China’s history under the Communist Party has been demarcated, like geological ages, into neat, self-contained phases. There is the Great Leap Forward (1958-62); the Cultural Revolution (1966-76); and Reform and Opening (December 1978-1989). The bits outside these branded groups of years, including the first nine years of CCP rule, can feel a little fuzzy, while…
Ukrainian-born nurse Kateryna Ivanonva Desnytska became a Thai princess at the turn of the 20th century as wife of the Siamese prince Chakrabongse Bhuvanath. This story, with echoes of that of King Chulalongkorn and his English tutor Anna Leonowens (immortalized in The King and I) , has obvious potential for artistic adaptation: it was made…
The Dead Sea—and its environs of Jericho and the Jordan River—is perhaps second only to Jerusalem as a place where history, archaeology, religion, politics and international relations meet and mix. It is, as Nir Arielli points out in his new book, quite a bit older, and today is as much a place of environmental as…
Originally written in Russian by Ukrainian novelist Igor Zavilinsky, A Dream of Annapurna spans Nepal, Italy and the US. The book has an equally broad time frame, ranging from the 1950s to 2015.
Fifteen years into his marriage, Noor Mohammad Ganju has never seen his wife naked. He lusts after her but sex, when she occasionally obliges him, is reduced by veils—literal and symbolic—to tedious and unimaginative coupling in the dark.
In a dystopia-lite future, singles in Korea opt for pseudo-marriages under the mysterious Wedding & Life (W&L for short), an exclusive and expensive matchmaking company that hosts the VIP branch of “New Marriages” (NM). In an NM, W&L clients could pay for a new spouse—either a field wife or field husband (FW or FH)—for a…
Released in late 2024, 100 years after the most infamous mountaineering event in history, Other Everests: one mountain, many worlds is not a retelling of the Mallory expedition, but rather an attempt to widen the framing of Everest beyond western mountaineering exploits. Everest has often been seen through the eyes of western explorers and been…
Several women walk children down a flagstone path to a hot spring in the cozy opening scene of Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird. The children play while the women enjoy the warm water. The narrator has been married for five years to a factory worker. He works while she takes care…
After student protests toppled Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year, New Delhi and Dhaka have been at odds. Indian politicians complain about Hindus being mistreated in the Muslim-majority country; Bangladesh’s interim government fears that Hasina may launch a bid to return to power from India.
Chie Ikeya’s InterAsian intimacies across race, religion and colonialism focuses on inter-Asian marriage in colonial Burma. Ikeya argues that over time these marriages became “the subject of political agitation, legislative activism and collective violence”.
China has been one of the leading sources of overseas visitors to the Maldives in recent years. Bin Yang, a professor of history at City University of Hong Kong, makes the argument in Discovered but Forgotten that this is to some extent a rerun of the situation in the 14th and 15th centuries when the…
A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro’s photographs of Macau are certainly worth that and more. This latest collection consists of 100 photos taken during the last five years, a period which included Covid-19. The photojournalist, who been resident in Macau for well over a decade manages both to capture…
Most people “collect” stuff, but Paul Bromberg is a “collector”, the difference being that he proceeds with intent and purpose, focusing on a relatively narrow group of objects.
The word miniature in fact comes from the Larin miniare or “to paint red”; early European miniatures—palm sized pieces that are parts of manuscripts and books facing a verse or an intense moment in a story or placed behind one—were initially delineated in that pigment. There was an Asian tradition of such painting as well,…
Seen through the lens of a career, Yukio Mishima is a difficult author to classify. In the introduction to this new collection of the author’s stories, Voices of the Fallen Heroes, Mishima biographer John Nathan notes that, by his death at the age of forty-five, Mishima had written dozens of novels, forty plays and 170…