Reading post: May

It's almost the end of May and I know I won't finish another book before tomorrow night, so... In May my plan was to read Asian and Asian-American related books, since May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. I had a long list of authors and books from 2022 when I read Japanese and Japanese-American classics, but the problem was that the Boulder Public Library had almost none of the books on the list. So I ordered things from Prospector and otherwise made do. 

The names of some of the authors I was looking for came from a collection of poetry that I read in 2022 called The Narrow Road to the Interior by Kimiko Hahn, which I got from the library accidentally. I had ordered The Narrow Road to the Interior by Basho, but they sent me this modern collection instead, so I went ahead and read it while waiting for Basho. In one poem called "Asian American Lit. Final," Hahn mentions numerous Asian and Asian-American writers, and that's where I got the names of many of the authors I tried to read this month (Yamada, Yamanaka, Cha, etc.). 

Books I said I'd like to read

Camp Notes and Other Poems by Mitsuye Yamada (originally published 1976/this edition 1992). Yamada (who was on that list in Hahn's book, see above) grew up in Seattle and was in the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho during WWII (along with John Okada, author of No-No Boy, and Monica Sone, author of Nisei Daughter). This poetry collection (which I found at the Bookworm, much to my surprise, almost as though it were waiting for me) includes 20 poems about the camp, seven poems about her issei parents, and 16 "other" poems. I really liked it. The poems are short and simple, but some of them pack a punch. I looked Yamada up and she is still alive at 102!

Snow Angel, Sand Angel by Lois-Ann Yamanaka, illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky (2021). I read this picture book because our library had almost nothing by any of the authors I was interested in, including most of Yamanaka's books, but it did have this! It's a lovely book about a little girl in Hawaii who has never seen snow. Her parents take her to the top of Mauna Kea, but the snow there is old and icy. She thinks it would be so wonderful to see real snow falling, make a snowman and a snow angel. Then, on New Year's Eve, they go to the beach and make a sandman and sand angels. And she realizes that she loves her homeland the best. A lovely sweet story and one that I can relate to, having grown up in California.

The Village of Eight Graves by Seishi Yokomizo, translated from the Japanese by Bryan Karetnyk (1950/2021). In 2022 I read my first murder mystery by Yokomizo, The Honjin Murders, didn't love it, but later read his The Inugami Curse, which was better. And I noted that I wouldn't mind reading more by him. Ergo, this book. It was better than The Honjin Murders, but it wasn't very good. I guessed the murderer early on, but I still had to sit through the rest of the 349 pages of red herrings. Much of the book takes place in a cave, which was kind of interesting, but I thought rather unrealistic. Anyway, I might read more of Yokomizo, I might not. Someone on Reddit said several of his novels (mystery and other) have been made into Japanese movies and those are good, but so far I haven't found any mystery ones with English subtitles.

Blu's Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka (1997). It occurred to me that most Y-names are Asian (except Young), so at the main library I started looking at the "Y" shelf in the fiction section. And I found this. That's odd, I thought, I didn't remember that the library had anything by Yamanaka except the picture book (see above) and a couple of e-books (which I dislike and avoid). I tried to check this out, but the machine wouldn't accept it. So I went to the desk, where I learned that the book was actually LOST. "Thank you for finding it," said the librarian. "It was just sitting there on the shelf," I murmured. Maybe the book decided to reappear just for me...

Anyway. This well-written but incredibly depressing novel is about three working-class Japanese-Hawaiian kids whose mother has recently died and whose father is struggling to cope. They live on mayonnaise sandwiches, rice mixed with canned mushroom soup, and chocolate. The boy, Blu, is very fat and has no friends. Their horrible next-door neighbors kill their cat's kittens. An old man living nearby exposes himself to Blu in exchange for candy. The cat-killing neighbors' uncle molests everybody. And so on. It has kind of a happy ending, sort of, but I never did understand the title.

Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1982). The Korean-American author of this book was raped and murdered by a stranger a week after her book was published. That nightmare overshadows the work and makes it hard to assess, although I guess it's also a commentary on the dangerous lives of Asian women. The work itself, hmm. I understood so little of it. It's divided into 9 sections, each corresponding to one of the Greek muses (Calliope, Clio, Urania, etc.). One section has to do with the author's mother, who was Korean but grew up in China. But most of the sections I did not understand at all. If Cha hadn't been murdered, would we still be reading this? Would she have written more understandable stuff later? Impossible to know. I don't know what else to say.

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories by Hisaye Yamamoto (1988). Another book by a woman who lived through the Japanese internment camps. Yamamoto was born in 1921, so about the same age as Mitsuye Yamada and Monica Sone and other writers I've read. Yamamoto was in Poston, though, in Arizona, which is supposed to have been a particularly bad camp. Only one of these stories is set in a camp, though. Mostly they're about growing up Japanese-American in California. In the introduction she is compared to Toshio Mori, whose short stories I read in 2022. Yamamoto's English is much better, though. Some of these stories are really quite accomplished. I think she should be better known than Mori, instead of not known at all. 

Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, translated from the Japanese by Meredith McKinney (1914). In 2022 I read I Am a Cat by Soseki and didn't love it, despite its delightful premise. As I noted then, 

Supposedly some of Soseki's other works are better, but they don't get read as much because they aren't titled I Am a Cat, which I still think makes the book very hard to resist. Even knowing what I know now. 

Kokoro is supposed to be Soseki's best book (it was also the last one he completed), so I decided to read that. And it was really good, so much better than I Am a Cat. It's the story of a young man who befriends an older man, who he calls Sensei (teacher, more or less). Sensei harbors a deep dark secret, which he reveals to the young man in a long letter that ends the book. I mean, it's a Japanese novel from 1914, so anyone who considers reading it should understand that it's not good in the sense of a modern American novel. But it is really good. I gobbled it up in a couple of days. I may read more Soseki as time goes on.

Books from the New Yorker's "Briefly Noted" reviews

Properties of Thirst by Marianne Wiggins (2022). I chose this novel because, although it's not by an Asian-American author, it's set in the Owens Valley (not far from Ridgecrest) and is, in part, about the Manzanar internment camp, which we visited when we lived there. It's an odd book, though. The author apparently had a massive stroke when she was partway through the book, and over the next few years her daughter helped her finish it. So there are long stretches that are beautifully written and then there are shorter sections that seem very choppy and confused. And the long stretches should have been cut down and probably would have been, if the author had been fully functional. I should read something else by her someday, just to see what she was like as a writer in her prime. Anyway, it was interesting, but ultimately disappointing. Not enough about the internees, too much fairytale happy ending stuff.

Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang (2024). Hmm, I don't know. The subject matter of this first novel was interesting -- a movie theater in China in the 1980s where gay men (most of whom are married to women) congregate, and what happens to them and their wives after they emigrate to America. But it was so first-novelish. The New Yorker called it "moving if uneven," but I would have just said bad. Way too much telling, not enough showing. So much politics, not much art. I would have given up on it after a few chapters, except that I was waiting for two books to come in from Prospector, so I kept saying, oh, I'll read a little more... Maybe his next book will be better.

Other reading

The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin with Neil Strauss (2023). I read about this in the New Yorker, but in the "Book Currents" section, not Briefly Noted, so I'm putting it under "Other reading" instead. The mystery writer Patricia Cornwall recommended it.

Sometimes when you're doing something creative... it feels like you're conducting electricity... One of the reasons I like The Creative Act so much is because it talks about that process, and about how you've got to keep your current unfettered by all the distractions in life.

That sounded good, and actually that part of the book was good, but a lot of it was kind of meh. Meh, and then occasionally brilliant, but not brilliant often enough. I kept reading because the book helped put me to sleep at night.

Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon (2013). This is another book I found by browsing in the "Y" section at the main library. Yoon is Korean-American, and his grandfather was a POW from North Korea. This novel is about a North Korean POW who relocates to a small town in Brazil in the 1950s, works for a Japanese tailor there, takes over the shop, and gradually assimilates. I don't know, it was OK. Very lovely writing, but I had some trouble identifying with the main character, especially after he came to Brazil. The flashbacks of his time as a soldier in North Korea were more moving. Anyway, it was OK, something a little different.

Trip by Amie Barrodale (2025). I have been interested in Amie Barrodale ever since I read a ghost story by her (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/10/03/letter-from-a-haunted-house-part-one/) and I knew she'd published a novel, so when I spotted it on the shelf at the George Reynolds library, I grabbed it. It was great! A divorced mom of a teenage autistic son goes to an academic conference in Nepal where she dies accidentally. The rest of the book is her getting used to being dead (experiencing the bardo), and then attempting to rescue her son from danger. Such a cool book AND it's an autism book. That was a surprise, but yeah, it's a book about what it's like to be the parent of an autistic kid. I loved this passage, in the last chapter:

I thought for the last time about how I had not diagnosed Trip early enough. How I had been impatient with him.... I had let him look at screens. I had let him eat dyes. It was my fault for living in a house with lead paint on the porch. For feeding him meat. For not drawing him out sooner, over and over again, the very first time I wondered about him playing alone with his cars. 

I let go of how, like one of his teachers, I had tried to argue my way out of it at first.

Obviously, one should "let go" of these things before one actually dies, but it's hard. Barrodale apparently has an autistic child, so this was very authentic. And moving. I might even buy myself a copy when it comes out in paperback. I'm counting it as my seventh book about autism, and I loved it.