Take No Names by Daniel Nieh (HarperCollins, release date July 5, 2022)

Fasten those seatbelts and hold on tight. From the first page to the last of this puzzling thriller, Daniel Nieh keeps readers guessing with unanticipated twists and hairpin curves taken at breakneck speed. 

Dennis Lao is almost an invisible man in Seattle’s Chinatown, one in a crowd of waiters and dishwashers who are paid under the table, rent rooms filled with bunkbeds, and sleep in shifts. Lao has lived this way for sixteen months. Before that he was Victor Li, an affluent guy who “grew up with a white mom, a free-spirited sister, a golden retriever, and a Playstation 3.” That came to an end when his father is brutally murdered and Li learns where the money came from. Sun Jianshui, a “mild-mannered assassin,” arrives from China, introduces himself as an enforcer employed by Li’s father, and takes Li on a quest for revenge that ends in another death. Now Victor Li is Dennis Lao, on the run with a warrant out for his arrest.

But the guy is a self-confessed adrenaline junkie. With a friend he’s met at a martial arts gym, he ends up rummaging through storage units run by Homeland Security, scavenging the confiscated belongings of deportees. That’s how he ends up on the run once again, in possession of a sizable gemstone, painite, the rarest in the world, worth $65,000 a carat. His friend drives the getaway car and Li has the address of a potential buyer. They’re headed for  Mexico City.

Once they cross the border, they’re plunged into a morass of pulque bars, political dissidents, a controversial Chinese construction project, American goons named after cheap beers, and head-spinning deceit. These boys simply cannot catch a break or make a good decision. Lucky for them that Li’s sister manages to track them down, accompanied by the assassin who killed her father. Jules and Sun have formed an unlikely alliance--and with her brains and his array of talents, (not all of them homicidal), the Hard Luck Twins just might come out of this alive.

Sprinkled generously through this noir adventure are looks at geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China, the economic hegemony that China is weaving across the globe in competition with the U.S., the political power of drug cartels, and some fascinating glimpses of DF, Distrito Federal, the 573-square-mile capital that’s known as Mexico City.

Nieh is quite obviously enthralled by this metropolis and was fortunate in having the thirty-two-year DF resident and author, David Lida, as his friend while he was there. Under Lida’s guidance, Nieh was given the background that he uses to depict dive bars, street markets, and religious shrines in enticing and sometimes harrowing detail. He has the observation skills of a good journalist, deftly describing the Seattle sky, “always near at hand, bearing down, making problems bigger,” the carnivalesque vibrancy of Mexico City streets, and the presiding saint of the city, Santa Muerte, “a black-robed skeleton with rhinestone eyes and a Mona Lisa smile.” 

Even more frightening than the Saint of Death are the economic strangleholds that threaten Mexico, exerted by mammoth corporations owned by Chinese and American magnates. When Nieh takes readers inside the Baoli Tower, home of a global construction empire with Chinese ownership, this is a place even more chilling than the palatial compound of the foremost cartel leader. Deftly he turns real-life threats into fiction, believe them or not. 

With equal skill, Daniel Nieh has perfected the art of the cliffhanger ending and the ability to transform a sequel that’s possibly part of a series into a free-standing adventure. Although it’s a fine idea to read Beijing Payback, the novel that introduced Victor Li, that’s only because it’s such a good book. Take No Names stands on its own without a required preamble, one of the books most likely to be tucked in a suitcase after its publication in July--especially if vacation plans include a trip to Mexico City. ~Janet Brown

The Prince, the Demon King, and the Monkey Warrior retold by Janet Brown (ThingsAsian Press)

The Prince, the Demon King, and the Monkey Warrior is the retelling of a Hindu epic called Ramanaya which is attributed to a fifth century B.C.E. poet named Valmiki. It tells the story of the life of Prince Rama, the first-born son of King Dasarat in the country of Ayodhya. The story opens with King Dasarat speaking to one of his advisors. 

King Dasarat is a wealthy man without any enemies. He has four wives and yet says to his advisor, “I am sadder than the poorest peasant in my country.” He believes the peasants are richer than he is. They may be poor and have no possessions of their own and they live grueling lives but they have one thing that King Dasarat doesn’t have—a son. 

The wise man helps the king and his four queens each had a son within a year. The oldest is Rama, who “from the day he was born, made everyone feel happy.” Barat is the second son, a righteous individual who supported those around him. The third son is Satrugan and the youngest is Lakshaman who is always very loyal to his eldest brother Rama. 

The King informs his sons that the land is being torn apart by two demons and that the wise men of the forest have told him that only his oldest son would be able to defeat them, yet he did not want to burden his child with this news. 

Rama is a dutiful son and does not hesitate to take up the challenge. His youngest brother says he would join Rama on his quest. The two sons travel far and wide and defeat the demons without any problems. On their way home, they set foot in another kingdom whose king is said to be as wise as their father. 

Rama meets his soon-to-be wife, Sita in the kingdom. The two marry and live a happy, peaceful life for many years. Rama’s aging father tells his son that he is going to abdicate and Rama will be King the following day. However, the mother of Barat, Kaikeyi, is fooled by her evil maidservant Mantara. The distressed Kaikeyi pleads with the king to fulfill one of her wishes that he had yet to grant her. 

So it comes to pass that Rama is exiled from his home for four fourteen years while Barat is crowned King. Lakshaman follows his brother and his wife into exile. They settle in a land surrounded by evil demons. A She-Demon that has the power to transform herself into anybody she wishes tries to trick Rama into making him believe she is his wife. When he tells her he already has a wife, she then shows her true form but is disfigured by Lakshaman and runs back to her home. 

One of the She-Demons brothers is Ravan, the Demon King. He sends an army of demons to kill Rama but they all end up dead except for one. It is this demon that convinces King Ravan that the best way to defeat Rama is to kidnap his wife and make her his own. 

The King of the Demons manages to kidnap Sita and now Rama finds himself on a quest to save his wife. With the help of Hanuman, the Monkey Warrior, Rama defies all odds to save the love of his life. 

This modern retelling will appeal to everyone, young and old alike. The full-color illustrations by Vladimir Verano bring life to the story. It is a beautiful introduction to the culture of India as seen through one of its most popular stories. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Artisans: A Vanishing Chinese Village by Shen Fuyu, trans. Jeremy Tiang (Astra House)

Forget about Wordle. Dismiss Quordle as a puzzle for amateurs. If you really want to send your brain into convulsions, pick up The Artisans and enter a never-ending maze.

This book begins innocently enough—it traces the past hundred years in a village that’s been in place for six centuries. Founded by a distant ancestor of the author, Shen Village was a community held in place by “rules formed around customs, ways of thinking and agreements,” where the residents were either related by blood or by proximity. Self-sufficient for most of its lifetime, it is now dying out, with its children leaving for the opportunities of urban life and factories encroaching upon its farmland. Shen Fuyu hasn’t lived there since he was eighteen but he says “When our hometowns vanish, we become rootless people.” Drawing upon stories from his grandfathers and his father, as well as his own memories, he recreates a web of craftsmen who formed and strengthened the fabric of Shen Village and whose deaths ensured the death of their community. 

At first the villagers’ stories seem like a form of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, without the magic but with all the familiar characters—The Tailor, The Carpenter, The Blacksmith, The Clever Girl, The Village Beauty. The fortune of two different families are both destroyed in fires; one family recovers, the other disintegrates. A feud over property rights and a political execution are both touched upon in passing and later are shown to be linked. All of these misfortunes are the roots of pivotal events, with the connections between them revealed slowly and tortuously in convoluted tragedies. 

Imagine working on a jigsaw puzzle where all of the pieces keep shifting. At a certain point, it becomes obvious that this book needs to be read with paper and a pen close by. Mrs. Fifth Life, introduced briefly at the very beginning as the powerful widow of The Scale Operator’s Son, shows up near the end as a girl whose courage and brilliance rivals Scheherazade’s. The toothless old woman who was once The Village Beauty is the leading figure in a multi-generational tragedy. Craftsmen identified only by their trades are called by their real names much later, bringing them into complex family relationships that are as intricate as spiderwebs.

“That’s how life is, a series of interlocking circles,” Shen Fuyu says as he nears the end of his social history. Suddenly the interlocking circles of Shen Village become part of a galaxy, one of hundreds of thousands of similar communities across China, and the jigsaw puzzle becomes immense, a taste of infinity.

Shen Fuyu’s hometown, in common with other dying villages in China, has a shrine that holds the ancestral tablets, “a place to worship the ancestors of long ago, everyone’s common forbears.” If this shrine disappears, the villagers are left “all alone in the world.” The Artisans exists as a record of what once was. Through the stories of the people whose work kept a community alive, it serves as a modern form of ancestral tablet, anchoring the descendants of Shen Village to their own history and to the history of the world.~Janet Brown

The Sushi Economy : Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg (Gotham)

Sasha Issenberg takes us on a journey to learn the history and evolution of a culinary item that people once discarded or used as cat food. The Sushi Economy introduces us to the world of tuna from its humble beginning as a cheap and easy to make street snack in Edo, the old name for Tokyo, to its prominence in the culinary world as a must have and must eat item for the jet set. 

Issenberg makes it clear that this is not the first book about sushi. It is not a cookbook “filled with glamorous food photography and do-it-yourself instruction on how to reproduce those delectable morsels. These books tend to suggest that all one needs to make sushi are a sharpened knife, plastic-wrapped bamboo mat, traditional wooden spatula, and Japanese pantry staples such as short-grain rice, vinegar, and dried seaweed.”

Issenbert believes that to understand the world of sushi culture, one needs to read about what goes into the making of suchi. It has to be “a narrative about the development of twentieth-century global capitalism”. He further states, “A book that wants to revel in the beauty and deliciousness of sushi must be a celebration of globalization. This is that book.”

Issenberg sets up the book in four separate sections. Part One deals with the freight economy and the logistics of moving bluefin tuna from the Atlantic to the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, Japan. It describes in detail the birth of modern sushi. Before sushi became a familiar item around the world, it was considered worthless throughout the world, the only market for the red tuna was as pet food. 

Part Two covers the food economy and how many young and ambitious entrepreneurs went about setting up sushi restaurants around the world and about their efforts to receive the best cuts of tuna from the world’s oceans. 

Part Three deals with the fish economy. The job of catching tuna in the wild is sporadic and uneven. The fisherman is never sure if his or her catch is going to win the jackpot for him. In order to make it possible for diners around the world to enjoy fresh tuna year round, Issenberg investigates the development of fish ranching for Bluefin Tuna. 

Finally, in Part Four, Issenberg discusses the future of the Tuna industry. The Atlantic Bluefin Tuna and others are in danger of being overfished and the world’s supplies are dwindling at a rapid rate. To solve the problem and to find more sustainable solutions, an organization called the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna was formed. The organization is known by the moniker of ICCAT and is called “eye cat”. 

Unfortunately for ICCAT, the organization has a high hurdle to overcome. The group has set rules for signatory nations but has no way of enforcing them. “Tuna is, like air, a placeless common resource, so it suffers from what economists call the commons problem : An individual nation has no motivation to limit its catches alone, since everyone else will continue to benefit.”

“The national fisheries that should be implementing ICCAT rules end up doing little but protecting their own lawbreakers against foreign intruders.” An American environmentalist, Carl Safina, had this to say about ICCAT. He said that ICCAT “might as well stand for International Conspiracy to Catch All the Tunas”. 

This book will appeal to foodie and economists alike. It is an interesting look into the world of how the tuna business evolved. As Michiyo Murata said in a 2010 New York Times article, “Originally, fish with red flesh were looked down on in Japan as a low-class food, and white fish were much preferred. ... Fish with red flesh tended to spoil quickly and develop a noticeable stench, so in the days before refrigeration, the Japanese aristocracy despised them, and this attitude was adopted by the citizens of Edo.”

As the child of a Japanese mother, I was exposed to sushi at an early age. However, I adopted the position of my American father who believed that raw fish was only good for fish bait or cat food. It wasn’t until I was older and perhaps wiser that I began to realize what I was missing. I will never forget my first taste of tuna, or magura as it’s now known. My mother jokingly offered me some while believing I would never eat it. I surprised my mother and myself saying, sure, I will try it. I dipped the maguro sashimi in soy sauce with a bit of wasabi, and said to my mother, “It’s not bad. It’s pretty good” to which she responded, “NO!! Don’t say that, It’s too expensive!!” She certainly didn’t want to share any of her maguro with me!! ~Ernie Hoyt

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville by Akash Kapur (Scribner)

History puts Utopia in a bad light. The concept has never worked very well, drenched as it is in failure, death, and tragedy. But what if the effort to achieve the ideal community simply has never been given the time it needs to evolve? The process isn’t pretty, as Akash Kapur shows in his story of “the quest for Utopia” in a barren region of India, but the end result is a town with an international population that thrives in a setting of “vibrant forest.” What was once “a moonscape” is now “a global model of environmental conservation.” But are the results worth the human sacrifice that this achievement demanded?

The “intentional community” of Auroville was born because of the unlikely meeting of three very different people: Sri Aurobindo, a Cambridge-educated Indian mystic, a wealthy French matron, Blanche Alfassa who believes in visions made incarnate, and a young Frenchman who spent his youth in concentration camps. Madame Alfassa recognizes Sri Aurobindo as the Indian seer who came to her in her dreams. She becomes his leading disciple and is known by the name he gives her, The Mother. Bernard, weighted to the breaking point by his years in the death camps, meets The Mother just before Sri Aurobindo dies, putting her at the forefront of the seer’s following. She gives Bernard a new name and, as Satprem, he becomes her primary henchman, propelled by the belief that The Mother is divine.

The Mother has a dream and at the age of 87, she reveals it to the world. She buys 90 acres of barren ground and announces this will become a “Tower of Babel in reverse,” an international community” that will belong “to humanity as a whole.” Three years later, the first settlers arrive, finding an empty desert.

Others join them, from India, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States. They become obsessed with finding shelter, water, and food; they dig wells and build huts with their bare hands. They gather seeds that they find within animal droppings and nurture crops of native plants. An administrative group formed by The Mother raises funds and disburses money to Auroville’s inhabitants, who espouse a subsistence economy that has reduced them to peasants. Then The Mother dies and the money begins to trickle away. 

Political schisms crack through the utopian surface of Auroville and a form of cultural revolution blazes through the hearts and minds of the residents. Satprem has convinced most of them that The Mother is a divinity and the prevailing belief is she will provide them with what they need. She will heal the sick and bring up the children while the healthy adults work to venerate her memory. Medicine and education are regarded as unnecessary and the energy of Auroville is spent in building a multi-storied  edifice that will house The Mother’s spirit. 

Within this maelstrom of belief and chaos, two people become the poster children for disaster. A devout member of Auroville, a young Belgian beauty, falls from the heights of the construction project and is permanently paralyzed. The man who loves her, a wealthy patrician from New York who devotes his fortune to Auroville, becomes ill. Both of them refuse the medical help that would save them and they die young, with one survivor.

The woman’s daughter, Auroalice, has known no other world but Auroville. At fourteen she’s semi-educated and semi-feral, having grown up in a tribe of free-range children. She’s adopted by the sister of the wealthy patrician, is taken to live in The Dakota where Lennon and Yoko are her neighbors, and by chance meets a man who had been a childhood friend in Auroville, Akash Kapur. They marry.

Well educated and well off, the two of them live happily in Brooklyn until their pasts begin to claim them. Returning to Auroville with their young sons, they find it’s become a place where they can raise their children safely and happily, as well as a place where their own childhood histories have found peace.

Unsettling and uncomfortable, Better to Have Gone raises troubling questions. Kapur turns to Mao and Robespierre: “Revolution is not a dinner party.” “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” To create this ecological triumph, people died and children were sacrificed. 

Kapur says, “Children of utopias, I’ve come to understand, are like exiles.” He and Auroalice were each rescued in different ways. Kapur’s parents never truly espoused the demands of Auroville; Auroalice became an orphan who was whisked into the wealth of Manhattan after fourteen years of a helter-skelter upbringing. Other children weren’t so fortunate and their stories go untold, “mere expedients on the journey to a new world.”~Janet Brown

Tokyo on Foot : Travels in the City's Most Colorful Neighborhoods by Florent Chavouet (Tuttle)

Florent Chavouet is a graphic artist who spent six months wandering around different neighborhoods in Tokyo while his girlfriend Claire was interning at some company in Japan. The only reason why he found himself in Japan.  He would go out with a set of sketchbooks and colored pencils along with a mamachari (a term used for the bicycles that most housewives use) and a folding chair. The result of his stay and his sketches led to the publication of Tokyo on Foot : Travels in the City’s Most Colorful Neighborhoods.

Chavouet’s opening statement in the book is “Tokyo is said to be the most beautiful of ugly cities.”  He also mentions in the beginning, “So this is a book about Japan. About a trip to Tokyo, to be precise. It’s neither a guide nor an adventure story, but that doesn’t mean you’ll avoid the out-of-date addresses of one or the digressive confidences of the other.” 

The six months period of Chavouet’s stay was between June and December, 2006. All the sketches included in the book are Chavouet’s interpretation of what he saw and how he saw the city’s neighborhoods. He has organized the book in which every chapter focuses on a certain neighborhood he visited. “The respective lengths of chapters in no way indicate the relative importance of the neighborhoods in the life of the city but rather my familiarity with them.” 

Each chapter is announced by a koban, a small and very local police station, often referred to as a police box whose officers main job is community policing. The illustration following the koban is a hand drawn map of the area listing the places that Chavouet thought were interesting 

Once you read the blurbs on the map and take the time to absorb it all into your head, then Chavouet then provides full color illustrations of those various neighborhoods, along with the people who inhabit the place such as the owner of a small shop in Machiya, located in the northern part of Tokyo. He also meets and draws pictures of a woman who runs an okonomiyaki stand in Takadanobaba at the Kotohira-gu Temple. This is where Chavouet also meets a Canadian graphic designer who told him about his lung operation and meditating on the Ganges in India. The Canadian left and came back later and handed Chavouet two-thousand yen for no apparent reason. Chavouet jokes it’s “the first money I earned in Japan.” 

In between many of the chapters of the book are “interludes” where Chavouet just indulges himself such as drawing his interpretations of the Strict Salaryman and the Cool Salaryman. The difference between Math Nerd Junior-High Student and Physics Nerd Junior-High Student. They are amusing and humorous and will put a smile on your face. 

He also draws from his experience as he tells us his impression of visiting a manga kissa, a shop that carries manga books guessing what the topics are just by looking at the covers. He surmises that the main themes are, “porn (soft, hard, kinky, gay, etc.), romantic stuff, and some sports”. 

As Chavouet mentions, this is not a guidebook, just what he saw and sketched when he wandered around Japan. He explored the neighborhoods of Machiya, Ikebukuro, Takadanobaba, Shinjuku, Shibuya, and more. Trendy neighborhoods, downtown neighborhoods, old neighborhoods, new ones. Every page is a visual treasure.

As a former and long-time resident of Tokyo, I can attest to the accuracy of the neighborhoods Chouvet has visited. His eye for detail is amazing. His illustrations draw you in and make you feel like you’re exploring the neighborhood on your own. If I feel homesick for Tokyo, I can always browse through Chavouet’s book and return anytime I want to. ~Ernie Hoyt

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au ( New Directions)

A dream you can’t quite remember, a path you know well that’s suddenly hidden by fog, a glimpse of a person you think you recognize who turns out to be a stranger--this is the disorientation that comes when reading this slender little book. Is it a mystery, a ghost story, jagged bits of travel memories transformed into a novella? 

A daughter and mother float through an enigmatic sojourn in Japan, together but barely connecting. They are ageless and unnamed, each born into a different language and each living in separate places that go unidentified. The mother carries memories of an early life in Hong Kong, one  that she left long ago and has shown to her daughter through fading photos and fragmented stories. The daughter offers her own fragments, using bits of her education to explain things her mother never learned.

But are the two of them really there, together? A hotel clerk insists only one person occupies the room that the daughter and mother share. The mother, after the two spend a day apart, walks toward her daughter as if she were approaching a “ghost she did not want to meet,” her breath released “in a little cloud, like a small departing spirit.” 

“It was strange at once to be so familiar and yet so separated.” This feeling pervades the entire book, filled as it is with the familiar and the disembodied, “halfway between a cliche and the truth.” Slowly the distance between the mother and daughter becomes a visible chasm, their lives so divergent that there’s no middle ground. As the novel unfolds, the daughter takes shape through her stream-of-consciousness memories, while the mother “might as well have been an apparition.” Perhaps she is. The pain of that possibility is never enlarged upon.

Instead readers are whisked along in a strange journey, one that’s so devoid of emotion that it’s almost numb but with intense and vivid sensory details that come as a constant surprise. “A strong, deliberate wind,” the taste of green tea ice cream that’s “bitter and pleasant,” a lake set within a crater, “uncanny and almost artificial,” persimmons lying “on the ground in a sweet pulp,” are alive and real, with the evocative precision that is usually found only in a poem. The story in its formlessness becomes inclusive, enveloping readers in a world that becomes their own, wrapping them in its avoidance of pain and its fluid impressionistic images.

Writing,” the daughter tells her mother, is “the only way one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been…” As she travels with someone who may not be there, making things as she wished they had been, she offers a space in which others can travel in their own way, with their own companion, “as we wished they had been.”

With the delicate tenacity and strength of a cobweb, Cold Enough for Snow lingers after it’s been read, teasing and tugging, calling for explorations of  its puzzling beauty just one more time. Its sentences carry the weight and comfort of a freshly washed blanket, “fragrant and thick.” in a meditative quest into what’s real, what’s imagined, and how the two realms overlap.~Janet Brown

Soldiers of God : With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage)

Robert K. Kaplan’s Soldiers of God was first published in 1990 with the subtitle “With the Mujahideen in Afghanistan”. He states that “it provides historical context for the emergence of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. His final chapter of the new edition titled “The Lawless Frontier” was first published as a long article in the Atlantic Monthly and provides a follow up to post-Taliban Afghanistan.

In 1979, the former Soviet Union with the backing of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, attacked the small Central Asian nation  without provocation and continued to occupy the country until their withdrawal in 1988. 

Kaplan was one of the first American journalists to travel with the Mujahideen, a collective name for the insurgents, that fought a nine-year guerilla war against one of the world’s most powerful nations and won. Without them, it would not have been possible for Kaplan to even set foot in Afghanistan. 

During the war, the Soviets heavily mined the land of Afghanistan. No one is sure of the actual numbers. Britain’s BBC stated “millions”. The Afghan resistance claimed five million. The U.S. government’s estimate was about three million. However, in 1988, a State Department spokesman said the figure was more likely “between ten and thirty million”. According to Kaplan, “that would be two mines for every Afghan who survived the war.” 

In order to report on the war, journalists first had to get to the war but this required more effort than it was worth for most of the media. Not only did the journalists have to contend with the dangers of stepping on a mine, they were faced with boredom, disease, and exhaustion. 

In the beginning, Kaplan reported the news from Peshawar, the closest city to Afghanistan but is located in Pakistan. He was determined to see for himself the realities of the war that virtually the whole world was unaware of. 

In one of his final journeys “inside”, and supposedly after the Mujahideen secured the nearest airport in Kandahar, a city located in the northern part of Afghanistan, Kaplan saw with his own eyes that the Soviets were sending some soldiers back to the city and were also using the airport. When he mentions this to an American diplomat, the government man responds by saying Inter-Services Intelligence, the intelligence agency of Pakistan, reassures the U.S. that this is not the case. 

Traveling with Kaplan and his Mujahideen companions makes this book read more like an Ian Fleming spy novel without the women or gadgets that help James Bond. It’s also very scary because it’s real. Americans don’t realize it but it was a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the U.S. with the U.S. government providing arms to the mujahideen to fight the communist forces. It was a veiled Vietnam War that wasn’t given national coverage so most Americans did not see the tragedy from the comforts of their home in their living rooms. 

Now, here in the 21st century, Russia has attacked a sovereign nation without cause for its own gain and is being condemned by the international community. It appears that the current president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, didn’t study up on the history of his nation. The Ukrainians are not going to willingly agree to the terms set by Putin’s government to end the current war. 

Putin’s demands are for the Ukraine to agree that the Crimea as part of Russia (another piece of land that was seized illegally by the Russians), to recognize to the two pro-Russian provinces in the Ukraine, Luhansk and Donetsk, as independent nations, and to promise not to try joining the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). Putin states his reasons for military action is to “deNazify” the Ukraine. I’m sorry, but the only Nazi in this scenerio is the current president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. And so once again, we see history repeating itself. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung (Random House)

Karen Cheung was four years old in 1997 when Hong Kong’s handover took place. She grew up believing that the policy of “One country, two systems” would be in place for 50 years and that Hong Kong was protected by the rule of law. The Sino-British Joint Declaration stated that Hong Kong people would administer Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s chief executive would be elected by its citizens or through local caucuses, a policy that would lead to universal suffrage and democracy. When this failed to take place, protests against a national security bill that would ban “sedition, treason, subversion, and secession,” began in 2003. From then on, Hong Kong held a thriving community of activists and dissidents.

There was much to protest, much to change: Hong Kong’s “land problem” that led to high rents, squalid housing, and government confiscation of rural villages; mental health care that was largely inaccessible even to affluent expatriates; and a disregard that bordered on intolerance for “non-conformist art.” When the protests of 2003 made Hong Kong’s chief executive withdraw the controversial national security bill and resign from office, it seemed as though change was possible. Instead the problems grew worse. 

Cheung grows up without a strong identification as a Hong Kong citizen. Until she turns 18, she is shaped by her grandmother’s Chinese customs and Taoist traditions and by the English language that she’ s steeped in at an international school for six years.  When she transfers to a public school run by Christians, where students are allowed to speak  Cantonese,  the curriculum is taught in English. After six years there, Cheung is fluent in English and the English literature that she has read compulsively convinces her that Western culture is superior. In Kowloon where 90% of the population is Chinese and English is considered “a snobbish anomaly”, she longs for a life in London or New York. When she at last goes to the island of Hong Kong and enters Hong Kong University which is “vaguely international,” she feels a step closer to the life she wants.  In 2014 she spends a semester in Glasgow and watches the Umbrella Revolution from another country, suddenly and painfully realizing her home is in Hong Kong, the place where her life is waiting. “We recognize all of its imperfections, and still refuse to walk away.”

The subtitle of The Impossible City says it’s a Hong Kong memoir and that’s exactly what it is. “This book is about the many ways a city can disappear,” Cheung says. Her own story is told merely as a fragment of life in Hong Kong, used as an illustration in  “documenting disappearances.” Her personal narrative gives depth to the stranglehold tycoons have on Hong Kong’s real estate, showing how extreme wealth controls everything from housing to public services. To gain an apartment in government-subsidized housing can mean a five-year wait;  instead people rent bunk-bed spaces in illegally subdivided apartments for over 400 US dollars a month. Others sleep in Japanese-inspired “space capsules”  or in “caged homes,” beds surrounded by barbed wire. SARS and a long period of political protests give rise to depression and PTSD. 

Student suicides rise by 76% in the years between 2012 and 2016. “There are only around four hundred psychiatrists in a city of over seven million people.” where a government census showed “one in seven Hong Kongers live with mental health conditions.”

“What unites Hong Kongers,” Cheung says, “is pain.” Suicidal herself, she finds a new life in the creative energy and freedom of the city’s indie music scene. Surrounded by people who live “alternate lives” in a version of Hong Kong that Cheung wants to inhabit, she finds her way to the industrial buildings of East Kowloon and begins to write about what she hears and sees there. “Music is the archive of the times,” she says. From there she begins recording other forms of archives in Still/Loud, an online magazine that focuses on Hong Kong’s culture, not its lifestyle. 

Her examination of expat and Asian American writers who dominate Hong Kong’s English-language journalism and literature, reporting and telling stories “through their lens,” is scathing. Hong Kong locals who write in English, as Cheung does,  are frequently mistaken for members of the diaspora, usually as Asian Americans, and she is told by a newspaper editor to write stories that can be understood by “a Texas grandfather.” After three of her essays are published in the New York Times, other publications ask for pieces that tell “how it feels” to live in political turmoil.  As a Hong Kong writer with English fluency, writing for “the foreign gaze,” Cheung frequently feels like “a language traitor…betraying her mother tongue.”

Protests against a new version of the 2003 anti-sedition bill in 2019 are halted by Covid. On June 30, 2020 the bill becomes law. National security police scour the city for forms of dissidence while police hotlines welcome people who will report on neighbors who breach the law. The maximum sentence for this is life imprisonment.

Although employees who work in city government offices take loyalty oaths and teachers are given “patriotic syllabi” for their classrooms, a writer on Twitter claims “It’s absolutely not that bad for the average Hong Konger…that is 99% of the population.” For Cheung and her friends, “Are you leaving?” is a frequent question. Cheung’s reply is “I’m not ready.” She’s still recording what she knows will disappear. “Hong Kong,” she says, “will be physically unchanged but there will be nobody here that remembers the place that once existed….The only ones left {will be} those who believe this is the best version of Hong Kong there could ever be.” In showing the possibility that’s been taken away, The Impossible City is a record of what’s been lost. But, Cheung says with more than a trace of irony, “We are always so attuned to loss in this city.”~Janet Brown

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli (Harper)

The Lotus Eaters is Tatjana Soli’s first novel. She has set her story amidst the Vietnam War, or as the Vietnamese call it, the American War. It focuses on a woman named Helen Adams, a woman who dreams of becoming a photographer for Life magazine. She is also torn between two men she loves - Sam Darrow, her mentor and Nguyen Pran Linh, an ex-soldier and assistant to Darrow. 

The story opens with the fall of Saigon. The time is April 1975. At this time, Helen had been in Vietnam for over ten years. She and Linh are on their way out of the country. Linh may be Vietnamese but he has papers that will allow him to flee on one of the last flights out of the country. As the two rush to the U.S. Embassy, Lihn is shot and injured. Helen is determined that they will both leave, although unknown to Lihn, she plans to stay to cover the changeover. 

The story then goes back to the beginning when Helen first goes to Vietnam. After losing her brother in the war, Helen decides to go to Vietnam and tries to make a name of herself as a photojournalist. There she meets prize-winning journalist Sam Darrow. It is not love at first sight as Darrow treats her like a child but he takes her under his wing and she develops a love for him knowing full well that he is a married man and constantly feels as if she is being watched by his assistant Linh. 

After Darrow is killed in a helicopter accident, the bond between Helen and Linh gets stronger. However, Linh is a very private man. Helen does not know as yet that he was a former soldier fighting for the North but deserted the army and headed to Saigon with his wife. Helen does not know the burden Linh carries with him wherever he goes. His wife is dead, he is a deserter, and yet he is also attracted to Helen. 

The love triangle between Helen, Sam, and Linh and their relationship with each other seems to play out as a soap opera at times and the background of all three characters makes you care for them as real people. Their strong personalities can sometimes be aggravating but when you take into consideration the time and circumstances, one can imagine that you need to be strong in order to love and survive in a war zone. 

Soli was inspired by the female journalists who worked in Vietnam during the war. In her research she came across people such as Catherine Leroy, Kate Webb, and Barbara Gluck but it was the true story of Pham Xuan An, “a North Vietnamese intelligence agent who also was working undercover as a journalist for Time magazine” which would set her on her path to completing this novel. 

The Vietnam War may have ended for both countries and for Helen and Linh, but that didn’t stop the world from continuing their various conflicts. The war may have officially ended in 1975 but the next conflict to make headlines was the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and the beginnings of the “killing fields”. 

It is one thing for governments and people to say, “Never again!” Yet it seems apparent that we as a people haven’t learned anything from our past. Following Vietnam, there was the genocide in Cambodia, the Bosnian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and now Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attack on the Ukraine. When will there be a time when people say “Never again!” and really mean it? ~Ernie Hoyt

Fong and the Indians by Paul Theroux (Penguin)

Paul Theroux is mostly known for his travel essays but he has also written a number of novels. Fong and the Indians is a story he wrote shortly after meeting a glum Chinese gentleman in Kampala, Uganda. When he started the novel, he had been living in East Africa for about four years. At first, what he wrote about the place was “apologetic and sorrowful, or else very angry”. Writing fiction about Africa gave him another perspective. “Africa was, briefly, a comedy”.

Sam Fong, a Chinese immigrant who has been living in East Africa for thirty-five years is the owner of a small grocery store. “They called him an immigrant; actually he had lived in Africa longer than the Prime Minister, who was an African. But to be one Chinaman in a country of seven million Africans is not easy: you stand out; the East cannot save you, you remain a visible immigrant all your born days and so do your children, and so do theirs.”

Sam Fong wasn’t always a grocer. He was a carpenter who worked at the Ministry of Works when East Africa was still a British Protectorate. . He became a grocer out of necessity after the country gained independence. One day an Englishman came and asked Sam Fong to point out “someone terribly keen”. The Englishman insisted on a native, an African. 

The following day, the Englishman returned and handed an envelope to the “keen African” worker, Mohinder Singh. The African was sent to England. When he came back six-months later, he was appointed foreman and became Sam Fong’s boss. The African became like his white bosses, calling his countrymen baboons and useless natives and telling Sam Fong that he could sack him anytime. Sam Fong left the Ministry of Works that day and made three resolutions - “Never trust a white”, “never trust a black”, “never be a carpenter”. 

On his way home, Sam Fong spotted a sign reading “Store for Hire”. Fong signs a ten year lease with the owner, an Ismaili from India named Hassanali Fakhru. What Fong didn’t realize was that in his contract was a clause that stated, “And I promise to buy all stocks and stores and goods from the above-named Hassanali Fakhru at prices to be agreed upon so help me God.”

Sam Fong just wants to be left in peace but aside from being swindled by Fakhru, he is faced with a couple of hardline communists from his home country, a couple of Americans who only want to be his “frin”, and continues to be used and abused by the actual owner of the shop, namely Fakhru.

As Theroux has spent time in Africa, his satire is quite funny at times but I’m not sure how it will appeal to today’s readers as he describes the native Africans as crooks and being simple-minded. The Asians, mostly of Indian descent, as cunning scoundrels, and the Chinese, well mostly Fong, as simple-minded and clueless. 

The book was originally published in 1968 and I don’t know if it’s the sign of the times or not, but I failed to see the humor in Theroux’s description of Fong taking out his frustrations by beating his wife and having her accept it as part of her duty. In the first three chapters alone, Fong beats his wife for such minor offenses as writing a sign for the grocery store where he works. 

The story may be a bit dated but it’s still quite enjoyable. Just remember, don’t apply today’s standards for a story that was written in the late sixties about an African nation becoming independent from British colonialism. It is satire and is meant to be fun or perhaps it was a bit of commentary on life in Africa during those times. ~Ernie Hoyt

Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia edited by Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas (University of California Press)

Curry has become such an international dish that it’s hard to remember it originated in India. Yet when people think of Indian cuisine, this is the first menu choice that usually comes to mind. How did this dish become both the culinary symbol of a country and a popular meal across the globe? Japan, Thailand, Great Britain, the United States all have their own version of curry—Campbell’s Mushroom Soup with a dash of curry powder, anyone?

In Curried Cultures, a group of academic writers look at the history, proliferation, and perhaps the decline of curry, in a series of essays that painstakingly comb through every detail of the dish. 

When the princely states of the Subcontinent became Great Britain’s Jewel in the Crown, culinary matters sharply divided the colonized from the conquerors. The British occupiers, believing that the local diet led to weakness and poor health, clung fiercely to their slabs of animal flesh washed down with beer. The people of the Subcontinent prided themselves on vegetable dishes that were spiced with a sophisticated flavor that had yet to reach the West. Each side shuddered at the barbarity of the other; it took the common soldiery of England to find a meeting ground with their subcontinental counterparts through meals of curry. Although canteen cooks probably adopted curry because of its ease and economy, the dish became popular with British troops and traveled with them to Japan and other corners of the world.

Today in Great Britain curry shops are as numerous as fish and chip stands. “Going out for a curry” is a popular way to end a night of serious drinking. In the U.S., fast food curry houses are spreading across the country, becoming almost as ubiquitous as Chinese or Thai restaurants—and equally Americanized. The Indian princes of the Raj would be horrified by what America calls curry and most citizens of modern-day India would find it inedible.

Even within India, the concept of curry is changing fast. Traditional curry dishes take time and attention which is difficult to find in a high-tech, high-speed world. Even the least sophisticated curries, the ones found in the roadside hostelries called Udupi hotels, have changed in the drive for efficiency. In India and abroad, supermarket shelves are filled with small, flat, red and white boxes that are sold under the MTR label. They contain a foil envelope filled with curry that’s quickly reheated in boiling water.

These ready-to-eat meals are cheap, flavorful, and based upon an ancient culinary tradition. In a temple in southern India, five thousand pilgrims are fed daily with fifty different selections, including curry. Legend has it that this is where the famous Mavalli Tiffin Rooms (MTR) garnered their recipes, giving their restaurant customers silver utensils with which to eat the adopted temple curries. Nowadays a version of that food can be ordered online or bought in overseas grocery stores; boxes of MTR meals feed foreign consumers who have no idea of the history behind the packaging, as well as families in India who demand flavor as much as convenience in their fast food.

Although it’s an interesting look at the way global popularity changes traditional food, Curried Cultures suffers from this kind of sentence: “I think studies of immigration demand a dose of corporeality.” Readers who hack their way through the jungles of jargon will find a lively history waiting for them—and probably a strong yearning for a plate of curry.

The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky (W.W. Norton & Company)

Even the least adventurous American eater owes a big debt of gratitude to China. Dan Jurafsky’s research shows that, if it weren’t for the Chinese, bottles of ketchup might never have gained dominance in U.S. kitchens. 

When Jurafsky’s daughter pointed out that “tomato ketchup” was redundant because that was the only kind of ketchup in existence, her father began delving into the origins of this omnipresent condiment. A Hong Kong friend provided the answer--”ketchup” is a word that comes in direct translation from Cantonese--ke means tomato and tchup is sauce. The mystery then became how did ketchup gain a Cantonese name?

The answer turned out to be fish sauce, the fermented fish liquid that’s the staple of many Southeast Asian cuisines. Inhabitants of Southern China depended on fish as their primary food source and learned that fermentation not only preserved their catch, the byproduct of the fermentation provided a tasty condiment. When the Han Chinese chased the “Yi barbarians,” more properly known at Khmer-Mon and Tai people, into Southeast Asia, fish sauce went with them. But the process of fermentation became popular in China where it led to soy sauce, spread to Japan in the form of sushi, and was seized upon by Western sailors when they found that Indonesian ke-tchup made their seaboard rations much more palatable. 

The earliest recipe for ketchup appeared in English in 1732, and was credited to a British trading post in Sumatra. When the sauce migrated to England, shallots, mushrooms, and walnuts gradually took precedence over the fermented fish, with a dash of anchovies giving a trace of its original flavor, (as is still found in ke-tchup’s descendant Lea  Perrins Worcestershire Sauce). In 1817 tomatoes took over and this is the version that traveled to America, where it became thicker, sweeter, and totally devoid of fish. (How the less appetizing name of “catsup” came about is still an unexplained mystery.)

Ketchup isn’t the only fermented Chinese invention to have invaded Western kitchens.  Although the creation of molasses is credited to India in 500 BCE, it took China to ferment it with rice and palm sugar, creating arrack, a liquor invented long before rum or gin. This was also seized upon by English sailors, probably with even more enthusiasm than they had for fish sauce. When arrack was mixed with citrus, sugar, spices, and water, the British Navy’s “punch” may have been the precursor to the cocktail--once again thanks to China.

Although China didn’t invent ice cream, if they hadn’t discovered gunpowder that dessert may never have come into being. Potassium nitrate or saltpeter was once called “Chinese snow” in Arabic because it was a major component of the gunpowder exported by China. Arabs were the ones to find that Chinese snow could chill water and centuries later it was used to create the first wine slushy in Italy. Sorbet soon followed.  

Jurafsky points out that the one food Americans adore and think of as being “Chinese” isn’t from China at all. Fortune cookies,  found in every old-school Chinese restaurant in the U.S., first appeared in Kyoto as little cookie-shaped crackers, each one holding a paper fortune. (A similar cookie is sold on the streets of Bangkok, but without the enclosed fortune.) Now almost 3 billion fortune cookies are made, sold, and eaten all around the world--but not in China, where sweets aren’t usually offered at the end of a meal.

The Language of Food dives deep into culinary matters--the vocabulary of menus and Yelp reviews, the importance of sound symbolism when it comes to giving a food a name, the way adjectives can reveal social class. But it’s in food history that the book excels, making us realize that without China, hamburgers might lack savor, there might be no such thing as Happy Hour,, Baskin-Robbins might never have become a household word, and some of us would be much thinner and far less happy.~Janet Brown

The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri (Harper)

Manil Suri’s comic novel The Death of Vishnu was inspired by a real person named Vishnu who lived on the steps of the apartment where the author grew up. Vishnu died on the landing after living there for many years. 

In the novel, Vishnu is a man who does odd jobs for an apartment block in Bombay, now known as Mumbai. He was named after the Hindu God Vishnu, the Deity of Preservation. The God Vishnu creates, protects, and transforms the universe. He currently lies dying on the staircase landing where he lives. He has been living there for the past eleven years. Mrs. Asrani, a resident of the apartment has been bringing Vishnu a cup of tea everyday for those eleven years, however, she doesn’t think he will drink it today as during the night he has thrown up and soiled himself. 

Vishnu was a drunk but managed to make a contract with the previous occupier of the landing, named Tall Ganga, to be her replacement as a ganga, a servant who does domestic chores for a number of households. The apartment dwellers found to their dismay that Vishnu was not up to doing a ganga’s duty. They thought of various ways to dislodge him from the landing but the cigarettewallas (walla being a suffix for “one associated with”), one who sells cigarettes and the paanwalla were aware that Vishnu made a deal with Tall Ganga to take her place and “since nobody actually owned landing, it was clear that all inhabitation rights to it now belonged to Vishnu.”

Vishnu isn’t quite dead yet and as the lives of the people in the apartment go on about their business, Vishnu reminisces about Padmini, the love of his life. All the residents have their own stories to tell and their relationship with each other is often confrontational, especially between the two married women Mrs. Asrani and Mrs. Pathak. The two families share a communal kitchen and often accuse each other of using more than their share of the apartment’s water supply.

The Jalals are the only Muslim family living in an apartment whose residents are mostly Hindu. Mr. Jalal is seeking to find a higher meaning in life and doesn’t understand the concept of faith. He often tried debating with his religious wife trying to persuade her that her faith has no logic or reasoning to be of any use. The Jalals have a son who is in love with Asrani’s daughter, Kavita. They are love-struck teenagers who plan to elope and neither family believes they are suitable for each other. 

And on the top floor of the apartment is Vinod Tanej, a man who lost his wife to cancer and has become a recluse himself as he continues to long for his wife. He only has contact with Small Ganga who still does various chores for him. 

It is when Mr. Jalal decides to sleep next to Vishnu on the landing where he has a vision and believes that Vishnu is not just a sick man, but the God Vishnu and he has been chosen to spread the word that people should worship Vishnu and treat him as a God. The dying Vishnu thinks maybe he is the incarnation of Vishnu the God and is in the process of changing the universe. 

Suri’s story blends Hindu mythology within a contemporary setting in present day India and we are left to ponder. Was Vishnu just a man or was he Vishnu the God? It is really left up to the reader to decide. ~Ernie Hoyt

Tales from the Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Hanover Square Press)

A tiny cafe set in central Tokyo, Funiculi Funicula is easy to overlook, but for some it’s a destination worth traveling to. In this place, if all of the conditions are met, customers can travel back in time to see anyone they wish--provided that person had once visited this cafe. The time travel can only begin when the would-be traveler has sat in a particular chair, one that is always occupied by the same woman who leaves it only once a day, when she goes to the toilet at a time that always changes. Travel begins once a cup of coffee has been poured and must end before the coffee gets cold, and during the visit to the past, there is nothing the traveler can do that will change life in the present. If the visit doesn’t end before the coffee gets cold, the visitor can only return to the present as a ghost, sitting in the cafe forever.

One man orders his coffee because he’s been lying to his daughter for 22 years. A young man who hadn’t gone to his mother’s funeral drinks his coffee while planning to let it turn cold because he intends to stay in the past.  A homicide detective wants to give his dead wife the birthday gift he had never been able to present to her. One unusual customer travels in reverse. He comes from the past to visit the future, longing to know that the woman he loved and was unable to marry is living a happy life. Each of these stories is heartwarming but even more so is the underlying plot--the lives of the people who run the cafe. The owner, the young waitress who is his cousin, his little daughter who longs to be the server of the coffee, and the mysterious woman who chose never to return from the past become the primary focus of this charming narrative and each one of them finds a satisfying, happy ending.

A combination of fable and fairy tale with a dash of science fiction, this is a novel that comes just at the right time. It sparkles with hope and love, with a piercing question posed on the page that would usually hold a dedication: If you could go back, who would you want to meet? In this era of loss, when many people died alone without the people they loved beside them, this is a haunting thought to consider, one that has been posed in many different mediums.

Tales from the Cafe is a sequel.  Playwright Toshikazu Kawaguchi adapted one of his own plays to become a novel, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, in 2015. It then became a film, Funiculi Funicula, in 2018 and in 2021 was underway to become a television series. Kawaguchi’s underlying message--that we honor the past by seeking happiness in the present--continues to resonate and comfort, both in its original Japanese versions and in its English translations. “Spring,” he says, “hides inside winter,” a thought we need to keep in mind, especially during a winter that seems as though it will never end. ~Janet Brown

eatlip gift : COOK BOOK for COOKING PEOPLE by Yuri Nomura (Magazine House)

eatlip gift is a cookbook and photography book by food director Yuri Nomura with full color pictures taken by photographer Yurie Nagashima. Unlike most cookbooks, pictures of the food are given one or two full pages with the name of the dish and the page where you can find the recipes. The recipes are all provided at the end of the book, after the pictures. There are fifty-seven recipes in total. For each dish, Nomura also provides an amusing anecdote related to the food item. 

At the time of this writing, Yuri Nomura presided over the food creative team “Eatrip”. She went to London in 1998, after that she worked at various restaurants. In 2010, she gained a lot of experience as she was employed at the highly praised organic restaurant in Berkeley, California, Chez Panisse. Her main job now consists of working reception parties, catering, teaching cooking classes, writes a food-related column in a magazine, hosts a radio show, and does a lot of food direction for television and commercials. She also opened her own restaurant in Tokyo called [eatrip] in 2012.

Totte oki nikushiminaku tsukuru. Nomura says this is something her mother passed on to her when making food. It translates to “Make special foods without loathing.” Cook, eat, and share. This is the ideal that Nomura strives for. She has divided the book into four categories - timeless, sharing, seasons, and for you. 

In the timeless category you will find recipes for the French specialty coq-au-vin (chicken braised with wine, lardons, mushrooms, and the optional garlic), an Italian dish from Milan called osso buco (cross-cut veal shanks braised with white wine, vegetables, and broth), Russian favorites pirozhki (baked bun with a variety of fillings) and borscht (beet soup). Nomura being Japanese, she has also included recipes for chirashi-sushi (scattered sushi, as you can add any toppings to sushi rice) and gyusuji no shiro miso nikomi (stewed beef tendon by white miso).

In the sharing section, you will find recipes that would be great at parties such as cheese dip or cauliflower dip. Also featured are avocado with ricotta cheese, the Spanish favorite paella, shrimp salad with lemon dressing, fruit shortcakes, octopus tapas and more. 

Next are some seasonal dishes. As the book was published in 2010, the year of the tiger according to the Chinese zodiac, Nomura starts off with a recipe for a dish called kuri-kinton pudding. Kuri-kinton is a sweet chestnut paste with a yellowish color and says it represents the color of the tiger. Spring is the season for mimosa flowers to bloom in Japan and Nomura has a recipe for mimosa cake. She shares her recipe for corn pancakes which she remembers were made from the white corn harvested in the summer from her father’s vegetable garden. 

Finally, in the “for you” section, recipes for food and snacks to share with friends, co-workers, and more. There is a very traditional Japanese tradition called sashiire in which a person will bring snacks to a group of people, such as people working late at the office or they can be for entertainers, musicians and actors alike, who can snack on them in their dressing rooms. 

Photographer Yurie Nagashima brings all the dishes to life. Full color pictures in all their mouth-watering glory. The text for the recipes are in Japanese and the measurements for ingredients are all in the metric system but even if you don’t cook or can’t read Japanese, it is still a wonderful book to look through. Perhaps the pictures of the dishes will inspire you to create your own culinary delight. ~Ernie Hoyt

Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang (Random House)

Joan is the kind of woman who makes dinner table conversation by complimenting her host’s utensils. At 36,  she has never had a boyfriend. She has no hobbies. She has no idea who or what Seinfeld is because she doesn’t own a television. Her apartment is so spartan that when her next door neighbor sees it, he asks if she had recently been robbed. 

Under five feet tall and weighing less than one hundred pounds, Joan is easy to overlook, unless she’s at work. In the ICU of a busy Manhattan hospital, she’s the attending physician, the one who teaches and supervises the other doctors, ““the most senior person in the room.” She’s “a gunner, and a new breed of doctor, brilliant and potent, with no interests outside work and sleep,” the hospital director says approvingly. 

Neither he nor anyone around her thinks this is peculiar behavior until the day Joan asks other doctors to cover her weekend shift. Her father has had a fatal stroke in Shanghai and she needs to attend his funeral. When she returns to the hospital 48 hours later, with 32 of those hours spent in the air, both the director and the human resources department are forced to realize that this may be an excessive work commitment that “the gunner” displays. She’s told to take time off, “to reassess, recenter, release.” “It’s only six weeks,” the director assures her, “time will fly.” “I couldn’t quite picture that,” Joan decides, “unless I was put in a coma.”

“I love my brother,” she tells the director when he asks about her family, “we met in Wichita.” Like many of Joan’s statements, this is eerily true. She didn’t know she had a brother until she was four and a twelve-year-old boy showed up, her parents’ first child whom they’d left in Shanghai with relatives six years before. That elusive quality characterizes her familial relationships. The minute Joan turns eighteen and enters Harvard, her parents move back to Shanghai, “their jobs as parents complete.” `Her final visit with her father is a quick chat in the hospital cafeteria that ends before she’s finished her cup of coffee and soon after his funeral, her mother announces her unexpected US arrival in a phone call that she begins with “This is your mother. I’m having terrible jet lag.” Her brother, rich and successful,  owns a ten-acre compound in Connecticut where the grass is cut “more often than I cut my nails,” Joan observes. Their visits are filled with his nagging that she leave the hospital and take up a more lucrative private practice. “I lost my brother,” she says, “the day he decided to become my parent.”

This should by rights be a grim novel about a woman who is clearly somewhere on the spectrum, with social skills that hover around absolute zero. Instead it’s hilarious. Although Joan’s mother is scathingly accurate when she tells her daughter, “You’re a very literal person,” Joan is a woman who refuses to tolerate pretensions and who regards the world without filters. She’s smart and funny and completely devoid of self-pity. “A person of two languages and two cultures,” Joan gives a unique perspective on “the gulfs within families…the migrations we have to make…the cost of love” without pomposity or finger-pointing. She --and this book--radiate pure delight and both are absolutely, stunningly, more than okay.~Janet Brown

2:46 Aftershocks : Stories from the Japan Earthquake (Enhanced Editions Ltd.)

Next month is the twenty-first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, commonly referred to as 3-11. On March 11, 2011 at 2:46pm, a massive earthquake that registered 9.0-9.1 magnitude hit the Tohoku area of Japan. It was the most powerful quake to hit Japan and triggered a tsunami that reached a height of over one-hundred feet (over forty meters) which washed away people and their homes. The tsunami caused the disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant as well. 

2:46 Aftershocks was recorded, written and published in just over a week after the disaster.  It was the brainchild of a man living in Abiko, Chiba Prefecture. The man who calls himself Our Man in Abiko explains, “The idea for this book came out of desperation; desperation to do something for a country on its knees.”

On the morning of March 18, 2011, one week after the quake, Our Man in Abiko wrote to @fatblueman, a group who became popular for their song “Christmas in Japan” on YouTube, to start writing a song for Japan quake survivors. It was this Tweet which got him thinking, “I want to compile a book of quake experiences and publish it like within a week and donate all profits to Red Cross.” 

Our Man in Abiko created a Twitter account with the #quakebook hashtag and tweeted, “If  everyone wrote 250 words - one page - or submitted their favorite (original) tweets, pics or artworks, I could edit, publish it in days.”

People from all over the world contributed pictures, stories, illustrations, prayers, and words of hope to unite the world in helping Japan get back on its feet. Many of the stories were written by the people who were there, living and experiencing one of the world’s worst disasters. A couple of celebrities donated their time and gave support to the project including Yoko Ono and cyberpunk author William Gibson. 

The Foreword to the book was written by Barry Eisler, the creator of a half-Japanese, half-American assassin named John Rain. Eisler says, “If my books have been love letters to Japan, this one is an SOS. I’m both proud and humbled to be a part of it, to be in a position to reach others who love Japan and long for Japan so that together we can give back some of what we received, and to do something to help Japan back to her feet.”

American journalist and Japanophile Jake Adelstein rewrote an article titled Muenbotoke, a term that literally translates to ‘Buddhas without connections’. The piece was originally published in the magazine Shambhala Sun. He related the story of a double-suicide of a couple whose bodies were never claimed by anybody. This made him think of the bodies that were never recovered from the tsunami. Adelstein ends his article with “May their memories last longer than the accident that took their lives. Because remembering them is all we can do for them now and for all those who lost their lives. And in the act of remembering, hopefully we will lead better lives and remember to care for all living things. We owe the dead that much.”

According to a press release on March 9, 2021, twenty years after the quake, the official figures reported 19,747 deaths, 6,242 injured, and 2,556 people still missing. Anybody who was living in Japan at the time knows exactly where they were and what they were doing. I was living in Tokyo at the time of the disaster as well. I had taken the day off from work and was sitting on the couch with my wife. She was watching television while I was on the phone with my parents who live in the States. The room started shaking but we didn’t give it much notice as we have been through the routine many times before. But this time, the shaking wouldn’t stop and was getting stronger as well. I had to cut my call quickly as my wife and I headed out the door of our fourth floor apartment. It is definitely not an experience I wish to relive. I currently live in the Tohoku area and hope and believe that I am also contributing to its recovery. ~Ernie Hoyt

Fate: The Lost Decades of Uncle Chow Tung by Ian Hamilton (Spiderline, House of Anansi Press)

When Ian Hamilton decided it was time for Uncle to depart from the Ava Lee series, apparently he missed Ava’s mentor as much as his mournful readers did. Uncle was a power behind the throne, influential, omnipresent, and subtle. Ava asks no questions about his past, although she knows from seeing his friends and employees that the man she cares most about in the world came from shadowy beginnings. And although Uncle is her mainstay throughout the first six volumes of her adventures, neither she nor Uncle ever reveal the details of when they first met.

Piece by piece, in six books, Uncle comes into focus: where he lives, what he eats, what he wears, along with his loyalty to those who work for him, and his paternal love for Ava. From the very first Ava Lee novel Uncle is old but his network of influence spreads far beyond his Hong Kong home and his mind can understand--and withstand--the most devious acts that any human is able to conceive. When at last he was removed from the series, even though he left a younger counterpart to stand with Ava, it was enough to bring at least one devoted fan to tears. 

Prequels are usually books that are picked up with a healthy degree of apprehension and it could be easy to dismiss Fate as an opportunistic spin-off. That would be a mistake. Uncle is as fascinating and dominant a character when given the spotlight as he once was as a presiding genius on the sidelines. His life is chronicled in three volumes: Fate (2019), Foresight (2020), and Fortune (2021), carrying him from his swim from Shenzhen to Hong Kong, an adventure that cost him the love of his life, up to his meeting with the woman who would become his partner and his daughter in every way but biological. Unfortunately only Fate is available in the U.S. at this time, perhaps because of covid-spawned difficulties in the world of publishing.

Chow Tung arrived in Hong Kong with little more than enough clothes to keep him from being naked.. Within ten years he’s become the White Paper Fan, the accountant, money manager, and administrator of legal and business matters, for a branch of The Heaven and Earth Society. Also called the Hung society, named after the Chinese character that showed the union between heaven, earth, and man, this organization had been in existence since the 1760’s within China until Mao chased it out of its country. Now in Hong Kong, it’s known as the triads and has become a major power in all parts of that region. In the town of Fanling, Chow Tung’s swift rise to a level of management has made him an integral part of that area’s triad and, through his financial acumen, he’s made his branch a leading player in Hong Kong’s vast underworld. Because of his remarkable maturity at a young age and his professional formality, his associates have begun calling him “Uncle,” and what was first a joke soon becomes the name that replaces Chow Tung for everyone.

When the Mountain Master, or leader,  of the Fanling triad dies in what seems to be a random hit and run, Uncle has doubts about the ability of the man slated to become the next chief. Calling for an election by secret ballot--one man, one vote as was always the traditional method--he begins a subtle campaign to elect a more qualified candidate. But politics is never a straightforward enterprise and Uncle becomes challenged by the twists and turns involved. When a neighboring triad senses weakness and moves in to take over, Uncle’s administrative skills are stretched to the limit. How much violence can be exerted upon the problem without beginning a fullscale war that will cause a crackdown by the Hong Kong police? Fortunately Uncle is a skilled user of the bonds forged by guanxi, and his web already is a wide one. But as he learns, guanxi can exact an unexpected price, one that even he is reluctant to assume.

Ian Hamilton has done his homework. Anyone who reads Fate is going to come away with an assortment of facts about the Triads, Hong Kong’s racetracks, and traditional funeral etiquette. Even a detailed description of chicken feet, how to cook them and how to eat them, is provided in succulent detail, and Hong Kong history comes into play with the appearance of a Saracen, the armed and armored vehicle that Hong Kong police once used in dangerous situations. 

However it’s always Uncle who keeps every page turning at a rapid rate, revealing the events that shaped him and brought him into power. Ava Lee is a hard act to follow but Uncle has proved to be more than equal to the challenge. May Foresight and Fortune show up soon on U.S. bookshelves!~Janet Brown

Monsoon by Di Morrissey (Macmillan)

Monsoon by Australian author Di Morrissey is the story of two women who grew up together and have ties to Vietnam. Sandy Donaldson has been working with an NGO for the last four years and her contract is about to expire, however, she doesn’t really want to leave the country she has come to love. She persuades her friend Anna, whose mother was a Vietnamese boat person, to come and explore her mother’s heritage. Anna is reluctant to leave Australia and feels she has no ties with the country as her mother died when she was a very young girl. 

Sandy has one other connection to Vietnam. Her father, Phil Donaldson is a veteran who served in the war and was at the Battle of Long Tan, a battle that took place at a rubber plantation in Phuoc Tuy province. The clash involved Australia’s D Company, 6th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment (6 RAR) seeing action against the Viet Cong and People’s Army of Vietnam. Phil Donaldson was a member of the 6th Battalion. He comes home a bitter man and resents the fact that his daughter is helping what he still considers “the enemy”. 

I wasn’t familiar with Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, so the Battle of Long Tan was a bit of a history lesson for me. I know I may get some flack for this as it’s sexist but I would classify this story as chick-lit. It is without a doubt aimed more towards women and the romance they may find in a foreign country. However, It is also a story about coming to terms with one’s identity. 

Sandy and Anna meet Tom Ahearn, a former war correspondent for an Australian newspaper. He was in Vietnam around the same time as Sandy’s father and may have interviewed him at a hospital that housed wounded soldiers who saw action at Long Tan. 

It has been forty years since the siege at Long Tan and the government of Australia is finally giving it the recognition the soldiers thought it deserved. A ceremony is to be held and many of the surviving veterans are planning to attend. Only one person is adamant about not attending - Phil Donaldson

Monsoon is a very moving story of people facing the ghosts of their past. Phil with the demons that haunt him. Anna, coming to terms with what it means to be Viet Kieu, a foreign-born Vietnamese, and finally there is Sandy’s relationship with her father who never speaks about the war, what he saw, or what happened to him. Most of the characters are people you can care about except for Anna’s boyfriend Carlo, who seems to be a two-dimensional model of an egotistical, narcissistic specimen of machismo that’s just a bit over the top. 

Monsoon blends present day Vietnam with the memories of war and the damage it has done to both people and country. The streets of Ho Chi Minh City and Saigon and other locales come to life with Morrissey’s vivid descriptions, as does the food and the atmosphere of each city, from the World Heritage designated Halong Bay in the north to the island of Phu Quoc in the south. It’s enough to make you want to visit the country yourself.~Ernie Hoyt