Far Eastern Fiction

CHINESE AUTHORS

Gao, Xingjian: Soul Mountain
In 1983, Chinese playwright, critic, fiction writer and painter Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer and faced imminent death. But six weeks later, a second examination revealed there was no cancer – he had won "a second reprieve from death." Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing and began a journey of 15,000 kilometers into the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southwest China. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is Soul Mountain .

Min, Anchee: Becoming Madame Mao
From the best-selling author of Red Azalea, this extraordinary novel tells the stirring, erotically charged story of Madame Mao Zedong, the woman almost universally known as the "white-boned demon," whom many hold directly responsible for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Bringing her lush psychological insight to bear on the facts of history, Min penetrates the myth surrounding this woman who was driven by ambition, betrayal and a never-to-be-fulfilled need to be loved.

Min, Anchee: Empress Orchid
The setting is China's Forbidden City in the last days of its imperial glory, a vast complex of palaces and gardens run by thousands of eunuchs and encircled by a wall in the center of Peking. In this highly ordered place the Emperor, "the Son of Heaven," performs two duties: he must rule the court and conceive an heir. To achieve the latter, tradition provides a stupendous hierarchy of hundreds of wives and concubines. It is as a minor concubine that the beautiful Tzu Hsi, known as Orchid as a girl, enters the Forbidden City at the age of 17. Based on copious research, this is a vivid portrait of a flawed yet utterly compelling woman who survived in a male world, a woman whose main struggle was not to hold on to power but to her own humanity. Richly detailed and completely gripping, Empress Orchid is a novel of high drama and lyricism and the first volume of a trilogy about the life of one of the most important women in history.

Jin, Ha: Waiting
Lin Kong is a devoted doctor in love with a modern young woman – a nurse who is educated, clever and vivid. The only complication is the wife to whom he was married when they were very young – a tiny woman, humble and touchingly loyal, whom he visits in order to ask, again and again, for divorce.

Jin, Ha: War Trash
War Trash is Ha Jin's most ambitious work to date: a powerful, unflinching story that opens a window on an unknown aspect of a little-known war – the experiences of Chinese POWs held by Americans during the Korean conflict – and paints an intimate portrait of conformity and dissent against a sweeping canvas of confrontation. Set in 1951-53, War Trash takes the form of the memoir of Yu Yuan, a young Chinese army officer, one of a corps of "volunteers" sent by Mao to help shore up the Communist side in Korea. When Yu is captured, his command of English thrusts him into the role of unofficial interpreter in the psychological warfare that defines the POW camp. As Yu and his fellow captives struggle to create some sense of community while remaining watchful of the deceptions inherent in every exchange, only the idea of home can begin to hold out the promise that they might return to their former selves.

JAPANESE AUTHORS

Adachi, Jiro: The Island of Bicycle Dancers
This is the coming-of-age story of twenty-year old Yurika Song, a Korean-Japanese woman who comes from Japan to New York City for a summer to work with her Korean relatives and improve her English. Yurika's friends back home have always joked that she is half-sushi/half kim-chi. But cross-Asian ethnicities turn out to be far less jarring than her entree into New York life in the guise of bicycle messengers and the street culture in which they thrive.On one level this is a tale of mistaken love--Yurika falls hard for an attractive, but dangerous, Puerto Rican bicycle messenger nicknamed "Bone." But on another, deeper level, our heroine finds freedom in this new language, which to her "is like a huge octopus, very clever and sometimes hard to catch.

Hirahara, Naomi: Snakeskin Shamisen
Few things get Mas Arai more excited than gambling, so when he hears about a $500,000 win - from a novelty slot machine! - he's torn between admiration and derision. But the stakes are quickly raised when the winner, a friend of Mas's pal G.I. Hasuike, is found stabbed to death just days later. The last thing Mas wants to do is stick his nose in someone else's business, but at G.I.'s prodding he reluctantly agrees to follow the trail of a battered snakeskin shamisen (a traditional Okinawan musical instrument) left at the scene of the crime ... and suddenly finds himself caught up in a dark mystery that reaches from the islands of Okinawa to the streets of L.A. - a world of heartbreaking memories, deception, and murder.

Massey, Sujata: Girl in a Box
Chronically underemployed Rei Shimura takes a freelance gig with a Washington, D.C., alphabet agency that just might have ties to the CIA. Her mission, should she choose to accept it, is to go undercover as a clerk in a big Tokyo department store. It's a tricky and risky assignment, but it also gives Rei the opportunity to check out all the latest fashions and use her store discount to indulge her shopping impulses." "Meanwhile, she's listening in on conversations not meant for her and crashing a conference she's not invited to. She winds up fending off the advances of couple of the store's executives who seem to be fascinated by her navel ring. When her cover is blown, Rei is in big trouble, and it will take all her resourcefulness and unorthodox methods to unmask a killer.

Murakami, Haruki: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
This novel is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II. In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife, as well, in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid 16-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Tsukiyama, Gail: The Street of a Thousand Blossoms
It is Tokyo in 1939. On the Street of a Thousand Blossoms, two orphaned brothers are growing up with their loving grandparents, who inspire them to dream of a future firmly rooted in tradition. The older boy, Hiroshi, shows unusual skill at the national obsession of sumo wrestling, while Kenji is fascinated by the art of creating hand-carved masks for actors in the Noh theater.  Life seems full of promise as Kenji begins an informal apprenticeship with the most famous maskmaker in Japan and Hiroshi receives a coveted invitation to train with Tanaka. But then Pearl Harbor changes everything. As the ripples of war spread to both families' quiet neighborhoods, all of the generations must put their dreams on hold - and then find their way in a new Japan.

Yoshikawa, Mako: Once Removed
Painful breakups and long separations define this novel in which two stepsisters rekindle a long-interrupted friendship. Claudia and Rei first meet when they are nine, after Claudia's father, a New Jersey geologist, abandons Claudia's mother for Rei's mother, a Japanese artist who has recently immigrated to the U.S. The two girls become fast friends – they insist that they even look alike, though Claudia is blond and Catholic-Jewish, and Rei is Japanese – but when they are 17, their parents divorce and they are separated. As the novel begins, they meet again for the first time in 17 years. As they come together, the two women realize they must strike a balance between the friendship they long to recover and the secrets they have learned to keep.

Yoshimoto, Banana: Kitchen
This novel is a lyrical tale about loss and grief and familial love. When college student Mikage Sakurai is orphaned by the death of her grandmother, she is rescued from loneliness and grief by Yuichi, a young flower shop delivery man, and discovers that families come in many shapes ... and can be found in many places.

Yoshimoto, Banana: Asleep
Asleep comprises three novellas of women bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning a lost lover, finds herself sleepwalking. Another, who has embarked on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, finds herself suddenly unable to stay awake. And a third finds her sleep haunted by a woman she was once pitted against in a love triangle.