Chinese Buddhist poetry traditionally calls to mind ancient monks like Hanshan, traveling up mountains in terrible poverty. Zhang Ruzhao does not really fit into that mold. For one she was born in the turn of the 20th century, earning an English degree in 1925, then later worked at a local office for the National Party…
Masters of Sleep by Zhu Yue, a Beijing-born author with both a legal and philosophical background, is one of three published collections of short stories, and the first translated into English. Translated by Jianan Qian and Alyssa Asquith, it is an esoteric, ironic book. Some stories read as if written in the Victorian era. Others…
Osamu Dazai’s Good-Bye is a collection of short stories picked from different stages of his career, most of which have been translated into English for the first time. The final story, which shares the title of the book, was Dazai’s last work before he committed suicide, and remained an unfinished novella at the time of…
Chen Munian is not a murderer. Yet who is he accused of murdering? Why can he not shake off the accusation? These questions, otherwise central in a book initially presented as a murder mystery, unravel in Xu Zechen’s Night Train. The novel begins with Munian working as a gardener at a unaccredited institute of higher…
First published anonymously in March 2014 as a series of blog posts, Lady No is Kim Hyesoon’s latest collection of poetry translated into English. These posts were written during the most politically significant years of South Korea, when the ferry MV Sewol sank, killing 304 people, including 250 high school students. The event and the…
Jennifer Wong’s Light Year is a meditation on separation and exile, tracking the concerns of other authors of the Hong Kong diaspora. The title is especially appropriate for the theme: a unit of measurement that calculates distance through the optics of speed and time. Indeed, the poetry focuses on the geographical distance between the United…
Originally published in Japan in 1964, and now translated for the first time into English, Kobo Abe’s The Traitor starts with a writer’s visit to a country town of Akkeshi. There he learns from an innkeeper, Fukuchi, the story of three hundred convicts who escaped into Hokkaido after the end of the brief Boshin War,…
Jiban Narah’s The Yellow Metaphor is an unassuming collection of poetry, written from 1990 to 2023, that draws from the Mising and Assamese traditions of north-east India. Occasionally embedded in the English translation are the original Mising words, a translator’s decision to retain the otherworldliness of the poems. Assamese geography, fauna, and history feature prominently…
Written 40-50 years ago during the South Korean dictatorship from the 1970s-80s, now newly-translated into English and framed by reflective essays, Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection The Hell of That Star is a violent and grotesque testament to a censored time. Having worked as an editor during the regime, Kim is familiar with the censorship apparatus…
A child was abandoned on the train tracks of Cheongnyangni Station, Seoul. Nothing was known of her before that moment—no certificates, no paperwork. She would grow up to be called Munju by her foster father, then Esther by the nuns at the orphanages, and finally given the name Nana by her French adoptive parents. Those…