Born of a Swiss mother and an Indian father and raised in England, Meira Chand’s novels have been set in Japan, Singapore, and India, and a couple have been adapted for the stage in London and Singapore. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she lived in India. Her recent book, The Pink, White…
Seicho Matsumoto was one of Japan’s most celebrated mystery writers —with two dozen novels to his name from the late 1950s, at a time when Japan was rebuilding after the war until just before his death in 1992—but only in recent years his work has been translated into English. Point Zero, translated by Louise Heal…
Somewhere in Tamil Nadu, there is a small village with “a golden four-lane highway near it but not a single tamarind tree.” Here, the novel’s unnamed narrator spends his days loitering around town and smoking cigarettes. This routine—and everything about life as he knows it—changes with the arrival of Kamala, a widowed mother, a schoolteacher,…
Therapist Haesoo Lim used to appear on television to provide her professional opinion on matters in the news. But after speaking about a famous male actor, her career took a nosedive when the actor committed suicide. Haesoo not only lost her job, but her marriage also fell apart. Kim Hye-jin’s new novel Counsel Culture, translated…
Set in the metropolis of Kolkata, A House of Rain and Snow describes the struggle of a section of middle-class Bengali society to cope with the effects of globalization during the early 1990s. It tells of their passion for art and culture, which too was affected by changing times. The author, Srijato, an eminent Bengali…
In his Akutagawa Prize-winning Cannibals, Shinya Tanaka doesn’t shy away from dark topics, dealing with crippling poverty, violence and sexual abuse in an often matter-of-fact way. Perhaps the author’s candor is part of the reason that Cannibals (a literal translation of the original Tomogui, though the original has a secondary meaning of ‘mutual destruction’) received…
Janet Poole, a professor at the University of Toronto, in Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories has translated into English a collection of works by Choe Myong-ik, a writer whom she calls in her introductory essay an “exquisite architect of the short story form”. Following her essay, Poole presents nine stories, five from the…
Examining the omnipresence of grief and revolution in South Korea for women and the queer community, as well as the whole nation after the sinking of the MV Sewol in April 2014, Hwang Jungeun’s dd’s Umbrella presents twin novellas from the perspective of two distinct narrators.
Eric Arthur Blair once wrote that he was born into the “lower-upper-middle class”, having cachet but no capital. His father had been a sub-deputy opium agent in India, where Blair was born in 1903; his French mother was the daughter of a Burmese teak merchant.
How is a reviewer, faced with (yet another) excellent short-story collection, supposed to convey to readers a convincing rationale for “why this one?” To note that this author is Kazakh is necessary but insufficient; if diversity alone were the criterion, one would need an entire year to cycle through books from every country, territory and…
If Wong Kar-wai were to write a screenplay for a post-Handover story, along the same lines as his classic films set in the 1960s and 1990s, it might look like Sheung-King’s new novel, Batshit Seven. The pen name of author Aaron Tang, Sheung-King writes a raw and gritty story of a twenty-six year old called…
Given Amin Maalouf’s Lebanese origins, one might suppose that the Antioch in the title refers to the Levant, but it is in fact a small island, part of an isolated archipelago off France’s Atlantic Coast. (The French title, Nos frères inattendus, “Our unexpected brothers”, telegraphs the story better). Alexandre, a French-Canadian cartoonist, shares the island…
As Comet Hyakutake passes Earth in March 1996, four friends experience an array of puzzling events: the dead reappear and the living disappear. Daryl Qilin Yam’s Lovelier, Lonelier begins in Kyoto, where the paths of Isaac Neo, Tori Yamamoto, Jing Aw and Mateo Calvo Morales first intersect, and where the trajectory of their lives change…
If one seeks to characterize “Asian-American writing” as something other than just the ethnicity of the author, one might well land on Gina Chung’s short story collection Green Frog as a sort of case-in-point, if not a model.
Apocalypse narratives from the West tend to relate to the end of the whole world, rather than just a region or a country. Aliens, climate change, zombies, nuclear wars—the scale of these narratives is global. When Indian voices do come to these themes, they more often than not come across as very rooted in Indian…