The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
TODD SHIMODA | 02 September 2010Set in Japan in the early 19th-century, THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET is part historical fiction, part mystery/thriller, and part swashbuckler. That the author, DAVID MITCHELL, can pull all this together is a tribute to his considerable skills as a storyteller. His brilliant use of language also helps pull the elements together and make the novel a great... [ more ]
Kissing the Mask by William T. Vollmann
TODD SHIMODA | 09 August 2010The subtitle of WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN's non-fiction work, KISSING THE MASK, is "Beauty,understatement and femininity in Japanese Noh theater". Noh, performed since the 14th century, is a type of musical drama centered around historical events or classical tales. The main characters wear masks, and men play male and female roles. A single performance of five plays interspersed with shorter, humorous pieces can last all day. Noh is arguably the most... [ more ]
Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco
TODD SHIMODA | 09 May 2010Novels which consist of stitched-together, varied narrative text styles such as non-chronological plot fragments, book and memoir excerpts, emails, dreams or imagined scenes, television show synopses, interviews, and even jokey-humor tend to succeed or fail spectacularly. ILUSTRADO, MIGUEL SYJUCO's constructed postmodern novel, succeeds... [ more ]
Pearl of China by Anchee Min
TODD SHIMODA | 22 April 2010For the winner of a Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature (1938), and the author of nearly forty novels including the best-selling The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck seemed largely ignored in American literature and by the reading public. I read The Good Earth, a sympathetic tale about a Chinese village in the early twentieth century, when I was young, more than forty years ago. I hadn't heard much about the... [ more ]
Hidden Buddhas by Liza Dalby
TODD SHIMODA | 21 January 2010Only a few non-Japanese writers can penetrate into deep Japanese culture as well as LIZA DALBY. Her previous works include a first-person account of the lives of geisha, an in-depth historical and symbolic analysis of kimono, and a fictional account of Lady Murasaki, the author of the Japanese eleventh-century novel The Tale of Genji. In her first work of contemporary fiction, she centers the plot of HIDDEN BUDDHAS around the... [ more ]
Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein
TODD SHIMODA | 13 January 2010TOKYO VICE is a fascinating, highly readable, and unflinching story of an American reporter working for the Japanese newspaper, Yomiuri Shinbun. The memoir covers JAKE ADELSTEIN's 12-year career reporting on crime and vice, as well as the beginnings of his work fighting human trafficking. After graduating from Sophia University in Tokyo, Adelstein applied for one of the few positions at the newspaper available for new graduates. He... [ more ]
Occupied City by David Peace
TODD SHIMODA | 29 December 2009The second book of DAVID PEACE's trilogy set in Tokyo in the early years after World War II, OCCUPIED CITY is based on the true story of the Teikoku Bank Massacre. In January 1948, a man claiming to be a public health official entered the bank and ordered the employees to drink two doses of clear liquids to protect them from an outbreak of dysentery. Immediately after swallowing the second dose, they are dead or near death. The man... [ more ]
The Word Book by Mieko Kanai
TODD SHIMODA | 20 December 2009The short stories in THE WORD BOOK begin with a prosaic remark or observation, typical of how we spend the vast majority our days. For example, the first line of "Fiction" is "The platform was crowded with commuters boarding the 6:58 a.m. train for Tokyo and with high school boys in uniforms, their hair slicked... [ more ]
