Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders, published in Japan in 1946 and now available in English for the first time, employs the plot tricks of early European and American mystery writers to tell the story of a rapidly changing Japanese society around the time of the Second World War.
“Dissatisfaction with the womanly rôle,” the psychologist Alfred Adler wrote in Understanding Human Nature (1927), “is … more evident among [women] who escape from life because of some so-called ‘higher reasons’. Nuns, or others who assume some occupation for which celibacy is an essential, are a case in point.” Adler, of course, was not judging…
Early in The Aosawa Murders, Riku Onda writes that “it’s impossible to ever really know the truth behind events,” setting the tone of the mystery surrounding a horrible mass murder in 1970s Japan in which seventeen people are poisoned by cyanide after drinking a toast with sake and soft drinks. What starts as a jovial…
One has to be pretty dedicated to Russian literature to run across Alexander Grin (1880-1932). Nor, if this newly translated collection of (long) short stories is any indication, once one has found him, does Grin fit any expected mold.
When Chi Pang-yuan was a young girl, her father Chi Shiying was wanted by warlord Zhang Zuolin and his son, Zhang Xueliang. The crime was siding with a rival general, Guo Songling, at a time when the Republic was still relatively young and northeast China in constant turmoil. For most of her childhood and teenage…
The twilight of the Ming Dynasty in Southern China, with its elegant courtesans, poets and playwrights, pageants, drinking bouts and boat rides, bedazzled the generation which witnessed its fall in 1644. It inspired a literary legacy which has fascinated readers ever since. The Ming twilight in “Southland” is immortalized in Kong Shang-Ren’s (d. 1719) classic…
An Introduction to Zen Training is a translation of the Sanzen Nyumon, a foundational text for beginning meditation students by Omori Sogen—one of the foremost Zen teachers of the 20th century.
Karine Khodikyan is one of Armenia’s foremost writers, with a body of work encompassing plays, film and TV scripts, fiction, and journalism. Armenian literature, like others of the Caucasus, is surely under-represented in the English-speaking world, but now Khodikyan’s collection of short fiction, The Door Was Open, has—via Nazareth Seferian’s smooth translation—been made available in…
Year of the Rabbit is a graphic memoir that follows the journey of Lina, Khim, their son Chan, and their extended family members, as the Khmer Rouge take over Phnom Penh. Graphic in format, graphic in content, it is a story of resilience and hope, a profound testimony to one of the greatest tragedies of…
There are many novels by Western authors sojourning in Asia. Stories that go the other way around are as rare as hens’ teeth.
Few contemporary works of fiction from Uzbekistan are translated into English directly. Those that have found their way into the English language are usually classical texts or themselves translations of Russian translations of the Uzbek originals. Given this scarcity of accessible modern Uzbek literature, the casual English language reader could be forgiven for not knowing…
Chan Ho-kei has worked as a software engineer and video game designer, and his knowledge of the latest technology shines through in his new high-tech thriller, Second Sister, his second novel to be translated into English.
Visceral and enigmatic, Ye Lijun’s collection translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain reveals the intimate relationship between man and Nature. From home-brewed wine, Lake Huai to an intellectual’s return to her hometown, the poems in her first bilingual volume draw on the interaction between the environment and one’s internal states of being, reflecting on the seen and…
In the dead of winter, a Frenchman arrives at a small guest house in Sokcho where Franco-Korean author Elisa Shua Dusapin’s narrator works in a dead-end job as receptionist and run-about. Sokcho is a nondescript seaside town not far from the North Korean border. In the summer, Sokcho is a beach resort, if not the…
A rare and precious glimpse of pre-Khmer Rouge literature, Suon Sorin’s recently translated novel is set during Norodom Sihanouk’s Cambodia. Originally published in 1961, it harks back to the late colonial and post-colonial eras.