Seicho Matsumoto was one of Japan’s most celebrated mystery writers —with two dozen novels to his name from the late 1950s, at a time when Japan was rebuilding after the war until just before his death in 1992—but only in recent years his work has been translated into English. Point Zero, translated by Louise Heal…
Therapist Haesoo Lim used to appear on television to provide her professional opinion on matters in the news. But after speaking about a famous male actor, her career took a nosedive when the actor committed suicide. Haesoo not only lost her job, but her marriage also fell apart. Kim Hye-jin’s new novel Counsel Culture, translated…
In 1975, journalist Ian Gill met up with his mother Billie in Hong Kong. He flew in from his home in New Zealand while she came from her home in Geneva. They hadn’t seen each other in a few years and Ian thought it would be just a chance to catch up with his mother….
Over the last few years, there’s been a renewed interest in pre-War Chinese-American film star Anna May Wong. A screenplay by David Henry Hwang starring Gemma Chan is in the works and the US Mint recently issued a quarter to commemorate her. A novel and narrative non-fiction study were published last year, but there hasn’t…
It was a striking sight. A blond-haired man waved a large red and white Danish flag among thousands of Chinese refugees ninety minutes from Nanjing. It was late 1937 and the Japanese army had just marched into Nanjing, without much resistance, and went on a spree of pillage, rape, and murder, the likes and scale…
If Wong Kar-wai were to write a screenplay for a post-Handover story, along the same lines as his classic films set in the 1960s and 1990s, it might look like Sheung-King’s new novel, Batshit Seven. The pen name of author Aaron Tang, Sheung-King writes a raw and gritty story of a twenty-six year old called…
Dan Morrison was researching the history of cholera in India when he came across a 1930s murder case that made headlines around the world at the time, but has since been forgotten, and found therein a story fit for a medical thriller. An Indian film in the 1970s was loosely based on the story, but…
Sweet malida is a dish made from rice grains softened in water mixed with sugar and dried fruit and nuts. It’s enjoyed in Afghan, Indian and Pakistani homes, and it’s also a dish popular with the Bene Israel, a Jewish community with a 2000 year history in India. Zilka Joseph has written before about her…
At first glance, Sophie Wan’s debut novel, Women of Good Fortune, set around a glamorous wedding in contemporary Shanghai, may seem like an archetypal romantic comedy of girl meets boy, girl loses boy, and girl gets boy at the end. But it soon becomes evident that the novel is instead a more sobering story that…
Memoirs from Cambodian and of Cambodians remain rare, at least in English. A Cambodian Odyssey by Haing S Ngor came out almost forty years ago and became a bestseller a few years after the Oscar-award winning film, The Killing Fields. It is hard to think of many since. Until now with Chantha Nguon’s new memoir,…
Mariko Tatsumoto has made her name as a children’s author; her new book, Blossoms on a Poisoned Sea: A Novel of Love & Betrayal in Minamata, Japan, set during the 1956 industrial disaster, is suited for a more mature audience of adults and young adults. It’s a thrilling coming of age romance of a poor…
Looking back, 1976 was the most tumultuous year in modern Chinese history. Zhou Enlai died in January, Zhu De in early July, and Mao in September. The three main founders of the PRC were gone, unleashing a new era. And in late July that year, Tangshan in Hebei province suffered the worst earthquake in China’s…
Sports writer Ben Rothenberg took special notice in August 2020 when three professional tennis tours were shut down for a day in protest for Black Lives Matter. There were protests around the US that summer, but this one was different. Never before had professional tennis shut down during a tournament, but also Rothenberg saw that…
In her letter to readers at the beginning of her debut novel, The Storm We Made, Vanessa Chan writes that Malaysian “grandparents love us by not speaking” and goes on to explain that this only pertains to the four years of Japanese occupation during World War II. In every other subject, she writes, Malaysian grandparents…
Over the last thirty years, Shanghai has been demarcated by the two sides of the Pudong River, the almost-futuristic Pudong and the historic Puxi. These two areas inspire the title of Aube Rey Lescure’s impressive debut novel, River East River West, a story of people more complicated and layered than they may first appear, set…