Tokyo, 1984 (the title refers to the year and the Orwell book of similar title, not the IQ measurement of intelligence). Boy meets girl in the fifth grade and without a word being spoken they form an unbreakable love bond. Boy loses girl who turns into a contract killer. There follows sex, violence, magical realism, suspense, and a compelling love story that is sustained for three consecutive books, published separately in Japan, but as a single volume in the U.S. Japan in the mid-80s feels very cold and lonely. Religious cults, here standing in for Orwell’s Big Brother, dominate large swaths of people. Everyone else appears to be either stuck in traffic jams or mindlessly trudging through their working day. And yet. Aomame, Tengo, and Fuka-Eri hooked me. I wanted them to succeed by finding connection and meaning in their lives. More than once I felt like I was being unnecessarily drawn into the sexual fantasies of an aging Japanese writer and wondered how the plot would have been handled in the hands of a female author. (Japanese women don’t really purchase Manga, do they?). Nevertheless, I blazed through all 900 pages to find out if individual actors could overcome the forces of thought-control and the magical realism that suffused the book and was sometimes hard to deal with.
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The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka **** (of 4)
An elegy for the Japanese women who arrived in California in the early part of the twentieth century as mail-order brides to join lonely Japanese laborers. Agreeing to marry an unknown man in a far-off land can only be undertaken by women whose prospects at home must be even worse. Otsuka chooses no individual character to follow, instead providing a wash of experiences as she tracks in single poetic lines the lives of all women subject to extraordinary dislocation. At first, a bit dissatisfying to read, this spare account in the end encompasses the experience of everywoman with precision and compassion. -
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell *** (of 4)
High marks for originality. The year is 1799, though it feels like the period is 150 years earlier than that, and the location is just outside Nagasaki, Japan. A Dutch trading ship has just deposited its crew and cargo for a five year stint. Japan remains one of the most impenetrable societies encountered by Western traders who must negotiate strict cultural isolation in a blisteringly hot and humid, remote outpost. We meet Japanese shoguns and interpreters, regional magistrates and physicians and from the West clerks and ship captains, doctors, deckhands, and a multitude of slaves mostly acquired from Indonesia. A love affair blossoms between the Dutch clerk, Jacob de Zoet, who appears to be the only honest man in the Pacific and a Japanese midwife, who may just be the only female medical professional in Japan. Japanese custom forbids their open interaction. My one irritation is the frequency with with the author begins chapters mid-scene, requiring his readers to tangle with disorientation for many pages, probably as a technique to reinforce the feelings of his subjects. You’ll have to read the book to learn the outcome of Jacob’s and Orita the midwife’s mutual affections. -
The Tiger: A true story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vailiant *** (of 4)
One of those intriguing books about an animal I knew surprisingly little of and a part of the world, eastern Siberia, about which I was completely ignorant. The Tiger is the tale of a singular animal at the end of the 20th century that searches far and wide for one hunter that has done him wrong so he can eat him. In addition to learning how tigers can distinguish and track one human from another for the purpose of avenging past injustices it was equally fascinating to discover eastern Siberia. Here in the forest with winter temperatures routinely forty degrees below zero live both tigers and people abandoned following the demise of the Soviet Union. Survival in the forest is not much different in the year 2000 than it must have been 300 years prior: hunting, gathering wild mushrooms and pine nuts, log huts, and vodka. -
Matterhorn by Carl Marlantes **** (of 4)
On the face of it this is the retelling of the life and senseless destruction of a group of marines in the Vietnam War, but, oh, this novel is so much more. The action is riveting, as is the accompanying strain of anticipation. It is also realistic: more soldiers succumb to disease, injury, infections, and friendly fire than to enemy bullets. The lack of purpose of fighting in Vietnam is brought home by the repeated taking and losing of a remote jungle hilltop called Matterhorn. We witness the maturation and then existential collapse of 18 and 19 year old grunts extracted from their American homes to kill gooks for no apparent reason. And we observe the growth of black nationalism and racial awareness as African American recruits are asked by white officers to kill yellow people that have done them no wrong, especially in comparison to racism experienced back home. Remarkably, Matterhorn also works as a novel. Characters are complete with strengths and flaws, some fatal and others just annoying. And though the book may appear to be dauntingly frightening, we care about these soldiers with such fervor, that we finally understand what it means to be in the company of brothers. The story arcs in the hands of brilliant writing pulling you from page to page, burying you in the lives of Marines asked by their government to win a war of attrition. The continuing battle so many Vietnam vets faced to maintain their individual humanity post-combat is laid bare. -
The Things they Carried by Tim O’Brien *** (of 4)
A series of related stories about the life of U.S. soldiers trying to get by during the grind of the Vietnam War. O’Brien wavers across the line between autobiographical non-fiction and pure fiction partly as a tool, I think, to capture the war’s surrealism: dense jungle, extreme heat, young men face to face with unpredictable death, and the camaraderie that comes when living with a small group trapped in a senseless situation. My one complaint is the book, while easy enough to read, felt too much like a self-consciously highly stylized novel. A more effective book on the randomness with which death comes to soldiers is The Good Soldiers by David Finkel about one company’s experience over one year in Iraq. -
Peony in Love by Lisa See * (of 4)
Hard to believe this sold as many copies as it did. The veil over this novel, that belongs on the mass market Romance shelf with other books sporting steamy cover art of bursting bodices and swarthy heartthrobs, is as thin as a transparent silk scarf. Set in Ming dynasty China a young female courtesan arranged to be married falls in love with the poetry-spouting, artistic, dark, brooding, hunk of a guy from a neighboring estate. Did I mention his hot breath on her ear smells of Jasmine and rose petals? Wait for it. Lisa See isn’t going to let them touch just yet. The ancient Chinese veneer is just a tool to keep Little Peony locked away from men where she has nothing to sustain her but an evil mother, step mother, wicked witch, whatever, and her secret scrolls of loveplays. Blah, blah, blah. -
The Tenth Parallel by Eliza Griswold ** (of 4)
Griswold travels the around the globe hanging out approximately 10 degrees north of the equator. In Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines it’s the abrasion zone between Muslims who have spread from the north and Christians arriving by boat from the coasts and the south. In some aspects Griswold makes more of a religious conflict than probably really exists; she simplifies culture to unidimensional religious identification when most people carry ethnic, tribal, historic, and family identities, too. She focuses on the cities where conflict is most pronounced, sidestepping communities where coexistence and intermarriage are prevalent. What does jump out, however, is how tenacious and aggressive American-born, Christian missionaries are in their drive to save souls from damnation. It is easy to see how Muslim people and governments perceive American intervention (say in Iraq or Afghanistan) as a continuation of a long history of western, Christian, first British and now American, colonial domination. Anyone who has ever confronted a Christian missionary knows how unrelenting and self-confident they can be. Unfortunately, the book isn’t an easy read. Somehow Griswold makes history and conflict more complicated rather than less. By mentioning every actor from local to national with a relationship to a particular zone she confused me. My mind wandered and eventually I could hang on no longer. -
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick **** (of 4)
I turned pages as fast as I could shaking my head in disbelief with each new revelation. North Korea is the last totalitarian comm
unist dictatorship in the world. Nothing seems to have deviated from the 1950s Mao-ist playbook: god-like worship of the premier, state controlled propaganda and media, rigorous policing against free enterprise or any information from the outside world, and famine of extraordinary proportions. Demick is the Beijing bureau chief of the LA Times and bases much of her story on interviews with defectors who have escaped across frozen rivers into China and then into South Korea. This book won this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize. -
Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
Nobel Prize in Literature
