Mio The Beautiful by Kinota Braithwaite, translated by Setsuko Miura (Self-Published)

Kinota Braithwaite is a Canadian-African children’s book author and elementary school teacher. He is married to a Japanese citizen and they have a young daughter. Braithwaite wrote Mio The Beautiful for his child who experienced being bullied at school due to the color of her skin. He also illustrated the book. 

The book includes English and the original Japanese which was translated by Setsuko Miruo who is also a childhood educator and Montessori Teacher Trainer. She dreams of a world “where all children can find happiness, love, and acceptance”. 

It is Mio’s first day of school. She is starting the first grade but is feeling nervous. She’s wondering what her new school would be like, with questions all new students have when they’re starting a new school or going to elementary school for the first time. Will she be able to make friends? Who is going to be her teacher?

Mio enjoys her first day of school. She likes her teacher, Momo-sensei. Momo-sensei makes learning fun and all the students enjoy her lessons. Mio really likes school. She enjoys the school lunches, called kyushoku, which is common to all Japanese schools. Students help serve the food as well. 

Mio also likes learning new things about Japanese culture such as flower-arranging and wearing a kimono. But then one day everything changes. Some of the other students start making fun of her because of the color of her skin. Once she gets home, she tells her parents she doesn’t want to go to school anymore. 

Prejudice against foreigners is nothing new to Japan. Even for those foreigners who were born and raised in Japan and even if they can speak the language, often they are not accepted as Japanese. Mio’s father being African-Canadian means her skin color is different and being different in Japan makes you stand out. And if you stand out, you are almost sure to become a target of ridicule. 

In the book, Mio’s parents call Momo-sensei and express their concern. Momo-sensei says she will talk to all of the students about the power of words and how they can hurt people. In class the next day, Momo-sensei asks the other students if they have ever had their feelings hurt because someone called them a name they didn’t like. Many of the students raised their hands. 

Momo-sensei explains to her students that Japan would be a boring place if everyone was the same. She goes on to tell them, “Mio has a different color than many of you but that does not mean she is not beautiful”. She continues by telling her students, “Mio was born in Japan, like us, and speaks Japanese, like us, and she loves Japan like we do”. 

If all teachers in Japan were like Momo-sensei, there wouldn’t be bullying of any sort in any of the schools. It would be an ideal world but bullying continues to be a problem, not only for biracial children but for Japanese kids as well. 

The story is very reminiscent of the children’s book Yoko by Rosemary Wells. In a plot similar to Mio The Beautiful, Yoko’s mother prepares her favorite dishes for lunch. At lunch time when everyone takes out their lunch box or brown paper bags, Yoko takes out her bento box. The kids then see that she’s eating sushi for lunch…and the teasing begins which leaves Yoko in tears. 

Finding acceptance in a foreign country can be a difficult thing, especially for kids, and Mio the Beautiful is a reminder to parents, teachers, and others how everyone should be treated with respect. As my father used to say to me, “Treat people the way you want people to treat you.” I’ve always taken that advice to heart. ~Ernie Hoyt

Recitation by Bae Suah, translated by Deborah Smith (Deep Vellum)

There are some books you read and can’t put down. Once you come to the last page, you’re saddened by the fact that the story has ended because you want more. Then there are books you read, reread, and try to read but the more you read, the angrier you get as there’s no plot or point to the story. 

Bae Suah’s Recitation falls in the latter category. Perhaps there is something lost in translation from the original Korean. Suah is a South Korean writer and translator who made her literary debut in 1993 with A Dark Room in 1988. Bae had no formal training in writing nor did she have a literary mentor to help her and it shows. She started writing as a hobby but left her full-time job after getting her first story published. 

Recitation starts off with a woman named Kyung-hee talking to some people she met at a train station. We never know who she is talking to or why but she tells them she had the idea of visiting the houses she’s left behind. We do learn that the people listening to her were from the same city as Kyung-hee. She tells them in her hometown she was a theater actor specializing in recitation. 

The people who first talk to Kyung-hee meet her at the train station. They offer to accompany her to her hotel or wherever she was staying, but she tells them she doesn’t have a reservation anywhere, that she is waiting for a man who is going to let her use his living room for a few days. 

She explains to the people who talk to her that she is a “part of a community of wanderers who let out their homes free of charge”. She continues by saying, “If someone comes to visit whichever city I’m living in, I give them somewhere to stay, and then when I go traveling, other people in other cities will let me use their living rooms, veranda, guest room, attic, or even in the off chance that they have one, a barn”. 

The people become intrigued with Kyung-hee’s story. They listen to her as she tells why she started traveling, the people she’s met, the experiences she had. This may sound like the beginning of an interesting tale but it becomes one long boring monologue. You discover that Kyung-hee doesn’t really have anything to say, or rather she speaks a lot but doesn’t say anything that makes any sense. 

Anyone who is not familiar with Bae’s writing may become frustrated as they try to decide who is actually speaking. Bae switches from Kyung-hee to other characters, to the unnamed people who first started listening to her, and then to a daughter Kyung-hee doesn’t claim to know. Not only is the writing confusing, but I found it pretentious as well. In the end, I wonder why I even bothered to read this book at all. If you’re a glutton for literary punishment, you could challenge yourself to read this. As for me, I was just glad that I was able to finish it. ~Ernie Hoyt

Off the Books by Soma Mei Sheng Frazier (Henry Holt)

Every girl should have a grandfather like Mei’s. When she graduates from Dartmouth and faces a tight job market, it’s Laoye who buys her a sedan and persuades her to forgo the easy money of working for a rideshare company. He’s the one who taught her to drive as soon as she was old enough to sit behind the wheel of a go-kart and he’s the one who sets her up with a woman who always needs a ride. So do her customer’s many female relatives, all of them with peculiar schedules and all of them turning out to be sex workers.

But then Laoye is no ordinary grandfather. He’s a devoted pothead with unconventional acquaintances who patronize his granddaughter’s ride service. Mei’s latest client is different--a conventional-looking handsome young Chinese guy with a Bulgari watch and the elegance of a GQ model. 

Henry Lee hires Mei to drive him from San Francisco to Syracuse, all expenses paid. It would be the ideal gig except for one glitch. Her passenger carries a giant suitcase that he takes out of her field of vision at every rest stop and that he allows nobody else to touch. 

Mei stifles her curiosity and respects her customer’s privacy until the day he steps away from his burden to take a phone call, leaving his baggage halfway out of the car. When Mei pushes it securely onto the back seat, she feels something move inside it.

Is her passenger transporting smuggled wildlife? Is this something that could put an end to her livelihood and maybe even land her in jail as an accessory? Mei keeps her questions to herself until that night, when she hears voices coming from the hotel room next door--Henry and another person, both speaking Chinese.

At this point what seems to be turning into a standard romantic comedy takes a sharp twist into global politics and stays there. The person in the suitcase is a terrified child who was taken out of China after her mother was imprisoned by the government. Her father is a professor who teaches at a university in upstate New York. His little daughter, traumatized, has begged for the safety of traveling in a gigantic suitcase. She and both of her parents are Uyghur, the oppressed minority of Northern China. 

If Laoye trusts Henry Lee, then Mei has no choice but to do the same. On the drive across the country, she, her customer, and Anna, the child who has chosen the safety of a suitcase, form a kind of family, with just enough potential danger and sexual tension to keep things interesting--but not interesting enough. 

Since many of the readers who pick up Off the Books may have no knowledge of what’s going on in Xinjiang, an autonomous territory of Northwest China where the Muslim Uyghurs are being forced to assimilate into mainstream Chinese culture, they have a lot of catching up to do. Soma Mei Sheng Frazier has done her homework but the information she ties into her novel eventually takes over and sinks the whole thing.

If you disdain the Crazy Rich Asians series for its frivolity and wish that romance novels would dabble in geo-political issues, this is the book you should take with you when you go to the beach. Otherwise pick up Tahir Hamut’s Waiting to be Arrested at Night (Asia by the Book, August 2024) along with the smart romance novel, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Asia by the Book, November 2023) and save yourself a bad case of literary indigestion.~Janet Brown

Shanghailanders by Juli Min (Spiegel and Grau)

Happy families are all alike, according to Tolstoy, but unhappy families are the ones who get all the attention. Starting with Cain and Abel and moving through millennia to the British Royal Family as portrayed by Netflix in The Crown, dysfunctional parents and their children feed the imaginations of novelists and fill the shelves of libraries. 

But not every unhappy family is captured in fiction with the skill that Juli Min gives to the Yang family in her debut novel. Shanghailanders. Taking the threadbare formula of successful husband, unhappy wife, and three beautiful daughters, Min reveals these cliched figures cleverly, in a series of interlinked short stories that move backward in time, from 2040 to 2014. 

While giving scant descriptions of Shanghai, Min provides a startling view of that city’s wealth, along with a capsule history of how swiftly this came into being. A man who was orphaned before he was in his teens and who grew up in a small, crowded room sees an opportunity when he’s still at a university. He borrows money from friends and buys several apartments. By the time he graduates, Shanghai’s rapid change has made real estate the arena where fortunes are made and Leo is a wealthy man.

His three daughters are in good schools, with the two oldest in the U.S. His wife is an artist, Japanese by birth but with most of her life shaped by living in Paris. In addition to the home in Shanghai, the family has a country place, a house in Vancouver, a village house in Zhejiang, an apartment in Paris, and an estate in Bordeaux. 

And yet as the years fly backwards, unhappiness settles in like a rot. Leo’s wife plans to leave him but her plans are set aside when she learns one of her daughters needs an abortion. His oldest daughter is a kleptomaniac who has made cruelty her second-favorite hobby. His youngest, at sixteen, has discovered a flair for sex work. His mother-on-law, teetering on the edge of dementia and living in a palatial assisted-living facility in France, has recently been diagnosed with an STD. Leo “loved them, all of them,” but he has lost interest. Slipping into another life is a thought he occasionally entertains, but—”how tiring.”

Wrapping her novel in snatches of time, Min mercilessly dissects this family, through the eyes of people who work for them and through the moments that bring yet another crack in their perfection. When she finally takes her readers to where this family began, at Leo’s wedding, where he sees his bride as “the loveliest, most reckless person he knew,” what pervades this event is “Spirit, grief, memory, and that, too, edited and faded over time.” 

Min has created a joyless world, with characters who spend their  lives “dancing around the truth.” The elegance of her sentences, the precision of her descriptions, the way she gives life to even those characters who exist in passing moments, all make Shanghailanders soar far above its soap opera possibilities, giving it the glitter and intricacy of a masterfully cut diamond set in bright platinum.~Janet Brown

Houses with a Story by Seiji Yoshida, translated by Jan Mitsuko Cash (Amulet Books)

Seiji Yoshida is a former employee of a PC game manufacturer who became a freelance Japanese illustrator and background graphic artist in 2003. He has worked on a number of video games and recently has designed the cover of books. He is also a lecturer at the Kyoto Univeristy of Arts and Kyoto Seika University. 

Houses with a Story is the English translation of his second book which was originally published in the Japanese language with the title ものがたりの家 吉田誠治美術設定集] (Monogatari no Ie : Yoshida Seiji Bijutsu Settei-shu) by PIE Books in 2020. It is a collection of his illustrations of imaginary houses.

Yoshida mentions in the Foreword that he has always been impressed by the buildings in the books and stories he’s read. He mentions “the hideout in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the hut in the Alps from Heidi, the Nowhere Hose Of Master Hora in Momo, and so many others”. He would read the stories and look at the illustrations over and over and would imagine the details of those various worlds. 

In Houses with a Story, he says, “To re-create my childhood self’s delight, I introduce unique homes within this book, all of which could easily turn up in stories of their own”. He has drawn more than thirty houses and the people that live in them. He also gives a lot of thought as to the location and time period for each building. 

Some of the houses featured in the book include the Kaidan-do Bookstore, a World Weary Astronomer’s Residence, the Meticulous Clockmaker, the Reserved Mechanic’s Cottage, the Post Office of the Dragon Tamer, and The Library of Lost Books, to name just a few. Many of the designs of the houses were meticulously researched while others were purely drawn from inspiration. 

One page is a full color illustration of the house from the outside. The other page shows a cut-away so you can look into the interior as well. He has imagined the type of person who lives in the house and gives a little background of the person and the story. 

The bookstore owner is a young man who “quit his steady job in the city and moved to this town, following his dream of owning a used bookstore”. The house is located on a hilly road that leads to the ocean. As the house is built on a slope, “its defining feature is the multiple levels that make up the interior”. 

Yoshida has also included a panel story about the Reserved Mechanic’s Cottage titled The End of the Day. There is absolutely no dialogue so he leaves it up to the reader’s imagination of what might be going on in the mechanic’s mind as he makes dinner and feeds his dog. 

Yoshida includes an illustration of his work studio and explains in detail where he makes his drawings. It is easy to visualize him at work as he includes the top of his work desk and the equipment he uses and also shows a top view of the layout of the room which he shares with his wife. 

Towards the end of the book, Yoshida provides concepts and commentary about each house included in this collection. For example, we learn that the house of the Meticulous Clockmaker is located in Japan and was built sometime around the nineteenth century. The interior of this house is based on a stationary store called Takei Sanshodo which can be seen at the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum in Koganei, Tokyo Prefecture.. Although it is an old building, he believes it’s appropriate for the present. Even today many old homes are renovated and given new life. 

The final section of the book is a full chapter on how one of his illustrations comes into being. It is titled Making of a Minor’s Engine House. He writes in step-by-step detail of how a drawing comes into being starting with “Creating the Rough Drafts and Sketches”, followed by “Color the Model Sheet”, and ending with “Color the Illustration”. 

Houses with a Story is more than just an art book. It is more than just a collection of unique houses. It is a book that will help you expand your imagination. Yoshida says, “The tale you weave for each house is entirely up to you, and nothing would give me greater pleasure than you finding yourself immersed in a wonderful story”. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)

Michael Ondaatje is almost legendary, a prolific writer with such creative energy and abundant talent that it’s hard to believe he’s reached the age of 83. Over the past fifty-nine years, he’s written twenty-two books: a book about film-making, a family memoir, seven novels, and thirteen books of poetry, including the recently published The Last Year.

Although this title sounds elegiac, these poems are not. They draw upon a life that Ondaatje has steeped in literature and enriched by living on several different continents. They celebrate the precise beauty of words and use imagery from Ondaatje’s first home, Sri Lanka. They are tender and sensuous, capturing moments with lovers and friends. And yes, there are eulogies that honor the memories of household animals who died old.

Above all, they are fragments of autobiography, told at a slant, never confessional, always alluring.

In his evocation of his Sri Lankan roots, Running in the Family (Asia by the Book, October 2007), Ondaatje mentions the kabaragoya, a monitor lizard the size of a crocodile, which an early explorer described as having “a blew forked tongue, which he puts forth.” A smaller relative of this lizard is prized because eating its tongue gives eloquence.” Both of these creatures are blended into one and become part of Dante in the poem Last Things. In an Italian piazza, a statue of Dante falls and the shape of a lizard “crawls out of shattered plaster, a blue rough tongue slithering…a finished book in his mouth.”

A similar echo is found in the poem Dark Garden, where a woman Ondaatje has not yet met but will someday love steps on a nail at the time he imagines one of his characters having a splinter pulled from her foot, “That faraway echo and coincidence” mirrors the final chapter of The English Patient when Kirpal and Hannah, separated by time and space, each see a household object fall at the same moment.

A man enthralled by language, Ondaatje, in his poem Definition, says “All afternoon I stroll the plotless thirteen hundred pages of a Sanskrit dictionary,” where he finds the word ansa, and gives it to the woman he loves, for “the warmth of that word for your shoulder blade.” The English patient springs into life in that poem, searching for the word that will name “that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck.”

In a mixture of poems and small essays, lives unfold. “The dyers who steal color out of the bark of trees to paint temples,” unnamed lovers who exist in a realm that’s “still all coal and smoke,” the dog whose death is “courteous and beautiful,” They all evoke memories of other stories, while breathing on their own and lingering in a new corner of the mind. “Nothing remains still in a story,” Ondaatje says to those readers who recognize shadows from his previous work. 

A Year of Last Things begins and ends with rivers, “the wet dark rectangle,” “all those echoing rivers.” And suddenly Lalla comes to mind, the glamorous, eccentric grandmother who often stopped her car to swim in a river, who stepped off her front porch one night and was swept into a flood that “was her last perfect journey.”

This is the gift that Michael Ondaatje always offers: each of his books brings new portions of beauty while taking us back into other wonders that he’s placed in our minds and hearts, sweeping us into an unending “perfect journey.”~Janet Brown

海峡の記憶：青函連絡船 (Kaikyo no Kioku : Seikan Rensakusen) by Asako Shirai (Kajisha) Japanese text only

Asako Shirai is a Japanese photographer. She was born in Hakodate, Hokkaido in 1951. Before the advent of the Seikan Tunnel that connects the islands of Honshu with Hokkaido, from Aomori City to Hakodate, the only way to travel to and from Aomori to Hakodate or Hakodate to Aomori was to take the Seikan ferry. 海峡の記憶：青函連絡船 (Kaikyo no Kiouku : Seikan Rensakusen) translates to Memories of the Strait : Seikan Ferry. The strait refers to the Kaikyu Strait that separates Honshu from Hokkaido. 

March 1988 marks the last day of the Seikan ferry service between Aomori and Hakodate. There were still seven ships in service at the time - the Hakkoda Maru, Mashu Maru, Yotei Maru, Towada Maru, Sorachi Maru, Hiyama Maru, and the Ishikari Maru. 

The Sorachi Maru was only a freight service ferry. The Hiyama Maru and Ishikari Maru were freight-only ferries but were converted into freight-passenger service. The other four ships were freight-passenger ferries from the beginning. 

A little history of the Seikan ferry service from 1960 onward is provided by Takashi Ishiguro. From 1946 to 1953, Ishiguro worked at the Ministry of Transport, General Bureau of Trade, Marine Division. From 1953, he was the Hakodate Railway Management Bureau Marine Affairs Division Manager. It was his job to design and oversee the safety aspects of the Seikan ferries. 

To understand the need for the safety of the ferries, Ishiguro says one must revisit the Toya Maru Disaster. On September 26, 1954, The Toya Maru sank during Typhoon No.15, also known as Typhoon Marie. Aside from the Toya Maru, four other ferries sank during the typhoon—the Dai Juichi Seikan Maru, the Kitami Maru, the Hidaka Maru, and the Tokachi Maru. 

From a total of 1,632 passenger and crew members, 1,430 people lost their lives, 112 people could not be found. Only 202 people survived. Out of the 1,089 passengers, 981 were lost, 108 survived. Of the 57 American servicemen, 50 died, 6 were unaccounted for, and only 1 survived. 

It was one of the worst ferry disasters in history. Ishiguro was assigned to design the new ferries and to make them safer so a similar accident would never happen again. Learning a bit of the history of how and why the new ferries were designed adds to the enjoyment of viewing the photographs taken by Shirai. 

As someone who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, one of the small pleasures of life was taking the ferry from Seattle to Bremerton. I had never given any thought to the people who work and run the ferries. However, with any form of public transportation, safety must always remain the top priority. 

Since 1990, the Seikan Ferry Memorial Ship [Hakkoda Maru] has sat in Aomori Bay as a Maritime Museum. My mother-in-law worked there as a receptionist for about ten years so I have taken the tour on many occasions. You would be surprised that the freight was carried directly by trains—some of the trains are displayed inside the ferry.

There are displays on the ship portraying life in Aomori during the Showa era. It startles some people because as you pass by some of the displays, the life-like figures start talking to you in the Tsugaru dialect. Even if you understand Japanese but haven’t lived or worked in Aomori, it is very difficult to understand what is being said. You can also take a tour of the Mashu Maru which sits at the harbor in Hakodate. 

There is still a ferry service between Aomori and Hakodate and it is much more economical than traveling by shinkansen, also known as the bullet train. After reading and looking through this photography book, you will have a new appreciation for how the ferries run. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Distant Heart by Sonali Devi (Kensington)

Sonali Devi’s novel A Distant Heart is the fourth in her series of Bollywood stories. It is set in the bustling city of Mumbai. The main characters are a young girl named Kimaya and a boy named Rahul Savant. 

Kimaya Kirit Patil is the daughter of a wealthy politician and his wife. Everybody calls her Kimi. Her name means “miracle” in Sanskrit and to her parents that’s exactly what she is. Her father has told her that her mother had given birth to seven other babies before she was born but only she, Kimi, survived. 

Rahul Surajrao is the son of a policeman. He is the oldest of three. His younger brother’s name is Mohit and his sister's name is Mona. Along with his Aie, which means “mother” in the Marathi language, they live in a chawl, a residential building similar to a tenement. 

The story is mostly told in the first person by the two main characters. However, Devi has the novel jumping from the present and past. Once you understand the development of the story, it gets easier to follow. 

Rahul’s father died in the line of duty. He was shot while protecting a high level politician. Rahul was only fourteen years old when his father died in his lap. The other officers around him told him, “He will be okay. Keep courage”. However, Rahul knew only terror. How could he “keep courage” knowing his father was not coming back after being shot a couple of times in the chest. At fourteen, it was now up to Rahul to take care of his family.

When Kimaya was eleven, it was discovered that she had a rare disease. Her body lacked the immunity to protect her from various pathogens and she was confined to living in a sterile room with a view of the ocean. She spends most of her days alone…until one day she spots a boy cleaning the windows on the outside. That boy would be Rahul and they would become good friends. In fact, for each of them, the other was their only friend.

Switching back to the present, Kimi was the recipient of a heart transplant two years ago. She becomes interested in knowing who her donor was. Her father explains to her a number of times that the donor wished to remain anonymous. The day Kimi receives her heart is the same day that Rahul lost one of his closest friends, a woman named Jen Joshi who worked in a clinic in one of the slums. 

Joshi had noticed that the names of organ donors on her list had been disappearing and it was Rahul who was helping her investigate it when she was killed by the leader of an organized crime boss, Asif Khan. This is the same man who had accosted Kimi earlier to show him her scar, asking, “Do you know where your heart came from?”. Rahul managed to shoot Asif who survived but is currently in a coma. 

Now, Asif has come out of his coma and has escaped the hospital. He has also threatened Kimi’s father because Kimi’s father was unable to stop the police from investigating the illicit organ-trading business. Ironically, Kimi’s father tried but the man heading the investigation was Rahul who refused to back down.

Devi’s story has an exciting blend of action coupled with romance. The story asks the ultimate question of its readers—a question of ethics. How far would you go to protect the one you love? Would you be willing to sacrifice others just to save your own flesh and blood? ~Ernie Hoyt

The Mantis by Kotaro Isaka, translated by Sam Malissa (Vintage)

Kotaro Isaka is one of Japan’s foremost mystery writers, along with Keigo Higashino and Miyuki Miyabe. A number of their books have been adapted into feature length movies and many of their titles have been translated into English. 

The Mantis became available in English in paperback for the first time in 2024. It was published by Vintage Books and translated by Sam Malissa, a Yale scholar who holds a PhD in Japanese Literature. He has also translated Kotaro Isaka’s books 3 Assassins, Bullet Train, and most recently Hotel Lucky Seven. 

The Mantis was originally published in the Japanese language as AX in 2017 by Kadokawa. It was nominated for the Bookstore Award in 2018 which was won by Mizuki Tsujimura’s Lonely Castle in the Sky (Asia by the Book, April 2023). The Mantis is the third book in Isaka’s Hitman series. 

The main character is Kabuto. An ordinary family man with a wife and a high-school aged son, Katsumi, he works at an office supply company. He started the job in his mid-twenties when his son was born and has continued to work there—but Kabuto has another job, a job he hasn’t mentioned to his wife or son. 

Kabuto is a contract killer. However, he has a strong desire to leave that particular profession behind. When he was talking to his son one evening, he says, “Do you know what the one thing I want to do most is?” Of course his son doesn’t know but Kabuto answers, “I want to worry about my son’s future. Whether it’s school, or anything. I want to rack my brains thinking about what path you should and shouldn’t take”. 

On his latest assignment, Kabuto teams up with a couple of other contractors who were given the same target. After the job is done, the assassins joke around with each other. The other two admire Kabuto for being a married man who continues to do this job. Kabuto shares a story about his wife that the other two find quite amusing. They tell him “The whole industry respects you” but add, “There are a lot of people who would be disappointed if they knew you were this frightened of your wife”. 

Kabuto often goes to a hospital in another part of town away from his own house and his son’s school. The clinic may seem like an ordinary clinic on the outside but the doctor who runs the place is also Kabuto’s handler. He advises Kabuto “to undertake this surgery”. In their line of business, they use codes and phrases that may sound normal in a hospital setting but have totally different meanings. “Surgery” means “target”. “Emergency operation” means the deed has to be done as soon as possible. 

Kabuto had promised his wife that he would go with her to their son’s parent-teacher conference but the “emergency operation” is to be held on the same day. Kabuto wants to refuse the “operation” and tells the doctor, “No more risky procedures”. He tells the doctor he wants to get out of the game. The doctor answers “Retirement requires capital” which Kabuto knows to mean the doctor will never let him retire. 

He reluctantly takes the assignment but consistently refuses other “risky procedures”. He also learns that the Doctor has taken out a contract on him. Now Kabuto must do everything he can to save himself and his family. 

Kotaro Isaka’s Assassins series never disappoints. There is a lot of action, there are many plot twists and you never know what will happen next. If you’re unfamiliar with Japanese mysteries, Kotaro Isaka’s books would be a good place to start. ~Ernie Hoyt

Kiki's Delivery Service (Volumes 1-4) by Hayao Miyazaki (Viz Media)

Studio Ghibli animation films have become popular worldwide, loved by many people around the world. Although the films are usually original stories, there are a few that are based on other works. 

Kiki’s Delivery Service is a film that was based on a novel written by Japanese children’s book author and essayist Eiko Kadono. The original title is 魔女の宅急便 (Majo no Takkyubin) which translates to The Witch’s Delivery Service. it was originally published in 1985 by Fukuinkan Shoten. This four -volume graphic novel adaptation of the book was written and drawn by Hayao Miyazaki. 

We are introduced to Kiki, a thirteen-year-old witch who is about to embark on a journey to become an independent witch. She is the daughter of the witch Kokiri and a mortal man, Okino, an anthropologist who studies witches and fairies. 

Kiki speaks in the first-person and tells us “I’m the witch Kiki. When a witch turns thirteen she has to take a journey to hone her craft!”. She has made her own broom and plans to leave on an evening when the skies are clear and the moon is full. Joining Kiki on her journey will be her pet and companion, Jiji, a black cat that can speak. 

Kiki’s mother offers Kiki her old and reliable broom but Kiki wants to use the one she made herself. Jiji also says that she should take her mother’s broom. An elderly woman says that Kiki can make a new broom once she gets settled into her new town. Then her adventure begins. 

Kiki heads towards the ocean and finds a bustling coastal city. it’s the kind of place she’s always imagined. The first person she meets and talks to in the city is the town’s clock-tower keeper who informs Kiki that nobody has seen a real witch in a long time. 

However, her first encounter with citizens of the city is the local police who reprimands her for nearly causing an accident. She is saved from the police when someone shouts “Thief!!”. It is a young boy who loves flying. He tells Kiki it was him who helped save her and would she mind teaching him how to fly. Although she is thankful for being saved, she finds the boy's demeanor to be rude and walks away. 

Kiki tries to find a place to stay for the night but wherever she goes, she’s asked about her parents or if she has any identification on her. She begins to have doubts about living in this big city and her cat Jiji suggests they look for a friendlier place. Then they meet Osono, the proprietress of a local bakery who offers Kiki a room in return for helping out in the bakery. 

As a new witch in a new town, Kiki must now find a way to make a living. After helping Osono by delivering an item a customer forgot, she returns with a message telling Osono her new delivery girl is quite special. Kiki knows the one talent she has that others don’t is the ability to fly. So she asks Osono if she could start a delivery service at Osono’s Bakery. 

The story is about the trials and tribulations of fitting into a new environment, making friends and becoming a responsible witch after a year of training. However, even with humans, witches have their ups and downs. The most serious possibility is losing their magical abilities. 

Kiki makes friends with a boy about the same age as Kiki named Tombo who has a love of flying. He is a member of the Aviation Club at his school. Although she feels comfortable talking to Tombo, she feels his friends look at her differently. She can sense that they see she is different. It’s after this encounter that Kiki discovers her magic is weakening. 

Will Kiki’s magical powers return? Will she be able to talk to her cat Jiji? When danger threatens and Tombo’s life is hanging by a thread, it takes all of Kiki’s power to conjure up the courage to face her fears and help her new-found friend. 

At its most basic, Kiki’s Delivery Service is a coming-of-age story. It is the story of becoming independent and finding the courage to face up to one’s fears in the face of danger. The story can be enjoyed by adults and children alike and perhaps will be able to teach the reader a lesson as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

Waiting to be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman (Penguin Press)

“No wall can stop the wind,” a Uyghur proverb says and Tahir Hamut Izgil knows this is true. In 1996, he is imprisoned for three years when Chinese authorities stop him as he leaves his home in Xinjiang to study in Turkey. Accused of “taking illegal and confidential materials out of the country,” this young poet has to rebuild his life when he‘s released just before the turn of the century.

He marries and makes a comfortable and secure living for his wife and two daughters as a film director for movies, television shows, and commercials. But his true vocation lies in writing poetry. Over the next twelve years, he nurtures this gift within a network of Uyghur writers.

Uyghur people have lived in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region for millennia, perhaps before the beginning of the Christian Era. Followers of Islam with presumably Turkish origins, most of them live in the capital city of Urumqi, as does Izgil. In recent years, the Chinese government has accused them of plotting separatism and when a spurt of violence erupts in Urumqi in 2009, the clampdown upon this ethnic group is swift and draconian. 

Mass arrests become routine, with Uyghurs accused of “fabricated crimes” and whisked away to re-education centers. Izgil is taken into police custody, extensively interrogated, and put under surveillance. 

In 2011, the government bans traditional Arabic greetings and orders people to change their names from those that have Islamic origins. The Chinese flag is raised over mosques. Radios are confiscated and banned from sale. Inspections of mobile phones routinely end in the arrest of the people who own them.

Izgil and his wife are called into police headquarters for fingerprinting, an ordeal that lasts three hours and includes taking blood samples, ‘voice prints,” and facial images. When asked about his religious faith, Izgil says he has none. When they’re finally released, Izgil’s wife, who has resisted any thought of immigration, says “We have to leave the country.”

They give away their copies of the Quran, they purge their phones and computers of anything that might be compromising, and they embark on a torturous, convoluted path that will lead them from their homeland. After a Uyghur academic is given life imprisonment under accusations of separatism, Izgil keeps warm clothing and thick footwear by his bedside in case the police come to take him away in the middle of the night.

“I wish China would just conquer the world,” one of Izgil’s friends says bitterly, “Then we would all be the same…not alone in our suffering.” Another says in a poem, “We came from nowhere else and we will not leave for anywhere.” Not long after Izgil and his family emigrate to the United States, this man is sentenced to 16 years in prison.

Once they are safely in another country, Izgil calls his parents but not even this message of reassurance goes unpunished. Soon after this, his mother’s phone and ID card are both confiscated. 

As they make another home in a strange place, “we burn with guilt,” Izgil admits, “Our bodies might still be here but our souls are still back home.”

Although this memoir is eloquent and illuminating, its narrative is told under a different timescape, twisting with personal history, conversations that are scrupulously detailed, and a wealth of poems. Reading it gives not just another perspective but a whole new form of psychology, one that was constructed to survive a world that could well have been invented by Kafka, one that readers are privileged to experience at a comfortable distance.~Janet Brown

The Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai, translated by Sam Bett (New Directions)

Osamu Dazi is the pen name of Shuji Tsushima, a Japanese writer who was born in the rural town of Kanagi, currently a part of Goshogawara City, in Aomori Prefecture. His most famous novel is 人間失格 (Ningen Shikkaku), translated into English as No Longer Human. 

The Flowers of Buffoonery is a prequel to No Longer Human and became available for the first time in English in 2023. It was first published as 道化の華 (Douke no Hana) in the literary journal Japanese Romanticism Vol.1 No.3 in 1935. It was published in book form as 晩年 (Ban’nen) in 1936 by Sunagoya Shobo. 

The story features Yozo Oba, the protagonist of No Longer Human, convalescing in a seaside sanatorium in Kanagawa Prefecture after an attempted double suicide with a young woman. The woman perished but Yozo was saved by a passing fisherman. 

Yozo Oba is staying at a place called Blue PInes Manor while recuperating from his failed suicide attempt. The story takes place over four days with Yozo’s friends and family coming to visit him. They try to keep Yozo in good spirits and avoid talking about Sono, the woman he was planning on dying with. 

The director of the sanatorium and the nurse that works there also drift in and out of Yozo’s room to see how well he is doing and to check his mental stability. While staying at the sanatorium, Yozo decides to write a book with Yozo Oba as the main character. 

The story opens with Yozo reading his own lines from his book he is trying to write. It starts off with “Welcome to Sadness. Population one.” He tries to tell the story about how and why he survived. He continues to write in the first person, “It was me—these are the hands that pulled Sono underwater. In my insolence, I prayed for my salvation in the same breath that I prayed Sono would die”. 

Yozo Oba isn’t the only patient at Blue Pines Manor. When he was brought in, there were thirty-six tuberculosis patients. Two of them were in critical condition, eleven had mild cases, and the rest were in remission. 

Yozo was staying in Room 4 of the Eastern Wing of the sanatorium, a place reserved for “special cases” such as himself. There are six rooms in the Eastern Wing, two of which are currently vacant. In Room One is a male college student. In Rooms Five and Six are a couple of young women. All three are recovering patients. 

Although the story is rather short at just shy of one hundred pages, the emotions displayed by Yozo and his friends and family show Dazai’s understanding of the human condition. 

Yozo Oba is of course based on Dazai’s own life experiences and he often makes fun of how people react to different situations. He makes Yozo act lighthearted when he is around his friends who can joke about a serious subject like suicide and yet Yozo’s innermost thoughts are quite the opposite of how he acts. 

It’s difficult to sympathize with Yozo Oba. You cannot know if he’s being serious or if he just has a chip on his shoulder and is a bitter person at heart. If you have also read No Longer Human, you will know what becomes of him. 

Reading Dazai’s stories can be quite depressing at times and yet he manages to add a bit of humor so the reader won’t give up in disgust. Even if you cannot sympathize with Yozo Oba or Osamu Dazai, you can’t help but to continue reading to find out what happens in the end. ~Ernie Hoyt

Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang (Random House)

In 1978 a Taiwan manufacturer established the Taiwan Handbag Factory in an isolated corner of Guangdong Province. It was the only foreign factory to have come to the small town of Dongguan, a place without railway connections or roads. It hired local labor but soon needed to augment that supply with migrant labor from rural China. Two years later Deng Xaoping established the first of China’s Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen, fifty miles from Dongguan. 

By the 1990s, Dongguan had become a manufacturing hub, with factories for electronics and computer parts standing beside the ones that made toys, clothing and shoes. It became famous for its “factories and prostitution,” a city “built for machines, not people.” Instead of streets, it boasted ten-lane highways.

In 2004, Leslie T. Chang, a bilingual reporter for the Wall Street Journal, came to Dongguan. Her goal was to report on migrant labor in that city, a tsunami of workers who had been streaming to its factories for two decades. She stayed in Dongguan for 1-2 weeks every month for two years.

A young woman herself, who is fluent in Chinese, Chang found it easy to gain the confidence of young women who worked in the factories, who at that time made up 70% of the labor force and one-third of the migratory flow. Homeless until marriage, by virtue of their gender these girls were never considered permanent parts of their family households. When parents realized their daughters could become financial assets in factory towns, they encouraged the girls to take that leap.

Chang follows the lives of two girls, Min who left home at 16 and Chunming who came to Dongguan when she was just a year older. Through them she chronicles the progress that could be made by girls who have left their villages.

Although social pressure may have sent these girls to work in factories, what keeps them there is freedom and mobility. If they dislike their workplace, they change jobs, going to “talent markets,” places where job fairs meet speed dating. Rapid-fire interviews are conducted to find workers who are “female, pretty, and single,” the younger and the taller the better. Lies and subterfuge are common, girls who have lost their identity cards and procured another go by a new name for as long as that’s necessary. Men are less desirable job candidates in this fast-paced employment arena and are usually confined to maintenance positions, while young women find their way into office jobs.

Within a year, Chunming goes from making 300 yuan a month to 1500. Min, after having her identity card, mobile phone, and her money stolen from her, goes from living on the streets to “building a new life from scratch,” getting a job in a Hong Kong-owned handbag factory where her salary is high enough to make her the dominant figure in her rural family.

Factory girls are the leaders of a social revolution. The money they bring to their parents give them a position of power. At the Lunar New Year, they are the ones who present envelopes of money to their elders and household decisions rest with them. As they gain positions of status in the workplace, they often outrank the men they date and use that power to their advantage. Chunming’s stock phrase when finding a man didn’t measure up to her standards is “Let’s just be friends, then,” which she often pronounces in a matter of minutes.

Pragmatic and ambitious, these girls set personal goals that dominate their time away from their jobs. Chunming keeps a diary and studies Ben Franklin’s Thirteen Rules of Morality. When direct sales come to China, promising a route to prosperity, speaking skills are a path to success and young women flock to classes that give them that ability. English is so in demand that the Taiwan-owned Yue Yuen plant that manufactured Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, offers English classes onsite at their gated facility, a place that also has a kindergarten, a movie theater, and a hospital.

Girls who had come from small farms find they need polish to achieve success and attend “academies” that tell them how to dress, eat, smile, pour tea, use the telephone, and when it was necessary, how to drink. (“Do you know how to make cocktails?” one of Chunming’s friends asks Chang.)

Chang wrote Factory Girls twenty years ago. It prompts a deep curiosity about what became of these upwardly-mobile, ambitious young women and if their effect on society continues to hold its power. A sequel is screaming to be written, if only to continue the stories of those indomitable girls, Min and Chunming. ~Janet Brown

Other Rivers by Peter Hessler (Penguin Press)

Of all the books I’ve read about the Covid years, whether they are fiction or memoirs, there’s only one I would ever reread. This is one that was written in 2020, Wuhan Diary by the sixty-five-year-old author, Fang Fang (Asia By the Book, December 2020). First published online from January to March of 2020, then translated into more than twenty languages, including English, and published by HarperCollins, this journal showed the day-by-day progression of the virus and the means by which it was suppressed, described in deeply human terms. For me, nothing else has measured up to Fang Fang’s reportage, for which she has been almost erased. She is no longer published in China and her name can no longer appear in that country’s press, nor can she be interviewed by any outlet. Despite this silencing, she remains hopeful, telling another writer, “I believe it won’t be like this forever.”

In his latest book, Other Rivers, Peter Hessler fails to reach the standard set by Fang Fang, although he was also living in China at the time she published her writing. A man who first came to China in 1996, Hessler has lived and worked in that country for over ten years. In the autumn of 2019, he returned with his wife (Leslie Chang, author of Factory Girls, who has matched her husband’s duration in China) and their nine-year-old twin daughters. 

Hired by Sichuan University in Chengdu, Hessler is greeted with a sardonic observation. Noting that he came to work in Cairo just as the 2011 Arab Spring with its subsequent massacres began and then returned to the US when Trump win the 2016 election, a writer at a dinner party predicts that with Hessler’s return to China, “something bad is probably going to happen.” Within three months, Covid erupts in Wuhan.

As a journalist, Hessler had a stunning opportunity to bring this time to life and at times he does that. His account of his daughters’ introduction to Chengdu Experimental Primary Elementary School where they are the only foreign students and the only ones who have no knowledge of the Chinese language, is fascinating, although given less attention than it might have received. The interruption that Covid imposes is perhaps partially to blame but the girls have a full year in the school after that. At the end of the book, Hessler admits his children’s time in a Chinese public school was the most challenging part of our time in Chengdu,” something a reader would never guess from his accounts of that “challenge.”

To be fair, he has a few challenges of his own, ones that are prompted by what seems a lot like naivete. Since English language classics are available in Chengdu, there are a wide assortment of books from which to choose, so it seems peculiar that Animal Farm is one of the two texts chosen for his class on English Composition. Instead of glossing over Orwell’s political satire, Hessler teaches it in tandem with 1984, a recipe for disaster.

In his nonfiction class, he decides to turn its center-point to journalism, sending his students out into the city to observe and report. When one of his students does a profile on her VPN dealer, Hessler identifies this as “edgy research,” but then has her read it out loud in front of the class. “I wasn’t sure if Yidi’s subject matter was too sensitive,” he says, “...by the time she was halfway finished, I was convinced that I had put her at risk.” Considering his “over ten years” in China, this seems negligent to the point of stupidity.

Later, when Wuhan is no longer under lockdown, Hessler visits and interviews Fang Fang, although this is forbidden. But why worry? By the time this is published, he’s back in the US. At the end of March, 2021, his request for a contract renewal is denied by Sichuan University and he and his family return to the peace of rural Colorado.

A writer without a selectivity index, Hessler has no ability to focus. Everything he has ever seen or experienced he tosses in a gigantic salad, recounted in a random fashion that is painfully staccato. His return to the city and the students that he depicted in his first book, River Town, is thrown into his time in Chengdu, no doubt in an effort to increase the page count in Other Rivers. Although he achieves over 400 pages, at least half of them could have been cut to make this a better book, presenting an inevitable question. Where was his editor? ~Janet Brown

Bangkok Babylon by Jerry Hopkins (Tuttle Publishing)

Among any of us who have spent time in Southeast Asia, a common observation is prevalent—that nobody is more tedious than an old white guy who’s rooted to a Bangkok bar stool. Jerry Hopkins, a man who has occupied many a bar stool in Bangkok (and other places), not only disputes that point of view, he refutes it. Telling the stories of men he has met on twenty-five different bar stools in Thailand’s capital, he proves his point of view. At least during his lifetime, some of the most intriguing people on earth were sitting in some of the most notorious bars in Bangkok. In Bangkok Babylon, he tells their stories and there’s not a boring one in the entire book.

Only a few of these are ones Hopkins wasn’t told directly by the profile subjects. He never met the man who has been called the inspiration for the Marlon Brando figure in Apocalypse Now, Tony Poe, nor the pianist who played for years at the best hotel in Bangkok and who turned out to be a vicious pedophile. In the case of the pianist, Hopkins quotes the lengthy confession that Eric Rossner sent to a Thai newspaper and briefly describes a videotape Rossner had made of time he spent with a ten-year-old girl. Tony Poe’s story comes from Poe’s close friend and colleague, Jack Shirley, a man who had been a self-described “journeyman killer” employed by the DEA and who worked with Poe in at least one successful assassination. 

These stories are counterbalanced by twenty-two others that are much less lurid but equally fascinating. Hopkins’ best friend, whom he terms an “urban guerilla priest,” is a man who’s devoted his life to the largest Bangkok slum, a rebel who knows how to say the Mass in Hmong and knocks back bottles of Heineken. Father Joe is a warrior who has battled the Thai power structure successfully enough that the slum he lives in now has a school, a 24-hour medical clinic, a credit union, and housing for orphans and abandoned children. His story is followed by interviews with the man who made Lonely Planet’s guide to Thailand a bible to travelers all around the world and with the college drop-out who turned abused elephants into musicians with their own symphony orchestra.

A man who once made his living by dressing up as Friar Tuck and selling advice at Renaissance Faires before making a life for himself in Thailand tells Hopkins “If you’re going to get a story out of me, you’ll have to pull and twist, and then make it up, because it’s not there.” He was wrong. If Hopkins had one religious belief, it was “Thou shalt not make things up.” Disdaining Somerset Maugham as “a predatory gossip,” Hopkins had a thousand untold stories that he refused to write, because, he said, “they aren’t mine to tell.” Every living man whom he interviewed for Bangkok Babylon was given the right of refusal. They each read their profile before the book was published and all of them approved what had been written.

The result is an oral history told by a group of eccentric expats to a reporter who likens himself to Forrest Gump, a man in the right place at the right time, who decided when he was young that he’d “travel the world, meet interesting people, and write about them.” Fortunately, one of the “interesting people” whose story is included in this book is Hopkins himself, a journalist who wrote for Rolling Stone, booked “kooks” for Steve Allen’s television show, had the first head-shop in Los Angeles, and was on the New York Times bestseller list for his biography of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, which is still in print since its debut in 1980.

Of Bangkok Babylon, Hopkins says somewhat wistfully, “ this book may be a celebration of a part of Southeast Asia that is sliding into the past…” Yes. It is—and a fine celebration at that.~Janet Brown

Five Point Someone: What Not To Do at ITT by Chetan Bhagat (Rupa Books)

Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone is his first novel, which was published in 2004. It follows the life of three university students studying at IIT, the India Institute of Technology, the author’s alma mater. The book was also adapted into a major motion picture and released as Three Idiots in 2009. 

The story is mostly narrated by Hari Kumar. He tells the reader from the beginning “what this book is not”. He says with a little mirth that “it is probably an example of how screwed up your college years can get if you don’t think straight”. He also reinforces the fact that “the book will not help you get into IIT”. 

On his first day at IIT, Hari meets his housemates from Kumaon hostel, Alok Gupta and Ryan Oberoi. Alok had dreams of becoming an artist to follow in his father’s footsteps, but his father had an accident when painting a ceiling mural, became half-paralyzed, and could no longer work. Alok also has an older sister that the family must marry off eventually, so they need money for her dowry. As Alok is the male of the family, he gives up his dream and decides to become an engineer so he can support his family. 

Ryan on the other hand has rich parents. They have their own business but Ryan is not close to them. Although they send him letters weekly, he has not answered any one of them. He also despises the university’s rules and thinks of many different ways to beat the system. 

The three first meet on the roof of the hostel. As freshmen, they are being hazed by a couple of seniors. and are made to take off all their clothes. Hari and Alok are told to get on all fours, while Ryan is forced to flex his muscles and make warrior poses. When a senior brings back a couple of empty coke bottles for nefarious purposes, Ryan takes quick action against his upper-level classmen, saves Hari and Alok from total embarrassment, and the three become fast friends. 

The three students are overloaded with work and need to be prepared for pop quizzes but Ryan talks his friends into seeing a movie instead of studying. The following day, their fears are realized as one of their teachers give a pop quiz. All three score below average, Ryan having the lowest score. To get themselves motivated again, Ryan suggests they go jogging. Hari and Alok are not in the best of conditions to go running but Ryan has a way of getting them to agree to whatever he thinks up.

While they’re out jogging, a young girl learning how to drive actually hits Hari. Instead of reprimanding her, Hari instantly falls in love with the woman. It is only later that he finds out she is the daughter of the head of the engineering program. 

If you’ve been a college student, you can guess where this is going. Yes, Hari can’t get her out of his mind and Ryan helps think of ways to not only beat the system but tries to help Hari win the girl of his dreams. 

And then it’s time to check their grades. From the results, students could determine their grade point average, or GPA, on a 10 point scale, 10 being the highest with the average hovering around 6.5. Hari scores 5.46, Ryan is at 5.01, and Alok at 5.88. These less than average GPAs can affect their future and the grades are posted for all the students to see.

Five-pointers are not only looked down upon by other students but by the professors as well. Will these three underperformers be able to graduate? And what will become of Hari’s relationship with the daughter of the head of the Mechanical Engineering Department?

The book is sad and funny at the same time. The attitudes of people in regards to degrees from prestigious universities compared with no name or not so famous colleges and universities persist to this day. It’s still prevalent in Japan where I currently live, a country where many women’s eligibility as marriage partners consists of the three 高 (ko) - 高学歴・高身長・高収入 kogakureki (graduating from prestigious university), koshincho (height), and koshunyu (high salary). 

Higher education isn’t for everyone and if you are able to get into a name-brand university, then the student should be proud of that accomplishment and not worry about their GPAs so much. Unlike IIT, graduating from a prestigious university in this day and age doesn’t guarantee a good-paying job either.

That’s just my opinion although I barely made it through my university years and ended up working in a bookstore for twenty-five years! ~Ernie Hoyt

Mistapim in Cambodia by Christopher Pym (Hodder & Stoughton)

Not many people traveled to Angkor Wat in 1954. The French War in Vietnam, which had spilled into Cambodia, had just ended. Although it remained a French colony until the end of the year, Cambodia was too absorbed with preparing itself as a newly independent nation to concern itself with tourism.

It was a Thai prince who organized a sightseeing expedition to Angkor and a member of this group was a young Englishman who was working in what was at that time called Malaya. At 25, Christopher Pym was still young enough to swerve from secure employment into charting his own adventure and when he fell in love with the glories of the ancient Khmer empire, this is what he did.

He began an intensive study of Cambodian history and the Khmer language, moving to Phnom Penh in 1956 without a safety net, determined to “carve one’s own set of circumstances,”

In Malaya, his life had been comfortable. The business firm Pym had worked for in that country had provided everything--”car, house,cook, gardener, cocktails, and so on.” This isn’t the way he wants to live in Cambodia; he finds a wooden house on stilts on the outskirts of Phnom Penh and almost immediately comes down with dengue fever. Moving back to the city, he rents a small room that is next to a shrine for a Chinese deity. His domestic comforts are limited to a bed, a table, and a wooden crate, but unlike his first home, this place has electricity and a rudimentary bathroom.

Learning Khmer and teaching English gives Pym the life he wants, with freedom to travel in search of “the heart of the Khmer people.” After an evening of opium-smoking at the home of a French acquaintance, he decides he isn’t going to find the heart of Cambodia in the company of Europeans in Phnom Penh and he begins to explore village life.

While urban Cambodians are jaded when it comes to foreigners, Pym is a delightful novelty to rural communities who are more than willing to let him witness and chronicle their ways of life. Although he has fleeting contacts with Cambodia’s royal family, Pym becomes close to people of less exalted lineage and he much prefers to spend his time with them.

Perhaps his favorite brush with royalty is when he’s a spectator at the funeral of one of the princes of the realm. The royal tomb has gone unused for many years and “a combined attack of blunt pickaxes and old crowbars” fail to open the entrance--until a member of the King’s family grabs a pickaxe, throws his jacket aside and leads “a continuing onslaught,” royal privilege be damned.

But any prince of the realm pales beside Pym’s friendship with Om, “a kind of Khmer teddy-boy.” Westernized but “not a delinquent,” Om opens village life and its daily life in a way no prince could ever have done. Because of him, Pym is given free access to Buddhist ordinations, engagement ceremonies, and “ a positively Aristophanic marriage-feast.”. He describes all of these events in photographic detail and with deep respect, without a trace of condescension or British snark.

Even in Phnom Penh, which clearly isn’t his favorite place in Cambodia, he only allows himself a tiny tinge of bitterness when he comes across “a milkbar neon-lit,” and thinks, “Well done, Cambodia, the same as everywhere else at last.”

Pym was lucky--he took up residence in Cambodia when ceremonies and rituals and village life still mirrored what was carved in bas-relief on the walls of the Bayon and Angkor Wat. He journeyed to the distant reaches of the kingdom by oxcart during the rainy season to view the citadel of Bantei Chmar, before looters dismantled it “stone by stone.” And he was invited to see a performance of the Royal Khmer Ballet within the royal palace, watching “the eloquent hands of the Khmer dancers” as they performed The Abduction of Sita from the Ream Ker, the Khmer Ramayana.

There are hints of change in Pym’s accounts--electric lights replacing the gigantic candle that illuminates the months when monks retreat to their temples, an American “education center” being built in the countryside, and rebel insurgents preventing a journey to a village near the Thai border. As the “temptation to go to Samrong just for fun increased in proportion as the police insisted upon my not going there,” Pym, respectful as always, doesn’t break his word.

The only facetious part of this book is its title, which Pym at the outset assures readers “was chosen by the publishers.” Although he can’t resist flashes of humor, he writes with a scrupulous lack of judgment that an anthropologist would envy and gives meticulous glimpses of Cambodian life that are worthy of Zhao Daguan, back in the days of the Angkor Empire. Thank you, Mistapim.~Janet Brown

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei by Sachaverell Sitwell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

Take one well-born aging Englishman, with a classical education that has centered around Europe, throw him into Asia, and watch him flounder when he’s not in places that were once part of the British Empire. The intellectual consternation that engulfs this sort of gentleman should be amusing but his excellent education keeps that from happening. Instead pomposity takes over, with rare moments of enchantment that veer on the naive. 

For a prime example of this, try to read Sachaverell Sitwell’s The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei.  A member of England’s hereditary peerage and the grandson of an Earl, Sitwell went to Eton and Oxford and was first published when he was twenty-five. This volume of poetry launched a career of writing over fifty books, almost all of them devoted to European art, music, and architecture. When he began to age, he turned his attention to other continents, venturing to Japan and Peru, but never deviating from his Eurocentric point of view.

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei is a misleading title which desperately needs a follow-up subtitle along the lines of And Other Travels in Asia, since only one brief chapter is devoted to what is now spelled “Banteay Srei.” This is probably a mercy because Sitwell is ill at ease in that lovely place or anywhere else in the Angkor complex. That he devotes only five chapters to Cambodia is a relief but that’s almost enough to sink this book.

Sitwell starts off in a sprightly fashion by falling in love with Bangkok. His time there is brief and comfortable, with a room in the Oriental Hotel and trips to places that aren’t yet tourist cliches--The Temple of the Emerald Buddha, floating markets which are still plentiful and utilitarian in the early 1960s, a night at a Thai boxing match. There he concludes that muay thai is “more serious and less amusing than the Sumo wrestling in Japan” and worries that an injured boxer may never be able to fight again. He’s delighted by the broken crockery that ornaments temple chedis and is impressed by the air-con in a Chinese restaurant that has his wife begging for a towel to use as a shawl during dinner. It’s sweet to see him fall in love with Thailand’s capital, which he explores without comparisons or judgments. Those he saves for Cambodia, where he seems determined to denigrate the glories of Angkor.

Although Sitwell confesses he came to Angkor “after half a lifetime of anticipation,” the heat, “of a kind and degree never experienced before,” and the humidity which “was something excessive,” appears to have flattened his enthusiasm. Although he immediately claims “the approach to Angkor Wat is on a grander scale than anything in the living world” and is later awed by the Bayon’s face-towers, he swiftly begins to describe the “sham buildings” constructed by people whom, he claims, had no conception of how to build a spacious room. He lapses into memories of blitzed London during World War I and begins to long for the “cooing of doves” and a “wood of bluebells.” If it weren’t for his frequent quotes of Zhou Daguan’s eyewitness accounts of Angkor, there would be no substance to his observations, which conclude with “this is a whole dead city…too big even for poetry.”

Things don’t improve in Nepal, where Sitwell becomes obsessed with the sexual nature of temple paintings. He tears himself away from erotic art long enough to write a detailed description of “a living goddess in Katmandu,” a heavily made-up child of twelve, the sight of whom made him decide she was “wonderfully, and a little pruriently exciting.” Once again he wallows in comparisons to Greece, Italy, and Spain and it’s impossible not to wish for the ability to slap him.

India, since the Empire had left it twenty years before, is a sad disappointment to Sitwell, who mourns that hotel dining rooms no longer serve proper English meals and that Delhi’s “houses with pillared porticos and nice gardens” are no longer inhabited by British families. Except for the brilliant colors of women’s clothing, Delhi is a disappointment but he consoles himself with a visit to the Taj Mahal and the Pearl Mosque, which he manages to view without his customary litany of European comparisons. Jaipur’s gardens, however, “did credit to English seedsmen,” and the Italian lakes immediately come into play when he goes to Udaipur. At Bombay he’s thrilled to find streets with English names and statues of British luminaries which might prove to console him when he discovers the Caves of Ajanta “are now too far gone with age to give pleasure.”

At this point anyone who’s persisted in reading Sitwell’s observations would be justified in saying the same of him. It’s a vast relief when he goes to Ceylon and becomes enthralled with its beauty. Perhaps his lack of jaundiced criticisms is because in Columbo he’s able to have a cocktail. “After a sojourn in India the inventor of Singapore Slings deserves commendation.”

Sitwell, sadly, does not--in fact the only way that his book should be read is in the company of several Singapore Slings as anesthesia against his pomposity. The reader is warned, as Sitwell’s Victorian forbears used to say--stock up on gin and limes before entering his realm of boring ethnocentricism.~Janet Brown

Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung (Riverhead Books)

Forgotten Country is Catherine Chung’s debut novel. It is a story about family bonds, secrets and betrayals. It is about a family that drifts apart and comes together. It is a highly emotional roller-coaster that will take you on the ups and downs of life. The book received an Honorable Mention for the 2013 PEN/Hemingway Award.

The story centers around a South Korean family who emigrated to the United States and made a life for themselves in a city in Michigan. The father was fleeing political persecution and brought with him, his wife and two young daughters, Jeehyun and Haejin. The girls were given American names at their school to blend in more with American culture and they became Janie and Hannah. 

Before the family moved and the night before Hannah was born, while Janie’s mother was in the hospital, along with her father, Janie was left alone with her grandmother. It was the first time she was away from her own home without her mother. The room her grandmother put her in was large and scared her. When her grandmother checked in on her, Janie was crying. She cried so hard, she had a fever. Janie still wouldn’t stop crying until her grandmother shook her and said, “Jungshin chalyuh” which meant pull yourself together.

Her grandmother said she was too old to be crying. “You’re an elder sister now, and you have new responsibilities”. The grandmother then tells her about how she also became an elder sister. The day Hannah was born, her grandmother also told her, “In our family, a sister always dies.”.

Now, years later, in the U.S., Hannah has disappeared without a trace. She cut all ties to her family. Her father has told Hannah that he and her mother are planning to move back to South Korea and that Janie needs to find Hannah before they leave.

Janie’s father told her that he has cancer and that a doctor recommended a specialist in his home country who handles his type of cancer. The doctor said there was nothing more he could do. The father and mother plead with Janie to find Hannah before they leave. Thus starts Janie’s journey in which she will learn more about her family and herself. 

Janie does track down Hannah in California. They have an awkward reunion but Janie did her duty and informed her sister that their father was dying of cancer and that their parents sold the house in Michigan and would be landing in Korea right about the time they were having this discussion. 

Their argument and Hannah’s attitude brings out the worst in Janie, who tells her, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to come.” Hannah of course doesn’t believe her but Janie can’t stop herself from saying, “Seriously. They just wanted me to tell you they sold the house and they’re gone. They’re done with you.”. 

Forgotten Country is definitely an emotional roller-coaster, not only for the characters in the book, but for the reader as well. It makes you question what is love and what is loyalty? It makes you think about what you would do if confronted with family secrets and how you would deal with it in this poignant and very strong story about family ties. ~Ernie Hoyt

Feasting, Fasting by Anita Desai (Vintage)

Feasting, Fasting is a novel by Indian writer Anita Desai. It is the story of complex family relations. The story is told in two parts. The first part deals with the family living in a rural town in India. The second part of the book is about the son of the family trying to make his way through life as a university student in Boston, Massachusetts. 

The first part focuses on the eldest daughter, referred to as Uma throughout the book. Her father has sent her to a convent school and although she tries as hard as she can, she has been held back for two years already. Uma also has a younger sister named Aruna. Then, the mother gives birth to a son.

Suddenly, the family’s focus is on the first son. Uma’s mother tells her there is no need for her to go to school anymore. She needs to stay home and help care for her younger brother, Arun. 

Arun is treated like a king. He gets the best meals, the largest portion, the best cuts of meat which he would rather not eat. He gets the attention of his parents wno continue to treat their eldest daughter more as a servant than a family member. The father is determined to have his son study at a university in the United States. However, it wasn’t the parents who did all the things for Arun, they made all their demands on the eldest daughter. 

After the father retires from work, Uma’s parents are very demanding of her. Uma thinks of them as MamandPapa, MamaPapa, PapaMama. For her, “it was hard to believe they had ever had separate existences”. Before she could finish one chore, she was always asked to do another. 

The parents try to marry off Uma on three different occasions. The first man told the family he was more interested in Uma’s younger sister. The second time, the father accepts a proposal from a family for Uma only to learn that the family has spent the dowry given to them but canceled the engagement. The third time, Uma is married. Then her father finds out that the man was already married and had a family in another town and used the dowry to help his ailing business. 

It may be a big cultural difference but Uma’s family and those who live in her village have old-fashioned ideas and believe in tradition. Girls are raised to be married off and boys are to be given the best education possible. 

Instead of blaming themselves for their shortsightedness, the parents believe everything seems to be Uma’s fault. They become even more demanding of her. As it often occurs in families with Western ideals, the parent’s treatment of their eldest daughter borders on child abuse or negligence. Uma comes off very timid and doesn’t seem to have a mind of her own. We know she does but she is not assertive enough to defy her parents. 

IN the latter half of the book, we travel to the U.S. Arun is studying in Massachusetts but he is having as much difficulty as Uma had at home. He wants to spend his time in the U.S. in anonymity. Coming to the U.S., he “at last experienced total freedom of anonymity, the total absence of relations, of demands, of requests, ties, responsibilities, committments”. He was just Arun, “he had no past, no family, no country”. And he prefers to keep it that way. 

Desai’s prose does make for easy reading and the book is beautifully written. However, there really seems to be no coherent plot. The story consists of a series of events depicting ordinary life in a fictional Indian family.  Nonetheless I found the family to be the epitome of a stereotypical Indian family that seems to verge on the comical. It would be laughable if the parents weren’t so despicable to their eldest daughter. To be honest, I was exhausted after reading this novel. I wanted to smack Uma’s parents into the twenty-first century, but that just may be my American upbringing. ~Ernie Hoyt