“If bears disappeared from this land,” writes Michio Hoshino in The Travelling Tree, “and we could sleep fearlessly in our camps at night, what a boring kind of nature it would be.” Mostly taking the author’s beloved Alaska as their topic, the short essays in this collection explore a human desire to reconnect with a natural world that appears, in its very essence, resistant to such a union. Hoshino nevertheless perseveres, and his enduring love of nature proves insightful reading for those chasing, in the author’s own words, “the other time that flows alongside the frantic daily exertions of humankind.”
Translation
To start: a confession. Academics often speak of imposter syndrome—the sense that we lack real expertise on the topics about which are talking or writing. Although it’s largely a psychological illusion, there are situations in which it’s not completely wrong to say that we are imposters. When we teach college courses we have to cover a lot of ground. There is therefore a wide variety in the depth of knowledge we bring to the range of subjects we cover. For some, we are genuinely experts and can talk at length with authority; for others we are operating on a much thinner basic level of expertise. It’s not to say that what we say in lectures or classes is necessarily wrong, but rather that we are well aware that there can be less real understanding than we would like of the nuances underlying a single slide and its 3 bullet points. Over time, we can hope to expand the range of our in-depth knowledge and fill in the areas about which we can talk with authority. For me, reading Gregory Smits’s and Takara Kurayoshi’s books on the Ryukyu islands has been such a process.
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 throughout the book. While steeped in regional references, Narah blends his poetry with literary allusions to Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot, as well as spiritual representations of Krishna.
Set in the tea gardens of colonial Assam, Moonlight Saga follows the communities who built and maintain these delicate ecosystems on the frontiers of India, and the tensions and pressures of plantation life. Originally published in Assamese in 2022 and recently translated into English, this family saga set on the Atharighat Tea Estate in Assam, just below the Bhutan border, portrays life from both the perspective of Western planters and the Adivasi, India’s indigenous population, the labourers who sustain it. These alternating accounts provide contrasting portraits of life, danger and change on a colonial tea plantation. There is relatively little Assamese literature translated into English and this novel additionally benefits from a translation which incorporates some of the songs and phrases from Assamese.
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 that her book contends against.
Jagadish Chandra Bose was a Bengali scientist who convinced a largely skeptical world that plants are living beings. I first encountered his work in an essay called “Ahoto Udbhid” (“The Injured Plant”), in which he records a plant’s response to different kinds of stimuli.
Yumiko Kurahashi (1935-2005) is celebrated as a pivotal female writer in Japan’s growing post-war break with literary tradition. Informed by European writers and philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s, “third wave” writers in post-war Japan—Kobo Abe, Kenzaburo Oe, Minako Oba, Meiko Kanai and dozens of others labeled experimentalists, avant-garde, and absurdists—were interested in the metaphysical, the existential, and the intertextual, rather than depicting the real world. Kurahashi’s work embodies all of these.
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 same train tracks are Nana’s first childhood memory, a memory that forms how she views her birth mother, her foster father, and her own sense of self. Now an award-winning playwright in Paris, Nana receives an invitation to Seoul from an amateur filmmaker, who proposes a documentary on her adoption, a film that will revisit the fragmented scenes of her past.
Although Razia Sajjad Zaheer’s collection Darkness and Other Stories was written following India’s partition in 1947, it simmers with relevance today. Women still confront misogyny and sexism. They continue to be judged for their choices—sometimes by their own kind—and must often accept a lower social status.
In Tokyo’s Himonya district lives Kaede’s grandfather, a former school principal with a love of mystery novels that he has passed down to his granddaughter.
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