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…
One of the first poems in Wang Yin’s recent collection, A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts, finds the Chinese poet in an unexpected place: Vermont. “The Task of the Poet, Written in Vermont After Robert Bly” opens with a pastoral scene on a front lawn, where the poet peacefully observes—and records—the sights and…
Vasily Eroshenko was a transnational writer working in the early 20th century, writing in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese and Russian to Esperanto as he moved about Europe and Asia. He was born in Ukraine and lived, among other places, in Russia, England, Japan, Myanmar, India, China, and the Soviet Union. His writings…
The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in titles translated from Japanese into English. While many of these novels and short stories collections are by rising authors, publishers also present readers with classic works by authors already well-known outside of Japan. These include Osamu Dazai, long celebrated for his No Longer Human, first…
Literature tends to be defined by language and place. For instance, Japanese literature is written in Japanese, or translated into another language, and written by Japanese authors. Chinese literature is however a little more complex because writers may also hail from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. In most of these places, citizens—a significant minority…
Banine’s Parisian Days picks up from where from where Days in the Caucasus leaves off: with the still very young woman pulling into the Gare de Lyon having the escaped the clutches of her besotted yet unwanted husband—the result of a deal to get her father out of jail, out of Bolshevik Baku and out…
Cheon Myeong-Kwan’s Whale is a sweeping epic mostly set in Pyeongdae, a remote mountain town that immediately evokes Macondo from Gabriel García Márquez’s similarly sprawling epic One Hundred Years of Solitude. Depicted with the same sort of dreamlike magical realism, Pyeongdae goes from a forgotten mountain hamlet to a booming railway city to a ghost…
Kotaro Isaka’s Three Assassins follows hot on the heels of the release of Bullet Train, the Hollywood movie starring Brad Pitt, based on the English-language edition of the author’s previous thriller of the same name. The novel alternates between the voices of Suzuki, a former middle school math teacher turned scammer; The Whale, a towering…
The Mongols, their khans, and the empire they built and ruled in the 13th and 14th centuries exert an enduring fascination. Caricatured as a marauding horde that ravaged surrounding peoples, in reality the Mongols created institutions, trading networks, economic systems, and intellectual and technological exchanges that shaped the early modern world. However, the centuries after…
Yamuna’s Journey is the English translation of Baba Padmanji’s 1857 Marathi novel Yamunaparyatan. “Yamuna” is both the name of the female protagonist of this novel as well as a reference to the river Yamuna in India; “paryatan” means journey or travel. “Yamunaparyatan” (“Journey to the Yamuna”) can be interpreted as travel to Vrindaban, a holy…
Several times a year, the narrator of Hiromi Ito’s The Thorn Puller boards a Transpacific flight to care for her elderly Japanese parents. She ferries her mother to and from the doctor. She keeps her father company. She buys him a dog. She reflects on her childhood.
While the foreigner in colonial India has become, at least since EM Forster, something of a genre unto itself, the foreigners are almost invariably British and the novels mostly in English. Museum of the World by Christopher Kloeble is something of a novelty not just because it is based on the true story of the…