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Yi T'aejun was one of twentieth-century Korea's true masters of the short story-and a man who in 1946 stunned his contemporaries by moving to the Soviet-occupied northern zone of his country. In South Korea, where he is known today as one who went north, Yi's work was banned until 1988. His momentous decision did not lead him to a safe haven, however: though initially welcomed into the literary establishment, North Korea sent him into internal exile...
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Paek Nam-nyong's Friend is a tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the story unfolds into a broader consideration of love and marriage. The novel delves into its protagonists' past, describing how the couple first fell in love and then how their marriage deteriorated over the years. It...
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There are the acknowledged classics of world literature: the canonical works assigned in schools, topping every must-read list . . . and then there are the B-Sides. These are the books that slipped through the cracks, went unread, missed their rightful appointment with posterity. They were ahead of their times or behind their times or on a whole different schedule than the rest of the universe.
What do you do when a book that you love has been neglected...
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First published in 1776, the nine gothic tales in this collection are Japan's finest and most celebrated examples of the literature of the occult. They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the period's fascination with the strange and the grotesque. They were also the inspiration for Mizoguchi Kenji's brilliant 1953 film Ugetsu. The title Ugetsu monogatari (literally "rain-moon tales") alludes to the belief...
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Kai-cheung Dung is an inventive and prolific author whose internationally-acclaimed, genre-bending work defies traditional acts of representation and narrative. This absorbing novel best exemplifies his versatility and experimentation, along with China's rapidly evolving literary culture, merging fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in a story of succeeding and failing to recapture the things we lose. Set in the long-lost City of Victoria (a fictional...
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As we passed from the city center into the Fukushima suburbs I surveyed the landscape for surgical face masks. I wanted to see how much people were wearing such masks, and calculate in what ratios. I was trying to determine, consciously and unconsciously, what people do in response. So, among people walking along the roadway, and people on motorbikes, I saw no one with masks. Even among the official crossing guards outfitted with yellow flags and...
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Published in 1917, Light and Dark is unlike any of Natsume Soseki's previous works and unique in Japanese fiction of the period. What distinguishes the novel as "modern" is its remarkable representation of interiority. The protagonists, Tsuda Yoshio, thirty, and his wife O-Nobu, twenty-three, exhibit a gratifying complexity that qualifies them as some of the earliest examples of three-dimensional characters in Japanese fiction. O-Nobu is quick-witted...
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Following his nation's defeat in the Pacific War, Kuki Kyuzo, a Japanese youth, struggles to return home to Japan from Manchuria. What follows is a wild journey involving drugs, smuggling, chases, and capture. Kyuzo finally makes his way back to Japan but finds himself unable to disembark. His nation remains inaccessible to him, and now he questions its very existence. Beasts Head for Home is an acute novel of identity, belonging, and the vagaries...
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In this eloquent and atmospheric novel, Li Ang further cements her reputation as one of our most sophisticated contemporary Chinese-language writers. The Lost Garden moves along two parallel lines. In one, we relive the family saga of Zhu Yinghong, whose father, Zhu Zuyan, was a gentry intellectual imprisoned for dissent in the early days of Chiang Kai-shek's rule. After his release, Zhu Zuyan literally walled himself in his Lotus Garden, which he...
10) Rapture
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The draft dodger Laurence yearns to take control of his destiny. Having fled to the highlands, he asserts his independence by committing a string of robberies and murders. Then he happens upon Yulita, a beautiful young woman trapped in an intricately carved mahogany house. Laurence does not hesitate to take her as well. Determined to drape his young bride in jewels, he plots ever more daring heists. Yet when Laurence finds himself casting bombs alongside...
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Tsering Döndrup is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed authors writing in Tibetan today. In a distinct voice, rich in black humor and irony, he describes the lives of Tibetans in contemporary China with wit, empathy, and a passionate sense of justice. The Handsome Monk and Other Stories brings together short stories from across Tsering Döndrup's career to create a panorama of Tibetan society. With a love for the sparse yet vivid language...
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On October 27, 1930, during a sports meet at Musha Elementary School on an aboriginal reservation in the mountains of Taiwan, a bloody uprising occurred unlike anything Japan had experienced in its colonial history. Before noon, the Atayal tribe had slain one hundred and thirty-four Japanese in a headhunting ritual. The Japanese responded with a militia of three thousand, heavy artillery, airplanes, and internationally banned poisonous gas, bringing...
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Born in Beijing in 1950, the experimental writer Li Rui came of age in the thick of the Cultural Revolution. His experiences shaped not only his perception of China's unraveling but also his novelistic style. Combining the stylistic innovations of Modernist literature, particularly a Faulknerian play with dialogue and form, and content and language drawn from rural China, Li Rui's writing captures the harsh reality of a world turned upside down by...
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Yi Mun-yol's Meeting with My Brother is a sobering yet hopeful depiction of the volatile relationship between the divided Koreas. Yi, the narrator, is a South Korean university professor searching for his father, who defected to the North at the outbreak of war. Instead he finds his half-brother, and their tense meeting takes a surprising turn. This semi-autobiographical account upends the West's assumptions about North Korean life.
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Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's In Black and White is a literary murder mystery in which the lines between fiction and reality are blurred. The writer Mizuno is working on a story about the perfect murder. His fictional victim is modeled on an acquaintance, a fellow writer. When he notices that this man's real name has crept into his manuscript, he becomes terrified that an actual murder will take place-and that he will be the main suspect. Mizuno goes to...
16) An I-Novel
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Minae Mizumura's An I-Novel is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister, reminds her that it is the twentieth-anniversary of their family's arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in...
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The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon is a fascinating, detailed account of Japanese court life in the eleventh century. Written by a lady of the court at the height of Heian culture, this book enthralls with its lively gossip, witty observations, and subtle impressions. Lady Shonagon was an erstwhile rival of Lady Murasaki, whose novel, The Tale of Genji, fictionalized the elite world Lady Shonagon so eloquently relates. Featuring reflections on royal...
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In these two novellas, Kimura Yūsuke explores human and animal life in northern Japan after the natural and nuclear disasters of March 11, 2011. Kimura inscribes the "Triple Disaster" into a rich regional tradition of storytelling, incorporating far-flung voices and experiences to testify to life and the desire to represent it in the aftermath of calamity. In Sacred Cesium Ground, a woman from Tokyo travels to volunteer at a cattle farm known as...
19) Faraway: A Novel
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In Taiwanese writer Lo Yi-Chin's Faraway, a fictionalized version of the author finds himself stranded in mainland China attempting to bring his comatose father home. Lo's father had fled decades ago, abandoning his first family to start a new life in Taiwan. After travel between the two countries becomes politically possible, he returns to visit the son he left behind, only to suffer a stroke. The middle-aged protagonist ventures to China, where...
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Top Graduate Zhang Xie is the first extant play in the Chinese southern dramatic tradition and a milestone in the history of Chinese literature. Dating from the early fifteenth century, but possibly composed earlier, it is the work of a writing club called the Nine Mountain Society.
The play relates the story of a talented scholar who sets off for the capital to take the imperial exams. On the road, he is robbed and beaten by a bandit. In a nearby...
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