Kiyoko Murata’s A Woman of Pleasure is a story of Japan’s pleasure quarters in 1903 and 1904. Fifteen-year-old Aoi Ichi grew up on a rocky volcanic island, “the sort of place where stumbling upon a folkloric demon would come as no surprise”. She always expected to grow up like her mother, a strong swimmer and…
Futaro Yamada, discovered by the hugely influential mystery writer Edogawa Rampo, was hugely prolific in his lifetime, with many of his stories being adapted to film, such as Nagisa Ōshima’s thriller Pleasures of the Flesh (1965) and Samurai Reincarnation (Kinji Fukusaku, 1981). If Yamada’s name is known in the Anglophone world, however, it is usually…
At first glance, Sophie Wan’s debut novel, Women of Good Fortune, set around a glamorous wedding in contemporary Shanghai, may seem like an archetypal romantic comedy of girl meets boy, girl loses boy, and girl gets boy at the end. But it soon becomes evident that the novel is instead a more sobering story that…
South Asian fiction based on the Partition of 1947 is generally concerned with specific incidents of trauma and violence. Urdu writer Ali Akbar Natiq’s Naulakhi Kothi, recently translated into English by Naima Rashid, adds a different dimension to the existing ways of narrating fiction. Its story begins several years before the partition and ends several…
In Maria, Just Maria, a woman born in the dense humidity of Kerala, with talking pets and petty saints as her friends, finds herself in a psychiatric hospital. The novel steps backwards, beginning with Maria as a recently divorced woman searching her memories for clues that might explain why she ended up in a hospital….
Harlequin Butterfly opens on a transpacific flight. Businessman AA Abrams introduces himself to an unnamed, first-person narrator and shows him a tiny butterfly net. “I use this net to go around capturing fresh ideas. That’s my trade,” he says. The rest of the chapter explains who Abrams is and the role of his net in…
Those of a geographical, or perhaps geopolitical, frame of mind might find it fitting that Elisa Shua Dusapin’s, after novellas set in Korea (Winter in Sokcho) and Japan (The Pachinko Parlour), has placed her third in Vladivostok, in Russia’s Far East. Other writers (Paul Yoon comes to mind) have also set their work in this…
Kyokutei Bakin’s Nansō Satomi Hakkenden is one of the monuments of Japanese literature. This multigenerational samurai saga was one of the most popular and influential books of the 19th century and has been adapted many times into film, television, fiction, and comics.
Film and television that satirize South Korea’s class division has garnered considerable audience and critical attention in recent years, notably the award-winning Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019) and the record-breaking Squid Game (Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2021). Less well known internationally, however, is literary fiction that takes aim at South Korea’s social hierarchy. Im Seong-sun’s The Consultant, first…
Looking back, 1976 was the most tumultuous year in modern Chinese history. Zhou Enlai died in January, Zhu De in early July, and Mao in September. The three main founders of the PRC were gone, unleashing a new era. And in late July that year, Tangshan in Hebei province suffered the worst earthquake in China’s…
It’s the Australian Mystery Writers’ Festival and debut author Ernest Cunningham is one of the participating writers. Cunningham arrives at the festival—hosted on the Ghan, the famous train that goes from Darwin to Adelaide—following the publication of his memoir Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (also, the title of author Benjamin Stevenson’s novel that…
Nestled among tea farms, the houses of Uchida Road have cradled generations. At the end of the lane, Chie Uchida lives in an old farmhouse with her parents and brother. The meaning of her given name, A Thousand Graces, is the novel’s title. Set in Japan in the 1970s, traditions abound, and gender roles and…
In her letter to readers at the beginning of her debut novel, The Storm We Made, Vanessa Chan writes that Malaysian “grandparents love us by not speaking” and goes on to explain that this only pertains to the four years of Japanese occupation during World War II. In every other subject, she writes, Malaysian grandparents…
“Perhaps you could call it a stroke of karmic good fortune that I was able to experience a once-in-a-century flood only three and a half months after moving to Chennai.” So opens Yūka Ishii’s The Mud of a Century, winner of the 2017 Akutagawa Prize. The novella’s narrator, a Japanese woman in her mid-late twenties,…
In an unnamed coastal city—along a seaside drive—a woman searches for her missing daughter. Watching her is a pregnant woman who will soon give birth to a stillborn child. She’s stuck in a hospital with hallucinations of the death of her best friend, who was last seen buried under bombed buildings. The Singularity is a…