It’s big, it’s heavy, and it’s beautiful. Dora Ching, the Associate Director of the Tang Center for Asian Art at Princeton University, has created a book that will surely become the volume to have if you are interested in Buddhist art from China or the history of photography. This book presents the art found in…
Kotaro Isaka’s thriller Bullet Train moves as fast as the train—the Shinkansen—it takes place on and is named after. Already destined to be a movie starring the not-very-Japanese Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock (one imagines some changes en route), Bullet Train, a guilty pleasure if there ever were one, is something of a cross between…
Polly Barton is a Japanese-English translator with an extraordinary output, including three novel-length projects published in English translation in the last eighteen months. Fifty Sounds is her memoir, chronicling her year teaching English on Japan’s remote Sado Island and the way it changed the trajectory of her life.
Opium’s role in the history of East Asia has been well-documented, most notably perhaps in Julia Lovell’s definitive 2011 book The Opium War. This, and others like it, deal with the issue mostly from the perspective of the consuming countries, in particular China; Thomas Manuel’s Opium Inc. is noteworthy in focusing just as much on…
Resource extraction has been integral to the economy of Myanmar’s borderlands for decades. One of the most valuable of these is jade, mined in northern Kachin state and then smuggled over the border into China. In Until the world shatters: truth lies and the looting of Myanmar, Daniel Combs depicts this extraction, the cost it…
Anthony Barbieri-Low starts his book comparing ancient Egypt and early China by saying it was a somewhat off-the-wall thing to do.
In her debut novel The Illuminated, Anindita Ghose weaves together stories of personal grief and struggle with larger socio-political afflictions. The personal stories of the women in the book are timeless and universal; these are stories of self-effacement and self-discovery that feminist writing deals with anyway. But Ghose refreshingly sets the stories in contemporary India…
If you are in Tokyo and you’re riding on the Yamanote Line, you are likely heading to one of the major shopping destinations on that line, such as Shibuya, Shinagawa, or Tokyo Station. If you are going to Tokyo Station, you will pass through Komagome, once a place in the country where people had villas…
It’s a familiar nighttime ritual: the sun has set, the kids are in pajamas, the toys are still. It’s time to say goodnight. And while many are used to the rhythmic lines of “goodnight room, goodnight moon”, in Goodnight Ganesha, Nadia Salomon takes young readers through a different “goodnight game”.
Traveling in rural Bengal in 1963, the 23 year-old Wendy Doniger spied the bas-relief of a horse carved into a simple mud and thatch hut. “Resembling the T’ang horses at a gallop … in style something like Picasso bulls, [it was] altogether one of most beautiful things I have ever seen.” The Bengali villagers did…
“China’s new global status as a rising technology power”, as the editors of this new study put it, has increasingly engendered alarmed, if not alarmist, rhetoric by Western politicians and commentators. The combined response of Innovation and China’s Global Emergence, a new collection of academic essays that attempts a ground-up review of the issue, might…
Alexander McCall Smith, of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency fame, has moved, literarily if not literally, from Africa and Scotland to Sri Lanka. He has placed the story of his latest novel The Pavilion in the Clouds, on the grounds of a tea plantation in colonial Ceylon.
Viewed from a perch in Hong Kong, one of the most striking things about Lion City, Jeevan Vasagar’s new book on Singapore, Hong Kong’s best frenemy, is that it includes nary a mention of Asia’s World City.
By turns brilliant, erotic and piercing, this third novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi shines new light into how historical oppression, both at a personal and societal level, continues to dominate our present-day thinking.
Comics in Thailand have enjoyed a long and rich history and have been enjoyed by people of all socio-economic classes, even though they’ve had a reputation as a form of “low culture”. In The Art of Thai Comics: A Century of Strips and Stripes, Nicolas Verstappen goes back even further than a hundred years to…