The City and Its Uncertain Walls is Haruki Murakami’s fifteenth novel since his first, Hear the Wind Sing, published in 1979. His most recent is unmistakeably his, unmistakeably an addition to his body of work and his own special brand of magic realism as practiced by the South American writers Jorges Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as Japan’s Kobo Abe and Yoko Ogawa, and writers like Mo Yan, Salman Rushie, and Toni Morrison. Murakami’s approach is metafictional magic realism to the extent to which he explicitly questions the nature of realism and truth throughout the novel. Murakami’s readers will not be surprised.

One of the publisher’s most recent of its national anthologies, The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories provides portrayals of the country in the years 1905 to 1945, when the nation was under imperial Japanese rule, as well as glimpses of life in the Republic of Korea (ROK, aka South Korea), which came into existence in 1948 in the zone of US military occupation one month before the establishment in September that year of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, aka North Korea) in the Soviet zone.

For fans of Korean film, the uncompromising film director Lee Chang-dong needs little introductions. With a brief but powerful filmography of six films made between 1997 and 2018, he has braved controversial topics to critical acclaim. Burning, his 2018 comeback film after an eight-year hiatus, was shortlisted for an Oscar and won numerous other awards. Lee also served as South Korea’s Minister of Culture from 2003 to 2004. Less known is that Lee began his career as a writer, penning novellas and short stories for literary magazines.

Does the world need a 700-page book about one people within the Indian Union? Considering that Gujaratis number 65 to 70 million, you could argue that they deserve as much attention as, say, the French. Indeed, Ted Zeldin’s “The History of French Passions” only covers the period 1848-1945 in twice as many pages. Western readers accept the availability of over 260 current books on French history, while having access to less than 20 on the history of India in its entirety, and only a couple of titles covering Bengal or, say, Tamil Nadu.  The challenge author Salil Tripathi faces is to justify his exhaustive survey of the Gujaratis, a topic not hallowed in historiography in the way that the French are.

Some years back as a graduate student enrolled in a mandatory DEI training for college teaching, I distinctly recall raising a question about dealing with the unabashed misogyny, depictions of sexual violence and child abuse bursting out of the primary sources so often used in the history classroom. Encountering More Swindles from the Late Ming: Sex, Scams, and Sorcery, triggered the memory, especially when faced with an array of humorous yet disturbing stories about everyday social relations in 17th-century China.

China’s history under the Communist Party has been demarcated, like geological ages, into neat, self-contained phases. There is the Great Leap Forward (1958-62); the Cultural Revolution (1966-76); and Reform and Opening (December 1978-1989). The bits outside these branded groups of years, including the first nine years of CCP rule, can feel a little fuzzy, while the links between phases are often overlooked.

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.