In the transition from spring to summer, tensions at Towa Textile are heating up. Factory workers—demanding higher wages, severance pay and other benefits—prepare for a prolonged struggle against management. With the senior executive director abroad at a textile convention and union leaders at a meeting, company director Gosuke Nishinohata is found dead by the train…
An Iranian grandee once asked this reviewer if he had enjoyed a dish of braised sheep brains. I replied, quoting Sa’di, “a lenifying lie is better than an irksome truth.” Face saved on all sides. This incident illustrates an important aspect of Iranian and Persianate culture: the use of poetic language to shape and elevate…
The 20 years or so after World War Two were a time of rapid development in the publishing industry. For instance, the paperback revolution made books more affordable. Book clubs kept up the momentum of reading, discussions, and curation going to sustain, or even expand reading cultures. The easy availability of books by the roadside,…
Japan is a favourite destination for tourists the world over, but one reason it appeals to Hong Kong tourists (for whom it is a particular favourite) is that Kanji allows them to more or less work things out despite not knowing Japanese at all. Zev Handel’s new book Chinese Characters Across Asia tells the story…
From the look of the cover design and the description, readers may think that Mizuki Tsujimura’s novel Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon is yet another example of Japanese healing (or comfort) fiction. Most Japanese healing novels are slim with an inviting cover in soft pastels. The stories center around lost individuals who hope…
In Saou Ichikawa’s debut story Hunchback, a pendulum swings between desire and survival, told through the voice of a disabled woman in a group home. Translated from Japanese by Polly Barton, the novella has been long-listed for the International Booker Prize, and in Japan, it won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize upon release. Hilarious and provocative,…
Radha Vatsal specializes in mysteries set in World War I-era New York City. Her latest, No 10 Doyers Street, is set a decade before that in 1907 New York City when mayor George B McClellan had grand plans to build new parks and bring safe drinking water to residents of the city. One of these…
Akha Ghanr is, for Akha communities, a “highly pragmatic system of customary law encompassing an entire way of life”, or it could be better described as “Ancestral ways”, acknowledging the role and leadership of their ancestors, something that is central to Akha identity and culture. How it has changed over time is the subject of…
Li Qingzhao (1084-1151 CE) is considered the greatest woman poet in Chinese history but, as translator Wendy Chen writes in her introduction, Li “remains relatively unknown in the West.” Chen, who first heard Li’s poetry as a child, is determined to help change this. The Magpie at Night is Chen’s translation of the Song-dynasty writer…
“I feel like there must be some way”, ends the title of one story in Tomoka Shibasaki’s A Hundred Years and a Day, “of visiting the places that exist only in people’s memories.” Each of the 34 fictional vignettes in this collection is a standalone slice-of-life that features a character, now advanced into middle-age, recollecting…
Who is Shuzo Takiguchi? Neglected and out of print for decades in Japan, ignored by the anglophone world, awareness of his contributions to 20th century Japanese writing and fine arts is long overdue. Profoundly influenced by French surrealism, Takiguchi’s heady mix of mythological rumination and avant-garde modernist poetry has finally been made available to an…
A young boy cracks open the front door and peers outside. The dark shadows from the roof and the trees give a foreboding sense of something to come. Three umbrellas sit neatly in their holder, right by the door. The boy goes out to play.
A new addition to the catalogue of stories about the Vietnamese diaspora, Khuê Phạm’s Brothers and Ghosts (translated, somewhat unusually, from the original German to English by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey) follows the three intertwining stories of Kiều, a Vietnamese German journalist, her father Minh who arrived in Germany in 1968, and of her…
History has scarred South Asian cities in very concrete ways. The most well known of these have been carrying the burdens of colonisation and communalism, and, after independence, a rewriting of their histories that are governed by ideologies of nationalism. Lahore, in Pakistan, is one such city. In his book Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways…
In 1946, Kornel Chang’s Korean grandparents fled south from Pyongyang across the border at the 38th parallel, leaving the zone under Soviet military occupation for the one occupied by the US military. Years later, his family left South Korea for the United States. This book is born of conversations heard by Chang growing up in…