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A 2025 round-up of reviews of 79 works in translation from Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thai through Bengali, Malayalam and Hindi to Arabic, Yazidi, Kyrghyz and French: fiction, poetry, non-fiction, children’s books and classics.
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Active in the 13th century, poet Matsuo Basho has been a cornerstone of literature globally since the late 19th century when the word haiku was used to cover traditional “haikai” and “hokku” (more about which further down). Largely due to 19th-century Realism, Western onlookers and practitioners have made much of direct personal experience in haiku;…
Tae Kudo is a neurotic 46-year-old woman who has become something of a hypochondriac in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Some of her experiences will be deeply familiar to most readers—like her caution about masking or disinfecting her groceries. Others, like her hyperfixation on conscious capitalism, the environmental impact of her actions, or…
That Kazushige Abe’s Mysterious Setting is difficult to read has nothing to do with the prose, which in Michael Emmerich’s translation is pacey and accessible, but is instead due to the novel’s relentlessly grim narrative. In a story replete with bullying, gaslighting and exploitation, the foreshadowing that often accompanies the end of a section becomes…
How did Asia fare in the best books’ races in the English language press? On the whole, it seems better than last year. The following (unscientific) sampling uses a broad definition of “Asian” in it’s selection, but nevertheless, the number of books about Asia, by Asian authors, in translation seems to have increased in the…
Coming from a literary family, Hajra Masroor and her sister Khadija have been referred to as the Brontë sisters of Urdu fiction. While Khadija was known for her novels, Hajra was a writer of short fiction and plays. A new translation of a collection of Hajra Masroor’s work, The Monkey’s Wound and Other Stories, by…
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,…