Natsuo Kirino has a real gift for seeing the worst in people. Her characters cheat, steal, and murder with an apparent lack of remorse that makes them (one hopes) unrelatable for most, but they are at least sympathetic in being partially the result of their bleak environments. Kirino’s hopeless worlds of economic and social pressure…
Over the past decade or so, Indian popular history publishing has seen a welcome trend. After a run of strong biographies on the great Mughal emperors, writers have begun to explore the lives of secondary figures, from the formidable empress Nur Jahan and the powerful princess Jahanara to the philosopher-prince Dara Shukoh and the chronicler-princess…
Shōtarō Ikenami’s The Samurai Detectives, the first volume in his celebrated Kenkaku Shōbai series, arrives in English translation by Yui Kajita as a lively entry into Japanese historical fiction. Originally published in 1973, this novel captures the shadowy underbelly of Edo-period Japan through the eyes of Kohei, a grizzled ronin turned detective, his 24-year-old son,…
Not as well-known as the classic poets of the Tang era, Xie Lingyun (385-433) stands at a turning point in Chinese literature. The long-ruling Han dynasty had a conservative view of culture. Scholars of that dynasty cultivated old fashioned poetic forms and adhered to a tradition-bound Confucian ethic. With the downfall of the Han and…
If, as is commonly supposed, Sanskrit is the mother of a multitude of Indian languages (first the prakrits whence emerged modern Indian languages such as Hindi and Bengali) who—or what—then was the father? In her recent book Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia, renowned linguist Peggy Mohan offers a narrative in…
In 1981, Japanese actress and television personality Tetsuko Kuroyanagi published a best-selling memoir, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, an engaging story set during her unusual primary school years that happened to take place during World War II. Her book sold 4.5 million copies in Japan in just its first year and has been…
Wars are always replete with tragedies, and the World War II Battle of Manila, fought between 3 February and 3 March 1945, is one of history’s greatest tragedies. An entire city was destroyed, millions of people were made homeless, and more than 100,000 civilians were killed as Allied forces liberated the Philippine capital from Japanese…
Although Half Light takes place on the cusp of India’s 2018 decriminalisation of homosexuality, Mahesh Rao uses this historic transition not as a centrepiece but as a lens to investigate the quieter dramas and private reckonings of those in the shadows of moments of social transformation.
Silk Mirage is veteran Central Asia correspondent Joanna Lillis’s compelling and deeply reported account of a nation in flux—one emerging from decades of suffocating authoritarianism yet still struggling to define what freedom means. The book centres on the turbulent period following the 2016 death of Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s first post-Soviet president and one of the…
The Sun family seems to have everything—a multi-squillion dollar empire, homes and compounds in prime California real estate and no shortage of power, influence, notoriety and fame. But the one thing access to the Sun family trust requires is the one thing the family doesn’t have: a male heir. But some members of the Sun…
When we think of colonialism on the Indian subcontinent, it is first and foremost the excesses of the British East India Company and the pomp of the Raj that come to mind. The legacies of Vasco da Gama and the Estado da India might be added as an afterthought. Outside the small circle of specialists,…
Yoko Tawada’s Archipelago of the Sun, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is the third and final instalment of a trilogy. The first two volumes—Scattered All Over the Earth and Suggested in the Stars—introduce a diverse cast of characters centered around Hiruko, a Japanese woman in search of her homeland, which seems to have vanished from the…
The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, never one to shrink from a challenge, visited Gobustan in Azerbaijan for two decades to prove his theory that the ancestors of today’s Scandinavians left behind the mysterious rock carvings near Baku. Uncanny similarities between petroglyphs showing the long, oared boats of Caspian seafarers and those of the Vikings, and…
Dahlia Abraham-Klein’s grandfather Haim Abraham lived to 102. She was fortunate to have gotten to know him when she was younger, but it wasn’t until Haim passed away in 1999 that Abraham-Klein learned more about his life thanks to a journal he had left behind. This journal chronicled not just Haim’s life but that of…
Chetan Bhagat occupies a distinct and highly influential space in contemporary Indian letters in English. While his previous work 11 Rules for Life nudged Bhagat into self-help, 12 Years reverts to his signature formula—romantic disillusionment as middle-class catharsis. His phenomenal commercial success from his 2005 debut novel Five Point Someone to this latest, eleventh work…