Japan has been aging for decades. The country’s birth rate first fell below the replacement rate in 1974, long before phrases like the “demographic transition” and the “silver economy” became commonplace. Now, with many countries rich and small staring at the prospect of an aging population, what’s happening in Japan may now be a leading…
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…
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…
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…
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 Warring States Period is one of the most important times in China’s history. It marked the end of one dynasty–the Zhou–and the beginning of a new imperial era, under the Qin. It’s an era that historian Andrew Seth Meyer describes as one of the most important revolutions in world history: The fall of the…
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…
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…
Mitya New’s earlier career as a foreign correspondent in Hong Kong, China, and Europe and his present position at universities in Hong Kong and India were evidently good preparation for his debut novel, Beyond Mount Kailash, an engaging story of a cross-cultural marriage that takes a different path from the typical Asian expat story. Maria…
What do the people closest to power really think about the system they serve? That’s perhaps one of the most important questions one could ask about North Korea, still one of the world’s least understood countries. Today, we’re joined by Jieun Baek, author of Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest…
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…
There is an irresistible temptation to read filmmaker Adachi Masao’s life as if it were itself a movie. A Japanese New Wave filmmaker disappears into Lebanon, becomes associated with the Japanese Red Army, spends decades in exile, is imprisoned, and eventually returns home as one of the most controversial figures in postwar Japanese culture. It…
On 9 August 1945, an American plane dropped a nuclear bomb over Nagasaki at 11:01 am local time. It exploded 47 seconds later, three kilometers northwest of its planned target. There is no consensus on the number of people killed, but immediate death estimates range from 22-75,000—with another 60,000 injured. Author Kyoko Hayashi was one…