Asian Books Blog: Tsundoku #5

Welcome to issue #4 of Tsundoku – a column by me, Paul French, aiming to make that pile of ‘must read’ books by your bed a little more teetering. June is a big month as publishers gear up for the summer months….let’s start with new fiction...

Asian Books Blog regulars will have read Andrew Lam on his new novel Repentance (see his recent 500 Words… column) and the story of Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team during World War II. Something happened while his father was fighting the Germans in France, and no one is sure exactly what. A fascinating dive into one avenue of Japanese-American history.

Vietnamese-American author Abbigail Rosewood’s debut novel If I Had Two Lives follows a young woman from her childhood in Vietnam to her life as an immigrant in the United States - and her necessary return to her homeland. Displaced in New York, returning to Vietnam is no easy process either.

Jan-Philipp Senker’s The Far Side of the Night is the third in his Rising Dragon series of China-set novels. It’s a fairly well paced thriller set in contemporary Beijing. During a trip to China, Paul and Christine experience the nightmare of every parent: their four year old son is kidnapped. They are reunited after a few hours but the kidnappers, very powerful people in today's China with close contacts to the police, want the child back.

Ovida Yu’s cozy crime character Su Lin is back with her character Su Lin, who has found her dream job with Singapore's brand new detective agency, in The Paper Bark Tree Mystery (the first Su Lin book, The Betel Nut Tree Mystery came out last year). It’s the 1930s, someone’s stealing diamonds and a seemingly upright Brit might just be a traitor.

Also on the cozy side is Balli Kaur Jaswal’s The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters that follows British-born Punjabi sisters Rajni, Jezmeen and Shirina on a pilgrimage across India to carry out their mother’s final wishes to get to know their ancestral homeland. While an extended family holiday is the last thing they want, each sister has her own reasons to run away from her life.

Jing-jing Lee’s How We Disappeared is a well researched work of historical fiction that could be fact. As Japanese troops sweep down Malaysia and into Singapore in 1942, a village is ransacked, leaving only three survivors, one of them a tiny child. In a neighbouring village, seventeen-year-old Wang Di is bundled into the back of a troop carrier and shipped off to a Japanese military brothel. After sixty years of silence, what she saw and experienced there still haunts her.

As someone who’s written themselves a little on the notion of fox spirits in Asia Christine Wunnicke’s The Fox and Dr. Shimamura is a must read. An outstanding young Japanese medical student at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr. Shimamura was sent to the Japanese provinces to cure scores of young women afflicted by an epidemic of fox possession.

And some non-fiction if you’re not planning to be on a beach anytime soon, or if you’re the impressive type that reads non-fiction on a beach…

Pang Yang Hui’s Strait Rituals examines the two Taiwan Strait crises that took place during the Cold War. Based on analyses of newly available documents from Beijing, Taipei, and Washington, Pang challenges conventional wisdom that claims Sino-US misperceptions of each other’s strategic concerns were critical in the 1950s. He underscores the fact that Washington, Taipei, and Beijing were actually aware of one another’s strategic intentions during the crises and that both were forms of tacit accommodation.

Roxann Prazniak’s Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art is visually fascinating and a new way to think about the East-West relationship in art. While early twentieth-century scholarship searched for a shared universalism in European and Chinese art motifs, this book looks to the relationships among societies of central, western, and eastern Asia during the Mongol era as a core site of social and political discourse that defined a globalizing era in Eurasian artistic exchange.

And finally, long time Korea watcher Anna Fifield’s biography of Kim Jong-un, The Great Successor. An irreverent, yet insightful, quest to understand the life of Kim3. Kim's life is swathed in myth and propaganda, from the plainly silly - he supposedly ate so much Swiss cheese that his ankles gave way - to the grimly bloody stories of the ways his enemies and rival family members have perished at his command.