Kotaro Isaka’s thriller Bullet Train moves as fast as the train—the Shinkansen—it takes place on and is named after. Already destined to be a movie starring the not-very-Japanese Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock (one imagines some changes en route), Bullet Train, a guilty pleasure if there ever were one, is something of a cross between Murder on the Orient Express and Train to Busan.
Polly Barton is a Japanese-English translator with an extraordinary output, including three novel-length projects published in English translation in the last eighteen months. Fifty Sounds is her memoir, chronicling her year teaching English on Japan’s remote Sado Island and the way it changed the trajectory of her life.
Opium’s role in the history of East Asia has been well-documented, most notably perhaps in Julia Lovell’s definitive 2011 book The Opium War. This, and others like it, deal with the issue mostly from the perspective of the consuming countries, in particular China; Thomas Manuel’s Opium Inc. is noteworthy in focusing just as much on the producer: India.
Resource extraction has been integral to the economy of Myanmar’s borderlands for decades. One of the most valuable of these is jade, mined in northern Kachin state and then smuggled over the border into China. In Until the world shatters: truth lies and the looting of Myanmar, Daniel Combs depicts this extraction, the cost it imposes on civilians and the myriad of uneasy business relationships between parties nominally at war with each other.
We think we know the history of China’s opening to the outside world. Maoist China was closed off, until Deng Xiaoping decided to reform the economy and open up to international trade, leading to the economic powerhouse we see today.
Anthony Barbieri-Low starts his book comparing ancient Egypt and early China by saying it was a somewhat off-the-wall thing to do.
In her debut novel The Illuminated, Anindita Ghose weaves together stories of personal grief and struggle with larger socio-political afflictions. The personal stories of the women in the book are timeless and universal; these are stories of self-effacement and self-discovery that feminist writing deals with anyway. But Ghose refreshingly sets the stories in contemporary India and connects them with the impact that the rise of fundamentalism is likely to have on women. Apart from this well-balanced personal-political equation, Ghose offers a hopeful vision that, fortunately, all is not bleak: the women in the novel strive to find a political space that protects their personal space.