“Bearing Word” by Liu Liangcheng
Bearing Word opens with a donkey observing life at West Kun Temple through a crack in the stable door. She has been imprisoned here since she was bought two years ago by religious leader Kunmen Virtue.
“Finger Bone” by Hiroki Takahashi
In his 1994 speech accepting the second Nobel Prize for Literature ever awarded to a Japanese author, Kenzaburo Oe claimed that, in the history of modern Japanese literature, “the writers most sincere and aware of their mission were those ‘post-war writers’” who “tried with great pains to make up for the inhuman atrocities committed by…
“People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice” by Ao Omae
The tales in Ao Omae’s People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice are about sensitive people trying to navigate an unjust world. Take Nanamori, the protagonist of the collection’s title story. The characters in “People Who Talk” are members of the university Plushie Club. Members justify the club to university officials as an organization…
“Chittacobra” by Mridula Garg
In 1980, a year after Mridula Garg’s Hindi-language novel Chittacobra was published, two policemen appeared at her door at night to arrest her under sections 292, 293, and 294 of the Indian Penal Code, commonly referred to as the Act of Obscenity. The case was built around a scene of just two pages that described…
New Book Announcement: “River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation”, edited by Nuzhat Abbas
What are the histories, constraints, and possibilities of language in relation to bodies, origins, land, colonialism, gender, war, displacement, desire, and migration? Moving across genres, memories, belongings, and borders, these luminous essays by poets, writers, and translators invite us to consider translation as a form of ethical and political love—one that requires attentive regard of…
“Painter of the Wind” by Jung-Myung Lee
Jung-Myung Lee’s Painter of the Wind is set in Hanyang, as Seoul, the capital of the Joseon Dynasty in the late 18th century, was then known. The protagonists are fictionalized versions of Kim Hong-do and Shin Yun-bok, both real-life figures who are considered some of, if not the, finest painters of the Joseon Dynasty.
“Yuwa” by Chen Yixin
Howard Goldblatt, known for his translations of such notable writers as Mo Yan and Su Tong, has a new translation of Chen Yixin’s novel Yuwa, which traces a year in the life of a young boy in a Gansu Province village much like that from Chen’s own upbringing. Chen’s prose is full of color and…
“An Honorable Exit” by Éric Vuillard
The title of French writer and filmmaker Éric Vuillard’s short book on the First Indochina War (1946-1954) exudes sarcasm. For Vuillard, there was nothing “honorable” about France’s efforts to hold on to its Indochinese empire by force. In this, he mirrors those on the American left who ridiculed the Nixon-Kissinger formula of “peace with honor”…
“Kappa” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa is the story of a psychiatric patient who claims he once spent time in a land of water-loving creatures out of Japanese folklore. Most of Akutagawa’s contemporaries—as most Japanese readers today—would have been familiar with this famous folktale monster. A kappa is about three feet tall and, according to Patient No 23,…
Podcast with Tanvi Srivastava, translator of “The War Diary of Asha-san: From Tokyo to Netaji’s Indian National Army”
On a trip many years ago to New Delhi, I was struck by an official memorial to Subhas Chandra Bose, the wartime leader of the Indian National Army, the Japan-affiliated force of Indians who fought against the British during the Second World War. India, of course, has a more complex view of the fight against…
New Book Announcement: “Yuwa: A Novel” by Yixin Chen
Yuwa is a novel originally published in Chinese in 2019. Set in a dirt-poor area of Gansu Province in China’s far west, it features a boy who rises above his marginal existence in a village bypassed by economic growth.
“Contemporary China: 1949 to the Present” by Gilles Guiheux
Contemporary China is a socio-political assessment of China since 1949, at the advent of the People’s Republic of China. The author, Gilles Guiheux, is a historian and sociologist at Université Paris Cité. Those familiar with 20th- and 21st-century Chinese history will find little new or surprising in Guiheux’s account, though unlike some other works on…
“Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Bengali Tales from the Land of the Eighteen Tides” by Tony K Stewart
Needle at the Bottom of the Sea, five Bengali romances from the 17th to 19th centuries in English translation, reflect on the folkloric world of the Sunderbans “where tigers talk, rocks float and waters part, and faeries carry a sleeping Sufi holy man into the bedroom of a Hindu princess with whom the god of…
“Beijing Sprawl” by Xu Zechen
When development began in earnest in Beijing, migrants from around China flocked to the capital city for jobs of all sorts. There was money to be made and when young people did not pass their university entrance exams—or didn’t take them in the first place—they viewed Beijing as as good a place to make money…
“The Mill House Murders” by Yukito Ayatsuji
On 29 September 1985, four men arrive at the Mill House, located deep in the mountains of Okayama prefecture, for their annual visit, but the weekend quickly spirals into a sinister nightmare: two bodies are discovered, a guest goes missing, and a valuable painting disappears. Exactly one year later, the remaining guests gather again, hoping…
