In her 1944 essay “Writing of One’s Own”, Eileen Chang wrote “I do not like heroics. I like tragedy and, even better, desolation”. Twenty-one years earlier, in his speech “What happens after Nora leaves home?”, discussing the ending of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Lu Xun raised the awkward question of what will become of a woman after her liberation if she has no viable means to support herself materially.
Of all the examples of Cool Japan’s global reach—from sushi to Hello Kitty to anime and manga—perhaps the most iconic of all is Hokusai’s print, The Great Wave. The huge curving wave has taken on a life of its own, reproduced and recreated on coffee mugs and tea towels and across the internet in the myriad ways that mark 21st-century creativity. However, as is well known, the woodblock print was one of a collection of 36 studies not of the sea, but of Mount Fuji. Andrew Bernstein follows Hokusai by placing the mountain right at the center of his new book, surrounded this time by all of Japan: religion, literature, culture, hunting, gathering, politics and even diplomacy.
In 1924, the Al-A‘waj, also known as the Crooked, set sail from Kuwait on a trading journey around the Persian Gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz, to Western India and, eventually, back to the Gulf. Dhows had sailed this route for centuries—and would continue to sail it for a few more decades still.
The Ganges may be more famous, but the Brahmaputra is arguably a far more geopolitically important river. By the time it reaches Bengal, it forms the largest delta in the world, having crossed through Tibet, India and Bangladesh. This river, and the people who live along its banks, are the subject of River Traveller, the new book by Sanjoy Hazarika. Hazarika has spent decades writing about India’s Northeast. A journalist, researcher, and filmmaker, he wrote Strangers of the Mist back in 1994, a landmark work on the region’s fractured politics, history, and identity, along with several other books. His newest work blends is part travelogue, part reportage, shaped by decades of fieldwork. Through a series of vignettes, Hazarika follows the river’s trajectory through Tibet, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam down to Bangladesh.
I was born in Bombay and lived there, not far from the Gateway of India, for the first sixteen years of my life. I left the city by the bay soon after turning sixteen. When I returned decades later, I barely recognised it. The city and I had both gone through dramatic changes in the interim. So it was with real anticipation that I picked up The Only City, an anthology of stories about the city of my birth, edited by Anindita Ghose.
In Western collective memory, Moscow, Peking, Pyongyang, Havana and Hanoi are remembered as centres of socialist revolution during the tense decades of the Cold War. Yet another Asian capital is often overlooked: Jakarta. After all, Indonesia was home to the largest non-ruling communist party in the world, and the country’s left-nationalist President Sukarno was a leading figure in the global anti-imperialist movement.
Across fifty-odd flash stories (particularly short pieces of fiction) in The Woman Dies, Aoko Matsuda and translator Polly Barton lean into the weird, nitty-gritty world of womanhood. For the most part, there is no immediate throughline connecting the stories—and their rich inner worlds—to each other. Yet eventually, the lines blur enough for images of women, glittery face highlighter, and lingerie frills to appear, blending the stories into a sparkling collection. All the stories play a part in building Matsuda’s world, where girlhood is a state of mind that can never be outgrown; it is at once a curse and blessing, the only thing the world values and despises in equal measure.
V Vinicchayakul, the pen-name of Vinita Diteeyont, is prolific by any measure, reportedly with more than one hundred novels under her belt, many adapted for television and film. Only a very few have made it into English; had not she been championed by translator Lucy Srisuphapreeda, perhaps none would have been.
In 2016, Ludovic Orlando, a genetics researcher, embarked on the Pegasus Project, an ambitious endeavor to use genetics to discover the origin of the modern horse. There were plenty of theories as to who domesticated horses first–but Ludovic’s team came up with their answer: They emerged on the western Eurasian steppe around 4200 years ago.
Natsuo Kirino has a real gift for seeing the worst in people. Her characters cheat, steal, and murder with an apparent lack of remorse that makes them (one hopes) unrelatable for most, but they are at least sympathetic in being partially the result of their bleak environments. Kirino’s hopeless worlds of economic and social pressure suit the hard-boiled detective genre she has made her home, but with Swallows, the Japanese author attempts something different. Dispensing with thriller tropes, she tells a grounded story of human commodification that proves a sobering indictment of consumerism in Japanese society.
You must be logged in to post a comment.