Picture Bride by Yoshiko Uchida
Reviewed in the TLS
Yoshiko Uchida (1921–92) was a leading Japanese-American writer of the twentieth century. Born in California to Japanese parents, she wrote children’s books and published collections of Japanese folk tales. Picture Bride, first published in 1987, is her only novel for adults. It tells the story of her parents’ generation, who struggled to make a life for themselves and their children in America.
In 1917 Hana Omiya sails from Japan to Oakland, California, to marry a man she knows only from his photograph. She is twenty-one and a “picture bride”. Her parents have lost their money and she doesn’t fancy life as the wife of a farmer or a merchant. When she hears about Taro Takeda, a shopkeeper in America who wants a wife, she volunteers. But once they meet she questions her decision: his shop is struggling and he has less hair than in his photograph.
From Land of the setting sun: The Japanese immigrant experience in early twentieth-century California, a book review published on October 21, 2022.
Beautiful Star by Yukio Mishima – Translated by Stephen Dodd
Reviewed in the TLS
The Ōsugi family are extraterrestrials. All have separately discovered their extraterrestrial roots after seeing flying saucers. Jūichirō, the mild-mannered father, prone to musing over the strangeness and dislocation of everyday life, is from Mars. Iyoko, the mother, is from Jupiter. Their daughter, Akiko, who possesses an unearthly beauty, is from Venus, while Kazuo, their son, is from Mercury. The family yearns to witness a flying saucer again, this time together.
Yukio Mishima, who died in 1970, considered Beautiful Star his masterpiece, but the novel is strikingly different from the intense and driven works that brought him earlier acclaim. First published in 1962, when fears of a nuclear holocaust were at their height (the Soviet Union had just tested a hydrogen bomb 3,800 times as strong as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima), it had a bumpy reception from the Japanese press and public. Mishima’s friend, Donald Keene, refused Mishima’s request to translate it into English. Stephen Dodd’s translation, the first into English, captures Mishima’s dark humour, succinct style and dry wit. […]
From Springtime on Earth: Noh masks and flying saucers in Yukio Mishima’s extraterrestrial ‘masterpiece’, a book review published on June 10, 2022.
The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk
Reviewed in Slightly Foxed
Many years ago, when it was possible to do such things, I hitchhiked to India. I travelled through Iran and Afghanistan, saw the Great Buddhas at Bamiyan, and rode through the Khyber Pass on the roof of a brilliantly painted truck with my hair blowing in the wind. Later, as the world changed and carefree travel became more difficult, I came across Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game (1990) and was thrilled to read about the adventures of the first western travellers to those regions in the nineteenth century.
Of course, those travellers were more serious-minded than I was, and their travels were often a matter of life or death. The young men (they were invariably men) whose tales Hopkirk tells, mainly British and Russian, operated in Central Asia and up into the Pamirs as explorers, spies, mapmakers, soldiers, and often all four at once. Many wrote books which Hopkirk brilliantly synthesizes, describing their successes, scrapes and disasters, and he also dug deep into Foreign Office and other archives. It’s gripping, page-turning stuff, as colourfully written as fiction, with a cliff-hanger at the end of each chapter. […]
From Of Captains and Khans, a book review published in Issue 74, Summer 2022.
Longing and Other Stories – Translated by Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy
Reviewed in the TLS
A little boy walks along a never-ending road; an obnoxious young man observes himself with a jaundiced eye as he sponges off friends and family and complains of his fate; a foolish mother brings about disaster in her family.
Longing and Other Stories, three of the great novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s early works, are very different from each other, but all touch on a theme to which he was to return again and again – his unhappy, obsessive relationship with his mother. This is the first time these stories have appeared in English, rendered by two eminent translators of Tanizaki’s work. They were written when Tanizaki was in his early thirties, around the death of his mother in 1917. […]
From Like mother: The early works of a distinctive voice, a book review published on January 21, 2022.
In the Shelter of the Pine: A Memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu and Tokugawa Japan by Ogimachi Machiko – Translated by G. G. Rowley
Reviewed in the TLS
In 1703 Ōgimachi Machiko, the sixteen-year-old daughter of an aristocratic Kyoto family, travelled to Edo, now Tokyo, to be the second concubine of a samurai in the service of the shogun. Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu was the shogun’s favourite, effectively the power behind the throne, and Machiko became the mother of his fourth and fifth sons. She was hugely literate and cultured and after Yoshiyasu retired she sat down to write a memoir of this extraordinary man and his life.
In the Shelter of the Pine is the most significant work of literature by a woman of the Tokugawa era. It was widely circulated in Japan and more than three dozen hand-copied texts are still extant, but this is the first time it has been translated. Yoshiyasu came from a relatively humble samurai family, but he rose to become far more powerful than any of the daimyo warlords, so naturally he inspired envy and acquired enemies. Over the centuries both he and his shogun received a rather bad press. […]
From Envy and enemies: ‘The most significant work of literature by a woman of the Tokugawa era’, a book review published on July 23, 2021.
Tokyo Junkie: 60 Years of Bright Lights and Back Alleys . . . and Baseball
Reviewed in the TLS
When Robert Whiting arrived in Tokyo in 1962 at the age of nineteen the city was engulfed in a frenzy of construction as it prepared to welcome the world to the Olympics two years later. The “rickety wooden houses, scabrous shanties and cheaply constructed stucco-covered buildings” that had sprung up after the devastation of the Second World War were being torn down and new highways and high rises were springing up. It was, he writes, “the most dynamic city on earth”.
For Japan the Olympics were to demonstrate that the country was back on its feet, ready to take its place among the community of nations. Everyone was sure the city would not be ready in time. In fact, as Whiting recounts, the 1964 Olympics were a triumph. Sixty years later Whiting is still in Tokyo and another Olympics looms; this one too already had huge question marks hanging over it, even before the pandemic.[…]
From Olympic success: A sports journalist observes a changing Tokyo, a book review published on June 18, 2021.
Language Hunting in the Karakorum by E. O. Lorimer
Reviewed in Slightly Foxed
When I was young I thought I knew exactly where the real Shangri-La was. It was the land of Hunza, in north-west Pakistan, or if not, then Gilgit or Chitral, and those magical names remained with me as I grew up.
Years later I was clearing out my father’s things and discovered a worn, spineless, much-used book on his shelves. It was called Language Hunting in the Karakorum. More years passed before I discovered where and what the Karakorum are and where my identification of Hunza with Shangri-La had come from. My father never went there but this book must have convinced him that Hunza was that perfect, unspoilt place, and it became one of those certainties that he passed on to me. […]
From Unravelling Burushaski, a book review published in Issue 70, Summer 2021.
THE JAPANESE: A history in twenty lives by Christopher Harding
Reviewed in the TLS
The Second World War was over and Japan in ruins when a child star called Misora Hibari appeared, with the sweetest voice imaginable. But when the eleven-year-old tipped her head coquettishly, cigarette in hand, and sang about being forced into prostitution, her audience found it uncomfortably close to home. One critic described her songs as the “music of a ruined nation”. For, as Christopher Harding writes in this engrossing retelling of Japanese history, she seemed to represent quite perfectly the spirit of the age..[…]
From Rising sons and daughters of Japan, a book review published on April 16, 2021.
Speak, Okinawa by Elizabeth Miki Brina
Reviewed in the TLS
Born to an American father and an Okinawan mother, Elizabeth Miki Brina grew up feeling different but not quite knowing why, wanting to fit in and not sure why she couldn’t. She believed that the problem was her mother, whose English was poor and who was even more of an outsider than she was. It is only when she is thirty-three and her mother decides to be baptized as a Christian that Brina begins to see her parents as autonomous beings with lives of their own, and to become curious about who her mother is and where she comes from. Speak, Okinawa is the story of Brina’s rebellious and angry youth. It is a tale of redemption, of finding out who she is, making peace with her mother, and atoning, saying sorry.[…]
From Autonomous beings, a book review published on March 5, 2021.
HOW TO BE A SAMURAI BY ANTONY CUMMINS
Reviewed in the TLS
Becoming a modern samurai is a full-time occupation if you follow Antony Cummins’s precepts. You will have to learn meditation, acquire some swords, make sure your house is well defended, collect a band of followers to be your army, learn to spy on rival bands, and much else. You will also need to master the secrets of ninja and samurai magic and get to grips with Confucianism, Shinto, Buddhism and Taoism.
Cummins is an enthusiast for all things samurai and in particular ninja. He doesn’t appear to speak Japanese or to have much experience in martial arts but with a Japanese translator he has produced many books, among them The Book of Samurai (2015), rewriting samurai and ninja texts for the Western reader.[…]
From Samurai, a book review published on September 4, 2020.
Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A woman’s life in nineteenth-century Japan by Amy Stanley
Reviewed in the TLS
At the start of the nineteenth century, Japan had been sealed off from contact with the West for nearly 200 years. While Europe and America were wracked with wars and revolutions and the British were building the British Empire, the Japanese enjoyed uninterrupted peace. Throughout that entire period, the only Westerners permitted to enter the country were a revolving cohort of twenty Dutch merchants whose lives were rigidly circumscribed. A few Japanese scholars studied Dutch, the wealthy might purchase luxury items imported by the Dutch, and ordinary people occasionally used fabrics inspired by Western designs, but most people lived lives little impinged upon by the West. It was a society that had developed largely in isolation, changing not as a result of events abroad but by its own internal rules – pristine Japan, a sort of Eden before the fall. Little did anyone guess that they were approaching the end of an era.[…]
From An awfully bad adventure, a book review published on July 31, 2020.
This Great Stage of Fools: An Anthology of Uncollected Writings by Alan Booth (Edited by Timothy Harris)
Reviewed in the Literary Review
Alan Booth, who died in 1993 at the age of forty-seven, was a London-born writer and journalist who lived in Japan for twenty years and wrote two well-loved travel books, The Roads to Sata and Looking for the Lost, which have become classics owing to their sharp depictions of Japanese life and their bracing humour. Now Timothy Harris has put together this collection of Booth’s journalism and other writings. This Great Stage of Fools includes Booth’s reviews of Japanese films, descriptions of festivals and folk songs and tales from his travels off the beaten track in Japan. I should confess that I was a friend of Booth: he was a great raconteur, with a fund of sometimes outrageous stories that reflected his enviable knowledge of Japanese life and culture. But for anyone with an interest in Japan, or who simply enjoys colourful writing, this volume will be a treat.[…]
From Our Man in Japan, a book review published in October, 2019.
The Tale of Genji: A Visual Companion by Melissa McCormick
Reviewed in the Literary Review
In 1510 a wealthy Japanese man called Sue (pronounced Sué) Saburō took possession of a magnificent album of paintings and calligraphy illustrating The Tale of Genji. He had commissioned it for his father, Sue Hiroaki, then governor of the province of Hyōgo (now Kobe) and a famous scholar. A few years later Hiroaki had the album leaves pasted onto screens to be used as a backdrop for a series of lectures on The Tale. The album ended up at Harvard Art Museums.[…]
From Album Notes, a book review published in July, 2019.
Dandelions by Yasunari Kawabata (Translated by Michael Emmerich)
Reviewed in the Literary Review
Yasunari Kawabata, one of Japan’s best-loved writers, was the first from the country to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Every Japanese can quote the opening sentence of Kawabata’s most famous novel, Snow Country: ‘The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.’ Dandelions was his last book, which he began writing in 1964, when he was sixty-five, and never finished. He died by his own hand in 1972 – a fitting end for a writer, according to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (included as an afterword in this book).[…]
From For Whom the Bell Tolls, a book review published in June, 2019.
Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima (Translated by Geraldine Harcourt)
Reviewed in the Literary Review
As Territory of Light opens, the unnamed narrator is newly separated from her husband, Fujino, and looking for an apartment. But she can’t break the habit of deferring to Fujino, who drags her around to more and more expensive places. She feels utterly defeated: ‘If I could live with my husband I didn’t care where, and without him everywhere was equally daunting.’[…]
From A Single Woman, a book review published in April, 2018.
The Maids by Junichiro Tanizaki
Reviewed in the Literary Review
Junichiro Tanizaki, who was born in 1886, is one of the giants of 20th-century Japanese literature. His work ranges from epic novels such as The Makioka Sisters, delving deep into the lives of four wealthy sisters in western Japan up to and including the early years of the Second World War, to the celebrated In Praise of Shadows, an essay on Japanese aesthetics. The Maids is his last novel and the last of his works to be translated into English.[…]
From At Your Service, a book review published in July, 2017.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Reviewed in the Literary Review
Pachinko opens with the portentous words ‘History has failed us, but no matter.’ The novel is a sweeping, engrossing family saga, written in simple prose, covering eighty years and four generations. Along the way we learn a great deal about the society, culture and history of Japan in the 20th century, seen always through the lens of one family’s experiences. Pachinko throws into high relief the relentless discrimination suffered by Koreans – and, for that matter, any outsiders – living in Japan. It’s a subject that anyone who has settled in Japan cannot fail to be aware of. […]
From Pinball Wizened, a book review published in March, 2017.
The Book of Yōkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore by Michael Dylan Foster
Reviewed in the Literary Review
There were many traps for the unwary in old Japan. You could be out walking at twilight at the edge of town and meet a beautiful woman. But before you proposed marriage, it would be as well to check whether she had a bushy tail protruding from her skirts. Otherwise you might wake up and discover that you’d slept with a fox.
Or you might buy a cooking pot that screamed when you put it on the fire and revealed itself to be a tanuki (Japanese raccoon dog), badly burnt and probably dead. (Tanuki are rather inept shape changers, unlike foxes.) On 3 May 1889 a train driver reported a train steaming straight towards him that suddenly disappeared, leaving a dead tanuki on the track. Domestic utensils like pots and pans had a tendency to grow arms and legs, and cats might develop a split tail and turn into cat monsters. […]
From Things that Change Shape in the Night, a book review published in March, 2015.
Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan
Reviewed in the The New York Times
“When I was 7, I knew exactly who I was.” With these words, Violet, the principal narrator of Amy Tan’s latest novel, “The Valley of Amazement,” begins her story. Yet over the course of the book, Violet’s certainty about her identity — and nearly everything else — will be turned upside down.
An American child (or so she thinks), Violet lives in Shanghai in 1905, in an establishment called Hidden Jade Path, a first-class courtesan house that caters to both Westerners and Chinese. It is run by her cool, aloof and seductive mother, who goes by several names, among them Lulu Mimi. A lonely, difficult child — one of Tan’s signature prickly heroines — Violet takes solace in playing with her ferocious pet cat and in spying on the courtesans’ lovemaking. She yearns for her mother’s affection — and for any clue about the identity of her father. […]
From Ladies From Shanghai, a book review published on November 8, 2013.
An Imperial Concubine’s Tale: Scandal, Shipwreck, and Salvation in Seventeenth-Centuary Japan by G G Rowley
Reviewed in the Literary Review
In 1609, a scandal broke out that shook the imperial court in the Japanese capital, Kyoto. Emperor GoYōzei had little temporal power. He spent his days in cultural pursuits such as hosting poetry parties in the imperial palace, a sprawling complex of buildings occupying an enormous compound. At the back was the women’s palace, home to his consorts and their gentlewomen and entirely run by female officials. His women attendants were all young, beautiful and aristocratic. They bathed the emperor, dressed his hair and served his meals. A roster, drawn up from among them, was assigned to spend the night with him in rotation.
GoYōzei had 16 concubines, one of whom was a young woman called Nakanoin Nakako. In the usual course of events she would have borne him a son, then retired to a nunnery. But in fact her life turned out very differently, as G G Rowley describes in this scrupulously researched and elegantly written account. Rowley specialises in making Japanese women and their stories known to English-speaking readers. She has written a study of Yosano Akiko, the feminist poet, and she translated Autobiography of a Geisha, the true and harrowing story of Sayo Masuda, a 20th-century geisha. […]
From Kabuki Nights, a book review published in July 2013.
Obtaining Images: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan by Timon Screech
Reviewed in the Literary Review.
In 1871 Claude Monet stumbled across a pile of Japanese prints in an Amsterdam shop and snapped them up. His discovery transformed Western perceptions of Japan (though Japanese art had first arrived in the West some decades earlier), inspiring artists such as Van Gogh and Whistler, as well as Monet himself, and sparking Japonisme, the enthusiasm for all things Japanese that swept across Europe.
Today Hokusai’s Great Wave is one of the most recognisable images in the world. In fact Westerners tend to equate Japanese art with wood-block prints, which, as Timon Screech writes in Obtaining Images, ‘would have chilled the blood of the shogunate and of most sober-minded people of the period’. To Japanese of the time, wood-block prints were akin to pin-up posters by and for the lower orders. Real art was very different. […]
From Artists of the Floating World, a book review published in July 2012.
Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love by Xinran
Reviewed in the New York Times.
In 1989, the Chinese writer and broadcaster Xinran was in a remote mountain village in Shandong Province having dinner with the headman when she heard cries from an adjoining room, where his daughter-in-law was giving birth. A while later, as the midwife collected her fee, Xinran noticed a movement in the slops bucket. “To my absolute horror,” she recalls, “I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail.” But she was the only one who was shocked. “It’s not a child,” the headman’s wife told her. “If it was, we’d be looking after it, wouldn’t we? It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it.”[…]
From Casualties of China’s One Child Policy, a book review published on April 1, 2011.
Under Fishbone Clouds by Sam Meekings
Reviewed in the New York Times.
[…] The English writer Sam Meekings’s accomplished first novel, “Under Fishbone Clouds,” is based on the lives of his Chinese wife’s grandparents. An unlikely love story set against the events of the last half-century in China, it’s a tale of terrible suffering that also manages to be a poetic evocation of the country and its people.[…]
From The Kitchen God Dreams of Love, a book review published on December 9, 2010.
Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows
Reviewed in the New York Times.
When I used to ask my mother about her family village in China, she always said it was three hours from Canton by bus. A hundred years ago, when my great-grandfather left China for good, that couldn’t have been far, but it was certainly no help in locating it. So I was pleased — though still mystified — to read in Deborah Fallows’s charming and witty little book that in China, “if you ask someone where their hometown is, they’ll say it is seven hours by bus. Or four hours by train. They won’t tell you where it is.” …
From Character Building, a book review published on September 24, 2010.
Burmese Lessons: A True Love Story by Karen Connelly
Reviewed in the New York Times.
Karen Connelly’s passionate and poetic memoir begins with her arrival in Burma in 1996 at the age of 27. Brash, naïve and bubbling with confidence, she is enchanted by the country, but also determined to “catch at least a glimpse of the truth — something beyond the beautiful images that are so readily available to the foreign eye.” …
From Border Crossings, a book review published on June 11, 2010.