Of the three empires that dominated late antiquity, Rome, China and Iran, it is the last whose legacy we understand least. “Proportionally to its historical significance, Iranian Inner Asia in this period is probably the least known and most grossly understudied time and place in world history,” writes Minoru Inaba in the introductory essay to…
There is a word in Japanese—komorebi—that refers to the way sun shines through the trees, casting a sea of soft, dark shadows scattered with gleams of light, a phenomenon reflected in the title of Riku Onda’s most recently-translated psychological thriller Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight.
The exploration of the Himalaya contributed vastly to scientific knowledge. From botanical discoveries, to understanding of how human bodies work at altitude, to pioneering the use of new scientific equipment, the mountain range had an immense importance. Yet its hostile environment meant that this knowledge was not easily gained. Moreover these scientific endeavors were by…
It was in the late 1930s that private detective Kosuke Kindaichi solved The Honjin Murders, the brutal killing of a newlywed couple in Okayama. Military service has prevented him from investigating another case since. Death on Gokumon Island, the second book in the Detective Kindaichi Mystery series by Seishi Yokomizo, begins just after the Second…
In India, caste can determine power and privilege. Indian fiction captures the nature of this power and privilege in different ways. Some novels depict the characters belonging to lower castes (Dalits) as victims (for instance, Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchables, one of the early classics of Indian English fiction) and some as villains in the…
As is so often the case, when Tibetans fled their homeland for Nepal and India, they thought to return in their lifetime. Their homes in these new lands were in what were hoped would be temporary refugee camps. Decades later these camps have now become permanent and Tibetans work in jobs that revolve around the…
The World War II fighting on Mindanao, the southernmost and second-largest island of the Philippine archipelago, rarely gets mentioned in conventional histories of the Pacific War, even in those histories that focus on the battles in the Philippines. Still less do those histories recount the heroic struggle of the Moro resistance fighters who conducted a…
In this lyrical follow-up to her Man Booker International prize-winning novel, Celestial Bodies, Jokha Alharthi explores love, desire and language through three generations of an Omani family.
In the early 2000s, a group of anthropologists formed the Matsutake Worlds Research Group (MWRG). Their object of collaborative study was to be the matsutake mushroom and the ways in which humans interact with it. 15 or so years might seem a long time for a scholar (let alone a team of them) to study…
A swamp turns into a castle. A princess shapeshifts into a squid of one pound and four ounces. An ugly toad by day transforms into a handsome young man at night. A betrayed sister reincarnates into a black bird to haunt who hurt her.
Thank You, Mr Nixon, Gish Jen’s latest work of fiction, comprises eleven loosely linked short stories essentially about people in the flow of a modern Chinese diaspora.
After the Myanmar coup last year, the country saw increasing rates of both censorship and persecution of dissidents. The relative access to and freedom of the Internet went into reverse. Born out of a desire to preserve the online voices of outrage, grief and dissent, editors Ko Ko Thett and Brian Haman assembled Picking Off…
One of the phrases in a reviewer’s regular toolkit is “You’re unlikely to read another book quite like this one”, either this year or in some number of years to come. But in the case of Man Asian Literary Prize-winner Miguel Syjuco’s long-awaited second novel and stinging political satire, I Was the President Mistress!!, one…
As the title suggests, this book is about traveling. However, the primary traveler isn’t human but a book, although of course humans are involved as transportation. In the fifth century. a Buddhist monk and translator named Faxian (c. 357-422) set out from China at the age of about sixty-two to travel to India. In his…
Solo Dance is a novel about identity. Yingmei Zhao is in the fourth grade when she develops a crush on a girl in her class. In the years that follow, she realizes her life in Taiwan isn’t going to look like everyone else’s. She won’t marry. She won’t start a family. When sexual assault shatters…