Long ago at the bottom of a lake lived a large, white snake—revered for his great powers, the local people implored this mythical creature to reform the landscape so that they could cultivate crops and survive the winter. According to the oft-told tale, after striking a deal with the chieftain, the snake god replaced the…
On first glance, one might see the title My Strange Shrinking Parents and the cover illustration of a child with blue school shorts, white knee-high socks and black polished shoes towering over his mother and father dressed in a blue-collared shirt and suspenders and think that Melbourne-based writer and artist Zeno Sworder is writing a…
The publication of Marco Caboara’s Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735 is an event to celebrate. At long last, every map of China printed in Europe—from Ortelius’s first map of 1584 to Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s landmark map of 1735—has been recorded and referenced in a single source.
One of the first poems in Wang Yin’s recent collection, A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts, finds the Chinese poet in an unexpected place: Vermont. “The Task of the Poet, Written in Vermont After Robert Bly” opens with a pastoral scene on a front lawn, where the poet peacefully observes—and records—the sights and…
Vasily Eroshenko was a transnational writer working in the early 20th century, writing in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese and Russian to Esperanto as he moved about Europe and Asia. He was born in Ukraine and lived, among other places, in Russia, England, Japan, Myanmar, India, China, and the Soviet Union. His writings…
At this point it is almost a truism that travel memoirs are more about the author’s internal journey than the physical one. “It is the journey, not the destination,” we are frequently told. Never was this point more clearly made than in The White Mosque by Sofia Samatar. Billed somewhat humbly as merely a “Silk…
In this remarkable debut, Kaamil Ahmed tells the story of the displacement of the Rohingya from their home in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state and their ongoing search for refuge. This is not a new story, but Ahmed puts the spotlight firmly on the Rohingya perspective and allows them to tell their own story in their…
Half a year on from the publication of India: A History in Objects, the British Museum and Thames & Hudson have released a new volume of the same vibrant format on Southeast Asia, an endeavor at least as ambitious as that for the Subcontinent: “it is hardly possible to be comprehensive,” as Alexandra Green modestly…
The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in titles translated from Japanese into English. While many of these novels and short stories collections are by rising authors, publishers also present readers with classic works by authors already well-known outside of Japan. These include Osamu Dazai, long celebrated for his No Longer Human, first…
Literature tends to be defined by language and place. For instance, Japanese literature is written in Japanese, or translated into another language, and written by Japanese authors. Chinese literature is however a little more complex because writers may also hail from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. In most of these places, citizens—a significant minority…
Banine’s Parisian Days picks up from where from where Days in the Caucasus leaves off: with the still very young woman pulling into the Gare de Lyon having the escaped the clutches of her besotted yet unwanted husband—the result of a deal to get her father out of jail, out of Bolshevik Baku and out…
During the Great War, 140,000 Chinese laborers were recruited to work in England and France in order to free up men in those countries to fight. Janie Chang uses this corner of history as the backdrop of her new historical novel, The Porcelain Moon. While the two characters at the center of the story—a young…
Cheon Myeong-Kwan’s Whale is a sweeping epic mostly set in Pyeongdae, a remote mountain town that immediately evokes Macondo from Gabriel García Márquez’s similarly sprawling epic One Hundred Years of Solitude. Depicted with the same sort of dreamlike magical realism, Pyeongdae goes from a forgotten mountain hamlet to a booming railway city to a ghost…
After the Myanmar military seized power on 1 February 2021, the country has been in the midst of a humanitarian crisis The military, who have been a major disruptive force in Myanmar politics ever since independence in 1948, is the focus of Oliver Slow’s new book, Return of the Junta: Why Myanmar’s Military Must Go…
Kotaro Isaka’s Three Assassins follows hot on the heels of the release of Bullet Train, the Hollywood movie starring Brad Pitt, based on the English-language edition of the author’s previous thriller of the same name. The novel alternates between the voices of Suzuki, a former middle school math teacher turned scammer; The Whale, a towering…