From the author of The Green Phoenix comes a riveting tale of female friendship, honor, and sacrifice for love, set in 17th century China and featuring the intertwined stories of three of the era’s most renowned courtesans, escorts skilled in music, poetry and painting who could decide themselves whether or not to offer patrons bed…
Xu Xu (1908-1980) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s. His popular urban gothic tales, his exotic spy fiction, and his quasi-existentialist love stories full of nostalgia and melancholy offer today’s readers an unusual glimpse into China’s turbulent twentieth century.
Hong Kong at the beginning of a new millennium—a teeming city where ritual, religion, the spirits of the dead and the spirit of enterprise meet and clash. For Reini “Kim” Kranich, a young German aid worker obsessed with death, Chinese underwear, Emily Dickinson and cockroaches, it’s a place of fragile hopes.
From the unique standpoint of an American woman who married into a Japanese family and has lived in Japan for more than thirty years, Rebecca Otowa weaves enchanting tales of her adopted home that portray the perspective of both the Japanese and the foreigner on the universal issues that face us all—love, work, marriage, death,…
We all belong somewhere: a place of our birth, the origin of our being. But there are those who belong to nowhere, an existence without a motherland, or circling in-between, as if in bardo. The Tibetan Suitcase is a story of the peripatetic life of the protagonist, an Indian-born Tibetan.
It is 1931 in colonial Singapore. A Chinese bondmaid of fifteen stands trial for her aunt’s murder. Mei Mei, born on the inauspicious double seventh day, feels her doomed destiny taking over.
In a society rife with conflict and a world on the edge of extinction, who should we turn to for answers: society’s strongest or weakest? This is the question Takuji Ichikawa, one of Japan’s most imaginative and unusual authors, poses in The Refugees’ Daughter, a magical modern parable for our troubled times.
At the dawn of the Ming Dynasty, the emperor will do anything to ensure the future of his empire. Building the Forbidden City in fulfillment of his father’s dreams is only the beginning. But few people share the emperor’s vision.
Cheng-Ming, a Taiwanese American, rummages through the used-book stalls and market bins of Taipei. His object is no ordinary one; he’s searching obsessively for accounts of ghosts and spirits, suicides and murders in a city plagued by a rapist-killer and less tangible forces. Cheng-Ming is an outsider trying to unmask both the fugitive criminal and the…
The Foley Artist: Stories is the much-awaited debut by Ricco Villanueva Siasoco—an incisive, probing work for fans and readers of the Filipino America brought vividly to life in the fiction of Elaine Castillo and Mia Alvar.
Wild Boar in the Cane field introduces a world of magic realism, in which a fly-covered baby girl, Tara, is found and raised by two mothers in a community rife with rituals and superstition. As she grows, Tara pursues acceptance at all costs. Saffiya, her adoptive mother, and Bhaggan, Saffiya’s maidservant, are victims of the…
Nainai has lived in Shanghai for many years, and the time has come to find a wife for her adopted grandson. But when the bride she has chosen arrives from the countryside, it soon becomes clear that the orphaned girl has ideas of her own. Her name is Fu Ping, and the more she explores…
After fleeing a disastrous teaching job (and a bad gambling habit) in Boston, Lindsey starts teaching English in Hime, a small fishing town in Japan. One morning, while trying to snap the perfect ocean sunrise photo for her mother, she slips off a rock at the edge of Toyama Bay, hits her head, and plunges…
In 1932 a new Asian country suddenly came into being in northeastern China. It was named Manchukuo, and it had been created as a result of the so-called “Mukden Incident”, in which Japanese soldiers had detonated a small charge of dynamite on a Japanese-built railway line and then claimed that Chinese dissidents had done it.
A Japanese American war hero has a secret. A secret so awful he’d rather die than tell anyone—one so entwined with the brave act that made him a hero that he’s determined never to speak of the war. Ever.