From the look of the cover design and the description, readers may think that Mizuki Tsujimura’s novel Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon is yet another example of Japanese healing (or comfort) fiction. Most Japanese healing novels are slim with an inviting cover in soft pastels. The stories center around lost individuals who hope to find happiness in their unfulfilling lives. And they often make use of magical realism. Tsujimura is one of Japan’s most highly-regarded mystery and fantasy writers and her best-known novel in English is the young adult fantasy Lonely Castle in the Mirror. Her entry into healing fiction makes sense, yet the beloved and award winning author’s book is different and more layered than stereotypical healing novels, as well as physically more substantial at almost 300 pages in Yuki Tejima’s English-language translation.
Author: Susan Blumberg-Kason
Radha Vatsal specializes in mysteries set in World War I-era New York City. Her latest, No 10 Doyers Street, is set a decade before that in 1907 New York City when mayor George B McClellan had grand plans to build new parks and bring safe drinking water to residents of the city. One of these plans included bulldozing Chinatown so it could be turned into one of these planned parks. The star of her book is an Indian female newspaper reporter named Archana Morley who finds herself covering more than one story in Chinatown. The result is a descriptive, engaging thriller set in the dark alleys of New York’s Chinatown more than a hundred years ago.
Miyoung has left her home in Japanese-occupied Korea to join her older sister in Kyoto to study. As what would be World War 2 begins to loom, and anti-Korean sentiment rises, Miyoung is caught between the need to pass as Japanese and a romance with an activist.
Ukrainian-born nurse Kateryna Ivanonva Desnytska became a Thai princess at the turn of the 20th century as wife of the Siamese prince Chakrabongse Bhuvanath. This story, with echoes of that of King Chulalongkorn and his English tutor Anna Leonowens (immortalized in The King and I) , has obvious potential for artistic adaptation: it was made into a ballet in 2003. A few years earlier, it provided the basis for a historical novel by V Vinicchayakul, the pen name of Vinita Diteeyont, a prolific Thai novelist. In her version, A Passage to Siam: A Story of Forbidden Love, only recently translated into English by Lucy Srisupshapreeda, Kateryna becomes the young Englishwoman Catherine Burnett.
Karissa Chen’s debut novel, Homeseeking, a sweeping family saga set across eight decades, is informed in part by her grandfather’s story. In her author’s note, she writes that she became interested in Chinese exiles in Taiwan a couple decades ago, just after her grandfather’s death. One of the images from her grandfather’s belongings was a photo of her grandfather crying before his mother’s grave in Shanghai. He was especially distraught because he hadn’t seen his mother since he left China just before the Communist victory in 1949 and was unable to return more than half a century later, after his mother passed away.
Debut author Kim Jiyun majored in creative writing at university, later studied television screenwriting, and found inspiration for her first novel in an unlikely place: a neighborhood laundromat. It’s paid off. Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat has become a bestseller in Korea and now it’s been translated into English by Shanna Tan, a prolific translator based in Singapore who works in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Novels set around the Jewish Bene Israel community in India are as rare as hen’s teeth, but Sheela Rohekar’s 2013 Hindi novel, Miss Samuel: A Jewish-Indian Saga, translated this year into English by Madhu Singh, must be one-of-a-kind. Rohekar is perhaps the only Jewish author in India who writes in Hindi. Her novel reads as two stories in one: the fictional saga of six generations of a Bene Israel family from Amdavad, the Gujarati name for Ahmedabad, and a more general history of the Bene Israel, the earliest group of Jews to settle in India some 2000 years ago, thought (by some) to be a lost tribe of Israel.
The Soyo Workshop is a pottery studio outside of Seoul that takes its name from the words for wedging clay and firing clay in a kiln. Yeon Somin has set her second novel, The Healing Season of Pottery, in the Soyo Workshop and the quaint neighborhood where it’s situated. Similar in structure and tone to Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop and other comfort novels, the familiar coffee and cats are placed with a pottery studio that is new and different.
Tara Isabel Zambrano has published widely in literary journals, mainly stories that center around mothering in one fashion or another, usually set in India or with Indian characters in the diaspora. Now she’s compiled these stories and more in Ruined a Little When We Are Born, which continues with the theme of mothering.
Bunkong Tuon’s debut novel Koan Khmer is a coming of age story of a young Cambodian immigrant, Samnong Sok, who ultimately finds himself on a writer’s journey, not unlike the author himself.
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