Of the many questions Japanese American internees were asked before they would be released from the World War 2 camps were Questions 27 and 28. Question 27 asked if men were willing to serve in the US military and Question 28 asked internees to renounce their loyalty to Emperor Hirohito. The interrogation of minority groups…
Histories of the Korean War (1950-1953) published in the United States have been surprisingly numerous for a conflict known as America’s “forgotten war”, but few books have appeared in English on the division and occupation of Korea by the Soviet Union and the United States (1945-48). Fewer still have focused on what happened in Korea…
One day Hana Ito, a forty-year-old part-time cashier at a deli shop, clicks on a link to an article detailing a recent crime. She suddenly finds herself wondering whether she might know the culprit. Reading the article brings back memories from twenty years ago, ones she has been desperately trying to forget but from which…
Cultural Mavericks traces the rise of independent bookselling in China over the last twenty years. That such a rise should merit a two-hundred-page academic study is, at first glance, counter-intuitive; this, after all, has been an era in which online bookstores and other digital reading solutions have, in the west, made independent bookselling seem an…
Gooday Nagar is a collection of short stories about the people (or, better, “characters”) of and around the eponymous fictional Indian town. If this sounds a bit like RK Narayan’s classic Malgudi Days, that’s no accident; one of the stories even references it. As a stylist, author Maithreyi Karnoor is hard to pin down. She…
In 2020, when the pandemic forced the world into lockdown, M Lin—who had moved to New York City from Beijing first as a film student—began writing fiction. The result was the stunning collection of nine stories titled The Memory Museum. These stories touch upon a wide range of experiences confronting China’s post-90s generation: seeking a…
“The Persian learned men,” wrote Herodotus in his Histories, “say that the Phoenicians were the cause of the feud.” Historians have been trying ever since to understand the series of wars that set Europe and Asia against each other, going back to the Trojan War. In The Race for Universal Monarchy, Ebru Turan argues that,…
Trauma echoes differently on the prairies. In her debut novel, Inheritance, Jane Park follows a Korean immigrant family whose father’s hidden and unspoken past shadows their Canadian-born children, unfolding not in the urban centres typical of immigrant stories, but in the stark towns of remote, rural Alberta. As the book opens, New York attorney Anne…
Shefalee Vasudev’s Stories We Wear unpacks the contradictions behind image and appearance in the vast and diverse land that is India. Vasudev’s approach to her subject is encapsulated in a chapter about the homespun fabric once championed by Mahatma Gandhi which she titles “How Khadi Became Uncool”. She interviews several hands-on designer-entrepreneurs who are deeply committed…
Ichiyo Higuchi, a contemporary of Anton Chekhov, Henry James, O Henry and Colette, may well be the most acclaimed and influential writer you have (perhaps) never heard of. Revered in Japan (she appeared in the ¥5,000 banknote for two decades this century), she is far less well-known in English than either late 19th-century European writers…
In one sense the title of Xiaobing Li’s biography of Chinese Admiral Liu Huaqing, China’s Mahan, is somewhat misleading because the author concludes that Admiral Liu has more in common with the onetime commander of the Soviet Navy Sergey Gorshkov than with the American naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Admiral Liu himself stated…
Miyamoto Musashi (ca 1583–1645) was a heroic figure of Japanese history, a master swordsman revered as a kensei, or “sword saint.” Although he was certainly a real person renowned for his swordsmanship and self-cultivation through the martial arts, little is known about his life. His work A Book of Five Rings offers insights into his…
Julia Kristeva is one of the most formidable minds in contemporary literary and cultural theory, the Bulgarian-born, Paris-based intellectual who gave us Powers of Horror, a 1980 study of abjection that remains a landmark of psychoanalytic criticism, who coined the term “intertextuality”, who spent decades making psychoanalysis and semiotics speak to each other in increasingly…
In one of the cases of history not so much repeating itself as rhyming, the current trend of Chinese Americans moving to China, either for opportunity or to avoid perceived threats, is hardly a new phenomenon. Historian Charlotte Brooks tells such a story from a century ago in her new book, The Moys of New…
First published anonymously in March 2014 as a series of blog posts, Lady No is Kim Hyesoon’s latest collection of poetry translated into English. These posts were written during the most politically significant years of South Korea, when the ferry MV Sewol sank, killing 304 people, including 250 high school students. The event and the…