New Japanese short fiction: One Love Chigusa

Soji Shimada is one of Japan’s best selling mystery writers. His latest work One Love Chigusa has been published in English as part of the Red Circle Minis collection. The collection, which began in 2018, includes short works from contemporary Japanese authors that have not yet been published in Japanese. This novel approach adds an interesting layer to the reading experience; literary criticism on the original texts is not yet available. 

The strange title One Love Chigusa is fitting for a novella that is indeed strange throughout. This strangeness slowly builds, reaches a crescendo in the final chapter, and then in the very last scenes recedes with the revelation of certain vital information. The bizarre array of characters and events that make up the work contribute to the disconcerting yet wonderful experience of reading One Love.

The story is set in Beijing, although it is easy to forget this as spatial descriptions are often very dream-like and dystopian. Surroundings are described to us from the perspective of the main character, Xie Hoyu. Xie has had half of his brain and body replaced by machinery, and this has fundamentally altered the way he experiences the physical world. People and objects often morph into more disturbing or mechanical versions of themselves. For example, when Xie has been wandering the city, we are given his observations: “the letters of the displays and the neon signs scattered on the walls and rooftops would suddenly start to change to numerals. Some changed slowly; some fluctuated violently... Were they stock prices?” Here, the hallucination itself questions the solidity of our linguistic system, while Xie’s question about stock prices points to the all-pervasive presence of financial motivation in our society. This extract thus evokes feelings of disorientation and instability, and conveys a cynical view of civilisation.

When the Red Gates Opened: A Memoir of China's Reawakening

The 1980s was a period of rapid change and economic growth for China. In 1979, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping opened special economic zones in southern China, experimenting with market capitalism. Dori Jones Yang, a reporter for BusinessWeek, saw China’s rise in the 1980s and has recorded it for her memoir When The Red Gates Opened.

Tsundoku #13 - September 2020

Autumn, cooler weather (perhaps, depending on where you are?) - back to school, back to work, back to some sort of new normal for most of us...and bookshops are open again all over. September is also a bumper month for new books - so many novels held back from spring and summer releases so let's get going....fiction first as ever which is the bulk of this month's new books...

Hong Kong, Inside and Out: Two Guest Poets Write Home

More than a year since pro-democracy protestors took to the streets in Hong Kong, the city has faded somewhat from headlines around the world, eclipsed by the uncertainties of a global pandemic and fast-changing events elsewhere. But for Hong Kongers at home and abroad, political and cultural upheavals on the island continue to take centre stage, while the fate of their city as they know it hangs in the balance. 

What does it mean to write from, to, and about a changing city? To start a conversation between writers within and outside the city, we invited two guest poets – one based in Hong Kong, to write about a fellow Hong Kong poet living abroad; and the other based overseas, to write about a fellow poet living in Hong Kong. Together, this pair of contributions reimagines Hong Kong as a larger, enduring community that transcends the island’s boundaries. 

Tsundoku #12 - August 2020

August's Tsundoku may not find you on a beach sadly - or if it does then it's probably the closest beach to your house. But summer reading remains essential wherever you are...here's some new Asian-focussed fiction and non-fiction for the month...some fiction first up...

Japan's Asian Allies - A Look at the Collaborationist Regimes of World War II

Compared to Nazi Germany, the Japanese Empire during World War II receives little to no coverage in Western media. Even more obscure, are the many puppet regimes that aided the Japanese occupation throughout Asia, spanning from the far north in Manchuria to the south in Burma and the Philippines. Luckily, Osprey publishing has come to the rescue with their newest edition to the Men At Arms series titled Japan’s Asian Allies 1941 – 45.

Elaine Chiew Chats With Professor Malachi Edwin Vethamani, Malaysian poet and short story writer.

Photo Credit: Chris Leong

Malachi Edwin Vethamani is a Malaysian-born Indian poet, writer, critic, bibliographer and professor. He is currently Head, School of English, University of Nottingham Malaysia. He has two volumes of poems, Complicated Lives (2016) and Life Happens (2017), and a collection of short stories, Coitus Interruptus and Other Stories Happens (2017). His research on Malaysian literature in English led to the publication of A Bibliography of Malaysian Literature in English (2015) and two edited volumes of Malaysian literature which cover 60 years of Malaysian poetry, Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems (2017) and short-stories, Ronggeng-Ronggeng: Malaysian Short Stories (2020).

 

EC: Welcome to Asian Books Blog, Malachi. Great to have you here. Your most recent publication, an anthology of short stories which you compiled and edited, Ronggeng-Ronggeng, has a Table of Contents that reads like a Who’s Who in the Malaysian short story. What was the impetus for this project, what are your hopes for the anthology, and how did you go about the selection process? 

 

MEV: I wanted to bring together a volume of short stories that is representative of Malaysian short story writing from the 1950s till the present. The two existing significant collections of short stories were compiled and edited by Lloyd Fernando in 1968 and 1981 and were republished in 2005 but are generally unavailable. Ronggeng-Ronggeng is one of the outcomes of my research on Malaysian literature in English and I wanted a volume of Malaysian short stories that showcased the works of a range of writers, the new, emerging and the established. I read all the published works that were available and then went on to select the stories and get permission from the writers to include their works for this collection. It is my hope that this collection will contribute to more scholarship on Malaysian literature in English.

 

EC: In your illuminating precis on the development of the short story as a form in Malaysia, you wrote that Malaysians writing in English have a distinct flavour, for example, in the use of Manglish or other vernacular – how important is it to retain this characteristic within the tradition of a national literature, and how has this played out nationally versus internationally, where big publishing houses may not yet recognise or appreciate local tongues and the hybridity it brings to British English as a global (though colonial) standard?

 

MEV: I believe that it is essential that Malaysian writing in English is recognisable as a distinct flavour both in the linguistic and literary dimensions. Malaysian English, in its full spectrum, ranges from the standard form to the non-standard form (Manglish). Between these two poles, there is a range of Malaysian English which contributes towards a national identity. This emerges not only in the linguistic forms but also in the literary dimension, the idiomatic expressions and local images that are used in the works. The multi-cultural mix in Malaysia further contributes to the hybridity in Malaysian English. It is a part of World Englishes, just as British English is a variety of the English language. The fact that Malaysian writers have won international literary prizes is indicative of the contribution Malaysian writers make to contemporary Literature in English worldwide. Sadly, at the national level, Malaysian writing in English remains in the margins as it is not considered part of national Malaysian literature as only literary works in Bahasa Melayu (the Malay language) is included in this literary canon.