Greek Lessons by celebrated Korean author and Man Booker International Prize winner Han Kang is a brief, poetic, and intimate look into the lives of two people, each affected by a disability, both cleaved from society in their own way, yet progressively drawn together by their shared grief and nascent hope. The narration switches between…
Akira Mizubayashi’s Fractured Soul opens in Tokyo in 1938. Rei sits quietly to the side while his father Yu conducts rehearsal for a string quartet playing Franz Schubert’s “Rosamunde Quartet”. Yu plays first violin, accompanied by three exchange students from war-beleaguered China. When Yu realizes they’re about to receive an unexpected visit from Japan’s military…
Fruits of the Barren Tree, a translation of the Nepali-language novel Phoolange, is set near Darjeeling, the hill station in India’s West Bengal synonymous with the Raj, tea gardens and domestic honeymooners. Yet the mountainous region portrayed by Lekhnath Chhetri is a far cry from the clichés and tropes that are so often invoked when…
There once was a tradition of storytelling that enthralled kings and beggars, mixing simple language and lofty poetry, while deploying ingenious tricks to retain the audience’s attention. Usually there were three or four stories embedded one within another, like a Russian doll. Just when you thought you were coming to a denouement, a new story…
A shimmering, fairy-tale city of glass towers where nothing is quite as it seems: this is the vision of Hong Kong presented by award-winning writer Dorothy Tse in her first solo novel.
The “six” in Dinner for Six is the number at the assembled table when a Chinese widow and widower form a temporary family with their respective son and daughter each. Author Lu Min, in this translation from Nicky Harman and Helen Wang, first focuses on the widow’s son Ash, who becomes shaped by all the…
Can Xue’s experimental novella Mystery Train opens in total darkness: a chicken-farm employee named Scratch wakes up to find himself “in one of [the] pitch-dark sleeper cars” of a train. Confused, Scratch gets out of bed and looks at his wrist to check the time, but is unable to make out the face of his…
While the first two books in Ahmet Altan’s “Ottoman Quartet”, Like a Sword Wound and Love in the Days of Rebellion, could be read as stand-alone novels, the third installment, Dying is Easier than Loving, requires familiarity with the story that came before.
On 12 March 1867, an American merchant ship, the Rover, capsized near Kenting, on Taiwan’s southern coast. A handful of survivors managed to come ashore, but almost all were promptly killed by a local indigenous tribe.
The poet Ghalib took a broad view about spirituality and ritual. He told a British friend he was half a Muslim, because while he wouldn’t eat pork, he enjoyed as hurrah peg of whiskey. Did Ghalib retain a medieval belief in cultic efficiency, or did he have a modern’s skepticism about revealed religions in general?…
Western thinking has long been dominated by essence, by a preoccupation with that which dwells in itself and delimits itself from the other. By contrast, Far Eastern thought is centered not on essence but on absence. The difference between essence and absence is the difference between being and path, between dwelling and wandering.
The beaches of Tel Aviv are some of the most spectacular of any major world city. Sarit Yishai-Levi uses these beaches as a backdrop for her newest novel, The Woman Beyond the Sea, translated from Hebrew by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann. And as the title implies, the water also serves as a boundary, specifically between three generations…
We are often told that the trend toward globalization is unstoppable, but then some event occurs—whether it is the war in Ukraine or Brexit—that reminds us of the power of nationalism; the emotional attachment that citizens have to their land and people. That power, that emotional attachment, jumps off every page of The War Diary…
Author Maki Kashimada became a member of the Japanese Orthodox Church when she was in high school. The Orthodox Church in Japan is an autonomous Eastern Orthodox Church within the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, one of fifteen subdivisions within the Orthodox Church. There have been Orthodox Christians in Japan since the 1860s, but they…
Long ago at the bottom of a lake lived a large, white snake—revered for his great powers, the local people implored this mythical creature to reform the landscape so that they could cultivate crops and survive the winter. According to the oft-told tale, after striking a deal with the chieftain, the snake god replaced the…