Kōhaku, the annual singing competition between the red and white teams, is a popular New Year’s event in Japan. In One Hundred Flowers, mother and son gather to celebrate the holiday at home by watching the program and eating dinner—a poignant reminder of how their relationship has changed over time. As a single mother, Yuriko was solely responsible for her son’s upbringing, but as the only child, Izumi increasingly finds himself taking care of his mother now as her memory begins to deteriorate.
In his book Tianjin Cosmopolis, Pierre Singaravélou remarks that “The history of modernity is a history of possible futures as much as a study of the processes of modernization.” Thanks to a new translation from the original French, English readers now have a chance to consider one possible future of China that never came to pass. Hewing to primary sources and refraining from simple narratives, Singaravélou details the agency and dynamism of the late Qing response to Western intrusion.
China, famously, built the Great Wall to defend against nomadic groups from the Eurasian steppe. For two millennia, China interacted with groups from the north: The Xiongnu, the Mongols, the Manchus, and the Russians. They defended against raids, got invaded by the north, and tried to launch diplomatic relations.
Initially evoking the sterile chill of a dystopian sci-fi tale, with horse-riding jockey robots and humans replaced by automation, Cheon Seonran’s A Thousand Blues quickly reveals itself as something far richer: a thoughtful exploration of humanity’s uneasy coexistence with technology, as well as the contradictions of a society that both creates and undermines its own systems of care.
In Sanjena Sathian’s new novel, Goddess Complex, women’s bodies are reduced to the idea of their divine if not interchangeable—wombs. The protagonist, Sanjana Satyananda (the stark similarity in names between the author and her character is no coincidence) is a thirty-something burnt-out academic who feels intense alienation toward motherhood. She spends the course of the novel hopping from America to India, trying to stabilise her increasingly volatile sense of self in a world that prizes her fertility and criticises her choices.
Set in West Bengal, Aurko Maitra’s debut novella The Spider grapples with the human predisposition to violence, to unmediated crimes of rape and murder. Maitra has spent part of his career as a journalist in this state of east India known for endless political violence, which, like clockwork, occurs as local elections approach and politicians with deep pockets hire gangs of mercenaries to instigate riots and raid opposing Party strongholds. He has interviewed both victims and perpetrators in the area, and from these interviews, The Spider was born.
An illuminating portrait of how Shanghai’s Catholic community surged back to life after the Cultural Revolution—and of a Church divided between allegiance to the Vatican and loyalty to the Communist party-state.
It’s a brave step to have a coward as your protagonist but acclaimed author Vivek Shanbhag’s unlikeable creation proves to be a memorable device for exploring power, patriarchy and politics in contemporary India.
The Kims, of North Korea, are perhaps the 21st century’s most successful family dictatorship—if only due to sheer longevity, having run North Korea for the almost eight decades since the country’s post-war founding. Kim Il-sung led North Korea for over half that time, from its founding in 1948 to Kim’s death in 1994.
By the time Emperor Shōmu’s daughter came to the throne in 749 CE the country’s economy was in ruins, bankrupted by Shōmu’s temple-building projects. Famines and epidemics put an unbearable burden on the peasants. Meanwhile the Buddhist establishment grew stronger and stronger.
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