Fate can mean a variety of things to many different people; depending on your culture, religion, background, your attitude to life or your level of romanticism. Fate, or destiny, has been somewhat simplified and beautified by media and fiction through the Disney filter of the twentieth century. But here, in The Yogini, it is used …
Asian Literature
The Ten Loves of Nishino (or The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino in the UK) is a novel that is, much like Kawakami’s other works, at once frolicking fun and darkly mournful. The out-of-order biography of an enigmatic frustration of a man tortured and strange, told through the intimate first-person perspectives of ten of his …
As a student, I remember having a conversation with my friend in which he complained that Thomas Hardy spent three pages describing a field as if such an act were self-evidently inherently wrong. I waited for further elaboration. Was there something lacking from said description? Maybe he found Hardy’s prose to be weighty and clunky? …
Tiffany Tsao is a writer and translator. She is the author of Under Your Wings (forthcoming with Atria Books in the US as The Majesties) and the Oddfits fantasy series. Her translations from Indonesian to English include Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s wonderful poetry collection Sergius Seeks Bacchus, Dee Lestari’s novel Paper Boats, and Laksmi Pamuntjak’s The Birdwoman’s Palate. Her translations of Sergius Seeks …
Through Ponti, we learn that one universal truth about love – paternal, romantic, platonic – is that it doesn’t ebb and flow. It falters, judders, gets lost and thrown out. It gets exposed and embarrassed, like a child. It is bled dry and shrivelled like fruit. We also learn that people can be a bit …
Translated from the Korean by Janet Hong More often than not, when a musician finishes an album, their first job is to figure out what order the tracks should be played in. There’s a craft to getting the flow of the album right; do you start with a bang, or a slow crawl? Is there …
The ethos and approach to publishing of Red Circle Authors Limited is everything that we at Books and Bao cherish. As someone who howls from the mountaintops about the importance of Anglophones reading more translated literature from across the globe, it is thrilling to see a small publishing house release a selection of Japanese stories …
Here is one of those rare books that has a lot to unpack – metaphor, motifs, motivations – but proves to be, nonetheless, completely accessible. More than that, it is compelling, carried by a desperate forward momentum that pleads with the reader to keep pushing on. It has all the page-turning fervour of a thriller …
All eyes are trained on Indonesia right now. Its tourism is flourishing more than ever; foreigners from the West are flooding there to work and live cheaply and healthily (for better or worse), and its art scene is finally being celebrated the world over. Some of the biggest names in poetry, prose, and essays all …
Translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles Here is a Japanese novel about social outcasts and the struggling and underappreciated working class, written by a social outcast, and translated by a proud socialist. Tokyo Ueno Station provides a harsh and honest look at the ways in which twentieth-century Japan has treated its people. Yu Miri …