Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami (Picador)

Mieko Kawakami’s novel Breasts and Eggs was originally published in the Japanese language as 夏物語 (Natsu Monogatari) in 2019 as a novella. The Japanese title translates to Summer Story. She then expanded the story into a full length novel and is her first book to be published in English. It was translated by Sam Bet and David Boyd. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is the original novella. The latter half of the book takes place ten years later and follows the lives of three women.

In the first half of the book we are introduced to the main characters - a thirty-year old woman named Natsuko, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s 12-year-old daughter Midoriko. Natsuko moved from Shobashi in the Kansai area to Tokyo ten years ago to pursue a career as a writer. She works at a minimum-wage job, her blog gets only one or two hits a day, and she still hasn’t had anything published in print. 

Makiko works as a hostess and is really concerned with her appearance and sex-appeal to her male customers. Makiko has become obsessed with the size and shape of her breast and has come to Tokyo to find a clinic that will perform breast augmentation surgery. In simple terms, she wants bigger boobs. As Natsuko describes them when they went to the public bathhouse together, “Her breasts themselves were little more than a couple of mosquito bites, but her nipples were like two control knobs stuck onto her chest. 

Makiko is accompanied by her 12-year-old daughter although the two are currently not on speaking terms. Midoriko has taken to communicating by writing everything down. She keeps two notebooks. One to “talk” to people with and the other to write down her most private thoughts. Midoriko cannot understand her mother’s obsession with getting breast implants and writes about it in her private notebooki. She also writes about the changes in her body as well and wonders “Why does it have to be like this”.

We then fast forward ten years into the future. Natsuko is now a published writer and her editor is encouraging her to complete her first novel. Her older sister Makiko is still working as a hostess in a less than elegant bar and Midoriko is now a college student with a boyfriend of her own. 

Now that Natsuko has turned forty, she has been giving considerable thought to having a child of her own. However, she doesn’t have a steady boyfriend and there are no other prospects to be a potential father figure. She once had a boyfriend when she was in her twenties but they broke up because she could not have sex. It was too painful and the thought of someone or something penetrating her made her incapable of enjoying the act. 

Adoption is out of the question as Japanese law doesn’t allow for single mothers to become parents. She investigates artificial insemination but finds that this is also not allowed in Japan for single women. Her only other option is to go to a sperm bank in a foreign country or to make an illegal arrangement with a willing donor. 

Natsuko meets two people who were the product of sperm donors. The first person she meets is Aizawa who is suffering from an identity crisis and longs to know who his biological father is. Through Aizawa, she meets Yuriko who was abused by her stepfather and she believes bringing a new child into the world is irresponsible and is “an act of violence”. Natsuko finds herself in a conundrum. Is it right for her to become a mother, raising a child who may never know their father. Is it a selfish act to want motherhood? How will the child feel when they grow older and learn the truth of their origin? 

The story is thought provoking and disturbing at times but it is well written and if you’re a woman, I imagine that you cannot help but ponder the same questions that goes through Natsuko’s mind about having a child or Makiko’s obsession with beauty and self-image or Midoriko’s confusion about the changes in her body. These three women share their feelings of what it is to be a woman. These women defy the conservatism of a male-dominated world and it may be time for men to wake up and see the light. ~Ernie Hoyt

Married to Bhutan by Linda Leaming (Hay House)

When Linda Leaming told people that she was leaving the states to live in another country. a common response was “Butane? Where’s that?” Oh,” she began to tell people,” It’s near Africa. It’s where all the disposable lighters come from.”

A tiny, mountainous country that shares its borders with Nepal, Bangladesh, China, and India, Bhutan has an agrarian, cohesive population that would fill a medium-sized U.S city. Historically isolated by its geography that holds only five habitable valleys and its weather, that often makes any sort of invasion problematic, including aircraft landings, it’s a country that has developed on its own terms. Currency replaced the barter system in the 1960s, both the Georgian and the lunar calendars are observed, and time is cyclical, not linear, based upon the seasons and the belief in reincarnation. Its king voluntarily abdicated in 2006 to make room for a democratic form of government and espouses a system that prioritizes Gross National Happiness, rather than Gross National Product. It has never been colonized, with astute monarchs that made Bhutan one of the few winners in Britain’s South Asian Great Game.

Leaming fell in love with the place in 1994, when she was one of the scant number of tourists to visit it. After two weeks in Bhutan, this 39-year-old American, whose daily life was removed from it by twelve time zones, was captivated. After two more journeys that cemented her feelings, she found a job teaching English and moved there in 1997. It’s been her home ever since.

Candid about her initial difficulties with culture, language, and manners, which she describes as a time of facing “minefields, so many opportunities to make an ass of yourself,” Leaming is too busy learning what she needs to know to indulge herself in the usual expat self-pity. Dzongha, the national language of Bhutan, is her primary preoccupation in which she’s frustrated by her teacher’s insistence that reading and writing come before speaking. Her oral language learning is a clandestine activity, aided by a phrasebook that gives her crucial tools to use at work, in the market, and at a doctor’s office. Unfortunately she’s enchanted by phrases that she’ll never have reason to use, which stick with her and emerge at inappropriate moments. The day she thinks she’s asking a physician a routine pleasantry and discovers his shock when it comes from her mouth as “Take off your clothes and lie down,” ought to be quelling but probably was not. Leaming is too eager to assimilate for chagrin to stand in her way.

Her language acquisition becomes total immersion when she falls in love with another teacher, a painter of thanka, works of religious art that are highly prized in Bhutan. He’s a man from a highly traditional family who lives in a large apartment within his sister’s home and when he and Leaming decide to marry, he’s reluctant to take his bride away from the hot water heater of her Bhutanese home to a small town.

But Leaming is aware that when she marries this man, she’s also marrying his country and insists the two of them live in her husband’s home. Here she discovers that her domestic skills are decidedly below par and relearns how to sweep, wash clothes, cook, and sew. In a town where almost everything is made locally, with a husband who wore deerskin moccasins made by his father and clothes woven by his mother, Leaming feels that she’s married to “the Last of the Mohicans.”

Her personal anecdotes are quite funny and rather sparse. Leaming’s focus is on the country that has let her become a resident as much as on how it has changed her. Buddhism is integral to every part of Bhutanese life, a daily practice rather than beliefs espoused on Sunday. From the obscene, scatalogical 15th-Century monk whose used underparts are still enshrined near her house to the elaborate, medieval process of her husband’s thanka art, Leaming’s life is pervaded with a system that gradually becomes part of her. So does the beauty of her surroundings which she loves best during the severe cold of winter and the barriers against rapid progress that geography and weather still forestall. She learns to savor the slow pace of her life, in which buying stationery involves going to a spot where handmade envelopes are constructed as she waits, finding sealing wax in an over-stuffed shop with a patient shopkeeper, and falling prey to the seduction of Bhutan’s gorgeous postage stamps.  

Bhutan is under threats, Leaming describes in her final essay. Surrounded by a “geopolitical equivalent to a trailer park,” with its squabbling tribes, avaricious leaders, and drug problems, it works hard to avoid the fate of the former kingdom of Sikkim which is now an Indian state. Climate change is melting its glaciers and flooding is a constant danger. Conversely there’s a shortage of water that may destroy the country’s agriculture. And. as is true all over the world, globalization is closing in through the inexorable incursions of the internet. 

“The world needs Bhutan,” Leaming concludes. Certainly she herself needed it. As a Bhutanese friend told her early on, “You are the arrow that hit its mark.” Her lovely little book poses an irresistible question: how many of us are still arrows in search of our own marks?~Janet Brown

American Shaolin by Matthew Polly (Gotham Books)

Matthew Polly’s biographical novel American Shaolin has the long and amusing subtitle of Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of the Iron Crotch : An Odyssey in the New China. It is the story of an American man who drops out of a prestigious college and goes on a journey to learn the art of kung-fu from the Shaolin Temple in China.

Matthew Polly grew up in Topeka, Kansas. He was the epitome of the 98-lbs weakling who was tormented by bullies at his school and while many people have an inner voice telling what they ought to do, Polly was fifteen and had an inner “to-do list”. When he was fifteen, there were five main points on his list of “THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT”. 

Topping the list was “ignorant”, followed by “cowardly”, “stil a boy / not a man”, “unattractive to the opposite sex”, and “spiritually confused”. In dealing with his ignorance, he once picked up the New York Review of Books but even with a dictionary in hand, he couldn’t understand it. This inspired him to study and read more and his efforts led him to being accepted at Princeton University and was doing quite well, so he felt he could cross off being ignorant from his list of THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT.

However, number one on his list was being cowardly. Polly started learning kung-fu when he was in the ninth grade after seeing a rerun of David Carradine’s television series Kung-fu. He was inspired by Carradine’s character - “the half-Asian Shaolin martial monk who wandered the Old West righting wrongs” and “seemed to be as strange and helpless and yet was a total badass.”

Polly’s obsession with kung-fu led to his interest in China and Chinese culture. He took courses in learning the language as well. As Polly was busy with his studies, he didn’t have time to practice his kung-fu which he had been studying for three years. He felt even after three years, he would not be able to defend himself adequately. That’s when he came across Mark Salzman’s memoir Iron and Silk, a story about a Yale graduate who studies with a martial arts master in China. This sets his plan in motion.

In 1992, Polly left Princeton and using the money from his college which his father had set up for him, went to China in pursuit of dreams to learn martial arts from the birthplace of kung-fu - at the Shaolin Temple. It did not matter to him that he did not even know where the temple was located. 

So begins Polly’s real adventure as he first goes to Beijing, then travels north to the Shaolin Temple and learns that there are numerous forms of kung-fu and that foreigners are only allowed to study at one of the state-sponsored schools. He manages to find a school that accepts him and for the next two years training and studying and learning that there are different types of “iron kung-fu” in which “a part of the body (such as the head, neck, stomach, or, most frightening of all, the crotch) is made impervious to pain.”

This book is a must read for any fans of old Jackie Chan movies where the harsh training seems to be exaggerated, only it’s not as Polly can well attest to. The story is an inspiration to anyone who has a dream and to see that dream fulfilled. ~Ernie Hoyt

Ayo Gorkhali by Tim I. Gurung (Blacksmith Books)

There is no such word as Gurkha in Nepal. A corruption of Ghorka, coined by the British, it would never have come into existence were it not for England’s Great Game and the British East India Company’s desire to control trade routes into Tibet. The barrier to this goal was the Gorkhali Army of the powerful kingdom of Gorkha, a state that had conquered Sikkim, ruled over much of what is now Nepal, and controlled almost all of India’s northern regions.  

In the first battle between these two forces, 2,400 British soldiers were defeated by 1,400 Gorkhas. Over half of the British troops were killed by soldiers crying “Ayo Gorkhali” (“The Gorkhas are upon you!”), and brandishing their fearsome knives, the khukuri, (corrupted into kukri), with the aid of villagers who came armed with bows and arrows, nettles, and active hornet nests.  It took almost fifty years and an army of 50,000 for the British to finally defeat 14,000 Ghorka soldiers. 

Being no fools, the British Army was eager to bring fighters of this caliber into its ranks, “which took the sting out of the Gorkhali Army and made Nepal “a toothless tiger.” From that time on, “the youth and able men” of that country were served up to Great Britain, depleting the power of Nepal on many levels. 

From the Sepoy Mutiny up through both World Wars and beyond, the Gorkhali became the legendary Gurkhas, brave, fierce, and, to the British, expendable. They led the other soldiers into battle, after being given lashings of rum by their commanders to boost their courage, and, with their kukris, were the ones sent to “clear the ground at the end” in hand-to-hand combat. Many among what was popularly known as the “Gurkha Legion” received Victoria Crosses for bravery, but when they were forced to retire at the age of 35, they were sent back to Nepal without military pensions, regardless of the injuries and honors they carried with them. 

“Each little Gurk might be worth his weight in gold,” General Ian Hamilton said during World War One, but his assessment wasn’t reflected in the way the Gurkhas were paid. Even in the 1960s, when the Gurkhas were stationed in Hong Kong, they received $42 dollars a month compared to the $450 paid to their British counterparts. They were cheap, dispensable, and handicapped by the virtues instilled in them by their culture. The Gurkhas were taught from birth that honor, respect, and loyalty were essential; their motto was “Better to die than be a coward.” And die they did. Over 60,000 Gurkhas were killed, wounded, or listed among the missing in action during the two World Wars.

The ones who were wounded placed a terrible burden upon the country of Nepal, both on social and economic grounds. Men who had been given two choices in life, to farm or to fight, came back to the farms broken by war. Gone by the age of 18, back at 35, generations of Gorkhali men became burdens, uncompensated in any way by the country that had exploited them.

It wasn’t until 1969 that private funds established the Gurkha Welfare Trust “to alleviate poverty and distress among Gurkha veterans and their families,” 154 years after the Gurkhas had been made part of the British Army. And only in 2009 did Great Britain allow the Gurkhas “right of abode.” Slowly and grudgingly the “debt of honor” owed to the Gurkhas is being repaid to a people who were “betrayed by their destiny.”

A former Gurkha himself, Gorkhali Tim Gurung presents an almost dauntingly detailed military history, a full and truthful picture that rewards persistent readers, leaving them to echo  his last words on the subject, “Jai Gurkhas!”~Janet Brown

Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui (Pocket Books)

Wei Hui’s novel Shanghai Baby was first published in China in 1999 and was subsequently banned by the Chinese government for being too decadent. The English language edition, translated by Bruce Humes, was published in 2001 and received a lot of positive reviews. 

It is the semi-autobiographical story of the author. The main character is a twenty-five year Shanhainese woman named Nikki. Her friends call her Coco, after Coco Chanel, who she considers to be her idol, after Henry Miller. Nikki had found a bit of success after publishing a book of short stories titled The Shriek of the Butterflies. She has recently quit her job as a magazine journalist and now thinks of herself as a “bare-legged, miniskirted waitress at a joint  called the Green Stalk Cafe.”  She is also trying to write her first novel.

She meets Tian Tian at the cafe and the two start a serious relationship. Nikki soon leaves her parents home to live with Tian Tian, who is an extremely shy but very talented artist. He was raised by his grandmother after his father died, while his mother married a foreigner and moved to Spain. Tian Tian no longer speaks to his mother as he still believes she and her Spanish husband were responsible for the death of his father. His hatred of his mother and other problems makes him impotent so he cannot have normal sexual relations with his girlfriend. 

Nikki is a young woman who loves Tian Tian but desires to be fulfilled sexually as well. When she meets a tall and handsome foreigner from Germany, she has an affair with him, knowing that he has a wife and children. While Mark, the foreigner, who knows Nikki lives with her boyfriend, only seems to want her to satisfy his carnal pleasures.

Although Nikki keeps her affair secret from Tian Tian, he realizes something is wrong and decides to leave for the south of China for an extended time. This leads to his drug use as he becomes further and further removed from life’s reality. Nikki goes to see Tian Tian to bring him back to Shanghai to go to a detox center but she continues to see Mark as well. She feels guilty but feels no remorse when having sex with Mark.

The supporting characters who are Nikki’s friends and acquaintances are as shallow and selfish as Nikki. The reader may find it hard to empathize with any of the characters as they all seem to be two-dimensional beings, thinking only of themselves and their happiness. 

Although the story is well-written and fast-paced and keeps you interested to see how things turn out, I found the main character to be selfish, self-absorbed and a bit narcissistic as well. It was difficult to relate to the problems NIkki and her friends mostly bring on themselves. They don’t seem to know who they are or what they want out of life. Fortunately, this is just a fictitious account of contemporary Shanghai but If this is the new generation of hipsters in China, I fear for their country. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd (Perennial Classics, HarperCollins, Publishers)

“I have heard that people change east of Suez and that could be what is happening to me,” Mary MacKenzie writes in a notebook days after turning twenty-one. The sheltered daughter of a severe Presbyterian mother, she is on a voyage to China, in 1903, en route to marry a young diplomat whom she barely knows. As she travels further from Scotland, she’s startled to find she’s developed a taste for curry and has stopped wearing her corset. “It’s almost frightening,” she tells herself, “that you can travel on a ship and feel yourself changing,” an observation she knows she can never write to her mother.

By the time she reaches her fiancé in Beijing, Mary has discovered her own mind and isn’t reluctant to speak it—or write it in a series of private notebooks. Bored by her handsome husband and her new baby, within a year of her arrival she embarks upon an affair with a Japanese military officer, becomes pregnant with his child, and is banished from her house, her husband, and her daughter. Under the intricate and omniscient protection of her aristocratic lover, Mary is taken to Tokyo and placed in a comfortable house of her own, where she gives birth to a son.

An event that is still shocking even in this century separates Mary from her baby and his father but she’s determined to remain in Japan with hopes that she may someday see her son again. For the next thirty-six years, she manages to make a life for herself in Tokyo, through years of sweeping social transformation and several wars. On the periphery of her life is the man who brought her to his country, with whom she has a bond that goes beyond the physical. He is the only person who may someday reunite her with her lost son.

This would be an ordinary historical romance, were it not for the history told through the lively voice of Mary’s candid letters and journals. Oswald Wynd gives intimate descriptions to life in Tokyo that indicate a deep knowledge and experience of that subject. The Ginger Tree takes on a surprising depth of detail as soon as Mary arrives in Japan. From her “pretty little house” which is “really not a house at all but a flimsy box around a game played to quite simple rules,” to the varying degrees of comfort ranging from no chairs to the recent invention of electric lights imported by German interests, Mary’s new life is made up of hundreds of curiosities. She’s  wakened at night by the sound of the night watchman’s wooden clappers and his cries that all is well and learns to appreciate eight-hour performances of Kabuki in which an actor prepares to disembowel himself while members of the audience hiccup from too much rice wine. She shops in the Ginza where rich women buy European imports in a four-storey department store and becomes friends with a Japanese Baroness who was imprisoned for staring at the Emperor Meiji. She describes the night sky brightened to blood-red by neighborhood fires that can destroy six thousand houses in one night and recreates the sounds that punctuate her domestic life, “the hootings of small steamers and tugboats,” “the great bronze bell at the Hongwanji temple,” the mournful music played on a neighbor’s samisen. She gives a startling first-person account of the beauty and terror of a tsunami and a detailed look at the Emperor Meiji’s funeral procession. 

At a certain point, the question of how did Wynd know so much about his character’s Japanese life demands an answer, one that is as compelling as the novel he has written. Born in Tokyo to Scottish missionary parents in 1913, Wynd was given Japanese citizenship at birth. Japan was his home until he was in his teens (when his parents moved him to Atlantic City where he went to high school—a kind of culture shock that’s unimaginable) and he spoke fluent and faultless Japanese. 

After moving back to Scotland just in time for the start of the Second World War, Wynd became part of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps, no doubt because of his command of Japanese. He was captured by Japanese troops and under interrogation by their secret police, admitted his dual nationality. For what was perceived as a betrayal of his birthplace, he was threatened with execution but instead served as an interpreter while imprisoned in Hokkaido. Here “he was baffled by the Japanese treatment of prisoners,” the Independent reports with true British understatement. When he was released at the end of the war, he swore never to return to Japan nor to “recognize his erstwhile ‘fellow countrymen’ in civilian life.”

Using the pen name of Gavin Black, Wynd wrote fifteen thrillers and seven novels under his own name. Two of them were about women in Japan—The Ginger Tree with its remarkably feminine point of view and his first novel, The Black Fountains, which tells the story of a young Japanese girl who returns to Japan after being educated in the U.S., just before the outbreak of World War II, an opposite mirror image of Wynd’s own experience.

He died in Scotland at the age of 85, with twenty-three years of his life spent in Asia and three and a half of those within a prison camp. It’s extraordinary that his bitterness and anger toward his birthplace only surface at the very end of The Ginger Tree, when Mary, facing repatriation at the beginning of World War II says she will only return to Japan “when Tokyo and Yokohama lie in ruins.” Even then Wynd’s attachment to Japan and the Japanese is made stunningly clear in his concluding paragraph, which is a masterpiece of subtlety and heartbreak.~Janet Brown

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (Vintage Books)

The Memory Police is a science fiction story written by Yoko Ogawa, author of The Housekeeper and the Professor and The Diving Pool. It was originally published as 密やかな結晶 (Hisoyaka na Kessho) in Japanese in 1994 and was first published in English in 2019 and was translated by Stephen Snyder.

Set on an unnamed island, everyday items are slowly disappearing. The story opens with the narrator who “wonders what was disappeared first”. Her mother had told her there were many things in the past, before her daughter was born. “Wonderful things you can’t possibly imagine.”

Her mother kept some of these things in a secret drawer and would encourage her daughter to open one and would tell her about the different objects she held in her hands. One day it may be a kind of fabric called a “ribbon” that people used to tie up their hair. This object “was disappeared” from the island when her mother was seven. Another was called a “bell” that if you shook would make a lovely sound. “Stamps” had also “been disappeared” from the island. Her mother explained it was something you used to send a letter to someone. 

No one knows why these things disappeared and everyone accepted it as a part of life on the island. People will wake up the next day and know that something has changed but with the disappearance of any items, the memory of the items disappears from the people’s thoughts as well. However, there were some people who didn’t forget. Some families tried to run away. 

The Inuis were the narrator’s neighbors. They came to the house late at night as they wanted to escape the Memory Police. They were also friends with the narrator’s mother. To repay the kindness of letting them stay one night at the house, the Inuis gave back three sculptures that the narrator’s mother had gifted to them many years ago. 

The narrator’s parents both died and she had been living alone in their house for the past two years. She works as a novelist and her only friends include her editor R and an old man who lives on an abandoned ferry who was a family friend. Life continued as normally as possible with the exceptions of more and more things disappearing. 

It is the job of The Memory Police to enforce the disappearances of objects and who also sought out people whose memories survived. Nobody knows what became of them but they were never to be seen in town again. The narrator began to worry about what would happen if words or books were to disappear. 

The narrator learned that her editor, “R” was one of those people who did not lose their memories. She decided she wanted to help hide him from the Memory Police. With the help of the old man, they built a secret room inside the house. The narrator told her editor that he would have to leave everything behind and leave without notice so the Memory Police wouldn’t suspect a thing. 

Things continued to disappear but most of the people were so used to the losses that they didn’t give a thought to the things that were gone. Then an earthquake struck. In the disaster the narrator’s mother’s sculptures were broken and she noticed there was something hidden inside. She showed them to her editor who told her that they were things “that were disappeared” long ago - a ferry ticket, a harmonica, and some candy called ramune. 

As the narrator predicted, books “were disappeared” but her editor encouraged her to continue writing and to hold on to the things her mother kept hidden, always telling her that he believes “they have the power to change you, to alter your hearts and minds. The slightest sensation can have an effect, can help you remember. These things will restore your memory.”

But will it affect the narrator? Will more things disappear. What will happen to the Memory Police when there is nothing left to remember? This is a most unusual story and is very reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 but Ogawa writes with a voice of her own. What would you do to preserve your memories? ~Ernie Hoyt

Drawing on the Inside: Kowloon Walled City 1985 by Fiona Hawthorne (Blacksmith Books)

Fiona Hawthorne came to Hong Kong in the 70s when she was six. For the next eight years of her life, she roamed through the city with a freedom that finally alarmed her parents. Exploring Kowloon’s street markets was one thing but drinking San Miguel in Wanchai’s bars and coming home late at night in a taxi wasn’t the sort of adventure they wanted their daughter to have at fourteen. They took their family back to Ireland but it was too late. Fiona had Hong Kong in her blood and at twenty-two, she came back as a young artist.

Now she had the ability to satisfy a longing that had gone denied when she was a free-ranging girl. On childhood visits to her favorite market, the one so close to the Kai Tak airport that jets screamed above the heads of shoppers, almost parting their hair, she had seen a spot nearby that was forbidden territory. Naturally that appealed to Fiona.

The Kowloon Walled City had been a separate entity since the days of the British takeover. Initially left out of the original treaty that claimed Hong Kong, when it was included in the following year, it continued to exist on its own terms, under its own rules. In the 70s, it was flooded with mainland Chinese who spawned an explosion of cheap housing blocks, built without inside plumbing or elevators. Rumors that the place was run by triads and was riddled with crime made it a “no-go” area for the rest of Hong Kong. To Fiona, this community of 60,000, supported by mom and pop industries, was irresistible, “a patchwork of chaos with a strange and compelling beauty.” She was determined to go inside but she needed an introduction that would serve as her passport.

One of her old classmates had a friend who worked with drug addicts within the Walled City, a woman who approved of Fiona’s plan to explore and paint the life and surroundings of this private world. Accompanied by a former addict, Fiona spent three months there, carrying her watercolors, stacks of cheap cardboard that ordinarily formed a base for mahjong tiles, and two heavy cameras for photos and videos. The residents of the Walled City spoke Mandarin, which Fiona hadn’t mastered, but in a mixture of Cantonese and English, she managed to communicate with the people she met.  As she sketched and painted, she openly showed her work to her subjects and they encouraged her to continue. She was accepted.

Fiona was immediately frustrated by the “image of notoriety” that stigmatized the Walled City. What she found there was a place filled with hardworking people who spent their days making food, plastic flowers, shoes, clothing, in small dark spaces. She painted the dark, impenetrable wall of buildings that characterized the City, but she also showed the shafts of light that passed through the slivers of space between them and brightened a wealth of color within. Flowers bloomed on caged-in balconies and vegetable gardens flourished in vacant bits of ground. 

Her art reveal no traces of menace. Watercolor portraits show faces turned toward her in trust and her quick sketches capture moments of deep tenderness. A young couple gaze at each other, lost in love. A man and woman sit with their infant, pouring all of their attention upon the baby. Within the dark and narrow alleyways between buildings, children play and adults sit together, chatting. Fiona’s drawings, paintings, and photos show a community that’s strikingly similar to ones that still exist in Kowloon, its streets filled with traffic and pedestrians, a forest of signs looming above them; small crowded spaces where workers take a break to eat together, sharing dishes made by a shirtless man who cooks over open flames; false teeth arranged in a macabre shop window display.

When Fiona steps away from this bustling world to show its exterior, it’s a view that can easily bring on a feeling of seasickness. The buildings are jammed together, tilting against each other for support, teetering as if they’re drunk. At night, they take on a comforting look, with hundreds of windows beaming light into the darkness, each one a spot of domestic privacy.

Fiona herself appears only twice. On the book’s unjacketed cover, she shoots a video, youthful, slender, and intent upon what she’s recording. At the end of the book there she is again shrouded in darkness, her face hidden behind her massive camera and her mane of hair blazing in an errant beam of light. Less than ten years afterward, the Walled City was demolished, its space transformed into a city park. “I had no idea that I was recording a place that would someday be gone,” she says, but through her eyes and her art, that community is truthfully and skillfully memorialized.~Janet Brown

Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda (Harper)

Canadian author Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s debut novel Secret Daughter is the story of two women who live worlds apart but have an unseen bond that will affect both of their lives. 

Somer has everything she could want in life - a good marriage, a nice and caring husband who is also a doctor. His name is Krishnan and he is originally from India. She also has a great career as a physician in San Francisco. However, the only thing that eludes her is the ability to bear any children of her own. 

In the same year, across the globe, in a rural town in India, Kavita gave birth to her second daughter. Her first one was taken soon after it was born and was never seen or heard from again. Kavita refuses to give up her second child without a fight and in order to save her life, she makes the decision to give her up for adoption.

Asha is an Indian child adopted from an orphanage in Mumbai. It is this girl that connects the two women who do not have anything in common. We follow the lives of both families over a span of more than twenty years. It is Asha’s search for her own identity that leads her to India to find a part of herself that she feels has been missing. 

One of Somer’s wishes is to be a mother. She’s had one previous miscarriage so she knows the symptoms. Her husband has taken her to the hospital and she has woken up to see an IV stand next to her bed. The next thing she hears is a doctor telling her “she’s clean”. This upsets her more than the doctors, nurses, or her husband can imagine. She feels “they just see her as a patient to be doctored, a piece of human equipment to be repaired. Just another body to be cleaned up.”

In a small town called Dahanu in India, Kavita feels as strongly about saving her daughter. She knows her husband and his family are all disappointed in her giving birth to another girl. The first one was taken away quickly so Kavita vowed that the same fate would not await her second child. With the help of her sister and a vast amount of courage, she and her sister walk from Dahanu to an orphanage in Bombay. Kavita names her daughter Usha. “Usha is Kavita’s choice alone. A secret name for her secret daughter.”

As we follow the lives of both families, we see Asha growing up and the older she gets, the more curious she becomes about her biological parents. This issue puts a strain on the relationship between her and her mother. They drift even further apart when Asha wins a scholarship and tells her mother she will be staying in India for a year to work on a project about children living in poverty. Her daughter’s decision not only affects their relationship but it also affects Somer’s relationship with her husband. 

I imagine many adoptees go through a crisis of identity at one time or another. Especially if they have been adopted from a third world country and brought up in the U.S., Australia, or the U.K. They grow up to find that they look nothing like their parents and begin to question who they are and where they are really from. However, most people do not give thought to the adoptee’s parents and how the children’s actions will affect them as well. In this emotional roller-coaster of a story, one learns about the power of love and the true meaning of family. ~Ernie Hoyt

Clash of Honour by Robert Mendelsohn (Prion)

Clash of Honour is Robert Mendelsohn’s debut novel and was first published in 1989. The story will take you to Thailand, Singapore, Burma, Spain and Japan. It centers on the theme honor, deceit, betrayal, loyalty and obligation. It is mostly a story of revenge and how far a person will go to achieve their aims without giving thought to the consequences of their actions.

The story opens in Bangkok, Thailand in December of 1975. A young English woman, the daughter of a British soldier and a Spanish mother, has come to the country and is heading Bang Saray, the place where her father died. 

Anna Bellingham is the daughter of Lt. Derek Pritchard, a soldier who was captured by the Japanese Imperial Army after the fall of Singapore. She is determined to find a man named Yoshiro Katsumata in the hopes of leading her to his father, Lt. Keichi Katsumata,the man she believes was responsible for her father’s death.

Yoshiro Katsumata is a businessman climbing his way to the top of Sato Kaisha where he works. He may become the first outsider to head the family-owned company. He has no idea that a foreign woman would come looking for him to seek revenge for her father.

After the fall of Singapore in 1942, Lt. Derek Pritchard and an Englishman colonel, Dr. James Hedges became Prisoners of War. However, they were not sent to a P.O.W. camp. The two soldiers became a pawn in a secret mission for the Japanese government. 

As the story progresses, the reader begins to question what really happened between Pritchard, Hedges, and Katsumata. Of the three, it is only Pritchard who died in the war. Anna and Yoshiro are told the stories of their fathers by surviving members of the ordeal. 

Hedges was friends with the Pritchard family. As he was present in Bang Saray, Pritchard’s wife insisted on knowing the circumstances of her husband’s death. Listening to the evils committed upon the one she loves, she instills in her daughter the venom and hate against the Japanese and especially against Lt. Keichi Katsumata.

Yoshiro hears the story of his father from his father’s commanding officer. It is after Anna meets him and is seduced by her that he finds out the truth about her. He feels obligated to ask Pritchard’s family for forgiveness and believes it is his duty as a Japanese son to bear the responsibility of his father to retain the honor of the family name.

It isn’t until the very end where the reader learns the truth surrounding Lt. Derek Pritchard’s death and the motives of those involved. In this story the sins of the father do fall on the son but not all is as it seems. 

In this day and age, having the son bear responsibility for the sins of the father seems to be an outdated idea or at least one where the Bible is misinterpreted as it states, “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.” 

Japan also has a feudal tradition called katakiuchi which is also the taking of revenge against someone who has killed an ancestor of the avenging party. Fortunately, in today’s society, it is against the law to take the law into one’s own hand. If not, who knows how many unnecessary deaths would continue. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Amur River: Between Russia and China by Colin Thubron (HarperCollins Publishers)

What is an eighty-year-old man doing, riding horseback through Mongolia and staunchly ignoring his injured ankle as it turns amber and black? To complicate matters even more, this octagenarian is at the beginning of a journey to travel the length of a river that’s perhaps the eighth longest in the world--or maybe the tenth. 

The Amur is probably the greatest river you’ve never heard of. With more than 200 tributaries, it flows for 2,826 miles, through Siberia, past China, and into the Pacific Ocean. It forms a 1000-mile border between Russia and China, “a fault-line shrouded in old mistrust.”

Colin Thubron is determined to follow the Amur River, from the source of its first tributary in Mongolia’s sacred and forbidden territory until it enters the Pacific. If anybody can accomplish this, it’s Thubron, a man who has spent his life traveling and writing, with a staggering total of eleven works of travel literature and eight novels. He’s known as a “gifted linguist,” a knowledge that gives a deeper dimension to his writing than that of many other travelers.  While most travel writing is solipsistic because of the isolation that linguistic ignorance guarantees, Thubron enters fully into every region he visits.

In this journey he is instantly immersed in the “icy torrent of light” cast by the Milky Way upon the Mongolian grassland and “a tide of wildflowers” that surrounds him in daylight. In the company of three Mongolians and with the grudging permission of officials, Thubron sets off to find the Amur’s furthest tributary, the Onon, which springs from the sacred mountains that spawned Genghis Khan and may hold his burial ground. Even on horseback, this is an arduous journey, through the evergreen forests of the taiga and the bogs that border them, with mudholes that can easily engulf a horse--and does. Thubron’s mount sinks and rolls, its weight trapping him and injuring his ribs. With pain alternating between ankle and ribcage, Thubron continues.  After reaching “a trickle of water,” the beginning of the Onon, he and his companions follow it back to the grasslands, a three-hundred-mile start of a much longer adventure.

Traveling by jeep, Thubron travels through blood-soaked country, where the Baryat Mongols from Siberia were imprisoned and killed by the Soviet government in the 30’s, their history still living in the stories of survivors, “the direct memory people.” Thubron himself revives the memory of the Xiongnu people who once threatened China as he drives through the region where their burial grounds live. “Horses haunt these graves,” he says, the skeletons of those who were sacrificed within the tombs, their harnesses, the jars filled with theirr bones. 

Thubron follows the Onan into Russia, where it becomes the Shilka River on one bank and the Heilongjiang on its opposite side. It’s a border between Russia and China that at times is less than half a mile in width, where the glittering modernity of a Chinese city faces a haphazardly preserved past in a Russian town.  Russian markets are filled with Chinese goods, transported across the river by Russian laborers, “camels.” their Chinese employers call them. China is feared and hated, even by the Russians who profit from doing business with them. Rumors persist that the Chinese are everywhere, planning to make Siberia their next province. 

Following Chekhov on that writer’s journey down the Amur which claimed Anton’s “unsentimental heart” with its “million gorgeous landscapes,” Thubron is stopped by police in an encounter that threatens to derail his journey, a disaster that is avoided for reasons he never understands. He moves through the history of slaughtered tribal people and massacred Chinese, of Pu Yi, the last emperor, held briefly in Siberia where his servants still brushed his teeth and tied his shoes, and traces of Manchu heritage in a Chinese village where he hears one of the last surviving speakers of Manchu speak a language that is known by no more than twenty people nationwide. 

Because the region’s savage winters make river travel impossible, Thubron postpones the final leg of his journey until the following spring. Six months later he returns, his body healed of what British doctors diagnosed as two fractured ribs and a broken fibula in his ankle. He moves north, into the land of indigenous people who live among bears and birch forests. Rumors claim they worship bears and their myths are filled with stories of women who bore children fathered by a bear. With Russian guides, he embarks on a fishing trip into the wilderness where bears are commonplace and rumors consist of the return of tigers. 

Thubron’s companions ignore the truth that they’re fishing out of season and so do the local police, who give them tips on where the best fish can be caught. They catch and feast upon a six-foot Amur sturgeon, a species that’s been off-limits for thirty years. When the police see what they bagged, they laugh and move on. Later when Thubron and his companions find an eight-foot Kaluga sturgeon who has had her caviar gouged from her body, even the poachers are disgusted. 

When he reaches his final destination, it’s a town with streets “barely woken after winter,” a place with a “louring past” of battles and massacres, one that was destroyed by fire and “grew piecemeal from the ashes.” The mouth of the Amur “yawns three miles wide” before it spills into the ocean and Thubron ends his account abruptly, as if he hated to have reached the end. 

Even this man, who has turned his travels into an art form that brings the places he goes, the people he meets, the history he encounters, vividly and thoughtfully alive in his books, has occasional qualms that every traveler has known: “Then I feel how liitle I understand where I am, and travel seems an exercise in failure.” 

This is a temporary slump. Thubron emerges to relish the sight of “ a thick, unending parapet of trees,” conversations with a man who venerates Cossacks and their never-ending spree of blood, with a woman whose grandmother was one of the last shaman, with people who live off the barren land of Siberia, and stories of a bear festival that once persisted, drenched in brutality. This is the traveler we all wish to be, futilely. There is only one Colin Thubron, moving onward into his eighties, redefining what age can mean to those who have the courage to ignore it.~Janet Brown

In Beautiful Disguises by Rajeev Balasubramanyam (Bloomsbury)

Fashion and beauty magazine Marie Claire describes Rajeev Balasubramanyam’s novel In Beautiful Disguises as “Holly Golightly meets Arudnhati Roy in an elegantly written novel about a girl who is desperate to escape from her life.” This is Balasubramanyam’s debut novel. The book was the winner of the Betty Trask Prize in 1999 even before it was published. 

The story is narrated by an unnamed sixteen year old girl living in South India. She begins her story by saying, “I was born a girl and remained so until I became a woman”. She was the youngest of the three children, having an elder sister and her much older brother, Ravi. Their father was an office clerk and their mother was a housewife and most of the time was treated like a domestic servant. 

The narrator had a passion for movies. She didn’t have any friends and spent most of her time at the local cinema called Majick Movie House. She came home one day and was informed that her sister was to be married. She was still fifteen and did not know how to react. 

She was seventeen when her sister had her first child. This was also the year when she saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s four times at the Majick Movie House. Holly Golightly became her role model. It was also the year she learned she was to be married. 

She meets the man she is to marry and doesn’t like him one bit. She didn’t like the tone of his voice, the look in his eyes, the way he was looking at her as “his look went way beyond visual autopsy”. It was also his six-year old sister, Savitri, pointing at something and asking, “What’s that thing?” The man could not hide his obvious erection. 

The father said the meeting was a success but the protagonist definitely did not want to marry the man. No, she was not going to marry the man, but if she didn’t, her father would be angry and would take out his anger on Ravi or her mother. For some reason, he has never hit her and she doesn’t know why. 

The narrator makes a life-changing decision. She decides to run away. She receives help from her sister’s husband’s grandfather who has found her a job in the City, a place she’s never been before. She was to start working as a maid for Mr. Aziz and his wife, Mrs. Marceau, a mean-spirited French woman who looks down on all the workers and Indians in general. She works for the couple for about a year and has many new life experiences. 

She meets a host of interesting characters at the house. Raju, a friend of her sister’s husband’s grandfather and the person that helps her settle into her new life. Ishaq, the person who was helping Raju in the kitchen. Manu, the driver. Arun, the gardener who often gets drunk after work and tries to take advantage of the younger women servants. She meets the other maids - Ambika, an old lady with a bad back who cleans the first floor and the kitchen and Maneka, one of the younger women who seems to be a bit promiscuous. Her job is to clean the top two floors of the house. And there is Armand, the son of Mr. Azia and Mrs. Marceau, who she begins to develop feelings for. 

This is a story of a girl who goes against traditions, defies her father’s wishes and sets out a new life in The City, where she gains new life experiences. However, she also comes to realize that she cannot go on living life as a fantasy, pretending that “she is a movie star in disguise as a maid”. She finally finds the courage to return home and to confront her greatest fear - her father. 

Balasubramanyam writes the story in such a way that you can’t help wanting the narrator to achieve her dreams of becoming the next Holly Golightly. Her actions may give other women in similar circumstances to question outdated traditions and to make their own life decisions no matter how difficult it may be. ~Ernie Hoyt

Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang (Doubleday)

 “My story starts decades before my birth.” Qian Julie Wang’s opening sentence immediately launches a searing memory that is not her own: the story of her father encountering his first dead bodies, corpses hanging from a tree,  when he was four years old. Three years later he witnessed the public beatings of his parents during the Cultural Revolution and faced daily humiliation himself at school, where he was singled out as a member of a “treasonous family.”

He grew up to be a professor of English literature, with a wife who was a professor of mathematics. They cherished their only child, and Wang’s father was a constant source of humor and delight to his little daughter. But he carried scars from nis childhood of brutality and fear. He left for America, Mei Guo, the Beautiful Country, with Wang and her mother following him there several years later.

“I ascended to adulthood at cruising altitude,” Wang says, when her mother became paralyzed with nausea and grief as soon as she got on the first plane to the States. It was Wang who lied to the stewardess that her mother’s seat belt was fastened and who held her mother upright as they changed from one plane to the next. In that journey, Wang at seven became her mother’s protector, a role her father was no longer able to assume. He had dwindled and had ““caved-in” during his time in America. His humor had dissolved into fearful caution. “Just remember this, Qian Qian; we are only safe with our own kind.”

When Wang starts school, her father leaves her with a warning, words for her to memorize and repeat, “ I was born here, I have always lived in America.” As an undocumented child of undocumented parents, this serves as her only guidance for twenty-two years. With both parents struggling to make a living, Wang is on her own in an unfamiliar universe, with only a smattering of a new language.

In her Brooklyn elementary school, ESL students are put in a special education classroom. Ignored, Wang turns to books, puzzling out words while using the English alphabet and phonics that her father had taught her in China, back in the days when he still had time for her. Slowly she progresses from Clifford the Big Red Dog to Dr. Seuss and begs her father to arrange for her return to the mainstream classroom that had rejected her months before. 

Wang continues to guard and protect her mother, joining her at her sweatshop job after school and becoming her confidant when the two of them are home alone. In turn her mother opens the world of New York to her, taking her to Fifth Avenue to view the holiday windows, bringing a strange old white American into the family who takes them on outings and introduces Wang to the joys of MacDonald’s Happy Meals. Slowly her mother’s confidence grows and blossoms into plans of going back to school and making enough money to hire an immigration lawyer, removing the family from poverty.

In the background, Wang’s father becomes frightening in sporadic episodes, directing his cruelty toward the cat that Wang has managed to bring into the household. “Bad luck,” he says, and when his wife goes into the hospital for surgery, the cat becomes the brunt of his anger. Even when Wang’s mother comes home and grows closer to realizing the ambitions she’s poured out to her daughter, her husband falls into darkness and renewed fear. When his wife divulges her plans, he slaps her in the face, hard enough to leave the mark of his hand unfaded for a long time afterward.

Through all of this violence, turmoil, and chaos, Wang learns, studies, and pushes herself. On her own, she passes the examination process to a school for gifted chidren in Manhattan, in spite of her father’s discouragement and the dismissiveness of the man who has been her teacher. When her mother graduates with a degree in computer science, Wang begins to believe that her own dream of going to Harvard and becoming a lawyer may come true.

“The thread of trauma was woven into every fiber of my family, my childhood,” she says, yet her childhood is heroic and ultimately triumphant. She tells her story without self-pity or drama, dedicating it “To all who live in the shadows: May you one day have no reason to fear the light.” Her memoir is one that should be read by every parent, teacher, and all  of us who hide behind our privilege, as an indictment and a wake-up call. Children are being overlooked and under-served in this country. Not all of them have the strength and the determination of Qian Julie Wang.~Janet Brown

The Sun in My Eyes : Two-Wheeling East by Josie Dew (Time Warner Books)

Josie Dew is first and foremost a touring cyclist from the U.K. She is also a professional cook and the author of a number of travel essays writing about her experiences cycling around the world. She says it was her elementary school teacher who inspired her to travel. “She told such wonderful stories about distant lands. I dreamed of visiting them one day”. It was after being involved in an auto accident in her childhood which put her off from being driven in anything with four wheels.

Dew rode around the country of Japan for the first time and wrote about it in her book A Ride in the Neon Sun : A Gaijin in Japan which was published in 1999. On her initial visit, she rode from Kawasaki in Kanagawa Prefecture all the way down to Kagoshima and Okinawa Prefectures in the south. 

The Sun in My Eyes is the story of Dew’s second cycling trip around Japan. She first finds herself in Hong Kong where even she admits, “For someone who has a strong affinity for wild empty places and a keen aversion to cars, I’m not quite sure just what I was doing immersing myself in a territory of only 1000 square kilometers with a population of 6.8 million people, most of whom were crammed into a feverishly paced forest of concrete, steel and glass.”

Dew first cycles around Hong Kong and its neighboring islands before finding a ship to take her to Japan. Once she reaches Okinawa, Dew’s Japan adventure begins and she spends time traveling to some of the smaller islands located nearby such as the World Heritage designated Yakushima and Tanegashima, the island known for introducing modern firearms to Japan in 1543. It is also the site of the Tanegashima Space Center, Japan’s largest space development center. 

Dew travels northward, first by riding around the island of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands. Her travels take her to Hiroshima and Miyajima, considered one of Japan’s three scenic spots. She marvels at the sand dunes in Tottori Prefecture; she checks out the through-leg viewing of Amanohashidate, another one of the three scenic spots of Japan.  

She makes a slight change of plans due to excessive rain along the coast and takes a ferry from the port town of Maizuru to Hokkaido. She travels along the coastal roads which takes her to Reibun Island, Japan’s northernmost island. She finds the time to do a bit of hiking in Shiretoko and mountain climbing in Rausu before cycling to Hakodate and catching a ferry to Oma in Aomori Prefecture. 

From Oma, Dew cycles down the Shimokita Peninsula and continues her way southward by going through the towns of Rokkasho, home to Japan’s largest nuclear waste dump; the town of Kessenuma, which was devastated by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Her worries about, “What if the Big One hits” seems almost prophetic, although the earthquake happened more than ten years after her journey.

Dew doesn’t just cycle around the country, she also delves into the history of the cities and sites she visits. Being a woman on her own in a foreign country, she shares some of her humorous stories communicating with the locals. One of her most common language exchanges follows below.

“You are one person?”

“Yes, I am one person?”

“Really? One person?”

“Yes, really one person.”

“Ahh, that is great. You are one person from America?”

“No, England.”

“Ahh so, desu-ka. You are indeed two person?”

“No, I am one person. I am alone. One person from England.”

If you have never been to Japan or are planning to do so in the near future, with or without a bicycle, you will find Dew’s book very informative and entertaining. Her biting wit will make you laugh, her positive mental attitude will make you want to challenge yourself as well...maybe! ~Ernie Hoyt

Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok by Emma Larkin (Granta Books)

Comrade Aeon roams the streets of Bangkok, barefoot and ragged, searching for truth,  measuring and recording the world around him in “empirical data,” that can’t be contradicted or whitewashed. His life has been reduced to a kind of invisibility. Once a teacher of history, his insistence upon honest records has ruined his career, giving him a life of “walking his songlines” and resting in a shelter made of discarded billboards. His sole possession is his collection of notebooks, filled with his observed facts. 

When he was a young student rebel, he fled to Thailand’s jungle, the place where he was given a new name that reflected his passion for the past. Now he lives in a patch of jungle in the middle of Bangkok, a vacant lot filled with “verdant mesh...feeding off itself, growing out of its own decay.” Both this land and Comrade Aeon hold a buried secret, a part of Bangkok’s suppressed and laundered history.

Few people know Aeon but he is the link between vastly disparate residents of his city. A beautiful actress with whom he is obsessed is married to a real estate developer who sees Aeon’s jungle as the land that will increase the magnate’s fortune. An old woman who lives in the slum near Aeon’s refuge feeds him, gives him clean clothes, cuts his hair, and is troubled by odd dreams that are fragments of his secret. An expat wife, who feels an encroaching physical weightlessness calling her to her death, stumbles upon his hut one drunken night and gives Aeon another name, “the bonekeeper.” In her walk through the jungle she has seen bones protruding from the earth. They’ve been uncovered by the bulldozer that has begun the first stage of the developer’s project, bones that may belong to the man’s son who disappeared seventeen years before in a bloody political crackdown.

This could easily turn into the sort of soap opera that the beautiful actress has begun to write, the kind that serves as a Greek chorus, underpinning the plot of this novel. What saves it from stereotypes and banality is the beauty and the knowledge of Emma Larkin’s writing. She links the expat wife who haunts the jungle on her nightly expeditions, as “pale as a dead woman,”  to “another weightless woman,” the horrifying Thai ghost called Phi Krasue. She reveals the close relationship that exists between Bangkok business interests and the underworld, and shows how rumors and gossip easily gain strength and take the place of truth. She skewers the “hi-so” world of wealthy Bangkokians with a restaurant meal in which “essence of roasted beetroot” bleeds on a plate and acknowledges the beauty of the “balletic performance” given by the city’s nonstop traffic.

Her descriptions are precise and painterly, displaying the often overlooked beauty of Thailand’s capital city: “the soft pale lotus pink” of its morning light, its night sky of “watered indigo tinted with amber...never truly dark,” the “curious shimmering light” of its river, and the “densely knit constellation” that Bangkok becomes after sunset.

This debut novel has its flaws. Larkin’s knowledge of her characters threatens to sink them in voluminous backstory details. The length of more than a few of her sentences would make readers turn blue if they tried to voice them in a single breath. These are distractions that could have been avoided with some judicious trimming. Even so, her plot soars with its originality and her evident affection for her characters keeps them afloat and alive. Of all the novels that have been written in English about Bangkok and its people, its history and culture, this is by far the best.  No other writer has pierced the layers of Bangkok’s multileveled society with the insight and knowledge that this lifelong resident has brought to bear upon it. Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok is a literary guide that steers readers into the city’s heart without leading them astray.. ~Janet Brown

Five Spice Street by Can Xue (Yale University)

Five Spice Street is Chinese author Can Xue’s first full-length novel to be published in English. The story is told by an unnamed writer who also lives on Five Spice Street which is located in an unnamed city in China. The people of Five Spice Street, a three-mile long road, had always led ordinary lives until the mysterious Madame X moved into their community. 

The first mystery the people of Five Spice Street speculates about is the age of Madam X. The unnamed narrator says, “One person’s guess is as good as another’s. There are at least twenty-eight points of view. At one extreme, she’s about fifty, at the other, she’s twenty-two”. Everybody believes they have the right answer but nobody can prove nor disprove the validity of their answers and her age still remains a mystery. 

Madam X, along with her husband and son Little Bao, have moved to Five Spice Street and make a living selling peanuts. She does not realize how much her actions affect the people living on Five Spice Street. When a widow notices the coming and goings of a man named Mr. Q, the whole community speculates that they are having an affair and although Madam X and Mr. Q have not been caught in the act of “spare time recreation”, everybody has their own theory as to the truth of the matter. 

Madam X does not care what others think about her. She goes on about her daily life selling peanuts and looking into her microscope when she’s not working. Some people believe she’s a witch. Others think she is a fraud. The actions of the residents of Five Spice Street can be compared to a type of small town mentality where newcomers are viewed with suspicion and hostility. They may appear to be friendly on the surface, but once the newcomer is out of their sight, gossip and hearsay are the order of the day.

Even the community cannot agree on who initiated the affair. This affair becomes the core of the story. People have meetings about it. Some say, Madam X and Mr. Q’s actions are demoralizing the neighborhood and something should be done about it while others secretly wish they could be more like Madam X. 

Many critics have heaped praise on Can Xue’s work, citing her books as “avant-garde fiction”. I found her prose to be confusing with the story having no real plot. From the beginning of the book, the people of Five Spice Street seem to have nothing better to do than to gossip or denounce Madame X as a sorceress or witch and yet in the last chapter, they decide to elect her as the people’s representative. The narrative is confusing as the actions of the people. 

In an interview with author Can Xue, she says, “In very deep layers, all of my books are autobiographical.” To the people who try to find meaning in her stories, she had this to say. “If a reader feels that this book is unreadable, then it’s quite clear that he’s not one of my readers”. I have nothing personal against Can Xue, but I am definitely not one of her readers! ~Ernie Hoyt

A Tokyo Romance by Ian Buruma (Penguin Press)

“I never thought I could be Japanese, nor did I wish to be.” Ian Buruma, half Dutch, half English, has spent his life in Amsterdam and London, while feeling an outsider in both places. This, the man who becomes his friend and mentor when Buruma arrives in Tokyo to study film, is an asset. In Japan, Donald Ritchie tells him, a foreigner will always be a gaijin, “an outside person,” giving a  “freedom that is better than belonging.” In Japan, Ritchie says, “You can make yourself into anything you want to be.”

Tokyo dazzles the twenty-three-year-old Buruma with its visual density and its propensity for change. The city he enters has been rebuilt over and over again, starting with the Western modernization during the Meiji era, then after the earthquake of 1923, and following the destruction of American bombs in 1945. Now in the mid-70s, the city still holds the changes that came with the economic boom of the 1960s. A coffeehouse called Versailles is a faithful replica of an 18th-century French drawing room, filled with people smoking cigarettes and reading comic books. Old wooden houses and the cries of street vendors carry traces of the past. 

Within this “plastic-fantastic” city is an avant-garde culture that rivals any other of its time. A subculture of Tokyo artists were out to erase all externally-imposed ideas of proper behavior with creative work that is steeped in “the seedy, the obscene, the debauched, the bloody.” Araki, with his daring photographs, Mishima before he disembowled himself with a samurai sword, and the masters of Butoh made art that they called “dorukusai” or “stinking ot the earth.” Their work is shocking and invigorating and Buruma has credentials that allow him entrance to their world. He’s John Schlesinger’s nephew who came to town not long after his uncle’s tour de force, Midnight Cowboy, and Buruma himself is a passionate explorer of Japanese cinema, from yakuza gangster dramas to samurai epics to the gritty skin-flicks known as roman porno.

This leads him to an introduction to Kurosawa, the perfectionist and genius who once had a medieval castle built for a film at great expense, only to have it torn down and rebuilt because nails had been used in the original construction. Shortly before Buruma met him, Kurosawa had tried to kill himself with a razor because funding for his films had dried up, saying that apart from his movies, he didn’t exist.

But Butoh is what claims most of Buruma’s attention, the art of dance that’s based upon ancient Japanese theater and is translated in forms that are “erotic, grotesque, absurd,” with eerie and sometimes terrifying beauty. His encounter with the founder of Butoh ends when Hijikata dismisses him with  “You’re a television.” His next introduction results in his brief Butoh performance in which he disgraces himself by dropping one of the dancers. “So, Buruma,” a performer  observes, “you still believe in words.”

From there he ventures into the Situation Theater of Kara Juro, whose art is “as though Kabuki had been reinvented in a completely modern fashion,” a form of theater that’s political, improvisational, and wildly original. Buruma becomes the resident gaijin, with his interest in art and film--and in Kara, who fosters a form of gang culture that’s rough and sometimes violent.  When a domestic altercation between Kara and his wife flares into the woman’s head nearly being smashed in with a hurled ashtray of gigantic proportions, Buruma intervenes. “So you are just an ordinary gaijin after all,” Kara tells him afterward.

And Buruma admits he is, “hovering around the edges of an exclusive world, content to remain a stranger.” As an outsider, he observes, he takes notes, and he leaves for London where he will write his first book. It is, of course, about Japan. 

“Japan shaped me when the plaster was still wet,” he concludes, “Japan was the making of me.” How his romance with Tokyo led to his career as a writer is a story that he tells with honesty and insight. It’s one that should be read by any aspiring expatriate, whether they follow Buruma to Tokyo or go off to explore their own romance.~Janet Brown

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead)

And the Mountains Echoed is Khaled Hosseini’s third novel. He has written another epic novel focusing on his home country of Afghanistan and the bonds of family. The story spans over sixty years and starts in the small village of Shadbagh in 1952. Abdullah and Pari are brother and sister and they were always together. Pari was Abdullah’s junior by seven years. Their mother died while giving birth to Pari. The story opens with their father, Saboor, telling the children a story about Baba Ayub, a simple farmer who is forced to make a hard choice. He must choose to sacrifice one of his children to appease an evil entity called the Div. Hossein’s clever use of foreshadowing sets the tone for the rest of the story. 

Abdullah’s father, Saboor, remarried but he was always busy in the fields, his stepmother was busy taking care of her own children so Abdullah took it upon himself to be a father figure to Pari. In the fall of 1952, Abdullah’s father was taking Pari to Kabul. He often found feathers for his sister who kept them as a treasure in a box. The father told Abdullah he was to stay home and help his mother and Iqbal. Abdullah thought, “She’s your wife. My mother, we buried.” Abdullah’s father is resigned to the fact that his son is determined to come along and watch after his sister. Little does Abdullah know that this would be the last time he would see his sister. 

We are then introduced to Uncle Nabi. Nabi is Saboor’s wife’s brother. It is Uncle Nabi who sets the entire story in motion. He works as a driver for a wealthy couple, the Wahdatis, who live in Kabul. He has also found a job for Saboor in the city. Abdullah doesn’t understand why his father sets out for the city in a wagon when he could have Uncle Nabi come pick him up in his employer’s car. He also doesn’t know why Father is taking Pari with him as she’s too young to be of any help. 

Uncle Nabi doesn’t just find a job for Saboor, it is he who makes the suggestion and arranges the “sale” of Pari to the wealthy couple. However, his motives are not really in the financial interests of his sister’s husband. He can see that the marriage is one of convenience and although Mrs. Wadahti is very sociable, her main desire is to have a child of her own. 

Uncle Nabi is in love with his employer’s wife and believes that if he grants her this one wish, she will think of him as more than just her husband’s chauffeur. Unfortunately for Uncle Nabi, once Pari becomes part of the household, Mrs. Nabi’s universe is centered around Pari. Soon afterward, Mrs Nabi leaves her husband and takes Pari to live with her in Paris. 

The story continues to follow the two main characters. Pari grows up knowing almost nothing about her past before the Wadahtis but always feels that there is something missing in her life. Something or someone important. Abdullah grows old but holds on to a yellow feather which is a reminder to him that he once had a sister. 

The actions of each character make you ponder what would you do if you were in their shoes. The poverty stricken father who makes the decision to “sell” his daughter. The uncle who suggests in the first place to gain the love of his employer’s wife. The complex familial relationships will keep you glued to the end to see if the two siblings are ever reunited. ~Ernie Hoyt

Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America by Mark Padoongpatt (University of California Press)

Thai food has become a staple for American eaters, with Thai restaurants found in the most unlikely places throughout the U.S. Even more surprising are the number of Thai temples in America, but as Mark Padoongpatt points out, food and Buddhism are tied together in Thai culture. Thai immigrants want the guidance and community found in their temples but “Thai people must have Thai food.” 

With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 which replaced the draconian Exclusion Act, young Thai students came to attend U.S. universities. Soldiers who served in the Vietnam War came home with Thai wives who gained entry under the War Brides Act.  (By 1980, 40% of Thai women in America were the wives of veterans.) 

Los Angeles became a popular destination for Thai imigrants, who rapidly found that the food of that city wasn’t what they wanted to eat every day. Worse yet, they were unable to find the ingredients that are the crucial underpinning of Thai food. 

American women who had lived in Bangkok came home with recipes that they gathered into truly blood-curdling cookbooks, with dishes that substituted sour cream for coconut cream, anchovy paste for fish sauce,  and cayenne pepper for Thai chile. Thai people found a better solution, although a risky one. They smuggled ingredients back to the U.S. in their luggage, ones that were often confiscated by customs officials. The result of this culinary deprivation meant that by 1971, there was only one Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, and no Thai or Southeast Asian grocery store, until Pramote Tilakamonkul opened the Bangkok Market.

Realizing the precarious nature of smuggling food, whether in a suitcase or a container vessel,  Tilakamonkul turned to Mexico and its Free Trade Zones, along with its climate that fostered the cultivation of Thai ingredients, grown from Thai seeds. The Bangkok Market flourished and attracted Thai small businesses to its neighborhood, including a large number of Thai restaurants.

This coincided with America’s love of dining out, which went from being a special occasion to its transformation into a regular event in the ‘70s and ‘80’s. Once it was discovered by food writers, Thai cuisine became a sensation with its distinctive, sophisticated flavors and its healthful dishes. Thai restaurant owners brought Thai art and artifacts to set their businesses apart from those of other Asians and brought the civility of Thai culture into the front of the house, while employing young and attractive waitstaff who were predominately female. As the owner of an upscale Thai restaurant said, “Whether we like it or not, we represent Thailand culturally.”

When the first official Thai Buddhist temple, Wat Thai, was opened in 1979, its suburban neighbors were surprised at how jovial and social an entity it turned out to be. Thai people from all over the region came to participate in everything a Thai temple offers, including the traditional temple fairs which in America became frequent food festivals. The food sold at the fairs was cooked for Thai tastes, not adapted to American palates, and it became wildly popular with all residents of Los Angeles. Neighborhood parking was soon a contentious issue, as was littering and live music sent out from loudspeakers. This wasn’t the quiet and deferential mood that diners found in Thai restaurants and the neighborhood rebelled, with the result that the festivals no longer took place once a week. Instead that facet of Thai culture found a more congenial spot, in the area near the Bangkok Market, which has been given the official title of Thai Town.

Second-generation Thai American Mark Padoongpatt posits that Thai Americans are constrained and stereotyped by the American Empire’s placement of them as purveyors of food, “privileging Thai cuisine over Thai people.”  He points out the cultural appropriation practiced by David Thompson, whose encyclopedic volume, Thai Food, collected recipes from aristocratic Bangkok sources and launched Thompson’s mini-empire of Thai restaurants, and by Andy Ricker, who did the same thing with Northern Thai food and spread his chain of Pok Pok restaurants from the Pacific Northwest to New York City. He excoriates the bamboo ceiling that has driven Thai Americans into making their fortunes in kitchens and the naivete of Americans who take the image constructed by those restaurateurs and apply it to every Thai person they meet. He blames the adaption of Thai food into a bland and sweet bastardization upon the culinary colonization that the American palate has forced on an unfamiliar cuisine. His argument is passionate and wide-ranging, raising issues that have been ignored for much too long~Janet Brown

Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller (Viking)

Nora Okja Keller is a Korean-American writer and Comfort Woman is her first novel. It was the winner of the American Book Award in 1998. The term “comfort woman” is a term used for women and girls who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Army of Japan during World War 2. It remains a sensitive subject between the nations of Japan and South Korea. However, the author doesn’t focus on the conflict between the countries.

Comfort Woman is the story of a woman and her daughter, Akiko and Beccah and is narrated throughout, by the two women who currently live together in Hawaii.  The story opens with the line, “On the fifth anniversary of my father’s death, my mother confessed to his murder.” Beccah’s father died when she was five years old.  Beccah doesn’t recall how she felt about her mother when she was told that it was her who killed her father. “Maybe anger, or fear. Not because I believed she killed him, but because I thought she was slipping into one of her trances.” 

Beccah realized at a young age that there was something different about her mother. Most of the time, she was like any other mother. She would laugh and sing songs with her daughter. She would tell Beccah stories about her father when he was in Korea. It didn’t matter how hard Beccah prayed or left offerings to the gods, her Aunt Reno (not a blood relative) would say “the spirits claimed your mother”. 

It was during these times that Beccah felt she could not understand her mother. When the spirits called to her, Beccah felt, “My mother would leave me and slip inside herself, to somewhere I could not and did not want to follow. It was as if my mother turned off, checked out, and someone else came to rent the space.”

Akiko starts off her narrative with “The baby I could keep came when I was already dead.” She says she was twelve when she was murdered, fourteen when she died. Even twenty years after leaving one of the “recreation camps”, Akiko was able to have a baby. A half-white, half-Korean girl who would be called a tweggi in her home village, but here where she was born, “she was American”. 

Akiko was saved by missionaries. They had assumed she was Japanese because of her name as it was sewn onto “the sack that was my dress”. “The number, 41, they weren’t sure about.” She could hear them talk amongst themselves saying she is “like the wild child raised by tigers”. Akiko responded to the simple commands they gave in Japanese -sit, eat, sleep. She said she would have responded to “close mouth” and “open legs” as well. In the camps where women like her were called Jungun Iyanfu, military comfort women, they were taught “whatever was necessary to service the soldier.” They were not “expected to understand, and were forbidden to speak any language at all.” 

When Beccah’s father died, they were living in Miami. Beccah’s mother sold whatever assets he had and tried to make their way to Korea but only got as far as Hawaii. It wouldn’t be until after Beccah’s mother's death that Beccah would learn the truth about her mother’s past. 

Can you imagine not knowing anything about your mother, the person who gave you life? Can you imagine not knowing what their real names were, thinking that the name you had been calling them all your life was a lie? 

The ordeal that the “comfort woman” had to go through boggles the imagination. Nora Okja Keller once again sheds light on a piece of history that Japan would like to forget and refuses to apologize for. Keller does not focus on the politics of the situation but weaves a story that could ring true for a number of women who were forced into sexual slavery. ~Ernie Hoyt