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…
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.
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…
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”…
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,…
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…
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 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, 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…
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…
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…
This is the first English translation of 2021 Suntory Literary Prize-winning author and visual anthropologist Itsushi Kawase. In this playfully-structured collection of stories and photographs, Kawase journeys from Japan to the Ethiopian streets of Gondar. Join him in Africa where he learns from a diverse cast of characters including local bards, prostitutes, musicians, priests, the…
Latin America is home to a large East Asian diaspora, the result of much the same forces that created the not dissimilar diaspora in North America; the authors arising in that other diaspora, however, write in Spanish (and perhaps Portuguese, depending on how one defines things) rather than English. Very few of these works end…
In 1856, the East India Company imposed the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act, allowing widows to remarry after their husband’s death. The Act was controversial at the time: Hindu traditionalists, particularly in higher castes, prevented widows from remarrying to protect the family’s honor, and even teenage and child widows were expected to live lives of austerity.
In these ten stories, selected by translator Kavita Bhanot, Anjali Kajal examines the lives of women across two generations of, mainly, mothers and daughters, set in current-era Northern India. No one who has lived in the region will be surprised at the unfortunate incidents portrayed in these stories: harassment of females by men on the…