The River Ki by Sawako Ariyoshi, translated by Mildred Tahara [in AsianWeek]
Through three generations of strong, independent women, Ariyoshi captures and conveys the tumultuous period of Japan from the stratified, socially constrictive end of the 19th century to the modern postwar era of the 20th.
Review:...
Just looking at the cover of this book will make you a little happier. … It’s a delightful visual romp that captures Japan’s love affair with the entertaining goldfish: most of these overbred guys are anything...
An informative overview that includes history, memoir, and technique by a world-famous Ninja grandmaster. These ain’t no stunts: They’re the real thing!
Review:
The looming question at the end of this fantastical novel is: “Is she or isn’t she?”
Naoko and her young daughter Monami are one of the few to survive a horrific bus crash. But Naoko is fatally...
An oddly compelling novella about a lonely man who never quite gets the girl – any girl – but is unwilling to give up trying. Indeed, few writers can do isolation quite like Kawabata, the Nobel-Prize-winning...
This is a World War II story told from the other side – without that other side being demonized and made to seem inhuman. The book’s narrator meets an engineer who recalls...
This is definitely not one of those “Dummy” guides. It’s a serious how-to manual/history/philosophy book about the Japanese art of healing using hand pressure, by an internationally renowned master, referred to as...
Okay, call me a terribly old fuddy-duddy, but I just don’t get the lure of reading about the sex lives of misdirected, apathetic teenagers. I know there’s an audience out there because Doll is...
It’s no wonder that Chinese film auteur Zhang Yimou chose the title novella for his film of the same name, about four desperate women vying for the attention of their...
Don’t be put off by the tacky cover with the bare chest of a necklaced young man. The story within, with all its rawness and shock, is hard to put down. Five Dragons, an...
These days, the many health benefits of green tea are well-known … now here’s a book to tell you why it’s so good for you, as well as...
In post-Tian’anmen China, Ni Niuniu refers to herself as “a fragment in a fragmented age.” Indeed, at almost 30, she is a young woman who has lost all the important people in her life,...
I confess I have no idea what really happened in this wacky novel, but it was nonetheless entertaining, if only because it's so totally indescribably unpredictable. From what I gathered, there's a love story...
Get ready to turn on all the lights, crawl into bed, and not get any sleep because the sequel to
While the premise of a young girl’s diary about surviving war in contemporary Iraq is promising – if not necessary in order to put an innocent human face to the so-called ‘war on terrorism’...
Is it a textbook? Is it a comic book? It’s both, it’s neither. It’s a unique (and clever!) hybrid made up of 30 lessons that use manga to teach basic conversational Japanese....
A collection of five interconnected short stories about five different women going about their lives, singularly alone. While these women seem to be live quiet, detached lives, they are each on the verge of...
Young Kenji avoids college by working as a "nightlife guide" for foreign tourists through the sleazier sections of Tokyo. When he meets Frank, an overweight American who hires him for...
A compilation of 14 essays that highlight the experiences of a group of elite Chinese soldiers who were trained at China's first modern military institution, Whampoa Military Academy, who were...
According to editors Nguyen and Sachs, “In the history of modern Vietnamese literature, no writer has provoked more debate than Nguyen Huy Thiep.” Indeed, his images of Vietnam are hardly flattering, a...