In the corner of a busy cafe in Tokyo, three men meet over coffee. But the trio of Goto, Takumi, and Sasaki are not who they seem—they are rehearsing carefully scripted roles in a property scam. With real estate values soaring in the city, schemes to make a quick profit are on the rise.
Novels set around the Jewish Bene Israel community in India are as rare as hen’s teeth, but Sheela Rohekar’s 2013 Hindi novel, Miss Samuel: A Jewish-Indian Saga, translated this year into English by Madhu Singh, must be one-of-a-kind. Rohekar is perhaps the only Jewish author in India who writes in Hindi. Her novel reads as…
Set in the early to mid-19th century in British-occupied India, Sayam Bandyopadhyay’s Carnival, at the outset, focuses on a middle-aged recluse living in Calcutta. Despite becoming a landowner at his father’s death, Rajaram Deb prefers a monotonous life confined to the walls of his bedroom—often at the cost of his responsibilities—barring rare moments of socializing….
Titles from the venerable Penguin Classics imprint are usually books one knows one should have read even if one hasn’t (yet): known unknowns, as the famous saying goes. Behind the Painting by Thai author Siburapha is, even for the well-read anglophone consumer of literature, likely to qualify as an unknown unknown. First published 1937, this…
Japanese woodblock prints of the 18th and 19th centuries are, one comes to realize, one of the earliest example of mass commercial art, at least purely secular art, and one that still resonates with modern sensibilities. As testament to their volume, Britain’s Victoria & Albert Museum has, quite literally, tens of thousands of prints, a…
Much has already been written about the Manila Galleon, the system of annual commercial sailings between Manila and Acapulco that dominated trans-Pacific trade for two and a half centuries from the latter part of the 16th-century until the early 19th, a development which is often taken to mark the beginning of “globalization”. Juan José Rivas…
At a time when much of what passes for international commentary has the depth and nuance of a tweet, Geoff Raby’s Great Game On is something of a relief. The former Australian Ambassador to China keeps his politics largely to himself, but doesn’t have much time for mainstream Western (read “American” for the most part)…
The Sassoon family was and remains legendary in global business and social history, with Victor Sassoon as its most iconic figure. He embodied the spirit of the cosmopolitan elite in the early 20th century, maintaining residences and businesses across the major financial centers of his time, dividing his life between Bombay, London, and Shanghai. As…
In Rio Shimamoto’s prize-winning novel First Love, a young woman kills her father. Her legal defence team must comb through the past and present, exploring her platonic, sexual, and romantic relationships to find a motive for murder. Though the novel begins as a crime thriller, it’s a genre-bending story that transforms into a romance, murder…
Literary history of vernaculars in the West has a well-established narrative. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer is considered the “father” of English literature, followed by the other greats of the Renaissance—Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare—and the canon continues. The literary histories of Indian languages, in contrast, do not have such a straightforward lineage.
Is it a commendation or criticism of the author or translators that one would never have imagined, had one not already known, that Keiichiro Hirano’s Eclipse was originally written in Japanese for a Japanese readership? Set in late 15th-century France and deeply permeated with Christian theology and late medieval philosophy, Eclipse evokes nothing as much…
Manzu Islam’s Godzilla and the Songbird stands as a mosaic of myth and modernity in which the protagonist’s life can be an allegory of the journey of post-colonial East Pakistan to Bangladesh.
For two decades, Singaporean diplomat and author Kishore Mahbubani has been a leading voice among a growing group of intellectuals and pundits publicizing the “Asian Twenty-First Century”, a triumphalist arc where Asian powers—especially a rising China—have cast off the shackles of Western colonialism to assume their “rightful” place atop in the global hierarchy of nations…
The ever-increasing amount of Indian fiction appearing in English translation has been one of the most striking publishing phenomena of the past two decades. But Lakshmi’s Secret Diary comes to us not via Bengali, Hindi or Tamil, but French. That author Ari Gautier hails from Pondicherry, the capital of the erstwhile French territory in India,…
Migration, especially in literature, is normally seen as having “the West” as its destination. Migration within Asia, from the less affluent to richer places, appears far less often. Singapore, for example, has had a long history as a trading port drawing in merchants and laborers from East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Singapore’s colonial…