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Book Review: The Thorn Puller by Hiromi Itō
One of Japan’s most prominent women writers writes of a contemporary woman’s life split between caring for her much older British husband in California and her aging parents in Japan and her three daughters in both places.
Summary:
The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about what it means to live and die in a globalized society.
Ito has been described as a “shaman of poetry” because of her skill in allowing the voices of others to show through her. Here she enriches her semi-autobiographical novel by channeling myriad voices drawn from Japanese folklore, poetry, literature, and pop culture. The result is a generic chimera—part poetry, part prose, part epic—a unique, transnational, polyvocal mode of storytelling. One throughline is a series of memories associated with the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the “thorns” of human suffering.
Review:
I picked this up from my library’s new books shelf, and for some reason I misunderstood and thought it was creative nonfiction. Since the main character shares the author’s first name, I stayed under this belief for quite some time, right up until the main character does something that shocked me. Then I investigated and realized it’s fiction heavily inspired by the author’s own life. I mention this to say that this reads like very modern creative nonfiction. It’s a mix of poetry, vignettes, and factual asides and doesn’t use quotation marks ever. Each chapter ends with a note of what works inspired that particular chapter. I was honestly impressed at this fictional creative nonfiction.
While each chapter vaguely goes in order of a year or two or Hiromi’s life, each also explores other parts of her life. And some weeks may be dropped in-between. The point isn’t a linear story but rather an exploration of how Hiromi deals with being in the sandwich generation with the added factor of her husband being at least 20 years older than her and so, he is aging more rapidly than she and requires more caregiving than he might otherwise. Hiromi thus deals with universal themes of caring for others while struggling to care for yourself. Of trying to give space to others to make their own decisions about their lives while worrying about them and wanting them to stick around.
Another major theme is Hiromi’s global life. She’s Japanese, living part-time in California, raising three daughters all of whom are American, one of whom is biracial (it’s unclear from the story if the older two daughters are biracial or not), living with a husband who is a British immigrant to the US who is also an older generation than her. There are so many cultural and generational differences for Hiromi to deal with. She struggles with Japanese perceptions of her husband, her husband’s perceptions of Japan, her own daughter’s difficulties to speak Japanese fluently, and more. What I found the most interesting was her husband’s misguided belief that because she was Japanese she wasn’t religious at all, only to become very angry at her when he finds out she took their daughter to visit a shrine. He thinks of this as religious. She thinks of it as simply a way of being. This thus explores the very interesting question of how much, if any, of spirituality is cultural?
Jizo and Jizo’s shrine are interwoven throughout the book. Hiromi feels a particular affinity for Jizo and so we see her memories of the shrine and also see her visiting the shrine in present time. Jizo is a Bodhisattva who is believed to help relieve suffering. Bodhisattva is a term used in two ways. It can mean anyone who is working in this life toward enlightenment. But it also can mean souls that have attained enlightenment but delays going to nirvana to help ease the suffering of others. This book takes up the latter definition, because the main character most strongly identifies with Pure Land Buddhism, which is a branch of Mahayana Buddhism that uses this definition of Bodhisattva. Although I have familiarity with Buddhism (as you can see in one of my short stories), I don’t think you have to in order to appreciate how Jizo is interwoven in the story. Hiromi is dealing with very difficult aspects of life, and when she’s struggling, she leans on a comfort from childhood – Jizo and his shrine. This is a very relatable emotional choice. It’s so relatable, in fact, that one cannot help but empathize with Hiromi when her husband struggles to understand why she feels an attachment to Jizo’s shrine when she’s dealing with her father’s aging and her mother’s slow death from a stroke. (Honestly, her husband is infuriating, even while you can see that he does indeed love Hiromi.)
As you can probably tell, this book does deal with difficult topics. Be aware that Hiromi’s mother’s stroke and its impact on her body is quite central to the story. Her father’s aging is depicted honestly, without any gentling of the more difficult aspects. Hiromi mentions in passing having had multiple miscarriages and abortions in the past. A character has a cancer scare that leads to a rather graphic scene of bleeding. Another character has a heart issue. Eating disorders are mentioned although not depicted graphically. Racism and xenophobia are both depicted on screen. Finally, and what was to me the most shocking, Hiromi engages in a violent act against her husband at one point. I thought all of these were dealt with in an even-handed and fair way except for how Hiromi treats her husband. That I felt was glossed over a bit too easily, especially for a character who believes suffering can come from a human killing spiders. Her lack of guilty feelings felt out of character to me.
Overall, this is an engaging read that merges creative nonfiction and fiction in fascinating ways and provides perspective on Japanese, American, and British cultures. For those less familiar with Japan, the translator offers an introduction to help understand what you might need to in order to enjoy the book fully. I also appreciate the translator’s note at the end that describes the translation process and how the author had some say in it.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 300 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: Library
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
Book Review: Solo Dance by Li Kotomi, translated by Arthur Reiji Morris
Summary:
Cho Norie, twenty-seven and originally from Taiwan, is working an office job in Tokyo. While her colleagues worry about the economy, life-insurance policies, marriage, and children, she is forced to keep her unconventional life hidden—including her sexuality and the violent attack that prompted her move to Japan. There is also her unusual fascination with death: she knows from personal experience how devastating death can be, but for her it is also creative fuel. Solo Dance depicts the painful coming of age of a queer person in Taiwan and corporate Japan. This striking debut is an intimate and powerful account of a search for hope after trauma.
Review:
This is a gut-wrenchingly beautiful read that I couldn’t put down.
The story starts with Cho in Japan. We learn what led to her emigration from Taiwan through a combination of flashbacks and her rereading her own college journal entries. Cho is a writer who has been obsessed with death from a young age. But she also went through a devastating trauma. The PTSD from that event destroyed her budding relationship with another young woman and haunts her to this day.
I think it’s important for anyone considering this book to know coming into it what the devastating trauma was. It’s central to the book and can be quite triggering for some. Cho was raped by a stranger who specifically targeted her due to her same-sex relationship. Although Cho does encounter kind and understanding people who validate how wounded she is from this experience, there are others who expect her to just get over it. Worse, some people blame her for it. She feels shame for what has happened to her. While this is realistic, it is painful to read about.
So this book is about many complex things. It’s about how Cho was obsessed with death from a young age. Why is that? Is it ok to feel that kind of emo way? It’s also about the systemic exclusion of queer and trans people. Cho also travels the world and sees how queerness and Pride and love exist in many countries. While she wants a sense of belonging, just what is the right way to belong is a question left for the reader. Ultimately, though, this is a book about trauma and healing from trauma. How trauma isolates a person, even when other people try, imperfectly, to reach out.
It’s easy as a queer westerner to get caught up in what queerness means in the west. It’s important to dive into what queerness means and looks like in other cultures in order to better grasp how we might create a community that’s more inclusive of all types of origins and experiences.
Although this novella is challenging, it’s also beautiful. If you feel ready to engage with the realistic trauma depicted in it, I encourage you to pick up a copy.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 149 pages – novella
Source: NetGalley
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Book Review: Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
Summary:
A Heian-era mansion stands abandoned, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company.
It’s the perfect wedding venue for a group of thrill-seeking friends.
But a night of food, drinks, and games quickly spirals into a nightmare. For lurking in the shadows is the ghost bride with a black smile and a hungry heart.
And she gets lonely down there in the dirt.
Review:
I thought this cover was deliciously creepy in a way that reminded me of The Ring, and I was ready for a quick spine-tingling thriller set in Japan. Unfortunately, for me, the cover was the only part of the book that elicited any real response from me.
Let’s start with the good. Representation is strong in this book. It’s a group of four racially diverse friends. The main character is bisexual, says the word, and isn’t demonized in the book. Since it’s common for thrillers and horror to demonize queer characters, this was nice. The writing is poetic, which is a bit unusual in horror. The idea of a bride being so into haunted houses that she wants to be married in a house where the haunting is a bride was also fun. So why didn’t it work for me?
For horror to work for me, I need to know enough about the characters to kind of care about what happens to them. This jumps so quickly into the haunted house moment with the friends that I just….never really cared about any of them. To be honest, I still kind of easily get them mixed up in my head. By the time we know any of their motivations, a lot of the thrills and gore have already happened but it’s too late for me to care about them. It wasn’t even that they were a collection of common horror tropes so I knew what was going on and could sort of care. (I’m thinking about the tropes used in Scream or The Cabin in the Woods). It seems to me that part of the goal was to subvert tropes but in order for that to work, I need to really know the characters for the tropes to be subverted and for me to still care about the characters. Tropes work because they fill in the blanks for us. The cheerleader may be ditzy but she really cares about her friends, so we know she’s really actually upset when she can’t find one of them. But if the trope has been subverted just enough that we know that the cheerleader doesn’t’ care about her friends but we also don’t know what she actually cares about then all understanding of what meaning and impact the plot has on her is lost.
Others who don’t need strong character development to get into the thrills of a horror will likely enjoy this story more than I did, particularly if the basic plot summary given above appeals to you.
2 out of 5 stars
Length: 128 pages – novella/short nonfiction
Source: NetGalley
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
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Book Review: The Girl from the Well (Series, #1)
Summary:
A dead girl walks the streets.
She hunts murderers. Child killers, much like the man who threw her body down a well three hundred years ago.
And when a strange boy bearing stranger tattoos moves into the neighborhood so, she discovers, does something else. And soon both will be drawn into the world of eerie doll rituals and dark Shinto exorcisms that will take them from American suburbia to the remote valleys and shrines of Aomori, Japan.
Because the boy has a terrifying secret – one that would just killto get out.
Review:
The official pitch on this one is that it’s Dexter meets The Grudge but what I heard about it was it’s another version of the Japanese myth that The Ring is based on. (After reading it, I can tell you that this is true). I was absolutely batshit terrified of The Ring when I first watched it. I must admit that I read this description and expected the book to me meh compared to the movie based on the same myth. This low expectation is what kept the book from being a disappointing read for me.
I found the writing to be overwrought and trying too hard for the actual genre and plot. Like when the small town seamstress thinks she’s a haute couture fashion designer. For instance:
His mind tastes like sour wine, a dram of sake left out in the dark for too long. (location 63)
Bear in mind that this passage is about a ghost girl who murders child killers/rapists. It’s a pretty passage; it just doesn’t fit.
As far as the plot goes, while I really liked the ghost, the tattooed boy’s plot rubbed me the wrong way. His mother is deemed mentally ill, partially for trying to kill him and tattooing him when he was a child. We later find out that rather than being mentally ill she was battling literal evil spirits, one in particular who wanted to go out and wreak havoc on the world. To try to bind the spirit, she decides to sacrifice her own child to the evil spirit by using him as an anchor, basically, to bind him. So after a bunch of the book basically saying hey the kid should forgive his mother because she’s ill we find out she did this act. I feel like the book wants me to think it’s heroic, but I thought it was sick. The way I felt the book wanted me to feel and the way I actually felt about the situation made me uncomfortable with the rest of the book and struggling with who to root for. Others may feel less conflicted than me over this part of the plot.
Overall, it’s a unique plot that other readers may enjoy more than myself.
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3 out of 5 stars
Length: 267 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: Library
Book Review: The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism by Naoki Higashada
Summary:
Born in 1992 and diagnosed with Autism at the age of 5, Naoki uses an alphabet board to painstakingly write. In this book, he addresses answers to common questions neurotypicals have about people with Autism, such as “Why do you line up your toy cars and blocks?” and “Why don’t you make eye contact when you’re talking?” Mixed in with answers to these questions are short stories that Naoki has written, squashing the myth that those with Autism lack imagination.
Review:
I read this for Katie of Doing Dewey’s Nonfiction Book Club back in April, which was also Autism Awareness Month. I don’t often have the time to do group reads, but this book appealed to me and was short, would count for the Mental Illness Advocacy Reading Challenge I host, and I was able to get a digital copy from the Boston Public Library. I read this in one day in just my morning and evening commutes. It’s a short but mind-opening work.
For those who don’t know, Autism is a spectrum disorder. This basically means that Autism can severely or minorly impact how a person with it functions with the world (and everything in-between). Someone who is high functioning may mostly just strike others as a bit odd, whereas those most severely impacted are unable to communicate at all. You may read more about Autism here.
Naoki’s Autism is more severe. He is mostly unable to speak but he has learned how to communicate by pointing to an alphabet board with an assistant who writes down what he points at. Since Autism is so individualized, bare in mind when reading this book that his answers might not necessarily apply to everyone with Autism. That said, Naoki generally answers the questions with the word we, not I. My suspicion is this may be due to cultural reasons. Naoki is Japanese, which is generally a less individualized culture than our own. Additionally, his words have been filtered through a translator. It’s important, I believe, for a reader to keep all of these things in mind when reading this book.
This is a short book and an easy read, so I won’t say too much beyond the two biggest takeaways I had. First, I think in general people often wonder if people with Autism are similar to neurotypicals inside or are completely foreign. I think Naoki’s book smashes that question with a sledgehammer. It left me with the distinct impression that people with Autism are extremely similar to neurotypicals, but their signals from their bodies interfere with their ability to interact with the world. But Naoki puts this better than me.
It’s as if we’re remote-controlling a faulty robot. (page 16)
My second takeaway was that we should never make assumptions about anyone with Autism. The biggest example of this is that it is generally assumed people with Autism do not have an imagination. (I’ve even seen having an imagination being used as a way to rule out some people as having high functioning Autism). But Naoki, who very clearly has Autism, also very clearly has a bright imagination. His own short stories are inter-mixed throughout the book. They struck me as things any 13-year-old might write. That may sound simple, but that’s a big deal for a person who others might assume is “abnormal” for 13 with “no imagination.”
I do wish that the person interviewing Naoki had asked a wider variety of questions. Some of the questions can get a bit repetitive, and I wondered why they didn’t ask something deeper. Instead of continually asking things like why do you do this or why do you do that ask more about what he enjoys. What his hopes and dreams are. Does he think there’s a god. Things like that.
Overall, though, I highly recommend this book to anyone who is curious about what it’s like to have Autism, as well as to those who do or may come into contact with someone with Autism.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 135 pages – short nonfiction
Source: Library
Counts For:
Mental Illness Advocacy Reading Challenge
Nonfiction November: Fiction and Nonfiction Book Pairings
I was looking forward to this week’s theme of Nonfiction November the most, because one of my favorite parts of being a librarian is “reader’s advisory.” Reader’s advisory is when you chat to a person about what they enjoy reading, what they’re interested in, what they’re looking for, and recommend a few books to them as books they might enjoy reading. (I don’t get to do this a ton as an academic medical librarian, but it does still come up sometimes). I view this as a book blogger version of that.
For this, I thought I would select out a few of my favorite fiction books and seek out nonfiction books that would pair well with them. If you read and enjoyed the fiction, consider checking out the nonfiction. Of course it will also work the other way around! If you’ve read the nonfiction book and enjoyed it, consider checking out the fiction.
First Pairing: Sled Dogs
The Call of the Wild
by:
Jack London
Fiction
Blurb:
Buck is a spoiled southern dog enjoying a posh life when one of the family’s servants steals him and sells him away to be a sled dog for the Alaska gold rush. Buck soon goes from an easy life to one of trials and tribulations as the result of humans fawning over a golden metal, but it might not be all bad for him in the wild Alaskan north.
Gold Rush Dogs
By:
Jane G. Haigh
Nonfiction
Blurb:
Dog lovers and history buffs will delight in this collection celebrating the beloved canines that offered companionship, protection, and hard work to their masters in the Far North.
Why pair it?
Buck, the main character (and dog) in The Call of the Wild is trained to be a sled dog for the gold rush (not the Iditarod). This nonfiction book is about the gold rush dogs.
Second Pairing: Women in Ancient Japanese Court Life
Fudoki
By:
Kij Johnson
Fiction
Blurb:
An aging empress decides to fill her empty notebooks before she must get rid of them along with all of her belongings to retire to the convent, as is expected of her. She ends up telling the story of Kagaya-hime, a tortoiseshell cat who loses her cat family in a fire and is turned into a woman by the kami, the god of the road.
Diary of Lady Murasaki
By:
Murasaki Shikibu
Nonfiction
Blurb:
The Diary recorded by Lady Murasaki (c. 973 c. 1020), author of The Tale of Genji, is an intimate picture of her life as tutor and companion to the young Empress Shoshi. Told in a series of vignettes, it offers revealing glimpses of the Japanese imperial palace the auspicious birth of a prince, rivalries between the Emperor’s consorts, with sharp criticism of Murasaki’s fellow ladies-in-waiting and drunken courtiers, and telling remarks about the timid Empress and her powerful father, Michinaga. The Diary is also a work of great subtlety and intense personal reflection, as Murasaki makes penetrating insights into human psychology her pragmatic observations always balanced by an exquisite and pensive melancholy.
Why pair it?
Fudoki features tales being told by an aging empress that illuminate women’s lives in ancient Japan. This nonfiction period piece is a diary by a real woman with an insider’s view of the same court life. Although not written by an empress, she was an empress’s companion.
Third Pairing: We’re Living in the Future the 1800s Scifi Imagined
The Time Machine
By:
H.G. Wells
Fiction
Blurb:
Nobody is quite sure whether to believe their eccentric scientist friend when he claims to have invented the ability to travel through time. But when he shows up late to a dinner party with a tale of traveling to the year 802,700 and meeting the human race, now divided into the child-like Eloi and the pale ape-like ground-dwelling Morlocks, they find themselves wanting to believe him.
In the Beginning…Was the Command Line
By:
Neal Stephenson
Nonfiction
Blurb:
This is “the Word” — one man’s word, certainly — about the art (and artifice) of the state of our computer-centric existence. And considering that the “one man” is Neal Stephenson, “the hacker Hemingway” (Newsweek) — acclaimed novelist, pragmatist, seer, nerd-friendly philosopher, and nationally bestselling author of groundbreaking literary works (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc., etc.) — the word is well worth hearing. Mostly well-reasoned examination and partial rant, Stephenson’s In the Beginning… was the Command Line is a thoughtful, irreverent, hilarious treatise on the cyber-culture past and present; on operating system tyrannies and downloaded popular revolutions; on the Internet, Disney World, Big Bangs, not to mention the meaning of life itself.
Why this pairing?
Wells and Stephenson are both considered masters of the scifi genre. In this nonfiction piece, Stephenson explicitly draws comparisons between modern culture and the one envisioned by Wells in The Time Machine.
Fourth Pairing: Scandinavia Is Perfect….Or Is It?!
The Unit
By:
Ninni Holmqvist
Fiction
Blurb:
In the Sweden of the near future women who reach the age of 50 and men who reach the age of 60 without having successfully acquired a partner or had children are deemed “dispensable” and sent to live in “a unit.” These units appear at first glance to be like a high-class retirement home, and indeed they have all the amenities. The residents, however, are required both to participate in medical experiments and to donate various organs and body parts up until their “final donation” of their heart anywhere from a year or a few years after their arrival in the unit. Dorrit arrives at the unit depressed, but accepting of her fate as the result of her independent nature, but when she falls in love, she starts to question everything.
The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
By:
Michael Booth
Nonfiction
Blurb:
The whole world wants to learn the secrets of Nordic exceptionalism: why are the Danes the happiest people in the world, despite having the highest taxes? If the Finns really have the best education system, how come they still think all Swedish men are gay? Are the Icelanders really feral? How are the Norwegians spending their fantastical oil wealth? And why do all of them hate the Swedes?
Michael Booth has lived among the Scandinavians, on and off, for over ten years, perplexed by their many strange paradoxes and character traits and equally bemused by the unquestioning enthusiasm for all things Nordic that has engulfed the rest of the world, whether it be for their food, television, social systems or chunky knitwear.
In this timely book he leaves his adopted home of Denmark and embarks on a journey through all five of the Nordic countries to discover who these curious tribes are, the secrets of their success and, most intriguing of all, what they think of each other. Along the way a more nuanced, often darker picture emerges of a region plagued by taboos, characterised by suffocating parochialism and populated by extremists of various shades.
They may very well be almost nearly perfect, but it isn’t easy being Scandinavian.
Why this pairing?
The Unit is a unique dystopia in that it is set in Sweden and takes various aspects of Swedish culture to their dystopic extremes. Since Scandinavia often comes across as idealistic, it was interesting to see a dystopia set there. This nonfiction work takes a long tough look at Scandinavia and exposes the minuses (in addition to the pluses) of living there.
That’s it for my pairings! I hope you all enjoyed them. I know that I certainly found a few new books for my wishlist!
Book Review: Fudoki by Kij Johnson (Bottom of TBR Pile Challenge)
Summary:
An aging empress decides to fill her empty notebooks before she must get rid of them along with all of her belongings to retire to the convent, as is expected of her. She ends up telling the story of Kagaya-hime, a tortoiseshell cat who loses her cat family in a fire and is turned into a woman by the kami, the god of the road.
Review:
I’m not usually big into fantasy, particularly not ones involving court life, but I am a real sucker for any story involving cats, especially if that cat is a tortoiseshell, since I’m the proud kitty mommy of a talkative tortie. This book didn’t just not disappoint me, it blew me away with two side-by-side, related by different, thoughtful tales.
I had no idea when I picked up the book that the empress would figure into the story quite so much. At first I was a bit irritated that she was a) getting 40% to 50% of the storytime and b) rambling off from one thought to another like elderly people tend to do. But I stayed patient, and I learned that there was more to the empress than met the eye and also that the two stories were actually informing each other. Kagaya-hime’s story shows everything the empress had secretly wished for her whole life, and the empress’s life translated into how Kagaya-hime felt trapped in her human body. It’s artfully done in a subtle way, which is part of what makes it so beautiful.
Kagaya-hime goes from a sad lost kitty with burned paws to a warrior woman, allowed along on a quest for revenge by a moderately elite rural family. She is able to earn respect from the men as a warrior because as a cat she sees no reason not to hunt or defend herself. She is a woman but no one ever took her claws away (though they may be arrows and knives now, instead of claws). Thinking of her is empowering to the empress, who always had an interest in war and politics but was forced to remain literally behind screens in gorgeous gowns that are hard to move in. It’s interesting to note that while the empress may be jealous of Kagaya-hime’s ability to do what she wants and defend herself, Kagaya-hime herself is unhappy because she simply wishes to be a cat again. It is the conclusion to Kagaya-hime’s story that allows the empress to see a conclusion to her own story (her life) that will ultimately make her feel fulfilled.
The details of ancient Japan were clearly meticulously researched. Johnson smoothly writes about the outfits, land, and battles as if she was there for them herself. The information never comes through as an info dump but instead is something that simply is, that the reader learns about naturally just by venturing into Kagaya-hime and the empress’ world. This is what knowing your history inside and out before starting writing does for historic fiction. It makes history come to life.
Overall, this is a stunning piece of historic fiction the reading of which feels like slowly sipping a well-made matcha latte. Fans of historic fiction of all sorts will be engaged, those that love cats will be enthralled, and those with an interest in women’s history will be enamored and touched by how much things change and yet still stay the same for women. Recommended to all who think they might even possibly be interested in a piece of historic fiction set in Japan featuring an aging empress and a shape-changing cat.
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5 out of 5 stars
Length: 316 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Better World Books
Book Review: The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura
Summary:
The narrator makes his living as a pickpocket in Tokyo. When the man who taught him the art, not to mention his only true friend, finds himself on the wrong side of the Yakuza, he sees the likely impending end to his own life. But can he run or are his heart strings tied to the city?
Review:
Nakamura is a best-selling writer in Japan, and this is his first novel to be translated to English. I’m a fan of the crime/noir novels coming out of Japan, and this one certainly didn’t let me down.
The narrator is everything you want from a criminal lead–sympathetic, dangerous, talented, handsome but not exceedingly so, trapped, creative. It is so seamlessly easy to jump into his head and move through his life.
The story is far more complex than pick-pocketing. We get a peek at the seedy underbelly of Tokyo, but also at the narrator’s poor, rural upbringing. We encounter everyone from the downtrodden son of a prostitute to the (apparently) leader of the Yakuza. It’s glamorous, dirty, and unpredictable.
The ending may turn some readers off. It is an ambiguous one, which I know some people don’t like. I love that kind of ending though, because it leaves me to ponder how I think things turned out. How I hope they turned out. And I didn’t feel at all cheated by it either. It’s well-supported, but stops just short of telling us everything.
Something did hold me back from completely loving the book though. I think it would have been better if we had met the narrator a bit earlier in his career to follow his downward trajectory more completely. It all felt a bit too sudden to me. I wanted to know the narrator and his relationship to his teacher better.
Overall this is a great piece of translated crime fiction that gives the reader a peak at the crime underworld of Tokyo. I recommend it to fans of both unique crime fiction and works in translation.
4 out of 5 stars
Source: NetGalley
Book Review: Y: The Last Man: Girl on Girl by Brian K. Vaughan (Series, #6) (Graphic Novel)
Summary:
We catch up with Yorick, 355, and Dr. Mann on board a freighter headed for Australia by way of Japan. They seem to have abandoned their hunt for Ampersand the monkey for now. The captain of the ship is gorgeous and has the hots for Yorick, but trouble arrives in the form of an Australian submarine. Is it the freighter or the submarine that is the pirates?
Review:
So the title is sort of a double entendre. We do get an excellent lesbian sex scene (inter-racial no less!), but we also have the war between the submarine of women and the ship of women. Haha, well played, Vaughan!
The great thing about this entry in the series is that by itself it has a lot of very cool elements, but it also moves the plot forward. We find out some about what’s been happening on the other side of the globe since the men died, characters hook up, and we get some really good action. It gets us places (specifically moving across the ocean), but it doesn’t feel like a filler book the way #4 did.
Plus, the Pacific Islander ship captain is really hot and badass.
Overall, this is an excellent entry in the series that is entertaining and moves the plot forward. Fans will not be disappointed.
5 out of 5 stars
Source: Public Library
Previous Books in Series
Y: The Last Man: Unmanned
Y: The Last Man: Cycles
Y: The Last Man: One Small Step
Y: The Last Man: Safeword
Y: The Last Man: Ring of Truth
Book Review: The Last Manchu: The Autobiography of Henry Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China by Henry Pu Yi, translated by Paul Kramer
Summary:
Henry Pu Yi became the last emperor of China when he was almost three years old. During the chaos of a post-WWI China fighting between republics and war lords, he would periodically rule, be a figurehead, or be in hiding on foreign-held embassy land. Working with the Japanese in WWII he sought to refind his throne by ruling as the figure-head of the Japanese-held Manchuria region. He then was held prisoner by the Soviets for five years before being turned over to the communist Chinese for thought reform.
Review:
Although the translator states that Henry Pu Yi’s life is an excellent way to examine how China survived so many upheavals in the early 20th century, after reading the autobiography I simply cannot agree. Henry Pu Yi’s life was incredibly unique and absolutely not a reflection of what was really going on in China at the time. If anything, he seemed to operate from an oblivious perspective up until the communists kind of smacked him in the face with reality. For instance, during the time of chaos, civil wars, and famine in China prior to WWII, he states:
Just as food was cooked in huge quantities and not eaten, so was a vast amount of clothing made which was never worn. (location 544)
When reflecting on his past perspectives, it is evident that his past self did not understand why such wastefulness would infuriate China’s poor or make them push for a republic via Chiang Kai-shek. Of course, one cannot entirely blame Henry Pu Yi for this short-sightedness. He was raised from a young age being treated as a god by all those around him, being told it was his destiny to be the holy emperor. That would mess with anyone’s mind. However, as he became older he did have teachers and advisors who tried to enlighten him, he just refused to listen.
Eventually, Henry Pu Yi reached this odd mental compromise where he believed everything Western was good, except for their ruling system.
I also became far more convinced than I had ever been in the days when Johnston was with me that everything foreign was good and everything Chinese, except the Imperial System, was bad. (location 2184)
His selfish mindset saw everything good he himself could garner from the west, but didn’t seek out anything positive to change or do for his people. This self-centeredness in a ruler is disturbing at best.
This is even more evident during the time of his life when Pu Yi was puppet ruling for Japan in Manchukuo (Manchuria). Pu Yi increasingly came to fear more and more for his life as it became more evident that Japan would lose the war. The more afraid he was, the more he beat members of his household and staff. Yet he simultaneously claimed to be a good Buddhist who would not even harm a fly. It seems the only thing Pu Yi excelled at was compartmentalizing his actions. A former servant of Pu Yi summed up his personality quite eloquently during one of the criticism sessions of the communist thought reform:
Pu Yi is both cruel and afraid of death. He is suspicious, tricky and a hypocrite. When he beat or scolded his servants, it was not for mistakes they committed, but due to his own mood at the time. (location 4020)
Pu Yi, for most of his life, was incredibly selfish. He was obsessed with his own death and life and with maintaining his emperor status. He cared little to nothing for those around him or for the people of China. One must wonder how things may have been different if a strong, selfless man had been made emperor during the same time period.
Thus for most of the autobiography, we’re reading about a most unsympathetic man from his own perspective. That can become a bit tough to endure. The light of the autobiography comes in the last quarter of the book, though, when he recounts his time in thought reform.
The translator refers to this time period as Pu Yi being brainwashed. I can’t say that it appeared that way to me at all. Pu Yi was not tortured, made to starve, or beaten. He was simply placed in prison and reformed. Frankly, I think his time in communist prison did him a world of good. Suddenly he was having to fend for himself. Where before he never even had to open a door or mend a button, suddenly he did. Slowly the communists gave him more and more responsibilities so that eventually he was on the same cleaning and work rotation as the other men in the prison. Pu Yi says himself that he came to realize how truly useless he was at doing anything worthwhile. Although at first he blames those who raised him, he comes to acknowledge his own bad character eventually, being ashamed for how he behaved. When he is eventually deemed reformed by the communists, he enters society as an equal and works hard to do his fair part. Personally I think if American prison systems could have this kind of excellent 180 result, we would soon see a much smaller inmate population. For isn’t the purpose of prison supposed to be reform? And one cannot deny that Pu Yi came out a better man than he went in, even if communist China has made many other mistakes, it is evident with Pu Yi things were handled quite well. A man was reformed and made useful in society instead of senselessly killed off.
It is a bit of a wait to get to the interesting thought reform portion of the book, however. Pretty much everything before that makes you want to attack Pu Yi through the pages. His style is a bit rambling, although the translator claims that’s partly just Chinese culture versus Western culture. It is an interesting read, but I do think it will only really hold the attention of those with a strong interest in China.
3.5 out of 5 stars
Source: Amazon
This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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