The winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize (and the 2024 US National Book Award for Translated Literature) is a piece of faux Japanese travel-writing, framed with an equally faux publication history. Aoyama Chizuko, an entirely fictional Japanese writer, travels to Japanese-occupied Taiwan in 1938 on an official lecture tour. After the War, her contemporaneous…
For anyone who grew up on British and Hollywood war films of the 1950s to the 1980s, Percy Herbert’s face is instantly familiar even if his name is not. He turns up in The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Guns of Navarone, The Wild Geese and dozens of others: the reliable “oh, that guy”…
A prestigious IT company sets six job finalists, all fresh out of university, an unusual task: through a group discussion, they have to decide who among them will get the job. If they manage to do so, the company will extend an offer to the winner. If they fail, everyone goes home empty-handed. The conversation…
In the 1930s, up to 20,000 European Jews turned to Asia for refuge before Japan entered the war as an Axis ally. Shanghai was the best-known destination, but the Philippines also played host to hundreds of German-speaking Jews. Mark Sy recounts this lesser known example of geopolitical empathy in The Manila Poker Club: Eisenhower, Quezon,…
Chen-Fu Hsu, a Taiwanese writer interested in bugs, photography and geography, traveled to Tibet to gain first-hand experience with snow leopards for What’s a Snow Leopard to You?, his collection of more than forty short prose pieces. The collection won the 2021 Taiwan Literature Award, an award that joins a number of others earned by…
She Walks at Night is the eighth Seishi Yokomizo mystery to be published in English since 2019 and features a cast familiar to previous readers of this popular series, which began with The Honjin Murders, published in Japan in 1946. The story brings back the eccentric private detective Kosuke Kindaichi and Inspector Isokawa, his longstanding, trusted…
The British Indian Overseas Territory is the sort of place only a stamp-collector will have heard of. It’s more commonly and better known as Diego Garcia, in fact the largest of a group of islands (the Chagos Archipelago) smack dab in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and home to a major US military base…
First published in Japan in 2009, then followed by a second volume in 2023 written in the shadow of a terminal diagnosis, these two books appear here together in English for the first time, translated by Sam Bett. When Ryuichi Sakamoto was asked as a child what he wanted to be when he grew up,…
The years immediately following Indonesian independence were optimistic ones. The early 1950s are remembered as the “parliamentary period” of pluralism, when communists, socialists, nationalists, Islamists and the military vied for positions in the government. But debate between these parties was fierce from the beginning and quickly became vicious. After national elections in September 1955, a…
In This is Where the Serpent Lives, Daniyal Mueenuddin unpacks the nuances of the Pakistani landowning class through rich, in-depth characterisation filled with complex interpersonal dynamics that shed light on the realities of class, discrimination and social mobility. Divided into four sections, each with a different narrator, the novel explores the interconnected lives of characters…
The rise of China as a global superpower, and the myriad impacts of “rising China” on Southeast Asia have energised a sizeable volume of scholarly literature and punditry. Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS)-Yusof Ishak Institute—one of the leading think tanks in Southeast Asia—has made notable efforts in explaining these impacts, especially in relation…
In the title story of Ysabelle Cheung’s debut story collection Patchwork Dolls, the narrator Sophia and her childhood friends sell bits of their bodies so they can pay down their student loans, start businesses and afford luxuries. Mahika had sold her deep-set eyes, her nose, her dimples, her lips; Jumana her sharp, symmetrical cheekbones; and…
In Hindu mythology, the snow-capped region of Kailash in Tibet is believed to be the abode of Kailashpati or Lord Shiva. Mount Kailash is the source of four rivers and in its vicinity lies Manas Sarovar Lake. Derived from the Sanskrit word Kailāsa or Kelāsa meaning “crystal”, this mountain is sacred not only to the…
The young witch Kiki, protagonist of Eiko Kadano’s beloved Kiki’s Delivery Service, is now fourteen years old. After a quick visit at home to see her parents, she’s returning to a life she carefully built for herself in the seaside town of Koriko, where she moved the year before. She now runs the town’s famous…
This review was originally posted in August 2024 and has been re-posted for its US release. Vikas Swarup is interested in narrative spectacle. His famous novel, Q & A, was adapted into the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire, which enthralled a primarily Western audience who had never seen the filth and grit of Mumbai slum life…