Electric Vehicles is a dense and chart-laden monograph; it is not for the faint-hearted. What makes it worth the effort, however, is its focus on developing countries (rather than the main players of China, the US, Europe and Japan) and that the “developing countries” in question are all in Southeast Asia. In addition to industry…
Masters of Sleep by Zhu Yue, a Beijing-born author with both a legal and philosophical background, is one of three published collections of short stories, and the first translated into English. Translated by Jianan Que and Alyssa Asquith, it is an esoteric, ironic book. Some stories read as if written in the Victorian era. Others…
World War II, as Hans Van De Ven writes in his new book Blood Dawn, reordered Asia’s geopolitics. During the war, national independence movements in Asia whose origins dated back to the First World War and in some cases earlier, emerged stronger in the wake of Japan’s defeat. The surrender of Japan to the Allies…
The title of Prakhar Vishwani’s debut, Wedding on the Maharaja Express, evokes the classic mystery Murder on the Orient Express. Both, indeed, feature an eclectic cast of characters and a murder on a luxurious train, yet unlike Agatha Christie’s romantically disinterested detective Hercule Poirot, Vishwani’s protagonist Vir Malhotra is head over heels in love with…
There is an irresistible temptation to read filmmaker Adachi Masao’s life as if it were itself a movie. A Japanese New Wave filmmaker disappears into Lebanon, becomes associated with the Japanese Red Army, spends decades in exile, is imprisoned, and eventually returns home as one of the most controversial figures in postwar Japanese culture. It…
On 9 August 1945, an American plane dropped a nuclear bomb over Nagasaki at 11:01 am local time. It exploded 47 seconds later, three kilometers northwest of its planned target. There is no consensus on the number of people killed, but immediate death estimates range from 22-75,000—with another 60,000 injured. Author Kyoko Hayashi was one…
Few novelists dare to take on the backdrop of COVID-19 in China but Isabelle Li does not shy away. In The Northern Tomb, the government’s severe regulations are woven into the background of a story where Mr Zhao, an elderly widow enlists the help of 51-year-old Sister Zhu, a retired cleaner, to be his full-time…
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin know each other well. Since 2013, when Xi completed his ascent to the top of the People’s Republic of China, they have met more than 40 times. Perhaps no other two heads of state currently in office have conferred as often. This, the pair maintains, has fostered an unusually close…
The life of the Japanese poet Chūya Nakahara (generally referred to by his given name, Chūya) followed an archetypal pattern of tragic genius ending in early death. Chūya was born in 1907 and, by his own account, began writing poetry in response to the death of his infant brother, when Chūya was seven. After a…
Once a major Hollywood star, George Abercrombie’s career has quietly cratered after a string of box-office flops. He has moved to Mumbai to be near his wife, Sweety Sahota, India’s biggest actress. George is accustomed to having things under control. Mumbai in Abir Mukherjee’s new novel, The Pinnacle, has other plans for him. During his…
The battle lines around Emperor Aurangzeb’s posthumous reputations are clearly drawn. On one side, the monumental five-volume history by Jadunath Sarkar over a century ago defined the last great Mughal as a bigot, a fanatic, a bloodthirsty tyrant, and the gravedigger of the empire. Moreover, some claim that the brother whom Aurangzeb defeated and executed…
The unusual word “limerence” in the title of Momo Yamaguchi’s debut novel is never in fact used in the book itself. It is a term coined by a psychologist in the 1970s and which hasn’t yet entered common parlance, requiring it to be defined on the book’s back cover—“the state of being obsessively infatuated with…
Born one year before the Republic of China, Qian Zhongshu was to become one of its most revered fictional chroniclers. The cast of Fortress Besieged—the only novel he ever completed—characters were to become stand-ins for a generation of the Republic’s fumbling (pseudo-)intellectuals. The novel follows one Fang Hung-chien, starting with his 1937 return from Europe…
For most readers and filmgoers, the emotional architecture of the final Qing court was built not by historians but by Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 visually intoxicating film The Last Emperor. It fixed certain ideas about the enigmatic emperor Puyi in the public imagination: a spectral figure wandering through a museum of vanished power, emotionally stunted, politically…
The Book of Damascus, an anthology of ten short stories and one non-fiction piece, gives English-speaking readers a chance to see the world through the eyes of Damascenes. The non-fiction piece, I Write to You from Damascus, by Khaled Khalifa serves as a preface. Khalifa, the internationally-renowned author of novels such as In Praise of…