Shopping by Gavin Kramer (Fourth Estate)

Gavin Kramer is a British writer who was born in London, graduated from Cambridge University. Shopping is his first novel. In 1998, it was the last book to win the David Higham Prize, a literary prize which was established in 1975 and named after a literary agent. The prize was awarded to citizens of the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland, Pakistan, or South Africa for a first novel or book of short stories. It was canceled in 1999 due to "the lack of publicity its winners received."

Kramer set his story in the heart of Japan. The metropolis that’s called Tokyo in the mid to late nineties. The bubble has already burst but there are still three types of foreigners you can find in the country or so we are told by the narrator of the story who isn’t even the main character. That falls on Alistair Meadowlark, a British lawyer in his thirties who has accepted a two-year assignment in Japan with his firm. The narrator is Meadowlark’s colleague in the same office. 

Meadowlark’s colleague breaks down the category of young professional expatriates working in Tokyo. He does not include the other expats such as English conversation school teachers or students. He also discludes “the shaven-headed failures who fancied themselves to be Buddhists.” He also does not include the most-despised group of expats, “the slight dark-skinned men who worked on building sites and lived maybe a dozen to a room in the back streets of Shinjuku.”

Of the three categories of professional expatriates, Meadowlark’s colleague believes that Meadowlark belongs to the first group. The kind of person who is in the country not because they want to be but because their company sent them here. The type of person who constantly suffers from culture shock and longs to go home. 

The second type are the graduates of the first. Although they still feel out of place, many of the white men in suits take solace in dating or hooking up with local girls who find foreigners fascinating. They can usually be found wandering the night clubs and bars in Roppongi. 

Then there is the third, to which the narrator considers himself to be. The kind of expat who avoids places that most gaijin, the catch-all term for all foreigners, hang out. The kind of expat whom the narrator says, “We knew our tanzen from our yukata, Our Dazai from our Mishima, our udon from our soba.” So the narrator wasn’t surprised by Meadowlark’s assessment of living and working in Tokyo when he says, “There’s nothing to do here apart from work. Is there?”

But then we follow Meadowlark’s downward spiral as he meets Sachiko. A precocious sixteen-year old high school girl who’s very much into the latest fashions and brand names. Meadowlark becomes obsessed with her and boasts to the narrator that she is his girlfriend and he is more than happy to spend his hard-earned money on whatever she wants. He is in denial of the fact that is just another middle-aged man taking part in a social phenomena of the nineties called enjo-kosai which translates to “compensating dating”. 

Kramer brings to life the excesses of living in Tokyo in the mid to late nineties as seen through the eyes of someone who has actually lived there. He focuses a lot on what was happening during that nineties - the “subsidized dating” problem with minors, the tamagotchi fad which was a hand-held digital pet. Although the city and its environs are well-described, his characters are not flushed out quite so well. They remain two-dimensional which makes it hard for the reader to care about any of them. Still, if you plan on living and working in Japan, this story could provide you with some insight as to what to expect. ~Ernie Hoyt

Around India in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh (Nicholas Brealey Publishers, Hachette UK)

“London had never looked so grey,” as it did on the day Monisha Rajesh decides to travel through India by train--on 80 of them, in honor of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. More than 20 million passengers travel that way in India every day, along routes that stretch for 64,000 kilometres, so she figures her dream is possible. 

Rajesh’s parents both came to England from India as doctors. “Two children and fifteen years later,” her family tried to resettle in Madras but when her father discovered that the hospital he worked in did a flourishing business in selling the hearts of dead patients, he decided this wasn’t a place where he wanted his children to grow up. That two-year stint was all Rajesh had experienced of India. Now she prudently decides that if she’s going to explore the country the way she plans, she needs a traveling companion and settles on a young Norwegian photographer who (for reasons of discretion) she refers to as Passepartout (the name Verne gave Phileas Fogg’s comrade in the 80-day journey).

Although they miss their first train in Chennai, Rajesh has an uncle who assures her “Leave it to me, my dear,” and finds them seats on what she calls The Insomnia Express. This is only the first of many sleepless nights enhanced by snores from neighboring bunks and itchy blankets that come in a paper bag wrapping. Passepartout quickly discovers the black coffee that he requires every morning is hard to come by in the land of chai and makes the mistake of cooling a prized cup of his favorite brew with a dribble of tap water. Rajesh learns that her basic Hindi leaves her prey to questions of whether she and her comrade are married and why her father allows her to travel as she does. “To be honest, “ she says, “the only place where I feel like a foreigner is in India,” where she’s immediately pegged as an NRI, non-resident Indian.

Part of that foreign identity is probably because she’s traveling with Passepartout. When a bitter skirmish over Indian temples and belief causes them to go in separate directions, Rajesh becomes accepted by her fellow passengers and the solitary journey she feared is essentially nonexistent. “On the rare occasions you find yourself alone in India, it is never for long.” In a compartment with three strange men for 28 hours, by the time the first meal appears, it’s “like eating with family.” “You haven’t eaten very much,” the men chide her in tones reminiscent of her mother, “By Indian standards, you are very underweight.”

By the end of her four-month journey of 40,000 kilometers on 80 trains, (all listed at the beginning of her book), she disembarks at her starting point, back in Chennai, and happily allows the crowd “to sweep me into its embrace.”

Rajesh’s crisply written descriptions range from the unsparing to the lyrical. From the “worst hotel in India,” which gives a new dimension to squalor, to the grand luxury of the Indian Maharajah-Deccan Odyssey, “a five-star cruise on wheels” that whisks passengers through India at night like “a luxury Tardis,” her experiences are recounted in a lively and humorous fashion that never falters. Whether she wakes to find a hand groping her, which she circumvents by swiftly changing bunks with Passepartout, gleefully imagining that hand fondling “a tired and grumpy Norwegian” or hears the familiar voices of her best friend’s Cambridge parents soon after she begins her first solitary train trip in tears, Rajesh takes it all in stride. 

Her conversations with strangers are illuminating and delightful, even when a man tells her without rancor that she’s a very selfish person, adding “Why are you caring if I am telling such a thing,” and then presents her with a translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. Another one scolds her, “You have traveled on 64 trains and you still don’t know how to make a bed.” After doing that for her in the proper fashion, he gives her a tutorial on the meaning of the numbers painted on each car that gives the age of the carriage. “It was like learning a secret handshake.”

India comes alive under her skillful writing--rain that’s “the kind that lacerates human skin” and mixes “mud and stone into a paste of Rocky Road ice cream,” “halos of light from candles in doorways,” a train that looks like a “metallic version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, “mynahs muttering quietly to themselves as the sky took on an eerie orange glow” at dusk. 

Rajesh is the perfect traveling companion. Even if it’s impossible to accompany her while eating chicken lollipops, drinking Thums Up, and discussing the palanquin carriers’ strike, buying an IndRail pass and carrying her book as a guide seem to be the only sane response to this absorbing work of travel literature. Reaching its end prompts the sentiment voiced by a New Delhi ticket agent, “Oh God…where are you going now?” To discover the answer, a quest for Rajesh’s Around the World in 80 Trains is the next step--I can’t wait to find it and go off with her on another journey.~Janet Brown 

Ava Lee: The Triad Years : A Series by Ian Hamilton (House of Anansi Press)

Ava Lee isn’t the kind of woman to work her way up a corporate ladder, although her skill as a forensic accountant would guarantee a swift ascent.  Her university degree has given her a marketable career but she’s more devoted to the practice of bak mei, a subtle and deadly form of martial arts that’s taught her how to kill with one of her knuckles. 

While working at a Canadian firm, Ava meets an elderly man from Hong Kong whom everyone calls Uncle. Impressed by her accounting talents, he offers her the chance to join forces with him as a “debt collector.” 

As humble as this sounds,the work actually involves the recovery of missing money--and lots of it. Uncle is only interested in jobs that involve sums of at least twenty million dollars US and his fee is 30% of what’s recovered, which in one case brought him one-third of 80 million dollars. His background is shadowy and the people he employs are rough around the edges. He needs Ava’s beauty and professional polish to get the jobs that will be most lucrative, and Ava is drawn to the variety and challenge of the work that Uncle can provide.

A deep affinity begins to take root between the septuagenarian who once swam from the coast of China to begin a new life in Hong Kong and the young Chinese Canadian woman who has a comfortable existence in Toronto but welcomes difficult jobs that come with a threat of danger. Uncle discovers that Ava can hold her own against the burliest goons that are brought to bear against her and Ava finds a smart and kindly mentor whom her distant father has failed to be. 

A woman with her own style, Ava begins each job dressed in crisp Brooks Brothers shirts, black linen slacks or pencil skirts, and conservative black pumps, enlivened by jade cufflinks, a simple gold chain that holds a small crucifix, a Cartier Tank Francaise watch, and the ivory chignon pin that has become her good luck charm. These details are far from trivial. The clothes aren’t just a uniform,  they’re armor, in good taste with a dash of luxury, but unobtrusive. When Ava’s dressed for work, nobody can guess that she’s also dressed to kill, professionally and literally. Small and slender, Ava is easily underestimated and she uses this as one of her primary weapons.

Uncle finds the jobs, through contacts from a subterranean life that Ava never asks about. She’s the one who’s the public face of their enterprise, who can gain entry to the highest levels of any world she needs to access, but who can also render an assailant helpless with one quick and strategically placed blow. Men hold no menace for Ava, nor any attraction either. She prefers women.

Her adventures become addictive and luckily there are many of them, recounted in fourteen books to date, beginning with The Water Rat of Wanchai and most recently found in The Diamond Queen of Singapore. The earliest volumes slowly unveil the world of Hong Kong’s triads, complete with a flow chart of their structure. Within that framework are detailed looks at the business of art forgery, the gambling worlds of Las Vegas and Macau, international money laundering, and the complexities of the seafood industry.  All of these settings involve sums of money that are almost unimaginably huge, a whole lot of violence, and a staggering amount of travel. Ava Lee books first class air tickets the way other people jump on a city bus. 

Hong Kong, Metro Manila, Surabaya, London, Shanghai, Las Vegas--wherever she goes, Ava’s destinations, along with the meals she has when she gets there, are described in mouthwatering detail, giving Lonely Planet guides a run for their money. A walk though one of those cities is charted carefully enough that any reader could follow in Ava’s footsteps and reach her destination--and because Ian Hamilton is such a good writer, many of them are going to want to do that.

Hamilton became an author after a long and varied career in over thirty different countries, with positions ranging from journalist to Canadian consul to international businessman whose specialty was runnning seafood companies. Obviously his journalism training in taking notes has served him well as a novelist but his talent goes way beyond that of a painstaking observer. His novels abound in descriptions that are both witty and evocative. “He looked like a garden gnome in a suit,” is the way he introduces one of his most repulsive characters and he pinpoints the prevailing odor of Southeast Asia with “The air was humid, thick with the smell of cooking oil, rotting vegetation, exhaust fumes, and garbage.” (Mmmm, I can smell it now.)

“People always do the right thing for the wrong reason,” Uncle frequently reminds Ava. It’s certainly true when it comes to this series. One book picked up to kill time in an airport is going to take the reader on a multi-volumed literary rollercoaster ride, one that’s going to give them more pleasure (and information) than they ever expected to find. Enlaced within Ava’s adventures are facts: the splendor of Surabaya’s Majapahit Hotel (“better than Raffles”), how long it takes for flunitrazepam to kick in (popularly known as roofies), who the Ndrangheta are and where they come from, the delights to be found in the Arab quarter in of Surabaya,  which kretek (Indonesian clove cigarettes) are the most expensive and the best,  the importance of an Italian collar on a well-made shirt--and all of that in a single book (The Scottish Banker of  Surabaya. Perhaps none of these tidbits are essential to know, but they open new windows into unknown corners, and that’s indisputably essential.

However these books come with a caveat. Anyone who ventures into Ava Lee’s territory will probably end up with her primary addiction--cups of Starbucks Via Instant Coffee. While her preferences for Cartier, Shanghai Tang, and five-star hotels may be out of reach for most of us, Via can be found all over the world at prices anybody can afford. Prepare to succumb to the inevitable. ~Janet Brown

The 13th House by Adam Zameenzad (Fourth Estate)

“Traditionally The Twelve Houses of the Zodiac are called mundane houses because they refer to every day life on earth activities.”

“Not much is said about The Thirteenth House”.

The 13th House is narrated by an unnamed person in the beginning. As the story progresses, we learn the narrator is someone close to Zahid. The narrator is the son of the man Zahid’s father worked for and embezzled from. It is the narrator who makes the story flow as he describes Zahid’s descent into his own private hell. We also learn the complicated story of the narrator as he also becomes a victim of the “Thirteenth House”.

As the narrator explains it, the Thirteenth House is “the house of perpetual pain and therefore no pain; the house of perpetual darkness and therefore no darkness; the house of perpetual despair and therefore no despair.”

So begins Adam Zameenzad’s story of a man named Zahid who has suffered much in life. He doesn’t understand his wife Jamila, he lost his first two sons at an early age, he is trod upon by his employer, and the political situation in Pakistan where he now resides is not one of peace and harmony. 

Zahid has two other children - a seven-year old daughter named Azra and a four-year old son who is not named in the novel and doesn’t seem to be quite normal. His parents had already passed away. He remembers his father as a kind and gentle man but ran away from home with a woman of “ill-repute” and was also discovered to have embezzled money from his employer. His mother was a hard-worker bringing up five children on her own and “would slap him each time he asked for anything, and advised him in a hard, grating voice to go and get it from his good-for-nothing thief of a father, wherever he was.” 

Zahid feels that his luck is about to change. He has found a new home to rent in a nice neighborhood in Karachi. A larger house than the room he currently lives in with his wife and two children. The joys of moving into a larger home and at a bargain price. So what if there are ‘stories’ about the house. What could go wrong? In Japan, this house would be considered a wake ari bukken which is a “discounted property due to special circumstances”, a stigmatized property.

Zahid was not bothered by what people said about the house. It took him a little while to convince his wife that it was the right thing to do for the family. She reluctantly gives into his wishes even though she believes the house contains some evil power.

What happens in the house is enough to make anyone believe that it is “evil”. A good friend is shot by the police in the home, Zahid’s wife is seduced by some religious guru, and most shocking of all, is what happens to the narrator and Zahid himself. 

This is Adam Zameenzad’s first novel. He is a Pakistani-born British writer. He was born and educated in Pakistan, lived in Kenya, Canada, and the U.S. before moving to the U.K. He has created a novel that makes you think of the absurdities of life and how people blame it on superstitions and other supernatural suppositions. It is you, the reader, to decide, was it just bad luck and misfortune that fell upon Zahid or did he bring it upon himself as an unwitting pawn in the circle of life. ~Ernie Hoyt

Hiromix Works (Rockin' On)

Hiromix is the pseudonym for Hiromi Toshikawa who was born in Tokyo’s Suginami Ward in 1976. She is a multi-talented individual who is mainly known for being a Japanese photographer.  She is also a writer, DJ, model, artist, and musician.

As a high school student, Hiromix took part in being a hishatai (a subject for photography, not to be confused with being a model), for Nobuyoshi Araki. At the shoot, she met Araki’s then assistant Takashi Homma, who has become a famous photographer in his own right. It was Araki and Homma who inspired her to take pictures on her own.

In 1995, she won the New Cosmos of Photography Award, an award sponsored by Canon. The youngest person to do so. The award was established in 1991 and is “Canon’s cultural support project to discover, nurture, and support new photographers pursuing new possibilities in creative photographic expression”. Hiromix was nominated by world-renowned Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki for her series of pictures titled Seventeen Girl Days which depicts life from a teen’s point of view. 

After winning the award, Hiromix has gone on to publish nine books of photography between the years of 1995 and 2005. She became known outside of Japan with the publication of her book Hiromix by Steidl in 1998 which was edited by French photography critic Patric Remy. She also won Germany’s Kodak Photo Prize in the same year. 

Hiromix Works is a collection of her full-color photographs taken between the years 1995 and 1999. Her subjects range from musicians to models, actors to artists and illustrators. All the pictures are candid shots and have a very casual feel to them. Some of the featured subjects have become known in the West as well such as actor Tadanobu Asano and designer Nigo, creator of fashion brand A Bathing Ape. Other photos are of ordinary everyday items such as a rack of bowling balls, pizza, a school bag, a shelf full of masks and more. 

Hiromix could be looked upon as the Annie Leibovitz of the East as her pictures are often used in music and fashion magazines such as Rockin’ On Japan, Men’s Non-No, Cosmopolitan, and Cutie to name a few. Her works also feature international recording artists such as The Beastie Boys, Marilyn Manson, Sean Lennon, and Skunk Anansie. 

Being an amateur photographer myself, there was a time when I was hooked on buying photography and coffee table books by a variety of photographers. I had picked up Hiromix Works shortly after its publication but only recognized a few faces. All the others were like Japanese citizens to me. 

After living in Japan for well over twenty-five years, I decided to revisit Hiromix Works to see how her pictures stand up today. I am glad to say they are great now just as they were when this book was first published. On a more positive side, I now recognize almost all of the subjects of her pictures including Hiromix’s self-portraits. 

I still enjoy taking pictures but I’m not confident enough to make them public. I admire people who pursue their dreams and become successful. Hats off to Hiromix and others! ~Ernie Hoyt

Mother Land by Leah Franqui (HarperCollins)

When Rachel Meyer opens the door of her apartment, she expects to find the vegetable seller, bringing produce and a bout of linguistic frustration.  Instead she sees her husband’s mother with a suitcase, waiting to enter and stay, and she knows disaster has arrived.

Newly married to a Kolkata man who has chosen to return to India, Rachel is a New York woman who’s thoroughly befuddled by Mumbai. Her Hindi phrasebook is almost useless because the people she interacts with speak Marathi. When she ventures out to buy food in the local market, she’s assailed with embarrassment and incompetence. When she goes out to explore the city, she’s faced with inexplicable chaos on every sidewalk. Her apartment is her only refuge and now that’s been invaded by a woman she barely knows, one who says she’s left her own home and intends to stay forever.

Floundering in a new country that baffles her, Rachel has ceded all decisions to her husband but this is too much. Suddenly the culture that’s thoroughly shocked her is in her bedroom, taking over, and her husband is acquiescent. After all, this is his mother and this is India. Blithely he takes off on an extended business trip, leaving Rachel with a problem that’s apparently her own.

Sometimes all that’s expected of a book is comfortable entertainment. Mother Land is the perfect antidote to winter’s darkness and the mind-boggling, apocalyptic speculative fiction of The Three-Body Problem trilogy. While it would be unfair to characterize the story of Rachel and her mother-in-law as chick lit; it’s definitely a warm-bath book, with a delightful twist at its end. Yet it’s more than that. It’s an insightful examination of culture shock in different forms--Rachel’s, her mother-in-law’s, and that of other Mumbai transplants with varying nationalities.  

Leah Franqui knows her fictional territory. Her home is Mumbai where she, like Rachel, is  married to a man from Kolkata. A self-proclaimed Puerto Rican-Jewish Philadelphia native and Yale graduate, she undoubtedly endured much of what Rachel suffers, but, as Franqui makes clear in her acknowledgments, without the intrusive mother-in-law. Her life in Mumbai gives depth and richness to Rachel’s, making this novel an illuminating, realistic, and occasionally satirical view of expat life in that city.

Rachel makes the classic rookie mistake by withdrawing from her new city and taking refuge in a world she can control, within her own apartment. Outside she spends “long afternoons, lost, aching with heat,” discovering that “the business she was trying to find had moved, or she had passed it twelve times, or that it had never existed at all.” “The crushing, bustling masses” and the cacophony of horns, bicycle bells, and cries from vendors that assail her on the streets lead her to conclude that New York “was a ghost town compared to Mumbai.” She stays home and amuses herself by cooking, until her privacy is invaded by the culture she’s hiding from.

As Rachel is forced out of her sanctuary, her tolerance for noise and crowds increases. At one of those ubiquitous gatherings of expat wives, the kind that lapses swiftly into criticisms of “them” as opposed to “us,” Rachel’s back goes up and her perspective takes on a new cast. Gradually she and her mother-in-law both begin to examine the concept of “home,” with startling results.

Anyone who has ever lived in another country, or who’s dreamed of doing that, needs to read Mother Land. While its setting is specific and stunningly descriptive, its stumbling blocks go beyond India’s boundaries. Entertaining? By all means, but it also provides a realistic guide to expat life anywhere in the world while presenting smart and seductive insights into one of the world’s great cities. ~Janet Brown

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (Vintage)

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie was originally published in 2000 and translated into English in 2001 by Ina Rilke. It is a semi autobiographical story set in the Republic of China during the latter part of the Cultural Revolution. The book was adapted into a film which was directed by the author and was released in 2002. 

Two youths from the city are sent to the village by a mountain called Phoenix of the Sky for “re-education”. The place consisted of twenty small villages clustered around the mountain and took in about five or six young people. The village at the summit of the mountain was the smallet and poorest and could only afford two people - the narrator and his friend Luo. The largest village was Young Jing which Luo describes as “so small that when the local canteen prepared a dish of beef and onions the smell reached the nose of every single inhabitant.”

The narrator and protagonist of the story gives us a little background on what “re-education” entails. “Towards the end of 1968, the Great Helmsman of China’s Revolution, Chairman Mao, launched a campaign that would leave the country profoundly altered. The universities were closed and all the ‘young intellectuals’, meaning boys and girls who had graduated from high school, were sent to the countryside to be ‘re-educated by the poor peasants’”. 

The two boys were refused permission to enter high school and then they were labeled ‘young intellectuals’ because their parents were labelled as ‘enemies of the people”. The narrator’s parents were doctors. His father was a lung specialist and his mother was a consultant for parasitic diseases. His childhood friend Luo who was sent with the narrator to be ‘re-educated’ had lived next door and the two were best friends who grew up together sharing all sorts of adventures. Luo’s father’s crime was being a ‘Reactionary”. 

The two boys have a friend named Four-Eyes who is also being ‘re-educated' in a nearby town. Four-Eyes is the son of a writer and a poet and he has a suitcase full of forbidden books, Western ‘reactionary’ novels translated into Chinese. Luo and the narrator convince Four-Eyes to lend them one of his books after helping him with one of his jobs. He reluctantly lends the two his copy of Balzac’s Ursule Mirouet. 

In the town where Four-Eyes lived, the boys met the daughter of the tailor. His services were very much in demand so he was often absent from home. The daughter was known as “the Little Seamstress”. She was the most beautiful girl in the Phoenix of the Sky and the two boys were taken in by her beauty and intelligence. They would make many trips to see her and to read to her from the books of classic literature - Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, and more. 

The narrator asks his friend if he’s fallen in love with her to which Luo replies,  “She’s not civilized, at least not enough for me.” It was as if Luo wanted to educated the little seamstress himself and although the narrator was also madly infatuated with her, he decides to help his friend Luo as best he can. 

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is more than just a coming of age story. It is a story of friendship and romance. It is a story of how humor and education can defy an oppressive system. The Western ‘reactionary’ literature helps the boys forget their woes of hauling buckets of excrement on their backs or working in the coal mine and it opens the eyes to a bigger world for the little seamstress.

The book epitomizes the old adage “The pen is mightier than the sword”. It shows how the world of books is more life-changing than any government or politicians and this continues to be true today. ~Ernie Hoyt

Death’s End by Cixin Liu (Tor)

When a man buys the woman he loves a star,  Earth’s fate is sealed. Centuries before, a Trisolaran identified humanity’s primary weapon as love. Now it becomes the instrument of the planet’s destruction.

This is not a plot spoiler, since this book concludes a trilogy called Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Nor is the conquest and subsequent destruction of Earth the most startling facet, or the culmination, of Death’s End. The trilogy has persistently pointed out that the betrayal of humanity will come from humans themselves and every character has shown to some degree that this is true. In this conclusion, the end of our world is set into motion by Cheng Xin, a woman so steeped in compassion and ethics that she’s unable to become an aggressor, not even when that’s called for.

Within the first half of this book, the Earth has been conquered, humans have become slave labor in migrant camps, and the entire solar system becomes endangered. At this point, we are all at the mercy of Cixin Liu’s diabolical imagination, cast out into space, exploring the threats of altered dimensions while swooping through millennia at dizzying speed.

It’s been obvious from the first book in this trilogy that Cixin Liu has a vast body of scientific knowledge that many of us lack. Footnotes provided by the translator can take readers only so far. When scientific theories and truths become intertwined with the settings envisioned by Liu, ordinary minds boggle. His plots range so wide that to summarize them is impossible. It’s hard enough to keep up with them when reading. There’s only one thing to do: buckle up, take a deep breath, hold on tight, and enjoy the journey.

There’s much to enjoy. Cities with buildings that hang like leaves from gigantic trees, an elevator that whisks humans through the Milky Way, the glory of a sunrise seen from space, an entire universe captured in an orb that creates a perfect Eden of only a few miles. 

Although Liu’s universe is alluring, its vast loneliness enforces its own rules. “Let me tell you,” the commanding officer of a rogue spaceship says, “when humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism.”

When humans are lost in Liu’s imagination, it takes only five minutes to reach fascination and fear. Questions of indvidual responsibility emerge into an uncomfortable precedence and fantasies feel unsettlingly close to predictions. Suddenly our forays into space seem as though they’re a foolhardy and naive act of hubris. What sleeping civilization might this provoke?

Does that sound absurd? On this planet where some people drown while fleeing in unseaworthy boats while others look for new sanctuaries in their private spacecrafts, it seems a quick step to reach the scenarios created by Cixin Liu. By combining his expertly observed insights of human nature with the terrors that can be found within a two-dimensional universe or in the body of a beautiful robot powered by artificial intelligence, he takes the realities of today and extrapolates them into the plausible horrors of the future.~Janet Brown

The Weary Generations by Abdullah Hussein (Peter Owen)

The Weary Generations by Abdullah Hussein was first published in Urdu in 1963. The English edition, translated by the author, was published in 1999. It follows the story of two Muslim families living under the British Raj up until Partition in 1947 when British India was separated into two nations - Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. 

Mirza Mohammed Beg, had two children. The elder son is Niaz Beg. His second son is Ayaz Beg. Niaz took after his father and had a love for metalworks and started his own workshop building many things.

Ayaz had a love for books. He studied at a madrasa, a school for higher learning. He found that he did not like it and helped his brother in the workshop but got bored with village life and left. He taught himself to read English and became a mechanic. “He did not return home”.

A major incident occurred which prompted Ayaz to return to the village. His brother Niaz was arrested “on the charge of having committed a grossly illegal act”. Niaz was sentenced to twelve years in prison. The government didn’t stop there. They also confiscated most of his lands which were in the names of both brothers, leaving just enough land for Niaz Beg’s two wives to get by on. 

Ayaz did not stay in the village. He came and took his brother’s son with to Calcutta. Although he was not formally educated, Ayaz rose to a good position as an engineer. He remained single throughout his life but felt he now had a purpose in life - to educate his nephew, Naim.

The main focus of the story centers on Naim and his relationship with those around him. He marries a woman whose father was a very prominent man who willingly works for the British. Azra, the woman, falls in love with Naim but her family does not approve of the relationship. After a long while, Azra’s father reluctantly gives his assent for the two to get married.

Naim was the son of a peasant who lived in a rural part of India. He marries Azra, the daughter of a rich landowner. Their relationship is strained from the start as Azra’s family was not supportive of the marriage, deeming themselves to be a higher caste of people. Their union reflects the relationship between the people of India and the rule of the British Crown. 

Shortly after Naim gets married, he is drafted into the military and is sent to Europe and Africa where he is wounded and loses his left arm. After he returns home, he is treated as a hero and is awarded lands for his bravery. However, it is what he witnesses that makes him question the validity and the oppression of his people under British rule and becomes involved in politics opposing the Raj. 

Naim’s marriage to Azra can be seen as a metaphor for the relationship between India and the British Empire as well. Naim is the underdog, the oppressed, he can be seen as the face of India while his wife Azra, who is from an upper caste represents the Raj. The class differences are hard to ignore. 

What makes Naim’s life more complicated is the Partition of the British Raj in 1947 when the British Crown arbitrarily set a boundary separating the mostly Hindu province of Bengal and the mostly Muslim area of the Punjab, setting off a vast migration of Hindus and Sikhs to India and Muslims to the newly created country of Pakistan. 

Hussein tells the story of Partition and the violence that followed in a way that creates a fear in the reader for Naim and his family. It is a story that opens the readers eyes to the dangers of colonialism and the arrogance of the British Empire. It’s a shame that the world still cannot live in harmony without conflict. We are supposed to learn the mistakes from history but as the old adage goes, “History tends to repeat itself”. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (Tor)

In his sequel to The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu steps out into a whole other world. The Earth is aware that its Doomsday is approaching and inevitable. Trisolaris has covered the planet with a shield of protons that receive and transmit every word that is spoken beneath its envelope of surveillance. Some humans who have the means are considering Escapism, a flight to safe planets, while others choose to undergo hibernation, planning to revive themselves when the Doomsday battle takes place. 

The woman who set this disaster into motion is preparing to die but first she finds an undistinguished academic, Luo Ji, and gives him two axioms that hold the secret of cosmic sociology, but only under the right conditions. Burdened with secrets that might save humanity but which he has no idea of how to use. Luo Ji becomes the most wanted man on Earth and is chosen as one of the men whose brains might forestall Doomsday.

In a transmission to an ally on Earth, Trisolaris reveals a fatal flaw and discovers a human advantage. Trisolarans communicate through thought alone and every thought they have is on visible display. They live in a society without hidden plans, lies, or subterfuge, and initially regard human speech as a biological weakness. Quickly they begin to understand that the human mind is something to fear and humans realize that duplicity is their key to survival. They assemble a group of intellectuals who will develop defense systems in silence, with alternate untruths being sent to Trisolaris in spoken words. The Wallfacers, as they are called, all succumb to the Trisolaris allies called Wallbreakers, all except for Luo Ji.

His plans are all self-serving and hedonistic, allowing him an earthly paradise shared only with the woman he loves. Trisolaris decides he’s ridiculous, worthy only of their extermination. When they infect him with a genetic weapon, a flu that will kill only him,  his doctors put him into hibernation, hoping when he revives in another century there will be a cure for his illness.

But Luo Ji not only carries a fatal virus, he has discovered the secret of the axioms given to him by Ye Wenjie. Can he use them to avert Doomsday?

Once again Cixin Liu has taken a cliched plot and enriched it with prophetic details,  puzzling science, and unexpected swerves. The Dark Forest is more opaque and difficult than its predecessor. Although the story rushes into new arenas, they seem to be dead ends, fascinating but unconnected to the general plot. Even when the ending seems to bring a conclusion, there are too many undecided fates for this to be satisfying--and far too many unanswered questions.

The perennial problem of constructing the middle of an adventure in a way that makes readers want to move on to the next installment is made murkier than usual because of a change in translators. Ken Liu provided quantities of footnotes that helped readers understand The Three-Body Problem and gave its characters ample dialogue to define and sharpen their different personalities. Translator Joel Martinsen has chosen to offer very little of either, evoking suspicion that he understood little of what he put into English and chose simply to translate The Dark Forest word by word. When the universe is at last revealed to be the dark forest, there will be many readers who have no idea of what this means. 

Fortunately the concluding volume of what has been named the Earth’s Past trilogy is back in the capable and brilliant hands of Ken Liu, the perfect choice to  clarify the complexities of Cixin Liu’s enigmatic genius. Don’t stop reading--help is on the way!~Janet Brown

The Pachinko Woman by Henry Mynton (Morrow)

Pachinko : a type of mechanical game similar to pinball but stands vertically and originated in Japan. It is widely used in Japan as a gambling device.

Harry Mynton is the pseudonym for a writer who has lived in Japan for over thirty-five years and was also a former business owner in Tokyo. His novel, The Pachinko Woman, uses his knowledge of Japan and Asia and has created a highly entertaining and provocative murder mystery involving the pachinko industry in Japan with its ties to North Korea. 

The story opens with an excerpt from a comfort woman’s diary. A Korean woman forced into sexual slavery during World War 2 to serve the soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army. This diary becomes a focal point of international intrigue as the woman writes about meeting an American woman who suffered the same fate as her.

Helim Kim is a naturalized American, born to North Korean parents and raised in Tokyo, Japan by her grandmother. The diary belonged to her grandmother who was from North Korea and is part owner of Allied International, one of the largest pachinko firms in Japan. Her mother disappeared when she was only seven. 

Kim worked for four years as a translator at the United Nations but has set up her own translating company in Los Angeles and still does client contracts for the UN. She had just returned from Pyongyang ten days ago and is now meeting with a Korean man who also has ties to the North.

She is meeting with Park Chung-Il, a North Korean officer who was a senior member of the intelligence department. However, in one of the hard-liners purges, he was stripped of all his powers and sent to Helsinki,Finland before being too liberal. They could not dispose of him because he was related to the current leader of North Korea, Park Tai Jin. 

Park Chung-Il has formed a group called Koreans for Democratic Action. The KDA’s main function is to sponsor indirect actions to destabilize Pyongyang and liberate North Korea. Park is using Helim Kim, the Pachinko Woman, to serve as a pawn for his own agenda. 

A few months ago, he contacted the FBI who were concerned about money laundering. Park told them he could give them information on Asia’s biggest money-laundering scam. “Blackmail from Japanese pachinko companies in the billions of dollars was being shuttled through offshore banks from Japan to North Korea. Someone inside the Japanese government was involved.”

Park has told the FBI how he could help stop the money-laundering operations. His group, the KDA, has managed to convince ten of the largest pachinko companies to file for Japanese stock listings. “Public listing in Japan demanded transparent accounting, stringent auditing, and recording of all funds transfers abroad. Japanese ownership and auditing would prevent extortion payments, dry up the money source, and decimate Pyongyang’s foreign exchange.”

There are multiple storylines happening concurrently and the number of characters are often hard to keep track of including an East German assassin hired by Russians to take out North Korean owners of pachinko parlors in Japan, a Japanese detective investigating the deaths, Kim’s former boyfriend who worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency, her current American lawyer boyfriend, FBI agents concerned with North Korea’s nuclear proliferation, and a former U.S. president who is to meet with the current leader of North Korea in Niigata, Japan. 

Many questions are left unanswered or are not satisfactorily explained. Who was the American comfort woman? Why is the Russian government involved in the killings? And how does Helim Kim’s grandmother’s diary tie into all this?

Mynton manages to use the current concerns surrounding the peninsula into his story such as North Korea’s attempt to continue making nuclear weapons. The comfort women issue is another delicate subject which is a thorn in the side of the Japanese government. Readers interested in the history of Asia and the politics surrounding both Koreas and Japan will be highly entertained, but should remember to keep notes about the characters. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Tor)

Although the Cultural Revolution wasn’t the greatest of humanity’s evils, three deaths that it caused during the late 1960s would be the impetus for the destruction of life on earth in the following century. Ye Wenjie saw her father and her favorite university professor die under the mental and physical torture inflicted by the Red Guards, while her sister was killed by those who had been in the first wave of this reign of terror.

When the 20th century makes room for the 21st, Ye Wenjie has the knowledge and the opportunity while working at a military installation to send a message out into space. When she receives a reply, it tells her repeatedly, “Do not answer.” Any response she might make would lead to the invasion and conquest of her planet. Wenjie, steeped in the brutal history of the past century, welcomes the thought of a hostile take-over and the doom of humanity is sealed by her next message.

An invasion from outer space is an ordinary theme in many works of science fiction, but this time it’s been twisted and turned by Cixin Liu into a trilogy, with The Three-Body Problem as its fiendish and confounding introduction. Using an intricate, multi-leveled virtual reality game as a snare, the extraterrestrial world of Trisolaris finds its way into the minds of other disillusioned members of the human world. Giving them peeks at the history of Trisolaris, with its three suns creating alternating time periods of Chaos and Stability, showing how Trisolarans survive times of Chaos by dehydrating into “dry, fibrous objects” which they rehydrate back to life  during Stabile Eras, Trisolaris gains toeholds into some of the best human intellects. With its superior technology, Trisolaris begins to damage the acceleration of human technological prowess, an acceleration that’s far swifter than their own, due to Earth’s environmental advantages. To Trisolarans, humans live in paradise, developing under the gentle power of a single sun, and they want this existence for themselves.

In a diabolical game of chess, Trisolaris begins a subtle destruction of Earth’s science, placing doubts of its importance in human minds and planting skepticism in the minds of scientists by carefully revealing the limits of what they thought were laws of the universe. Ye Wenjie becomes the leader of the Earth Trisolaris Organization, joined by an American plutocrat who carries on communication with the Trisolarans. Both of them welcome the destruction that Trisolaris promises. 

An attack force launched by Trisolaris will reach the Earth in four or five centuries, a successful capture of the interplanetary communication reveals. Trisolaris has no fear that Earth will find a way to repel its future invasion, sending human scientists a disdainful message through space and time: “You’re bugs.” 

However, as a nonscientist points out to the panic-stricken intellectuals, bugs are unconquerable, prevailing against attacks of technology.

The ffirst installment of Cixin Liu’s trilogy was first published in a Chinese magazine as a serial in 2006. Published as a book two years later, Its English translation came out in 2014, two years before politicians in the US placed science under attack. This time-frame makes the Trisolaran use of ignorance as a weapon seem prescient now. After all, how many people have died from Covid-19 in 2020 because they didn’t believe in the science that provided vaccinations? 

Along with its predictive qualities, The Three-Body Problem goes beyond ordinary sci-fi with its fully-fleshed characters, its enigmatic glimpses into the field of physics,  and its clever distortion of time as its story unfolds. “Science fiction should be the literary genre most accessible to readers of different nations,” Cixun Liu says in an afterword--not only accessible to science fiction readers but irresistible to those who usually would rather read the words on a cereal box instead. This book takes a soaring leap into the literary possibilities of science fiction, with its next installment, The Dark Forest, promising to extend that neglected genre even deeper into the realm of literature.~Janet Brown

The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck by Rory Nugent (Open Road)

Rory Nugent’s amusing account of his search for a rare bird started with a talk among five friends about lost treasures. They were talking about what is left to find in the world. One of his friends said, “India is the place”. He continued by saying, “One of us should go after the pink-headed duck. It hasn’t been sighted in years. Extremely rare…the most elusive bird in the world.” 

The next day, Nugent did some research and discovered that the last sighting of the bird was some fifty years ago in India. The more research he did on the duck, the more interested he became in finding it. Most scientists believe the duck to be extinct but from time to time, sightings of the bird have been reported. Nugent comes to believe that the bird may just be hiding. Then, two months later, he sold his apartment and put the rest of his stuff in storage, took a taxi to JFK airport and flew to India. 

The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck chronicles Nugent’s search for the rarest of birds as he begins his journey by looking for the Fowl Market in Calcutta. When people learn what it is he’s looking for, he is accosted by a number of people claiming to have the pink-headed duck although it is obvious even to the most casual of observers that the ducks presented to him have had their heads dyed pink. Not finding any luck in Calcutta, Nugent decides to go to New Delhi, the capital of India. 

Nugent spends the first few days riding the buses to give himself an introduction to the city. He buys a city map and a relief map of India where he discovers two areas that are unmarked and unnamed. “One is a narrow section near the giant rhododendron forest of Northeastern Sikkim; the other, triangular in shape, lies in the upper Brahmaputra River Valley, near the conjunction of Burma, China, and India. Rory decided then and there where next to start his search. 

As Sikkim is near the border of Tibet and Bhutan, permission has never been given to a foreigner to explore those areas. Nugent is also informed that it is only the federal government that can grant permits to those restricted areas. And so begins Nugent’s ordeal dealing with government red tape. One of the natives who befriends him suggests offering the officials some baksheesh, commonly known in English as a bribe. to the official but Nugent sticks to doing things the proper and legal way. 

His persistence pays off as he does get approval to visit Sikkim and can continue his search for the pink-headed duck. In Sikkim he meets smugglers who help him step inside Tibet even though his permit doesn’t allow him to visit that particular area. He checks into a hotel of questionable repute. He hangs out with the Gurkhas who want to claim land for themselves and establish Gurkhaland, but the pink-headed duck is nowhere to be found in the area. 

As the search was fruitless in Sikkim, Nugent decided to check out the other unexplored area on the map he bought in New Delhi. Once again, he subjects himself to government red tape in order to get permission to sail down the Brahmaputra River. As with getting permission to visit Sikkim, Nugent refrains from bribing any officials and his persistence and perseverance pays off. 

Nugent meets a man at a bookstore on his return to New Delhi and cannot believe his good fortune as the man had once attempted to paddle down the Bramhaputra himself. The two join forces and travel down the river from Saikhoa Ghat located in the east of the State of Assam, and paddle all the way down to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.  

At the time of Nugent’s journey, there was unrest in Bangladesh. Rioting had occurred in the capital city of Dhaka. Martial law was declared and the borders were closed. The two rivergoers decided to end their journey in Dhubri, the last town in India on the Brahmaputra. 

Did Nugent ever find the pink-head duck? Is it really extinct? Or is it just good at not being found? Whatever the results, Nugent’s narrative in the Himalayas and down the Brahmaputra River will keep readers glued to his exploits and may find themselves rooting for his success. His story is not only exciting, it’s also inspiring as we follow one man’s dream to rediscover a lost avian. In the process, you may find yourself wanting to pursue your own impossible dreams! ~Ernie Hoyt

O Beautiful by Jung Yun (St. Martin’s Press)

“So you’re Elinor Hanson, huh? You must have married a Viking or something, “ a North Dakota farm woman greets the reporter who’s come to interview her. Elinor’s used to this. She grew up in rhis area and has been asked the follow-up question since she was able to talk. “Your father was American and your mother was…?”

North Dakota is white people country, which is why Elinor’s Korean mother left it, deserting her half-white daughters and her white husband. Once she graduated from high school, Elinor did the same thing. She boarded a bus to New York City where her beauty allowed her to be  a model, a woman who’s “looked at for a living.” Now in her forties, still pretty, she’s back in her home state as a freelance journalist, assigned to a story on the changes brought by the Bakken oil fields.

Groggy after her journey from New York, uncertain if she was sexually attacked on the plane while she was knocked out by a sleeping pill, Elinor is unsettled by the unfamiliarity of a town she used to know. 

Her looks have made her accustomed to male attention and she grew up knowing she was an outsider, neither white nor Korean. But now, in Avery, North Dakota, she’s unique because she’s a stunning woman in a town that’s overtly and crudely dominated by men. “I’ve never been in a place where there are so many men. Where I feel completely outnumbered,” she tells her editor during a Facetime meeting. 

When she was a model, the gaze of a male photographer meant a paycheck. Now as she struggles to find work in a different competitive field, male gazes have become an annoyance. In  Avery, they strike her like a bludgeon. Catcalls and lewd gestures greet her when she gets out of her car, a raucous and obscene version of the attention she routinely receives from men in New York. Equally upsetting are the conversations in which racial slurs are casually directed toward anyone who’s not like the typical resident of North Dakota.   

A white town hit by a “diversity bomb” of oil workers, Avery has decided they’re the scapegoats for every problem that’s come with the petroleum industry. When a young white woman disappears, local vigilantes turn to the oil fields and grab two likely suspects, one Black and one Mexican. Nobody seems to know what was done to those men. They’re no longer around and that’s all that matters.

As Elinor spirals into a long series of serious mistakes, she’s caught in a claustrophobic web that’s tinged with horror. The view she loved as a child, the empty land that stopped only when it reached the horizon, is now clogged with drilling rigs and the crews that work on them. The air smells like Vaseline’s petroleum jelly. The women have turned into gleeful sexual trophies, their scarcity giving them an intoxicating illusion of beauty, making them prey. Then there are the American flags hanging upside down in random farmhouse windows, puzzling and shocking signals, but what are they signaling? Who are they calling? “Some people say it’s a distress signal,” a man reluctantly tells Elinor. The flags are placed that way, he says, because of “people who look like you.”

This difficult novel with its mixture of brutality and hope gives a bleak view of what America is and what it has lost. O Beautiful strips privilege from its readers as starkly as it does from Elinor. A graphic examination of misogyny, racism, class divisions, environmental damage, and xenophobia, it offers a form of Rorschach test. How much are we prepared to overlook? How much does it take to make us flinch? As Jung Yun sees it, we’re all being groped in a dive bar--or on a plane--and our beauty isn’t going to save us.~Janet Brown

My Falling Down House by Jayne Joso (Seren Books)

My Falling Down House is Jayne Joso’s third novel and the first one set in Japan. The book won the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Award whose aim is to “promote understanding and cooperation between the U.K. and Japan” in a variety of fields, including literature. 

Takeo Tanaka is a young man in his twenties who narrates the entire story. A year ago, he had everything a man could want. He was young and ambitious, and had a good job with a great salary.  He had a beautiful girlfriend he lived with in one of Tokyo’s more upscale neighborhoods. He seemed set for life. 

A year ago when he was out drinking with co-workers, he got so drunk that when he woke up, he found himself in an abandoned and dilapidated house. It seems he had also bought a cello before finding his way to this dwelling. 

It was sometime after his twenty-fifth birthday when a financial crisis occurred. Takeo lost his job, his girlfriend, and his home. For a while Takeo managed to sleep at the office creating a small nest under his desk with just a box and a blanket. His co-worker Shizuko nicknamed him the Box Man. But once he lost his job, he could no longer sleep at the office. 

After becoming jobless and homeless, Takeo decided to seek out the old house where he once spent the night in a drunken stupor. He was drawn to the place. He felt there was “a feel for nature here, a sense of a slow and simple way of living. A forgotten way of living.” He told himself it was only temporary. Once he recovered, he would move on. 

So begins Takeo’s new life of disappearing from society. He isolated himself by taking residence in an old house located on the grounds of a temple. He encounters a cat, finds his cello, and slowly settles into the life of a hermit. His supposed temporary stay extended to one season and then another. 

The longer Takeo stays at the house, he believes he sees or is being haunted by a yokai, a spirit or shapeshifter. As the summer turns to autumn and autumn turns to winter, Takeo seems to drift further and further away from the reality of life. It is becoming harder and harder for Takeo to determine what is real and what is fantasy. He thinks he may be slowly going crazy. In order to keep his sanity, he works on a number of projects just to keep his mind busy but still, he does not know if he is on his way to recovery. 

As Takeo had no room in a home to hide himself away in, he installed himself in a fragile wood and paper house. This phenomenon of hiding oneself away from people and society has become a very big problem in Japan. A new term was given to this phenomenon. It is called hikikomori in Japanese. It translates to “social withdrawal” in English. It can be described as a mild form of depression. 

Takeo’s story can be the story of any salaryman in Japan. Joso makes Takeo out to be an anti-hero. A man you hope will come out of his loneliness and self-pity to become a productive member of society once again. Anybody who has had a setback in life can relate to Takeo, however I believe there is no shame in asking for help. ~Ernie Hoyt

Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan edited by Bruce Rutledge (Chin Music Press)

When Bruce Rutledge, after living in Japan for fifteen years, thought briefly of writing essays about his time there, he realized “it’s been done to death...Who needs the views of another lanky Westerner?” Instead he “brought together a group of writers--a mix of Westerners and Japanese--who probably wouldn’t even get along if they were stuck in the same room.” 

The result is a volume that’s outstandingly gorgeous as an object and delightfully eccentric in its multiple points of view. Not your ordinary essay collection,  Kuhaku also contains short stories, paintings, a map that’s a single line of stark black ink and lists the businesses, over a hundred of them, crammed into one street, a satirical advice column, a gallery of canned coffee, each can described in the language of usually used for wine tastings, and an anecdotal glossary that’s illustrated by peyote, an artist whose drawings  resemble a kinder, jollier Ralph Steadman. This book is dizzying.

Kuhaku is defined as “a blank, empty space, a vacuum, a void, a tabula rasa” which means every reader can decide for themselves what the theme of the book might be. The opening essay provides one possibility with an expat’s claim that the even-tempered nature of Japan goes against the soul’s need for upheaval and tempestuousness. That assertion is backed up later by keruru, a newly-coined word defined as a sudden violent act that erupts when a person reaches a breaking point.

An upheaval of sorts is found in every piece that follows. It’s expressed benignly when an American tells of the confusion he causes in public by addressing his dog in Japanese as well as in English. It teeters on a kind of domestic insanity when a woman confesses to turning a bathroom into a storage unit for unclassifiable garbage, rather than facing public humiliation by putting it in the wrong trash bin. A short story by a Japanese writer, portraying a husband who explores the sex trade first-hand while writing a magazine article, is counterpointed throughout the book by translations of interviews with unfaithful wives. Modern-day Dharma Bums come perilously close to burning down a three-hundred-year-old wooden temple and Haruki Murakami explains why young Japanese men engage in “father-hunting,” when they set upon middle-aged salary men and beat them up in the street.

Grim? Oddly enough, not at all. Somehow every upheaval seems as natural as an earthquake, coming unexpectedly and releasing pressure before resulting in a tsunami. The elegance of the book itself--its compact size, its embossed cloth cover, the tiny illustration that ornaments a title page for every piece--makes it  a sensory pleasure, while its glossary gives it a thoroughly unexpected conclusion, a splendid potpourri of stories, descriptions, facts, words of warning, and even a couple of recipes. 

Somehow without ever nailing down a linear description of what it is to live in Japan, Kuhaku gives a vivid, impressionistic sense of how that life would feel. The first book published by Rutledge’s Chin Music Press, it’s set a standard that his small press has continued to nurture: books that find and reveal unexplored territory with skill, care, and beauty.~Janet Brown

Behind the Fire by Steven D. Salinger (Warner)

Steven D. Saligner’s debut novel Behold the Fire is a thriller set in the streets of New York. The murder of a man comes to the attention of NYPD homicide detective and Vietnam vet Mel Fink. However, at the scene of the crime, there was no sign of a struggle, no signs of a break in, and nothing was stolen. 

The victim was Franklin Grelling. He was an employee of Parker Global, a big defense contractor for the Pentagon. The company maintains that Grelling was “a traveling salesman with a fancy title”. Grelling’s partner, Barton believes the murder was related to drugs or to a relationship gone bad. Grelling spots a map of Vietnam on the wall and has a hunch that Barton is dead wrong about why the victim was murdered. 

Clear across the globe, in the jungles of Cambodia is Army Corporal Isaac Johnson, known to everybody as Zach. He is listed as an M.I.A. from the Vietnam War. Johnson was held captive in the Cambodian jungle by the Khmer Rouge for over twenty years. After saving a fellow American and former POW Ev Ransom and illegal arms dealer who works as a broker for Parker Global. 

Ransom agrees to try to return Johnson to his home in the U.S. It is Ransom that sets in motion a roller coaster ride that affects Washington and its relation with Vietnam as Ransom sends the fingerprints of Johnson to an MIA/POW activist senator named Antel Grantham. This is the proof the Senator has been waiting for even though the Pentagon has denied the existence or knowledge of any MIAs. 

To complicate matters even further, Fink has taken a liking to the wife of the first victim and Marissa Grelling seems to have ties to Ev Ransom and Parker Global as well. And the was another murder. The victim is also an employee of Parker Global. The mode of operation was the same as that of Frank Grelling. 

Fink’s continuing investigation leads him to find that the killings were done by a professional. He has also determined that the assassin is Cambodian. The only piece still missing from the puzzle is why the assassin has singled out personnel from Parker Global. What is the connection between Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam and Washington? Does Corporal Isaac Johnson ever get to set foot in his home country again? These are the questions that will keep the reader involved in the story up until its ultimate end.

Salinger’s story is fast-paced and exciting. The character development is great and makes you want to help Fink solve the crimes. His descriptions of New York City and the jungles of Cambodia are detailed and make you feel as if you are in the middle of all the turmoil as well. The action may not be enough for fans of John Rambo but this story doesn’t get preachy about alleged MIAs still being held prisoner in Vietnam or Cambodia. The book will appeal to fans of W.E.B Griffin and other military and detective fiction. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Woman Who Fell from the Sky by Jennifer Steihl (Broadway Paperbacks)

When her old high school sweetheart persuades Jennifer Steihl to spend three weeks in Yemen’s capital city, Sana’a, as a volunteer journalism trainer at an English-language newspaper, she has no idea this will change her life. After all, she’s a fast-talking, flirtatious New York woman who is one of the founders of The Week and has been a senior editor there for the past five and a half years. Her life is successful and established, but when the owner of the Yemen Observer offers her the position of editor-in-chief, making $1500 a month at a newspaper where reporters’ salaries top out at $200, it takes her only a few months to give up her $60,000 a year position in Manhattan.

Steihl has succumbed to Sana’a’s 2500-year-old charm and she’s captivated by the Observer’s reporters, especially the young women who have taken a large step in becoming journalists. Her New York confidence keeps her from being quelled by the city streets that are filled almost exclusively with men, all of them wearing the traditional dagger, the jambiya. She’s done her research and knows that neither the abaya that obscures women’s bodies, nor the hijab that covers their heads, nor the niqab that veils their face is mandated by the government or the Qur’an. It’s a cultural practice, not a religious one, and the women who wear these shrouds usually are clad in jeans and t-shirts beneath the outer covering. The women she meets tell her the coverings are “a statement of identity, an important defense against men, and a source of freedom.”

Out of respect for the culture she’s immersed in, Steihl wears the hijab but forgoes the veil. Like Lawrence of Arabia, her blue eyes immediately brand her as an object of curiosity and the niqab would do nothing to forestall attention, even though it hides her pale skin. Without realizing it, she picks up a larger physical change within a matter of weeks. Her walk is transformed from a New York stride to a gait that prevents her hips from swinging and her face stares at the ground. Facing declarations of love each time she walks outdoors has taught her not to return a man’s gaze and she realizes she’s become “someone else” under unflagging public scrutiny.

Within the newsroom, she’s faced with deeper challenges. Although the men she works with treat her with deference, that, she knows, is because for them she’s not really a woman--she’s the human equivalent of a giraffe. The women reporters long to be recognized as professional journalists yet social restrictions keep them from interviewing men, until Steihl persuades them to work in pairs. The men use their freedom to prolong their daily lunches with bouts of chewing qat, a mild stimulant that’s an ingrained feature of Yemeni culture and is indulged in for a minimum of two hours.Although the reporters have all studied English and speak it with ease, their writing is lengthy, stilted, and subjective. Deadlines are a foreign concept and stories are often intended to bolster the government or enhance the status of advertisers. 

With fleeting episodes of a personal life, Steihl works twelve hours a day, six days a week, not only as the paper’s editor but still working as a trainer, while negotiating unforseen hurdles. Within her first two weeks she’s faced with “kidnappings, stampedes, and suicide bombings.This,” she decides, “is a news junkie’s paradise.” But within this paradise, one reporter refuses to cover a story because it could get him killed. When the Observer reprints three Danish cartoons, each obscured with a black X and placed next to an editorial that condemns them, Steihl’s Yemeni co-editor is briefly imprisoned and is on trial for ten months. The owner of the paper insists that opinion pieces should be placed on the back page because that’s the most important part of the paper. “Arabic is read right to left. So Arabs will naturally turn first to what for you is the back page.” Only by pointing out that the Observer is an English paper does Steihl retain an Op-Ed page in its customary place.

When her contract is up at the end of a year. Steihl is reluctant to leave Yemen. The story of how she is able to remain gives her work-laden life a romantic twist and provides a happy ending to a book that skillfully handles serious matters with a light touch. Jennifer Steihl is far from being Bridget Jones but her book wouldn’t be out of place on a sunny day at the beach.~Janet Brown

The Householder by Ruth Pravwer Jhabvala (Penguin)

The Householder by Ruth Pravwer Jhabvala was first published in 1960. It is the story of Prem, a teacher at a local college. Until recently, Prem was a student at university. His marriage to Indu was arranged by his parents and now he is a “householder” with a wife who is pregnant with their first child. 

Indu’s pregnancy is an embarrassment to Prem as “now everybody would know what he did with her at night in the dark.” Prem’s current salary at the college is 175 rupees a month. His rent is 45 rupees. Aside from becoming a new father, his new worry is the increase in expenses that would occur. What he needs is a better paying job. 

It finally occurs to him to look through the classified ads in the newspaper. However, Prem could not find any jobs he was qualified for. It appeared that nobody wanted a Hindi teacher, “or if they did, they wanted him to be a first-class M.A. with three years’ teaching experience, not a second-class B.A. with only four months’ teaching experience, such as he was.” His only option was to ask his boss for a raise. 

Asking his boss for a raise is not something he would like to do but he took his father’s advice to heart. His father had told him, “Put all your strength into the things you don’t like to do.” Prem tries to find the courage to talk to his boss but instead of coming straight to the point, he talks about his colleague, Sohan Lal. The more he talks about his colleague, his boss comes to the conclusion that Sohan Lal had sent Prem to ask for a raise in salary.

Prem is also having trouble at home with his wife who says she is going to her parents, due to her condition. At the same time, Prem has received a letter from his mother who says she will be coming to help her only son to prepare for the child’s birth. Prem is having a hard time establishing his authority as the head of the household and seems to have crossed an invisible line when he tells his wife that he forbids her to go home. 

As much as you like to support Prem, he sometimes comes off as being a Charlie Brown-like character. He has a very wishy-washy personality and doesn’t assert himself. He’s taken advantage of by his only friend in New Delhi who he grew up with. There are times when you may want to smack him and say, “Grow up!”, which is what he is trying his best to do. Still, the humor in Jhabvala’s writing makes you forgive Prem his wishy-washyness.

Jhabvala’s story has the universal theme of what it is to become an adult and all the responsibilities that come with adulthood. It is filled with humor and drama  and readers of all ages may identify with Prem as he goes from being a student to getting married and then becoming a father. Family ties can also be a very delicate matter as one tries to find a fine balance in pleasing your partner and keeping other relatives happy. 

Prem is no different from any of us who have dreams of making more money and living a comfortable life. However, being rich and famous doesn’t doesn’t guarantee comfort or happiness. One must do their best with what life has to offer them. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed (Penguin)

“You’re an Arab! An Arab! And you don’t know your own language,” a teacher screamed at Leila Ahmed when she was twelve. “I am not an Arab,” she replied with equal fury, “I am Egyptian! And anyway we don’t speak like this!” 

In 1952, the Egyptian Revolution that stripped the country of British colonialism brought with it shouts of “Arab nationalism! We the Arabs!” But Ahmed, born in 1940,  is already shaped by the final days of the British Empire that had vouchsafed only partial independence to Egypt. She and her siblings have grown up speaking French and Egyptian Arabic but English is their preferred language. That’s what they speak at school and when they’re with their friends. Their father is a man with a “colonized consciousness” who had gone to university in Birmingham, “cherishing things European and undervaluing the very heritage that had shaped him.” He teaches his children to love Western classical music and to place it above the Arabic music that their mother, who is staunchly and thoroughly Egyptian, sings. Ahmed and her siblings begin to see Arabic as inferior, although it’s the language they use when they talk with their mother. This, Ahmed admits, “in some way marked her too, in some way silently, silently in my child’s mind, as inferior.” She realizes much later that this is one of “the hidden, uncounted costs of colonialism” that her mother pays, as her children speak a language she doesn’t understand and go away from her to be educated, and to make their lives, in distant countries. 

Ahmed’s mother lives in a world of women, talking, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes with her sisters and her friends. She teaches her children that the core of Islam is to hurt no one, to harm oneself before injuring someone else. “He who kills one being kills all of humanity, and he who revives, or gives life to, one being revives all of humanity.” She, and the women around her, have distilled their own “essence of Islam,” separate from the stern, fierce “orthodox interpretation” that’s the male version. They live in houses surrounded by gardens that are rich with trees and flowers, wrapped in desert silence, light, and shadow, a world of beauty. It’s one that Ahmed learns to disregard as “women’s culture,” gentle, generous, and powerless, in which “women bowed their heads and acquiesced” to the men “who did things.” “The only escape from this,” she tells herself, “ would be for me to become either a man or a Westerner.”

Ahmed grows up immersed in politics, living through a bloodless revolution that turned into a dictatorship and then through a war that prompted Ahmed’s British and Jewish friends to leave Cairo. Her father falls out favor with the government and Ahmed is long denied permission to leave Cairo for England, where she has been accepted at Cambridge. When she goes there at last, she has the label of “Arab” thrust upon her by English society and begins “puzzling out what it means to be Arab.” 

“In Egypt,” she says, “I’d be just another Egyptian, whereas in the West it’s impossible for me to escape, forget this false constructed Arabness.” In a country whose colonization of her own has made her English in language and thought, Ahmed takes on an imposed identity that is foreign to her. Yet while she learns about being Arab, she sees more clearly what it is to be an Egyptian from Cairo, a city where, throughout its history “Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Morocco, Istanbul, Alexandria” were all blended into “its own unique Cairo brew.”

Discovering the beauty of Arab literature, written in a literary language that no one speaks, Ahmed recognizes the richness of oral culture, expressed in the “mother tongue” spoken by the women whom she once dismissed. Her journey is farther than from Cairo to an academic American life. Her struggle to achieve a wider knowledge of who she is and where she came from is long and painful, told through a memoir steeped in rigorous intellect that opens new worlds of thought to its readers. ~Janet Brown