In his 1994 speech accepting the second Nobel Prize for Literature ever awarded to a Japanese author, Kenzaburo Oe claimed that, in the history of modern Japanese literature, “the writers most sincere and aware of their mission were those ‘post-war writers’” who “tried with great pains to make up for the inhuman atrocities committed by…
In 1903, Eric Blair was born in a bungalow in Motihari, India to a British father who worked in the colonial opium office in town and to a French-British mother. Years later Eric Blair would be known around the world as George Orwell. It’s his Indian roots, his birthplace in Motihari, that inspires Abdullah Khan’s…
Yellowface is a story about theft. But go down a layer and it’s a tale about racial appropriation and authorial ownership. And lying somewhere beyond these surface themes is a palpable anxiety over how the internet shapes public opinion, and the simultaneous necessity and terror of being too online.
In the story that provides the title of Nishanth Injam’s debut collection, The Best Possible Experience, a go-getter tour guide creates a new identity for himself and his son to seek opportunities that would otherwise be impossible for low-caste Dalits. Although Mr Lourenco the tour guide has a positive outlook, sometimes his plans don’t turn…
The tales in Ao Omae’s People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice are about sensitive people trying to navigate an unjust world. Take Nanamori, the protagonist of the collection’s title story. The characters in “People Who Talk” are members of the university Plushie Club. Members justify the club to university officials as an organization…
In 1980, a year after Mridula Garg’s Hindi-language novel Chittacobra was published, two policemen appeared at her door at night to arrest her under sections 292, 293, and 294 of the Indian Penal Code, commonly referred to as the Act of Obscenity. The case was built around a scene of just two pages that described…
It’s 1992 and Seoul’s tallest skyscraper has suddenly collapsed, killing thousands and bringing to light just as many questions as to why it happened and who was responsible. This is the backdrop of Hannah Michell’s latest novel, Excavations, an ambitious thriller that is just as engrossing for the whodunnit as is it for the historical…
Sometimes you must write the book you want to read. In the afterword to her debut novel Every Rising Sun, Jamila Ahmed remembers growing up with The Arabian Nights as “a cultural touchstone” while always “wanting more of her”. The “her” is, of course, Shaherazade, the teller of life-prolonging fantastical tales.
Jung-Myung Lee’s Painter of the Wind is set in Hanyang, as Seoul, the capital of the Joseon Dynasty in the late 18th century, was then known. The protagonists are fictionalized versions of Kim Hong-do and Shin Yun-bok, both real-life figures who are considered some of, if not the, finest painters of the Joseon Dynasty.
In an early story in Shubha Sunder’s debut collection, Boomtown Girl, the narrator states that her parents felt her younger brother “was old enough to deserve some independence”, yet the teenage brother finds trouble and lands in jail. This theme of independence forms the backbone of the nine stories in her book that mainly take…
Tackling one of today’s most emotive topics, gender transition, debut novelist Nicola Dinan delivers a keenly observed and unflinching examination of that journey and its emotional, social and physical consequences, both for the individual and the people close to them.
Howard Goldblatt, known for his translations of such notable writers as Mo Yan and Su Tong, has a new translation of Chen Yixin’s novel Yuwa, which traces a year in the life of a young boy in a Gansu Province village much like that from Chen’s own upbringing. Chen’s prose is full of color and…
Given that Buddhist thought is widely circulated in popular culture (in reference to mindfulness, wisdom, productivity, and spirituality), it is not surprising that Buddha’s story, or the Buddha himself, has come to be the subject of storytelling aimed at the larger audience. Advait Kottary’s debut novel Siddhartha: The Boy Who Became the Buddha reconstructs the…
During the 1910s, Hong Kong’s new Governor Francis Henry May seconded a delegation of Sikh police officers to Fiji. May had had a recent stint as Governor of Fiji and before that Captain Superintendent of the Hong Kong Police Force. He felt that Hong Kong’s police force could teach Fiji a thing or two. While…
Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa is the story of a psychiatric patient who claims he once spent time in a land of water-loving creatures out of Japanese folklore. Most of Akutagawa’s contemporaries—as most Japanese readers today—would have been familiar with this famous folktale monster. A kappa is about three feet tall and, according to Patient No 23,…