Seicho Matsumoto was one of Japan’s most celebrated mystery writers —with two dozen novels to his name from the late 1950s, at a time when Japan was rebuilding after the war until just before his death in 1992—but only in recent years his work has been translated into English. Point Zero, translated by Louise Heal Kawai, is one of his early novels. The story, set in 1958 and the first part of 1959, takes place mainly in Tokyo and the western port city of Kanazawa and is defined by both the hope of the new era and the agonies of war.   Unlike most noir stories of that time, Point Zero ..read more

Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour has become a milestone in Chinese economic history. Historians and commentators credit Deng’s visit to Guangzhou Province for reinvigorating China’s market reforms in the years following 1989—leading to the Chinese economic powerhouse we see today. Journalist Jonathan Chatwin follows Deng’s journey in The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future.     Southern Tour, The: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future, Jonathan Chatwin (Bloombusry Academic, May 2024) Chatwin follows Deng—from its start in Wuhan, through the Speci ..read more

Religion and Empire in Portuguese India: Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa, Angela Barreto Xavier (Permanent Black, April 2024) How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? And how did these contribute to the making of Goan identity? In this closely argued work, Angela Barreto Xavier asks these questions by reading the relevant secular and missionary archives and texts. She shows how the twinned drives towards conversion and colonization in Portugues ..read more

Although subtitled “Family Fortunes” and presented as being the story of the Jhaveri business family in Gujarat, Sudev Sheth’s recent history Bankrolling Empire is as much, if not more, about the wider arc of the decline of the Mughal Empire. Whether one is interested in the specific role of finance in the Mughal Empire or the jigsaw puzzle that is Mughal history, one is likely to come away from this well-written and colorful book quite the wiser. Sheth opens, as is the wont of even academic histories these days, with an episode of drama, when in 1726, one the later Jhaveris, Khushalchand, was ..read more

Somewhere in Tamil Nadu, there is a small village with “a golden four-lane highway near it but not a single tamarind tree.” Here, the novel’s unnamed narrator spends his days loitering around town and smoking cigarettes. This routine—and everything about life as he knows it—changes with the arrival of Kamala, a widowed mother, a schoolteacher, and the future object of his obsession. She & I, written by Imayam in Tamil and translated by D Venkataramanan, follows these two characters over a decade to tell a powerful story about obsession, self-destruction, and the violence of unrequited desi ..read more

In his Akutagawa Prize-winning Cannibals, Shinya Tanaka doesn’t shy away from dark topics, dealing with crippling poverty, violence and sexual abuse in an often matter-of-fact way. Perhaps the author’s candor is part of the reason that Cannibals (a literal translation of the original Tomogui, though the original has a secondary meaning of ‘mutual destruction’) received Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, although it often walks such a fine line between the frank and the gratuitous that readers themselves may settle on either side in their own assessment. In a stiflingly hot and forsaken l ..read more

Janet Poole, a professor at the University of Toronto, in Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories has translated into English a collection of works by Choe Myong-ik, a writer whom she calls in her introductory essay an “exquisite architect of the short story form”. Following her essay, Poole presents nine stories, five from the colonial era (published from 1936 to 1941) and four in the postwar period (published from 1946 to 1952). Apart from “Walking in the Rain”, which she published in a bilingual edition in 2015, the stories in this book are available in English for the first time. Choe Myon ..read more

Punjabi Centuries: Tracing Histories of Punjab, Anshu Malhotra (ed) (Orient BlackSwan, April 2024) The historical and territorial space of Punjab has been politically and spatially unstable and changing, What Punjab means to different people also varies over time and context. Equally, what one holds dear about Punjab, the sense of “Punjabiyat/Punjabiness”, is both emotionally and culturally complex. Punjabi Centuries highlights some critically important issues. Including India, Pakistan and the diaspora, the volume focuses on the crucial nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leading up to the pr ..read more

Examining the omnipresence of grief and revolution in South Korea for women and the queer community, as well as the whole nation after the sinking of the MV Sewol in April 2014, Hwang Jungeun’s dd’s Umbrella presents twin novellas from the perspective of two distinct narrators. The first story, simply titled “d”, follows a gender-nonconforming character named d as they navigate tragic events, from the sudden death of their partner dd to the Sewol ferry disaster that left 300 dead. “There Is Nothing that Needs to Be Said”, the subsequent story, is told from the first-person perspective of Kim S ..read more

On a sunny day, a young girl skips in the courtyard of her home in Iron Gate Hutong. She’s alone, but across the alley life is busy.     My family lived in a courtyard house in Beijing, China. These unique homes have courtyards surrounded by rooms. It is a very traditional style of home in China. The houses have front gates which open onto hutongs, or alleys. These alleys were at the center of our daily lives.   Iron Gate Hutong by Bao Dongni and illustrated by Wu Zhai tells a story of this young narrator over the course of a year in the hutong. Available in English through ..read more