Reviews

Non-Fiction Reviews
“The Life and Zen Poetry of Santoka Taneda” by Sumita Oyama and “Writing Poetry, Surviving War: The Works of Refugee-Scholar Official Chen Yuyi (1090-1139)” by Yugen Wang
15 March 20214 April 2021
Despite being separated by the sea and eight centuries, both of these poets share feelings of exile and displacement and exile as they wander more or less aimlessly around their respective countries, attempting to sort themselves out through writing poetry. They also share the good fortune of having attracted excellent biographers, who let them speak…
Read More “The Life and Zen Poetry of Santoka Taneda” by Sumita Oyama and “Writing Poetry, Surviving War: The Works of Refugee-Scholar Official Chen Yuyi (1090-1139)” by Yugen Wang
Non-Fiction Reviews
“Eight Days in Yemen” by Peter Schlesinger
14 March 2021
The area where the country of Yemen is now found was long known to geographers by the Latin Arabic Felix; felix meant “fertile” but also “happy” or “lucky”. Yemen is much in the news today and little of it is either happy or lucky. When Peter Schlesinger visited the Yemen Arab Republic (the northern half…
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Fiction Reviews
“You are eating an orange. You are naked.” by Sheung-King
13 March 202113 March 2021
The title—You are eating an orange. You are naked—gives away that this is not an ordinary novel.
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Fiction Reviews
“The Java Enigma” by Erni Salleh
12 March 202115 March 2021
To some extent, all one needs to know about The Java Enigma is that it has been called, more than once, “Da Vinci Code”-like. This will either intrigue or repel, depending on how one feels about Dan Brown’s genre-creating blockbuster. Neither reaction would however be entirely warranted, for—while there are certainly similarities—Erni Salleh’s debut novel…
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Fiction Reviews
“Tales of Ming Courtesans” by Alice Poon
11 March 202113 March 2021
The Ming Dynasty ended in a slow-motion train wreck that inspired poetry, opera and wistful memoirs. It also provided a platform for remarkable women entertainers, the mingzi, to shine and even outshine their male contemporaries, politicians, literati and courtiers. Later observers admired the “manly” virtues of three heroines, Chen Yuanyuan, Liu Rushi and Fragrant Princess…
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Non-Fiction Reviews
“The Woman Who Raised the Buddha: The Extraordinary Life of Mahaprajapati” by Wendy Garling
10 March 2021
Behind or beside the great male spiritual leaders are great women, so we are told, although it is usually the case that their lives and deeds are often relegated to secondary importance by androcentric religious constructs put in place by those who come afterwards. For example, Jesus has two Marys (his mother and Magdalene), Muhammed…
Read More “The Woman Who Raised the Buddha: The Extraordinary Life of Mahaprajapati” by Wendy Garling
Fiction Reviews
“The Mission House” by Carys Davies
9 March 20219 March 2021
Hilary Byrd is a depressed and disgruntled English librarian from Petts Wood in southeast London. Frustrated with the changes in his library over the past twenty years—digitalization and moms’ groups that take the focus away from print books and exacerbate his depression—he plans a trip overseas to clear his mind and to show himself and…
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Non-Fiction Reviews
“On The Ho Chi Minh Trail” by Sherry Buchanan and “The Saigon Sisters” by Patricia D Norland
8 March 202110 March 2021
In 1995, twenty years after the formal end of the war, the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam established diplomatic relations. The early 1990s marked a pivotal period for the country’s economy and politics, as well as on the diplomatic front, the improvement in relations among major powers: the normalization of relations with…
Read More “On The Ho Chi Minh Trail” by Sherry Buchanan and “The Saigon Sisters” by Patricia D Norland
Poetry Reviews
“A Gap in the Clouds: A New Translation of Ogura Hyakunin Isshu” by James Hadley and Nell Regan
6 March 20216 March 2021
“100 poems by 100 poets”: compiled in the 13th century by the famed poet, Fujiwara no Teika, (1162–1241) the Hyakunin-isshu (百人一首) is the most widely-read poetry anthology in Japan. Long celebrated in the arts, including in a famous woodblock series by Hokusai, the anthology is part of the curriculum of all Japanese school children, much…
Read More “A Gap in the Clouds: A New Translation of Ogura Hyakunin Isshu” by James Hadley and Nell Regan
Non-Fiction Reviews
“The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India” by Manan Ahmed Asif
5 March 20217 March 2021
History is commonly thought to be a subject about discovering the past in terms of exploring the origins and beginnings. Manan Ahmed Asif has previously written about resisting the need to look for beginnings and focusing on belonging.
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Fiction Reviews
“Love in the Days of Rebellion” by Ahmet Altan
3 March 20219 April 2023
Ahmet Altan is something of a master of the evocative opening line, brief this time: “Some nights he woke to the footsteps of the ants crawling across the Persian carpet.” Although Love in the Days of Rebellion, the second installment in Ahmet Altan’s “Ottoman Quartet”, is a sequel to Like a Sword Wound, it can…
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Fiction Reviews
“Tono Monogatari” by Shigeru Mizuki
1 March 20218 March 2021
Shigeru Mizuki’s Tono Monogatari has a complicated lineage. During Japan’s rapid modernization in the early 20th century, a man named Kunio Yanagita set out to preserve Japan’s cultural heritage of magic and the supernatural. Along the way, he met a young writer, Kizen Sasaki. Together they traveled Japan’s Tono region, today about five hours northeast…
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Non-Fiction Reviews
“China 1949: Year of Revolution” by Graham Hutchings
28 February 2021
Graham Hutchings writes in his new book China 1949 that “historians have often used a single year as a prism through which to view key changes that are said to have shaped an era”. He goes on to observe (somewhat counterintuitively) that of the years of China’s Civil War from 1945 to 1949, “… the…
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Fiction Reviews
“Rumors from Shanghai” by Amy Sommers
27 February 2021
William Gross (or Grose) was a 19th-century African-American pioneer and hotelier in Seattle that caught the attention of author Amy Sommers. She bases her novel Rumors from Shanghai on a fictional grandson, Tolt Gross, a young lawyer who moves to Shanghai and soon after learns of Japan’s plans to bomb Pearl Harbor.
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Non-Fiction Reviews
“The Analects”, translated by Moss Roberts and “Confucianism and Sacred Space” by Chin-shing Huang
26 February 202126 February 2021
Is Confucianism a religion, or is it a philosophy?
Read More “The Analects”, translated by Moss Roberts and “Confucianism and Sacred Space” by Chin-shing Huang

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