In my review of Simon Rowe’s Pearl City: Stories from Japan and Elsewhere (2020), I wrote of the titular “Pearl City” chapter: “It’s a very satisfying story but one that leaves you wanting a full novel. We want to ride with Ms. Suzuki again.” And that’s exactly what we get with Mami Suzuki: Private Eye, a four-chapter foray around Japan in the pleasant company of forty-something Suzuki. She’s a single mother, breadwinner for her mother and kindergarten-aged daughter. She works as a hotel receptionist by day, but finances are tight, so part-time sleuthing is a way to pay the bills. This immens ..read more

John Ross chats with Scott F. Crawford, an American writer based in East Asia. They talk about Scott’s Silk Road Centurion, published by Camphor Press in 2023, a historical adventure set in the Chinese borderlands two millennia ago. * * * Scott, we first met, online at least, five years ago, when you wrote a review for Bookish Asia. The review was of A Hero Born, the first book of The Legends of the Condor Heroes, a seminal series of wuxia (martial hero) novels serialized in the 1950s, written by Jin Yong (Louis Cha) and translated by Anna Holmwood. Are you a fan of that genre? I am a fan, pr ..read more

The book is surely man’s greatest invention. Sometimes, though, there’s a faulty leap in logic equating the civilizational glory of printed text with the arrival of Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press circa 1440. That’s a Eurocentric and modernity-skewed way of looking at things. Over the last two millennia, it is the humble woodblock printing process which has done most of the heavy lifting. And it is very much a story centered on China, the home of paper production and printing, and history’s primary producer of books. In fact, it was only about two hundred years ago that we see ..read more

Bridging East & West is a fast-paced and fun account of Kathie Wei-Sender’s long, fascinating life, from childhood dangers during the Sino-Japanese War to an arranged marriage and move to the United States, to a career in nursing and then a reinvention as bridge champion mixing with world political leaders. The memoir combines personal dramas, world events, and bridge. I’ve never played the card game but this was not a problem in understanding or enjoying it. Throughout the memoir, Wei-Sender’s strong personality shines, and readers will not be surprised when she admits. “I must say here t ..read more

Jen Paolini speaks with author John Saeki and reviews his The Last Tigers of Hong Kong. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Hong Kong stood as the backdrop to a spate of urban developments, transforming from “a barren rock” to a desirable port city in a matter of decades. Western expatriates flocked to this no man’s land inhabited by farmers and fishermen and met an unlikely neighbour from the north—the South China tiger. “South China tigers are now considered to be functionally extinct in the wild, but in the past, sightings were reported regularly in the local English-language press ..read more

SPOILER ALERT: Plot details of the novel Lily Narcissus are discussed in this interview. Jonathan Lerner lived in Taipei for two years in the late 1950s when his father, a foreign service officer, was stationed there. Later he was involved with the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, and then a violent breakaway group, the Weatherman, a.k.a. the Weather Underground. He has written a memoir about his time as a radical leftist, Swords in the Hands of Children: Reflections of an American Revolutionary. He has also written two novels in addition to Lily Narcissus—Caught in a Still Place and ..read more

This engrossing novel of expat life in Taipei in the late 1950s is a story which stays with you. That’s due, in part, to the interesting, believable characters, but also because the ending leaves a few threads untied. The minor mystery of the “Narcissus” in the title is easily enough guessed at; though the word “narcissus” appears nowhere in the text, I assume it’s doing double duty as a reference to the beauty of the flower and also the meaning of self-obsessed vanity as per the Greek myth. The central character of the novel, Lily, is both attractive and vain, at least in the eyes of daughter ..read more

Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges – long-time China watchers and prolific authors – seek to lay out the facts about Xi Jinping without prejudice and bombast. And they succeed. Some might say the subtitle itself, “The Most Powerful Man in the World,” is bombastic. It’s not. It happens to be true and prompts a useful tallying of Xi’s power compared to that wielded by the U.S. president. The first chapter is on Covid-19, which makes sense, but I’m rather burned out from living through it (we’re still wearing masks here in Taiwan, even outside) and I suspect other readers might find themselves skimmin ..read more

Taiwan’s greatest sports story occurred during the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945). The Kano baseball team, a ragtag band of players from a two-bit school in a backwater city, defied the odds to reach the final of the 1931 Koshien High School Baseball Tournament in Osaka. The team came from a low-status vocational school without a baseball pedigree and had an unusual tri-ethnic composition – Japanese, Aborigines, and Han Taiwanese. A new Japanese coach took this lowly side and whipped them into champions. The Kano team didn’t win the tournament but that was okay. That Taiwan’s most belove ..read more

“No poetry or memoirs,” warn some publishers in their submission guidelines. To be paired with poetry – yes, cruel, but the truth is often cruel. The fact is that the general reading public is not interested in non-celebrity memoirs, and the number of sales (or copies given away) is usually proportional to the number of family members. There are exceptions, memoirs that are beautifully written and those that cover eventful times. On that last count, Witness to History qualifies in spades. As the author himself says in a chapter titled “America the Beautiful, 1958–1998”: “It took sixteen chapte ..read more