If Wong Kar-wai were to write a screenplay for a post-Handover story, along the same lines as his classic films set in the 1960s and 1990s, it might look like Sheung-King’s new novel, Batshit Seven. The pen name of author Aaron Tang, Sheung-King writes a raw and gritty story of a twenty-six year old called…
What does Mongolia bring to mind? Maybe Genghis Khan. It’s in central Asia somewhere, isn’t it? Unless you’re a fan of sumo wrestling, that’s likely to be about the extent of your associations. Johan Nylander sets out to correct that, at least with respect to Mongolia’s economy, with his The Wolf Economy Awakens. It’s a…
Given Amin Maalouf’s Lebanese origins, one might suppose that the Antioch in the title refers to the Levant, but it is in fact a small island, part of an isolated archipelago off France’s Atlantic Coast. (The French title, Nos frères inattendus, “Our unexpected brothers”, telegraphs the story better). Alexandre, a French-Canadian cartoonist, shares the island…
A subtle interaction between the human mind, muscle and matter produces music. Over the centuries, these interactions change, as instruments come and go out of favor and the role of music and musicians evolve. A well-documented tradition like Turkish art music (or Ottoman classic music) exhibits a bewildering variety of innovations over its 500 year…
Dan Morrison was researching the history of cholera in India when he came across a 1930s murder case that made headlines around the world at the time, but has since been forgotten, and found therein a story fit for a medical thriller. An Indian film in the 1970s was loosely based on the story, but…
The civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists drove the largest refugee exodus in the modern history of China, across the sea to the southern island of Taiwan. Martial artists of many styles were among this diaspora. In the 1940’s areas of Taipei, Taiwan were terrorized by local gangsters. Supported by desperate martial artists…
As Comet Hyakutake passes Earth in March 1996, four friends experience an array of puzzling events: the dead reappear and the living disappear. Daryl Qilin Yam’s Lovelier, Lonelier begins in Kyoto, where the paths of Isaac Neo, Tori Yamamoto, Jing Aw and Mateo Calvo Morales first intersect, and where the trajectory of their lives change…
If one seeks to characterize “Asian-American writing” as something other than just the ethnicity of the author, one might well land on Gina Chung’s short story collection Green Frog as a sort of case-in-point, if not a model.
Wars produce confusion and panic that often result from fears—rational and otherwise—among government officials and populations subject to war’s vicissitudes. During World War II, British officials in India and their colonial subjects feared a Japanese invasion of the sub-continent that never occurred. Krea University philosophy professor and former editor of The Hindu Mukund Padmanabhan tells…
Apocalypse narratives from the West tend to relate to the end of the whole world, rather than just a region or a country. Aliens, climate change, zombies, nuclear wars—the scale of these narratives is global. When Indian voices do come to these themes, they more often than not come across as very rooted in Indian…
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…
Sweet malida is a dish made from rice grains softened in water mixed with sugar and dried fruit and nuts. It’s enjoyed in Afghan, Indian and Pakistani homes, and it’s also a dish popular with the Bene Israel, a Jewish community with a 2000 year history in India. Zilka Joseph has written before about her…
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…
From the temples of Angkor Wat and Borobudur to images of Ganesh and references to the Ramayana, anyone who visits Southeast Asia cannot fail to be struck by the influence of centuries-old Indian culture, an influence that seems more profound and deeply rooted than that of China. Yet in today’s Southeast Asia, the situation is…