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…
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…
A number of female war correspondents and photographers covered the Korean War for the American media, although much of this history has faded from public consciousness. Eve J Chung resurrects the memory of these journalists in her new novel, The Young Will Remember, an engaging story that revolves around Ellie Chang, a Chinese American war…
Asako Yuzuki came onto the English literary scene with her best-selling novel, Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder, based on the true story of a female serial killer. Her latest novel, Hooked: A Novel of Obsession, also translated by Polly Barton, explores female friendship. The story may not be as frightening as that of…
Sertac Karan, a Turkish-Kurd and the protagonist of this absurdist black comedy, is a would-be writer who is alienated from society and much given to procrastination. From childhood, his exorbitant imagination shines at creating outlandish characters, which, when he is an adult, will become actual delusions, as his fantasies invade and undermine conventional reality. First…
Eka Kurniawan’s The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks follows the coming of age of Sato Reang, a mischievous boy growing up in a small Indonesian town, whose life moves between childhood pranks, religious pressure, friendship with the deeply pious Jamal, and the consequences of choosing rebellion over obedience. From the very beginning, Sato Reang announces his…
War, in No Man River, is an endless affair. Sprawling from the 1950s to the 1970s, the novel follows a close-knit cast of characters in a northern Vietnamese village from the end of the war for independence from the French colonial power to the war between north and south Vietnam. As fathers, brothers, sons headed to…
The Osaka-based Hasegawas used to be a model family—happily married, two sons, a daughter, and a dog. But when the elder son Hajime dies at the age of twenty, their lives start falling apart. Each reacts to loss differently: Kaoru, the younger son and the narrator of the story, leaves to study in Tokyo but…
In 2023, University of Minnesota Press released a translation of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. The two novellas (published as one volume with a thorough explanatory afterword by translator Jeffrey Angles) add the often-forgotten backstory to one of the world’s most iconic monster movies, often credited solely to the imaginations of director Ishiro Honda and…
Originally published in Japan in 1964, and now translated for the first time into English, Kobo Abe’s The Traitor starts with a writer’s visit to a country town of Akkeshi. There he learns from an innkeeper, Fukuchi, the story of three hundred convicts who escaped into Hokkaido after the end of the brief Boshin War,…
The Korean word “han” is difficult to translate precisely into English, but the concept revolves around a profound sadness, regret, resentment and a loss of a collective identity that arises from historical injustice, such as occupation, war, and separation. It is, in other words, a generational trauma with Korean characteristics. Lisa Lee’s debut novel American…
Jackson Alone is a singularly unique novel that subverts expectations with a cast of characters who are each vividly imagined, performing confusing and surreal acts in a Twilight Zone ethereality. Written by Jose Ando—a winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize—and translated by Kalau Almony—known for his translations of unique and intense stories—Jackson Alone is a…
Karan Mahajan’s ambitious third novel, The Complex spans roughly fifteen years of Indian family life, from 1980 to the mid-1990s. It charts the Chopra clan of Modern Colony, North Delhi, through the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, the rise of the BJP and the Mandal Commission agitation against caste-based affirmative action….
Few institutions in India have shaped the imagination of the nation as profoundly as the railways. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong places this vast network of tracks, workshops, stations and employees at the centre of a sweeping narrative that follows one woman’s life alongside the evolving story of modern India. Moving from the decades after Independence to the…