Ryunosuke
Akutagawa, Rashomon & Other Stories,
pb $19.75 (trans)
Modern
translation of some famous Japanese stories (Rashomon was made
into a brilliant movie). The art of short-story telling is demonstrated
here in this minimalist" approach. Almost like Japanese calligraphy.
Sawaka
Ariyoshi, Kabuki Dancer pb $29.95 (trans)
The
Doctor’s Wife pb $20.95 (trans)
In sixteenth
century Japan, "kabuki" meant daring, outrageous, flaunting convention;
now it refers to a form of traditional theatre performed by men.
However Kabuki was founded by a woman, Akuni, in the seventeenth century.
Akuni's extraordinary story is recreated in this wonderful novel by
Ariyoshi. Kabuki Dancer gives a fascinating picture of courtly
and common life of the period. Highly recommended as essential background
reading on Kabuki. The Doctor’s Wife is another historical
recreation, this time of the first doctor in the world to perform surgery
for breast cancer under a general anaesthetic. The medical background
is absorbing but the real interest is the relationship, which develops
into an intense rivalry, between the doctor’s wife and his mother.
Arlene
Chai, Eating Fire and Drinking Water,
pb $18.65
In the
world news recently was a report of a rubbish dump collapsing onto houses
in one of the poorer areas of Manilla. The setting of this novel is
in this region and it is about the way the poor are kept poor by maladministration
and corruption which starts from the top, particularly under the Marcos
rule. It is a novel about the pitched battles between students and soldiers
reminiscent of what we have seen so much of recently in Indonesia, presented
in a literary style which echoes the magic realism of a Marquez or Rushdie
but without the verbal excesses of these latter writers. Arlene Chai
must be considered one of Asia's important current writers.
Ba
Jin,
Ward Four: A Novel of Wartime China pb $34.00
(trans)
A most
unusual novel originally published in 1945 based on the experiences
of the author in a hospital ward in rural China during the Japanese
invasion. This is a Chinese novel about people not about politics. Reminiscent
of a writer like Soltsynytsin, this is a fictionalised account of factual
experience, all about the occupants of a hospital ward, patients, nurses
and doctors, filmic in its detailed observations of generous and ungenerous
individuals going about their everyday chores.
Matso
Basho,
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel
Sketches, pb $10.95 (trans)
This is
not modern at all. Rather these are sketches written in the seventeenth
century by a Japanese haiku poet of that period. The short sketches
describe a mountainous landscape which to the modern Western reader
seems as exotic as a moonscape, certainly an untamed and very different
world. But above all else these travel sketches are coloured by the
beauty of haiku which the poet employs just as a modern traveller might
employ a camera to serve as both a mnemonic and a celebration of feelings
evoked by the splendours of the landscape.
Carolyn
Choa and David Su Li-Qun (eds), The
Picador Book of Contemporary Chinese Fiction, pb $23.00
Highly
acclaimed recent collection of translated modern stories from post-Maoist
China. These are stories about people and relationship, about personal
struggles, rather than about ideologies or politics. One of the attractive
features of this collection is the variety, from stories about ordinary
Chinese people, to stories about artists, to stories about personal
disabilities like the powerful autobiographical piece called "Fate"
describing a man’s struggle to come to terms with paraplegia which
shattered his dreams of a high-flying academic and personal career.
Lisa
Dalby, The Tale of Murasaki, pb $21.90
Murasaki
was the famous medieval Japanese author of The Tales of Genji, a Japanese
classic. The present book, a contemporary best-seller, is a novel written
by an American author who is also a Japanese specialist, reconstructing
the life of Murasaki based on ancient diaries. Slow-paced but exquisitely
written bringing out the complex character of the Japanese writer who
grew to identify too closely with her creation, but also bringing out
the particular sensibility and aesthetic which distinguishes Japanese
culture from Chinese at a time when Chinese represented everything that
was "Classical" and when Japanese writers were experimenting with their
own poetic 'waka' style, a style which preceded haiku. Despite its subject
matter this is a novel written in a straighforward contemporary style
with a great sense of visual immediacy, albeit made out in subtle pastel
colourings. A most memorable novel.
Fumiko
Enchi, The Waiting Years, pb 15.95
A Japanese
novel of the 1950s by one of Japan’s foremost women authors which
in technique and method is indebted to the British tradition of psychological
realism. It is a story about a traditional Japanese household and in
particular focusing on the paterfamilias who, in accordance with the
habits of the time (pre-WW2), takes into his house a number of "helpers"
who are really surrogate wives. The novel is an exploration of the minds
of the three women who are forced to serve him, especially that of his
"proper" wife who is torn between jealousy and duty. This
is a substantial novel, a little reminiscent at times of Jane Austen
in its eye for psychological nuance and detail.
David
Hill (ed),
Beyond the Horizon: Short Stories from Contemporary Indonesia, pb
$27.45 (trans)
A collection
of Indonesian short stories which is the result of joint collaboration
between translators, teachers and students, creating a more accessible
collection for Western readers compared with previous similar publications,
also containing an excellent lengthy Introduction. These stories reflect
something of the unexpected diversity that exists in modern Indonesian
society and are of particular interest at this present juncture of social
upheaval in Indonesia.
Kazuo
Ishiguro, Artist of the Floating World,
pb $14.95
An excellent
novel by the author of Remains of the Day which, in the usual
Ishiguo manner, turns on a first-person narrator. What is so interesting
about Ishiguro’s literary technique is his use of the method of
story-telling once advocated by Henry James, that of the so-called ‘unreliable
narrator". This is a method of narration which asks you to read
equally in between the lines as read the lines themselves. In this novel
the reader is able to catch the ambivalent tone of the narrator’s
voice as the narrator thinks back to his connections with the Japanese
imperial movement leading into WW2, revealing the mind of a man who
is forced, in a post-war world, to admit that that ultra-nationalistic
policy was wrong even while he still secretly celebrates the powerful
emotions the imperial movement generated in his time as a younger man.
Ha
Jin, Waiting, pb $21.95 (trans)
In
the Pond, pb $17.95 (trans)
Winner
of the 1999 US National Book Award for Fiction this is both a harrowing
and beautiful novel. It is a story about a doctor in rural China who
wants to divorce his arranged ultra-traditional village wife to marry
a modern women whom he loves. For seventeen years this man tries to
persuade the authorities of his wishes but the Party seems designed
to thwart human desires for reasons always bureaucratic despite the
familiar Party use of a moralistic rhetoric. By the end of this novel
the feelings between each of these people have grown muddied and uncertain,
and the concept of a 'relationship' in the modern sense seems doomed.
The story is a kind of modern Chinese Communist Party Romeo and Juliet
story turned sour and rendered improbable. The more recent In the
Pond has been described by the New York Times Book Review
as containing a mixture of art, politics, naughtiness and raucousness.
This is a story about the everyday workplace and the way corrupt bosses
can stymie the ambitions of an ordinary competent worker. Also:
The
Bridegroom, pb. $29.95
Written
in English, this is the best book of contemporary Chinese short stories
I have come across. The stories cover a range of likely and unlikely
topics about life in contemporary China, centring around the many confusions
and hypocrisies which typify modern day to day affairs in mainland China,
often narrated with a wicked sense of humour as well as a wonderful
control of the English language. The only word of caution is that these
stories include some ‘adult’ material regarding relationships,
though always presented in a totally inoffensive way.
Han
Shaogong, Homecoming? and Other Stories
pb $27.45 (trans)
Quite
different from the social realism which is the mode of much contemporary
Chinese fiction, a mode influenced by the Communist position. Here rather
are stories incorporating the magical, the psychological, stories which
suggest many things without finally resolving in any definite form -
perhaps a cunning way to avoid official censorship.
Philip
Jeyaretnam, Raffles
Place Ragtime pb $13.95
Abraham's
Promise
pb $19.95
Raffles
Place Ragtime has proven to be a popular first novel to do with
modern social and business life in contemporary Singapore. Abraham's
Promise is Jeyaretnam's best work tackling the large questions about
life and death, youth and age, loyalty and cowardice, marriage and career.
Highly recommended.
Sun
Li and Yu Xiaohui, Metropolis pb $16.45
Winner
of a major literary award, this is a novel about Chinese bureaucracy
and the way it rules the lives of workers in contemporary Chinese society.
The novel creates a complex picture of individuals scurrying to stay
ahead of the law while guarding their own backs in the process. A trenchant
indictment of post-Maoist Chinese society.
Liu
Xinwu,
Black Walls and Other Stories pb $27.45 (trans)
Satirical
stories which mock Chinese authority's abhorrence of individualism or
difference.
Lillian
Ng,
Silver Sister, pb $18.60
A simply
written novel which traces the life of a destitute child in a Chinese
village to Hong Kong, Singapore and eventually Australia (where the
author lives). A charmingly direct story which is all about cultural
and social contrasts and which an Australian critic describes as "full
of ironies, wisdom, hope, fear and adventure".
Kien
Nguyen, The Unwanted, pb. $30.00
A harrowing
but very well written memoir of a boy's attempts to escape from South
Vietnam to the US at the time of the invasion from the north. Kien Nguyen
is the illegitimate child of an aristocratic Vietnamese mother and an
American sailor. As a hybrid he is rejected by his society and can see
only a choice between suicide or escape. This is a powerful detailed
account of the decline of a wealthy southern family when South Vietnam
was taken over by the Communist north with its puritanical determination
to destroy anyone or anything that could be labelled capitalist. The
systematic handing out of undeserved punishments and the bloodshed so
often involved means that this is not a book that is not suitable for
the faint-hearted.
Karim
Raslan, Heroes and Other Stories, pb
$14.25
Malaysia's
exciting new talent. This short collection contains stories which must
rank among the best of anything that has come out of Malaysia written
in English. Written with extreme simplicity these are stories which,
often through the use of a technique of 'unreliable narrators', interrogate
notions of heroism, bravery, loyalty, and the like. Is one's loyalty
to a friend or to a former lover or a family member, for instance, more
important than loyalty to one's job or even to one's country? This is
the sort of ethical issue many of these stories raise, often rendered
through a protagonist's determination not to examine a dark side of
their own character too closely.
Moni
Lai Storz, Notes to my Sisters, pb $12.95
Notes
to My Sisters is a charming direct and humorous account of a Malay
Chinese girl growing up and coming to terms with adolescence. A wonderful,
short, lyrical, intelligent novel from an author who is currently a
sociologist at an Australian university. Emphasis on the personal rather
than the political.
Gail
Tsukiyama, Women of the Silk, pb $20.00
A novel
about Chinese rural life in the 1920s where a group of women working
in a silk making factory forge a sisterhood or union to rebel against
harsh working conditions. A most unusual insight into a particular segment
of Chinese society. The novel follows the life of a young girl who is
sold by her family to the factory out of economic hardship, and the
story is told with a pastel-like delicacy and attention to detail, dealing
rather surprisingly with matters which nowadays would be referred to
as feminism and unionism, matters not normally associated with early
twentieth century Chinese society.
Michio
Takeyama, Harp of Burma, pb $19.75 (trans)
A story
about the Japanese at war in Burma which challenges the stereotypical
Western view of Japanese soldiers. Raises some interesting questions.
Loung
Ung, First they Killed my Father, pb
$19.95
One of
the many personal memoirs coming out of the various bloody social revolutions
that have afflicted Asian countries in the second half of the twentieth
century. This one from Cambodia and a story of a young girl's horrific
experiences under the Pol Pot regime. What sets this account apart in
my own mind is that the experience described in this book is absolutely
horrifying as the girl witnesses the deaths of the members of her family,
and I personally don't recall being quite as physically and mentally
revolted by an account of the doings of a regime as in my reading of
this book, the story simply told by a young girl somehow enduring unimaginable
horrors.
Tao
Yang, Borrowed Tongue, pb $27.45
Although
many recent 'escape from China' memoirs have appeared on the market,
few have real literary, as distinct from sociological, interest. This
book is a notable exception and is perhaps the most thoughtful of those
currently extant, concerned not so much with what happened as the author's
innermost responses to what happened.
Wang
Wen-hsing, Family Catastrophe,
pb $30.75 (trans)
A novel
which challenges traditional Chinese notions of filial piety and family
harmony, focusing on a younger modern generation's psyche. A controversial
novel in China.
Mo
Yan,
The Garlic Ballads, pb $34.00 (trans)
Explosions and Other Stories, pb, $27.45 (trans)
Mo Yan
is a Chinese phenomenon. There is nothing else resembling his writing
which is a mixture of postmodernist 'magic realism' and gripping brutal
realism. In its graphic brutality it hits harder than anything else
I know, in its amazingly lyrical descriptions of the countryside it
again surpasses most other writing. This is savagely beautiful literature.
Yet the brutality is not gratuitous since Mo Yan records the cruel tyrannical
governmental rule of the Chinese villages in more recent times (Garlic
Ballads). It is not easy to forget Mo Yan's books and the cliché
'you will never be quite the same again' really does apply in this particular
case. Explosions is a good introduction to Mo Yan’s work,
showing him to be a master of the short story as well as of the novel
