage than its official title. It would also be the last building Machina designs. 

What really makes this novel interesting is Qudan’s use of ChatGPT to write about 5% of the book. However, she later clarifies that AI was used only for the AI dialogue in the book. It’s a book that’s guaranteed to start discussions on language and the use of artificial intelligence, which in my honest opinion, is a good thing.

Julie Chan is Dead by Liann Zhang (Simon & Schuster) ~Janet Brown

Maybe Shakespeare's the one to blame. When he announced "A sad tale's best for winter," he issued a pronouncement that publishing houses have taken to heart. For centuries, all the ponderous biographies, the academic elucidations, the gloomiest literary novels show up in bookstores during the darkest, coldest time of year. Anything light, diverting, and frivolous is dumped into the category of beach books. As soon daylight returns, so do entertaining bits of fluff, as bright and evanescent as daffodils, ready to toss into a bag along with sunscreen and an oversized towel. 

The truth is those puffy bits of fictional candy are wasted on the beach. They can't go into the water,  they're hard to see in blazing sunlight, and they're easily smeared with suntan lotion. When they're needed is during the cavernous black hole that stretches from New Year's Eve to St. Patrick's Day to combat Seasonal  Affective Disorder. Wallowing in depression, readers need books that settle lightly upon the brain and might even make them laugh.

They need Julie Chan is Dead. In spite of its grim title, this is a book to brighten winter's gloom, written by a woman who divides her life between Northwestern Canada and Northeastern Canada. Well acquainted with what's needed when daylight is scanty and temperatures plummet, Chinese Canadian Liann Zhang provides the perfect antidote.

Julie Chan is one of a matched pair, an identical twin who has the same looks but none of the luck enjoyed by her sister. When their parents died, Julie was taken in by an aunt while her sibling was adopted by the Van Huusens, a wealthy couple in New York. As Julie toils behind a supermarket counter, her sister Chloe becomes the darling of the Internet, an influencer with over a million followers on Instagram and six hundred thousand Youtube subscribers. 

She sees her sister only once after their separation, when Chloe descends upon her, followed by a camera crew, and presents Julie with a house. "A beautiful angel plucking me out of the gutter," Chloe embraces her twin while giving a loving speech, "so eloquent it must have been prepared." It all stops when a camera man announces "That's a wrap." Chloe vanishes. The reunion gets ten million views in ten days.

That's the last Julie sees of her sister for years until she receives a brief and ominous phone call that makes her worry. Going to Manhattan in an effort to be certain her sister is all right, Julie finds Chloe lying on the floor of her luxurious apartment, dead.

Physically the sisters are carbon copies and when Julie is mistaken for Chloe, she steps into another life. Chloe's body is accepted as the result of a drug overdose, taken by her less fortunate sister. Julie instantly has everything she's always wanted, burdened only by an identity that she hasn't been trained for. Almost immediately she meets her sister's PR manager and is given a full calendar of social events, ones that Chloe thrived upon and has Julie floundering. But not for long. 

What began as a Shakespearean comedy of errors becomes a social satire, as Julie takes on the trappings of an Internet goddess. This is where Liann Zhang shines, with phrases as sharp and as piercing as a tattoo needle. Julie describes her aunt as the sort of Cantonese woman "who uses old Cheeto bags as folders for her tax returns." A fellow influencer "runs a pet account for her white Yorkie who looks like she'd bite your ankle for sport." Chloe's parents had adopted "a Chinese kid to prove they weren't actually racist." One of Chloe's friends gained over almost two million followers and a spot on the New York Times bestseller list when she wrote a book called Healing Through Dessert. Another achieves fame by writing poetry that’s "less profound than the back of a shampoo bottle."

Zhang's biting observations pervade her novel, right up to the bittersweet end. Her modern day version of Cinderella is the perfect way to spend a long evening after the winter solstice has set in. It's neither profound nor thought-provoking, just a snarky, funny helping of gleeful schadenfreude that's "best for winter," no matter what Shakespeare had to say.

Kinami Mayumi's Aomori Apple Story 1 by Mayumi Kinami, translated by Takahiro Ido (Ringo History Research Center) ~Ernie Hoyt

2025 marks the 150th anniversary of apple cultivation in Aomori Prefecture, Japan. Mayumi Kinami who was born into a family of apple grower, decided to write a book about the history about it. The book was independently published in May of 2025 in Japanese with the title of [靑森りんご物語 ①] (Aomori Ringo Monogatari 1). The English version was published later the same year with the title of Kinami Mayumi’s Aomori Apple Story 1.

In this first volume about the history of apple cultivation in Aomori, Kanami begins by discussing why it began. She explains that it “began as an unemployment policy of feudal warriors who lost their jobs after the Meiji Restoration”.

Three apple saplings arrived in the Aomori Prefectural Office in the spring of 1875. A man by the name of Tate-e Kikuchi, a former samurai, planted them on the grounds of the Prefectural office. According to Kinami, Tate-e Kikuchi is the father of apple cultivation in Aomori. He “dedicated his life to apples and other agricultural products”.

However, Kinami explains that it wasn’t just Tate-e Kikuchi who was responsible for the growth of the apple cultivation business. In order to get a real understanding of apple cultivation in Aomori Prefecture, we also need to learn about these three other people - Tsugaru Tsugaruakira, the 12th daimyo (lord) of the Hirosaki Domain, Daidoji Shigeyoshi, a chief retainer of the Hirosaki Clan. Shigeyoshi was also the founder of the Aomori Michinoku Bank, Kakuhiro Company and other companies, and Naritomo Sugiyama, another chief retainer.

Kinami also says apple cultivation in Japan wouldn’t have been possible without these people - Shungaku Matsudaira, Gartner from Germany, Lewis Boehmer, and John Ing.

Matsudaira is thought to be the first Japanese to make and eat an apple. Gartner is known for establishing a large apple orchard in Nanae in Hokkaido, and Boehmer taught the grafting method to Kikuchi. 

John Ing was a teacher. He was brought from Yokohama to Hirosaki to teach at the To-o Gijuku, “the only school in Tohoku at the time that employed foreign missionaries”. He fed apples to his students. 

There are many others that were involved with the growth of the apple business in Aomori. After the introduction of the main people involved in the apple business, then the real story of Aomori Apple begins.

The book consists of five chapters. The first chapter goes way back to the prehistoric era of the Aomori Apple and is divided into two sections. The first section deals with where the apples came from while section two deals with the dawn of the apple industry in the Tsugaru Plain. 

Chapter 2 deals with the beginning of apple cultivation in Aomori Prefecture. In this section, Kinami gives a more detailed account of Tsugaru Tsuguakira, Daidoji Shigeyoshi, and Naritomo Sugiyama. 

Chapter 3 goes into detail about the life of Tate-e Kikuchi while chapters 4 and 5 deal with “Apple Bubble” and Tate-e Kikuchi’s successors. This entire book is just a prelude to Part 2, in which Kinami will discuss the history of the Fuji apple, one of the world’s most widely produced varieties of apples.

If you can’t wait for Part 2 to come out, Kinami has also created a card game called Apple Pie. She based it on the game of mahjong. She thought, “if I incorporate the history of apple cultivation into the yaku (hand) of mahjong, players will learn about it while enjoying the game.

It is a fascinating subject and an enjoyable read. However, I think the publishers should have hired a more qualified translator for the English version. Sill, I am looking forward to reading the sequel and no, I have not played “Apple Pie” as I don’t understand the rules of mahjong.

Two Women Living Together by Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo, translated by Gene Png (HarperCollins) ~Janet Brown

Two women living together automatically evokes several assumptions. They are mother and daughter, sisters, best friends from childhood, lesbians, or roommates sharing a flat. Wrong. None of those categories apply to Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo, yet they made a leap that is customarily taken by married couples. They bought a house together, even though they'd known each other for less than ten years.

Six years of a social media friendship had let Hana and Sunwoo discover they had a lot in common. They knew many of the same people, they both grew up in Busan, and each of them made their living as writers and editors. When they finally met for a cocktail that turned into hours of conversation, they became friends who eventually confessed they were both tired of living alone, yet neither of them was ready to get married. They loved their independent lives and careers in Seoul but they had "reached the apex of living alone." The novelty of it had grown stale.

Hana and Sunwoo were weary of living in their apartments but real estate prices kept  both of them from buying a place on their own. But, they discovered, if they pooled their incomes and got a loan from a bank, they could end up with what they wanted. The problem was deciding what they wanted, as their separate tastes and needs came into play.

Every home buyer knows how this purchase can affect a relationship, especially when pooled resources come into play. Perhaps because they had a friendship of recent duration, the two women were able to compromise while being clear and businesslike in their financial arrangements. They took equal financial responsibility in all aspects of home ownership.

This was the most clearcut solution the two of them were to find in their unconventional housing arrangement. More difficult was the way they managed their daily lives. Hana was a minimalist who kept a tidy house. Sunwoo took great pleasure in shopping and accumulating but housekeeping was the last thing on her mind. Since Hana worked at home while Sunwoo's workdays frequently lasted well into the night, housework became Hana's burden, and one that she resented. After a few domestic battles, the two women came to an agreement,  learned to live with each other's different approaches, and hired a part-time housekeeper. 

Sunwoo loves to cook. Hana is happy to do the clean-up work. Each of them brought two cats into their new household and turned the four felines into a blended family. Both women are avid readers and movie-goers. When Hana is hospitalized, Sunwoo is her companion and caregiver. When Sunwoo gets into accidents that require medical care, Hana is there for her. When Covid comes with its mandatory isolation, the two women become best friends.

"Living with a good friend is essentially having a neighborhood friend who lives zero meters away," Sunwoo observes, while often mentioning how much she and Hana love to drink. At times they fantasize about returning to Busan and opening a pub by the ocean. Instead they fall into another way of working together, one that's made them famous in Korea.

It's probably inevitable that two writers who live together will eventually write about it. Hana and Sunwoo joined forces, wrote Two Women Living Together, and watched it turn into an international bestseller. "It was as if our society had been waiting for a book like this," Hana says. The success of their collaboration is overwhelming, letting them pay off their mortgage and turn their backs on employers. In addition to writing a sequel about traveling together, they've created a podcast that's been picked up by Apple and Spotify. "It's like we're a quaint family restaurant that has received a Michelin star," Hana concludes.

Told in alternating voices, Hana and Sunwoo present their story with humor and candor, in short chapters that resemble blog posts. The simplicity of Two Women Living Together doesn't obscure the truth that these two women took a big chance and succeeded, making their adventure an enriching one, in every possible way. 

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder by Nina McConigley (Pantheon Books) ~Janet Brown

Amma is lonely. She had never planned to leave India and America hadn't been a place she yearned to see. Her life as a well-educated girl at the end of the Raj had been shaped by England and that's where she travels after she becomes a lawyer in Madras. That's where she meets a Texas geologist, where she falls in love with a man who marries her and takes her to Wyoming. Not only does she end up in one of the most Western of all the fifty states, she's the first person from India to live in Marley, "a town for passing through, firmly oil and gas land."

Her husband's job with an oil company turns Amma into a single parent. Her life centers around her two daughters, whom she names after her two favorite authors, Agatha Christy and Georgette Heyer. She raises Agatha Krishna and Georgie Ayer on a diet of Indian folktales and British manners but as the girls become immersed in their own lives, Amma, isolated and homesick, sends for her family. When her brother, sister-in-law, and nephew arrive, they're the first Indians Amma has seen in fourteen years and she happily lapses into a life with domestic squabbles and shared memories, in a house that now shelters an extended family.

But for Agatha Krishna and Georgie Ayer, what's an idyll of companionship for their mother becomes a secret nightmare for them. Their uncle turns out to be a sexual predator who teaches both girls "the art of freezing." Disassociation of their minds from their bodies is the only defense they have against Vinny Uncle, who tells them if they go to their mother about what he does to them, he and his family will have to return to India. "You know how lonely Amma was before," he warns them.

When a neighbor's cat dies from drinking antifreeze that drips from the family car, the girls find their solution to the horrors posed by Vinny Uncle. They begin to put spoonfuls of Prestone into his glasses of soda, gradually increasing the dose, with the goal of having him dead by the summer's end. A story that begins with the sweetness of To Kill a Mockingbird, narrated by Georgie Ayer, ends with the same ambiguity found in that American classic. What does their plan cost the two girls and who was Vinny Uncle's killer? And who is ultimately to blame?

Daughters of a woman who was shaped by colonialism, Agatha Krishna and Georgie Ayer blame the British. "Everything went back to the British...It was the British who taught us to keep our upper lips stiff at all times." The British were the ones who divided India and Pakistan and taught Amma to embrace English culture, making her a double foreigner living in a provincial little American town.

Agatha and Georgie, "half-and-half," born in America, enter adolescence guided by magazine quizzes and articles that promise popularity. They become astute observers of why they are different and what they hope to become. Cataloging what white Americans expect from them as their appearances promise exotic differences, the girls list every stereotype associated with being Indian and show how little these categories figure into their daily lives. Divisions are what they live with every day and they use satire and wit to cope, until Vinny Uncle shows up. The division he brings is insurmountable and they know he is ultimately the one to blame for what transpires.

Nina McConigley, biracial herself, was born in Singapore and grew up in Wyoming. She knows what she's talking about and what she has to say raises questions. What's the difference between an immigrant and an expat? What's it like to be a Third Culture Kid who grows up in a white monoculture? How does life in a small town in the American West make it easy to consider thoughts of violence? Who's to blame when powerless children find a means to achieve protection?

This is a book to handle with care. It may look like a cozy little murder mystery but instead it gives a perspective that's badly needed and has been a long time coming.

Very Bangkok (Updated Second Edition) by Philip Cornwel-Smith (River Books} ~Janet Brown

Bangkok, according to Travel + Leisure at the beginning of this year, is the most visited in the world. It's also the least understood, by design and intention. A city where all wishes can be granted, for as much or as little money as a traveler wants to spend, it has carefully extended attractive boundaries that few vacationers care to cross. Different circuits appeal to different tastes, from the sophisticated and affluent to the wide-eyed budgeteer. Both might leave without ever deviating from the coherent pathways of the Skytrain, feeling certain that they've "done Bangkok."

For foreigners who have decided to live and work in this city, things become more puzzling, a situation that's made more difficult by the idiosyncratic, multi-toned Thai language. Within a couple of months, unanswered questions abound and become a galling source of frustration, in a place that constantly changes like a hyperactive kaleidoscope.

Back in the distant past, Philip Cornwel-Smith provided a compendium of answers in a book called Very Thai. That was several coup d'etats ago and both Cornwel-Smith and Bangkok have changed since 2005. In 2020 he followed up what was essentially a dictionary of Thai customs and behavior with an encyclopedia to the place he's inhabited for over thirty years. Now he's come out with an updated second edition of over three hundred pages. (This would be much longer if it hadn't been printed in a font that just barely goes beyond miniscule, with photographs that are predominately thumbnails, an unfortunate decision.)

However Cornwel-Smith found a way to pin Bangkok to accessible proportions. Accurately terming it a "city of the senses," he explains it in a collection of essays that reveal Thailand's capitol and primate city as it's experienced through the senses. He goes well beyond the usual five, venturing into the sense of space, direction, motion, and the one known as "the sixth sense." He concludes with the very Thai concepts of "heart" and "face," venturing into local perspectives in a way that could only be done by a writer who's made Bangkok his home since 1994.

Cornwel-Smith immediately targets this city's sense of impermanence, one that has probably rendered many of his observations inaccurate. He anchors them with a sense of history, from ancient to the beginning of this century. This provides background that's usually unknown or overlooked (or obscured by the city government), expanding the perspective of foreign explorers and residents in a way they aren't going to find anywhere else, unless they tackle the imposing bibliography that's provided at the back of Very Bangkok. 

This isn't a book that will be read from start to finish in a linear fashion. Much like the magazine that Cornwel-Smith launched and presided over for years, Bangkok Metro, it consists of discrete bursts of information that can be browsed at random. Unlike a magazine, it provides insights that are far from superficial and are frequently deeply sad. Cornwel-Smith quotes many Thai writers and journalists who have seen their city change and don't applaud the changes. (In a burst of candid schadenfreude, one of them who goes unidentified says that "Brexit and Trump are direct karma for Western criticism of Thailand.”)

Delving into the spiritual underpinnings of a city that flaunts its materialism and carnality, giving urban history that illuminates areas that have been brutally modernized, providing a guide to the art that flourishes in a place that elevates financial profit, Very Bangkok accomplishes an impossible task. It provides as full an examination of this city as one book is able to capture. Although its readership will be a narrow one, its readers will keep it as an essential historical record of an enigmatic metropolis.

Celestial Lights by Cecile Pin (Holt) ~Janet Brown

Would you choose to become immortalized in history if it meant you would be separated from everyone you love for ten years, without human contact of any kind except for the three people who go with you? For Oliver Ines, the answer comes easily. He says yes.

A solitary child who has grown up feeling separated from the rest of the world, Oliver has two touchstones. One is a little girl who pulls him into her backyard search for cicadas and becomes his one friend until she moves away, never to return. The other comes through a rare conversation with his father who tells him he should work to become a mechanical engineer. Although the description of the job is prosaic, Oliver seizes upon it as a way to be "a builder of dreams."

A professor later tells Oliver that he sees him as a man who will sacrifice many things to realize his ambitions. When he's rediscovered by the cicada hunter, they marry and have a child. However the professor's assessment proves to be true. Oliver is given the chance to work for a plutocratic visionary who wants to conquer the universe. An earlier attempt led to failure when one of his spacecraft vanished into some unknown galaxy. Determined to achieve his dream, he hires Oliver to spearhead the building of an improved version of the doomed project. Then he gives Oliver the chance to make the dream materialize by becoming the commander of this new expedition, to reach the moon of Jupiter known as Europa and come back to Earth with samples taken from its surface.

Suddenly the man whose ambition was to build dreams is given the chance to become an essential part of what he has built. No matter that his mother is dying of cancer, his wife is in the midst of her own career, and their young son will be on the cusp of adulthood by the time this mission returns to Earth, Oliver accepts the offer.

Cecile Pin's first novel, Wandering Souls, (Asia by the Book, May 2023) told the story of a very different sort of voyage, a fictionalized account of her mother's journey from Vietnam to the safety of a new home, an odyssey as imperiled as Oliver's space journey. But Pin's mother and grandparents were driven by survival as a family while Oliver abandons his. 

His story alternates with entries he makes in the personal log that he keeps while rocketing through space. Through those pieces from his journal. Pin reveals the starkly impersonal spirit of their writer. While this is a novel of the exploration of outer space, it's equally a journey into the heart of darkness that lies within one man's soul. 

In his quest to become part of history, Oliver succumbs to a tragic flaw, the sin of hubris. His decision to override his craft's navigational auto-pilot turns him into a modern-day version of Captain Ahab, endangering the success of his mission and the fate of his crew.

Cecile Pin has written a novel that has more in common with Camus' The Stranger than it does with Samantha Harvey's lyric account of space travel in Orbital (Asia by the Book, December, 2025). As bleak as it is original, this book is a stunning achievement that carries a dark warning, along with echoes of “Be careful of what you wish for.”.