“And if you decide not to read anymore, hey, no problem, because you’re not the one I was waiting for anyway. But if you decide to read on, then guess what? You’re my kind of time being and together we’ll make magic!”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JAN 27, 2014)

How do a century-old modern-thinking Buddhist nun, a WW II kamikaze pilot, a bullied 16-year-old Japanese schoolgirl on the verge of suicide, her suicidal father, a struggling memoirist on a remote island of British Columbia, Time, Being, Proust, language, philosophy, global warming, and the 2011 Japanese tsunami connect?

In this brilliantly plotted and absorbing, layered novel, one can find the theme in a quote from Proust, quoted by Ozeki:

“In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self.”

Remember these poignant and piercing words, as it underpins all that this book is about. You can catch on immediately that it is self-referential, at least to some degree. The memoirist’s name is Ruth (like the author)–both Ruths have a husband name Oliver and live on a remote island in British Colombia. And both are writers. The Ruth of the novel suffers from writer’s block. She has been trying to write a book of her mother’s last years living with Alzheimer’s, and to illustrate her own feelings about her experience as daughter and caretaker.

One day, Ruth finds some barnacle-encrusted belongings washed up ashore, possibly from the 2011 Japan tsunami and the tidal drifts that deposited debris in their direction. Inside is a Hello Kitty lunchbox, a wristwatch circa WWII, letters in Japanese, a French composition book, and a diary of a 16-year-old Japanese girl named Nao (pronounced “Now”) written in English. The diary itself is set inside a hacked copy of Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu” (In Search of Lost Time). Proust’s novel is removed, leaving the shell as a cover protecting Nao’s secret journal.

In the meantime, a native Japanese crow has inhabited the island where Ruth and Oliver live with their moody cat, eerily haunting the island with its ke ke ke song.

According to the narrative, the ancient Zen master, Sh?b?genz?, stated, “Time itself is being…and all being is time…In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.”

I was hooked by that time, and for the time…being.

I know that, thus far, I have only quoted great historical thinkers and writers, whose words are enfolded in this shimmering tapestry of a book. However, be assured that Ozeki’s contemporary narrative will both exhilarate and touch you.

“I am reaching through time to touch you,” writes Nao with her purple gel pen.

Ruth decides to hunker down with Nao’s diary, a few pages at a time, each night reading to Oliver and herself. She learns early on that Nao is planning on killing herself after she writes down the life story of her great-grandmother Jiko, the Buddhist nun. As the diary unfolds, it is evident that Nao is also recording the story of her own life. Moreover, she shares the events, as she knows it, of her dead great-uncle, the WW II pilot who was also a philosopher and lover of French literature.

The opening of the book is abstract, unformed, and philosophical, but that only lasts for a few pages. Once the chapters begin, the narrative alternates between Ruth and Nao. I admit to an early concern, that the novel may be a YA-adult crossover, due to the chipper tone of Nao and her indelibly teenage style. But, eventually, as the story penetrates and cross-cuts through characters, the storylines become a piercing symphony. I am confident that you will be moved by not just its warmth, but its luminous beauty.

“In the interstices between sleeping and waking, she floated in a dark liminal state that was not quite a dream, but was perpetually on the edge of becoming one. There she hung, submerged and tumbling slowly, like a particle of flotsam just below the crest of a wave that was always just about to break.”

Along the way, you will learn numerous Japanese words, which are footnoted, and Buddhist concepts, which are woven in seamlessly. I have had too many experiences of overweening narratives exerting Buddhist credo that discharge as shallow power point presentations or pedantic coffee table ideas. Ozeki doesn’t disappoint. With a little magic realism (just a little!), a pinch of Murakami, and a lot of heart, she pulls the threads all together into a radiant tapestry. This book is a gift of love.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 279 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin Books (December 31, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ruth Ozeki
EXTRAS:	Guardian Interview
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami

Bibliography:

• My Year of Meats (1998)
• All Over Creation (2003)
• A Tale for the Time Being (March 2013)

“Just thinking out loud . . . How smart’s an AI, Case?”

“Depends. Some aren’t much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost a fortune, anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat is willing to let ‘em get.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd AUG 21, 2011)

One of the rare books to wear the coveted triple-crown of science-fiction, winning all three major prizes in the genre (the Hugo, Phillip K. Dick, Nebula awards), as well as being included on Time Magazine’s 1995 list, “All TIME 100 Best Novels,” it isn’t hyperbolic to claim that William Gibson’s 1983 classic, Neuromancer, is a must-read in our world of ubiquitous WI-FI, 24-hour connectedness, and the Blue Brain reverse engineering project, a world in which a recent Time magazine cover claimed The Singularity would be upon is in less than 40 years.

If  you – like me – are late to this party, and haven’t yet read this book, you’ll find it hard to believe it was published in 1983, and you’ll undoubtedly see the influence that it has had on a number of later works. Let me put the publication date in perspective: I was 5 and played Space Invaders on a Commodore-PET computer at school and it was almost a decade and a half later before I surfed the net (on dial-up, no less) or, even, had an email account. So I can’t imagine how Neuromancer – a book about hackers who jack into cyberspace and troll the matrix, essentially a virtual reality representation of all computers, and their data-structures, linked on a global network– was received in a 1983 world of Commodore computers.

Case is a “data-thief,” a hacker for hire, who loses his ability to jack into “a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix” when he makes the “classic mistake” of stealing from his employer during one of his runs. His punishment: forced administration of mycotoxin, the ensuing neurological damage locking him out of the matrix, a devastating punishment for a man who “lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace.” High on amphetamines and suicidal, Case scours black-medicine clinics in Chiba City, Japan, which has become, with its “poisoned silver sky,” a “magnet for the Sprawl’s [an eastern seaboard megacity that spans from Boston to Atlanta] techno-criminal subcultures.” That is, until he’s picked up by Molly, a street samurai, with silver lenses “surgically inset, sealing her sockets” and retractable scalpels embedded under her nails, who takes him to see her boss, Armitage .

Armitage, a former Special Forces soldier, has a job for him. He promises to repair Case’s neurological damage if he agrees to work for him. To ensure his complete co-operation, Armitage has time-sensitive sacs of the mycotoxin inserted into his arteries: if Case completes his assignment, Armitage will have the sacs removed; else, the mycotoxin will be released, his neurological restoration undone. Much to his chagrin, Case is given a new pancreas to boot – one that renders him insensitive to the amphetamines he was partial to. Faced with the prospect of living in his “prison of flesh” without the option of pill-popping escape, what choice does Case have but to agree?

But before he can get started on the actual job, Armitage needs a piece of hardware – a recording of McCoy Pauley’s consciousness, a legendary hacker, and one of Case’s mentors. The Dixie Flatline construct—McCoy Pauley survived brain death, or flatlined, three times while jacked into the matrix, hence his nickname, and the moniker for his construct– is locked away in the corporate headquarters of Sense/Net in Atlanta. With the help of a group of cosmetically modified radicals called the Panther Moderns, Case and Molly prepare to break into Sense/Net to steal the construct; they’ll need the Dixie Flatline’s expertise for the actual job. Rigged with a device that’ll allow him to toggle into a “simstim” stream of Molly’s “sensorium” while inside the matrix, Case will infiltrate Sense/Net’s security systems, breaking through the Intrusions Countermeasures Electronics, or ICE, to facilitate Molly’s passage through Sense/Net headquarters.

While things at Sense/Net don’t go exactly as planned – a riot breaks out; Molly breaks her leg – they succeed in lifting the construct, and so the group is off to Istanbul to retrieve the last member of their team, a heroin-addicted sociopath who gets off on betraying people, with a surgical implant that allows him to project images onto other people’s retinas – Peter Riviera.

But Case still doesn’t have any idea what they’re really up to or who Armitage really is. According to his research, there’s no record of Armitage being a part of Screaming Fist, a US military operation that sent US soldiers to infiltrate Russia on a doomed mission in order to glean information about the EMP weapons they knew the Russians would use to thwart the attack. And so, Molly has the Panther Moderns investigate Armitage: turns out he takes his orders from Wintermute.

Wintermute, an Artificial Intelligence, has been orchestrating the gig from the get-go, and now that its team is assembled, it arranges for them to fly to Freeside, a Vegas-like space resort that orbits Earth. Freeside is owned by a rich and mysterious family, the Tessier-Ashpools. No Tessier-Ashpool stock has been traded for more than 100 years, and it is rumored that the family – both original members and clones – exist in a state of cryogenic slumber in their labyrinthine space-station mansion, Villa Straylight, awaiting the time when technology renders man immortal.

Wintermute is housed somewhere in Villa Straylight, as is his AI sibling, Neuromancer. Two parts of super-intelligent entity, they were built with barriers between them to keep the Turing police, the law-enforcement body that regulates the construction of AIs, from destroying them. But to ensure their eventual consolidation and evolution, Wintermute was built with a single, overriding desire – to merge with Neuromancer. However, many non-digital safeguards were put in place, and in order for the fusion to happen, someone must speak a password into a console located somewhere in Villa Straylight. While Case breaks through the ICE that separates Wintermute from Neuromancer, Riviera and Molly will have to convince the only member of the Tessier-Ashpool family not in cryogenic freeze, 3LadyJane, to give them the password. If all goes according to plan, the two entities will fuse, creating an autonomous super-intelligence.

Believe it or not, this is a necessarily superficial sketch of a quite complicated plot, but for all its nuances and drama, I couldn’t get caught up in the suspense of it all: I was too impressed by Gibson’s enviable imagination, and it’s to his credit that the book never feels overburdened by detail. While, for the most part, the characters don’t rise above being clichés of the genre, this is an intelligent meditation on the conditions of autonomous intelligence.

Questioning the conditions of autonomous intelligence, or for lack of a better word, personhood, is as old as human society and has had many moral implications, from granting (and denying) women political participation to the emancipation of slaves, and I suspect in years to come, the ways in which we answer this question will be used to argue for (or against) the rights of machine intelligence. And yet, even as I type this, part of me balks at the assumption that machine intelligence, the kind of intelligence that deserves constitutionally entrenched rights and freedoms, is even possible. Although Turing’s famous test for machine intelligence is quite clear, I can’t ignore my resistance to the claim that any machine that behaves indistinguishably from an intelligent consciousness is an intelligent consciousness. Reading this book forced me to examine why that is: what about our minds am I so reluctant to admit might be reproduced in silicone?

In the current state of things, our brains are phenomenally superior to the best computers not in terms of memory, but of adaptability and processing power. The ways in which we learn and assimilate information is far more sophisticated than the way even the “smartest” computer program learns now. The Dixie Flatline construct, essentially a ROM construct, is not really alive, not really an autonomous intelligence, precisely because it cannot learn or adapt to new material.

In fact, it is the restriction of this capacity, the capacity to bring together information stored in disparate parts of the brain, that renders Armitage so unstable. As it turns out, Armitage did participate in Screaming Fist, known then as Colonel Corto. The sole survivor, Corto was physically and psychologically shattered. Wintermute first makes contact with Corto in a psychiatric hospital in Paris when he’s assigned to a computer-based rehabilitative program. Wintermute essentially constructs the Armitage personality around Corto’s broken psyche. The result is a personality with limited access to itself, and hence, limited assimilative and adaptive capacity, resulting in something more like an automaton, as Case notices, little more than “a statue.”

When Case asks “where had Corto been all those years,” he’s asking an age-old question about the nature not just of consciousness, but of our selves. While prostitutes, or “meat puppets” are able to disconnect the connection between their minds and their bodies, a neural cut giving a computer chip temporary control of their bodies– women literally objectifying themselves – in a way that suggests consciousness is strictly neurological, the language Mr. Gibson uses to describes Case’s experience in the matrix – “disembodied consciousness” – and the descriptions of Case’s consciousness piggy-backing on Molly’s experience through the simstim rig are more suggestive of embodied souls – Cartesian ghosts in the machine – than neurologically reductive consciousness.

And just as Case prefers the freedom and bliss of disembodied consciousness, Neuromancer, with its own stable personality, prefers solitary existence to the restrictive loss of self it believes merging with Wintermute would entail. But as the emergent Neuromancer/Wintermute super-intelligence suggests, the two are better together; and perhaps for all its advanced technology and autonomous Artificial Intelligences, Neuromancer really is a humanistic book; perhaps in encouraging Case to get emotionally involved in his work – to find his hate –Wintermute is pushing him to draw on his dual natures, rational and emotional, pushing him to be paradigmatically human.

At the end of all this, the Wintermute wins, and a superintelligent entity is born, one that is “the sum total of all works, the whole show.”  I, like Case and the Tessier-Ashpool matriarch who designed it, can’t really imagine what such an intelligence might be, but if Ray Kurzweil is right, and this day will soon be upon us, I look forward to one thing, the same thing that surprised and pleased me about this book: whatever a conscious AI entity looks like, whatever its motivations and character, whatever fortunes or calamities it spells for mankind, it will undoubtedly answer some of the important philosophical questions about what exactly it is to be human in this all too physical world.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 505 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ace Trade (July 10, 2000)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	William Gibson
EXTRAS:	ExcerptWikipedia on Neuromancer
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Zero History Spook Country Pattern Recognition

Bibliography:

• Neuromancer (1984) / / 
• Count Zero (1986)
• Burning Chrome (1986)
• Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)
• The Difference Engine (co-authored with Bruce Sterling) (1990)
• Virtual Light (1993)
• Idoru (1996)
• All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999)
• Pattern Recognition (2003)
• Spook Country (2007)
• Zero History (2010)

Movies from books:

• Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

“Mittomonai translates roughly as indecent or shameful. I looked it up when I got back to the barracks. But I don’t think I understand what Fumiko meant, not right away at least, not until some time had passed. At first and for a long while afterward, I thought she meant the idea of such a celebration at the scene of such a tragedy, but now I think her meaning was more complicated than that.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  AUG 9, 2011)

Only those who fully venerate war can think of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a glorified event. Indeed, many fictional books that are set in post-Hiroshima reconstruction are filled with vivid, colorful and poignant descriptions.

So it comes as a surprise that Michael Knight’s The Typist is such a gentle book. It is devoid of precisely what one might expect in a book set in the wake of World War II: no brow-beating, no heart-wrenching, no intrusive authorial political statements.

At its heart, The Typist is a coming-of-age book. The protagonist, Pfc. Francis Vancleave (Van) has one claim to fame: he types an astounding 95 words a minute. That skill keeps him off the battlefield, where his days are filled with mind-numbing letters of dictation and paperwork. That is, until he comes to the attention of General MacArthur, nicknamed “Bunny.” Bunny conscripts him to keep company with his young son, Arthur, an isolated boy, who enjoys staging figurine battles with his large assortment of toys.

Van is a man who is marginalized by life. As a married man – and we initially know little about his marriage – he does not enter into the “sport” of bedding the panpan girls who “smoked and teased and sent young boys over with indecent propositions.” Unlike his roommate, Clifford, he is a straight arrow, freshly minted from Alabama, more of an observer than a participant. He is able to lose himself in the games of his young charge (would Hannibel outfox Napolean?) and fits in beautifully in Arthur’s isolated world.

There is an authentic simplicity in Michael Knight’s sparse writing, a puissance that might elude a less gifted writer. As Van searches for his own legitimacy, Mr. Knight provides him with the luxury of reaching it at his own pace. This is slow, effortless, luxuriant prose, prose that casts a spell, prose that doesn’t waste a word and refuses to erect artificial roadblocks to the story. As far as comparisons, one work that comes instantly to mind is Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. There is as much power in what is not stated as what is.

A subtle theme of football runs through the book – and also in the magnificent story that precedes The Typist, called The Atom Bowl. MacArthur, in shocking disregard of sensibilities, holds a football game to rally spirit in what he dubs the Atom Bowl; “the players trotted out and suddenly the ball was in the air, the Giants kicking to the Bears in the city of Hiroshima, on the island of Honshu, in the occupied nation of Japan.” If there is any doubt of how Michael Knight expects us to read this scene, it is dispelled by the opening story. In it, a young boy interviews his “pawpaw” – the last surviving participant of the Atom Bowl. As his pawpaw relives these “gory days,” the boy asks him, “What about you? Did you ever feel guilty or anything?” The response: “For what?”

This small, quiet novel centering on a rootless man in search for something he only dimly understands packs a disproportionate wallop. By juxtaposing complex characters with an economy of language, Michael Knight has created a compelling meditation of a sliver of history.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Knight
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Boat by Nam Le

Bibliography:

• The Divining Rod (1998; 2010)
• Goodnight, Nobody: Stories (2003)
• Dogfight: And Other Stories (2007)
• The Holiday Season (2007)
• The Typist (August 2010)

“It might come in a drop of rain,” Xue Xin continued, ignoring the question, “a note from a faraway flute, the fall of a leaf. Of course, you have to be ready for it or it will pass unnoticed. But if you are ready, and your eyes are open, you will see it and suddenly understand everything. Then you will know who you are and what you must do.”

“Satori.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAR 07, 2011)

Satori, by Don Winslow, is a prequel to the best-selling thriller, Shibumi, by Trevanian. Trevanian introduced the world to Nicholai Hel, master of hodo korusu, “the naked kill.”  Hel speaks six languages, is a master of the game “Go,” and has a special proximity sense – the ability to detect when any person or thing is nearby. As Satori opens in 1951, the Korean war is in full swing and the Americans have had Nicholai in solitary confinement for three years for the honor killing of his beloved stepfather, General Kishikawa. General Kishikawa, sentenced to a public execution, loved and raised Nicholai, teaching him “Go.” Rather than let him die that way, Nicholai killed him himself.

While in jail, Nicholai was brutally tortured, physically and pharmaceutically by a CIA agent named Diamond. Out of the blue, a CIA agent who is a colleague of Diamond’s approaches Nicholai with an offer. The United States will give him $100,000 and a passport if he will kill Yuri Veroshenin, the Soviet Commissioner to Red China. The CIA’s reason for wanting Veroshenin killed is to put a wedge between Beijing and China. Nicholai takes the offer but he has other agendas – he wants to get even with Diamond and he hates Veroshenin who once forced his mother into a lurid affair so that she could survive.

A plan is put in place for Nicholai to kill Veroshenin with the CIA’s assistance. It is more like a suicide mission for Nicholai than anything else. His odds of surviving are about 1%. Before the mission begins, however, Nicholai must get a new face. He has been so savagely beaten while in jail that his face is a mess. He is sent to a plastic surgeon and then to France where he is to learn the language nuances and mannerisms of the identity he is to take, that of Michel Guibert, an arms dealer. In France, he is taught appropriate southern French by a beautiful woman named Solange, an ex-prostitute, who also teaches him about his adopted background and life in Montpellier where he is supposedly from. They fall in love but Nicholai must leave to begin his mission. He promises to return to her.

Before the mission begins there is an attempt on Nicholai’s life in France by two men from China but Nicholai manages to kill both of them. Nicholai heads off to China and the action revs up. There are arms deals, crosses, double crosses, and no one knows who to believe about what. Nicholai does manage to kill Veroshenin but he is shot in the leg and the CIA’s extraction team fails to show up. Instead, Nicholai’s life is saved at the very last minute by a mysterious group of monks who take him somewhere secret to heal and where he searches for satori, “true understanding and harmony with the world.”

Nicholai is trying to figure out who is after him and why. It seems like everyone has a reason. The cold war is blasting, Vietnam is a hotbed of strife and the different communist nations are not at peace with one another. Nicholai heads to Hanoi where he sets up his own arms deal and is followed by the CIA.

There is a wonderful cast of characters in this book, many kinky, quirky and mean. Winslow knows his geography and history and it comes through clearly, though at times a little too detailed for my preference. Readers know that Nicholai can survive all that this book throws at him because he is alive and well when Shibumi starts. He relies on his skill with Go to navigate the subtle feints and misdirections he is faced with and figure out each of his moves. Go is a game said to be much more complicated than chess; Nicholai is very good at it.

This is a thriller to end thrillers. At times I got lost trying to figure out who was after who and why, but mostly it was fascinating and fun.  Winslow’s writing kept me turning pages through the night and he is at the top of his game with this novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grand Central Publishing (March 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Don Winslow
EXTRAS:	Note from Don Winslow and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Savages The Winter of Frankie Machine The Dawn Patrol California Fire and Life Our review of a couple Trevanian novels: Incident at Twenty-Mile

Bibliography:

• The Death and Life Of Bobby Z (1997)
• California Fire and Life (1999)
• The Power Of The Dog (2005)
• The Winter of Frankie of Machine (September 2007)
• The Dawn Patrol (June 2008)
• Savages (July 2010)
• Satori (March 2011)

Neil Carey Series:

• Cool Breeze on the Underground (1991)
• The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror (1992)
• Way Down On The High Lonely (1993)
• A Long Walk Up The Water Slide (1994)
• While Drowning In The Desert (1996)
• Isle Of Joy (1996)

Movies from Books:

• Bobby Z (2006)
• Savages

“Loyalty looks simple,” Grote tells him, “but it ain’t.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (AUG 28, 2010)

This is quite simply the best historical novel I have read in years, Tolstoyan in its scope and moral perception, yet finely focused on a very particular place and time. The place: Dejima, a Dutch trading post on a man-made island in Nagasaki harbor that was for two centuries Japan’s only window on the outside world. The time: a single year, 1799-1800, although here Mitchell takes the liberties of a novelist, compressing the events of a decade, including the decline of the Dutch East India Company and Napoleon’s annexation of Holland, into a mere twelve months. He plays smaller tricks with time throughout the novel, actually, alternating between the Japanese calendar and the Gregorian one, then jumping forwards and backwards between chapters. The effect is to heighten the picture of two hermetic worlds removed from the normal course of history. One is Japan itself (the Thousand Autumns of the title), a strictly hierarchical feudal society, deliberately maintaining its isolation and culture. The other is the equally hierarchical society on Dejima itself, comprised of Dutch merchant officers, a polyglot collection of hands, and a few slaves, whose only contact with the outside world is the annual arrival of a ship from Java. To these, Mitchell adds two more hermetic worlds: an isolated mountain monastery in the second part of the book, and an English warship in the third. Without spoilers, I cannot reveal how these connect, but Mitchell’s writing will carry you eagerly from one event to the next.

The author has the rare ability to work on three narrative scales simultaneously: small, medium, and large. He immerses the reader in local details — particulars of language, culture, medical practice, philosophy and prejudice, commercial procedures, gambling, debauchery, and the capsule back-stories of the lesser characters. He will set up nail-biting situations that last a chapter or so, but introduce some twist that suddenly turns everything around at the end. And he arranges the book in three large parts, each of which ends with a transformative moral decision.

There is a large cast of of characters, whose plethora of exotic names can be confusing at first. But these crucial moments are associated with three or four who stand out for their human interest and moral dimension. Part I focuses on Jacob de Zoet (probably based on the real life Hendrik Doeff, who wrote a book about his experiences). He comes to Dejima as a lowly clerk, but he is smarter than the others, more genuinely interested in Japanese language and culture, and an incorruptible man in a nest of swindlers. Although by no means omnipresent, he serves as the commercial, political, and moral touchstone of the entire novel. Part II centers around two Japanese characters. One is the interpreter Ogawa Uzaemon, Jacob’s principal link to the Japanese world; his formal reticence conceals secrets of his own. The other is Orito Aibagawa, a young midwife who already knows more than most doctors. Despite a disfiguring burn on one cheek, she has a beauty that is hard to resist. But her importance to the book is less as a figure of romance than as the center of a moral challenge that tests her (and indirectly Ogawa) to the utmost. Part III introduces the fourth touchstone character, the British naval captain John Penhaligon, whose decisions will prove pivotal as the book approaches its climax.

Those who know David Mitchell from Cloud Atlas will be aware of his stylistic virtuosity and his fondness for channeling popular genres ranging from the nineteenth-century adventure story to dystopian futurism. There are traces of many different styles here also, but amazingly they all fit into his account of a single place and time. There are no postmodern tricks; this is Mitchell’s most straightforward novel to date. He does have a fondness for writing in short one-paragraph sentences of less than a line long, which makes some of the book look like blank verse, though it reads more like the rapid exchanges of a screenplay. Against this, he can produce set-pieces such as the opening of chapter 39, beginning thus: “Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas, and dung-ripe stables…” And going on for a page and a half to end “…a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observed the blurred reflection of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. ‘This world,’ he thinks, ‘contains one masterpiece, and that is itself’.” And David Mitchell, in HIS masterpiece, gives us an entire world.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 190 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (June 29, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Mitchell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Our review of Cloud Atlas Another MF review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

Bibliography:

• Ghostwritten (1999)
• number9dream (2001)
• Cloud Atlas (2004)
• Black Swan Green (2006)
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (June 2010) Commonwealth Prize

“Now forget the dead, forget even the living. Turn your mind only to the unborn.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (AUG 16, 2010)

Fractal designs, such as used to be popular twenty years ago, have the property that any part of them replicates the whole in miniature. If you zoom in on even the tiniest detail, you can reach an understanding of the entire shape. This analogy occurs to me after reading The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe, a late work by the Japanese Nobel Laureate, and so far the only thing by him that I have read. Where most novels have a linear narrative behind them, this one reads as a series of one-sided conversations, thoughts about literature and other arts, buried memories, and some bizarre incidents — all generally minor in themselves, but each seemingly endowed with immense hidden significance, each a clue to some overall design that only gradually emerges as the various details replicate and mirror one another.

Despite its abstract content, the book is easy to read and its framework simple. Kogito Choko, a celebrated writer, is listening to some tapes sent him by his brother-in-law Goro Hanawa, once his childhood friend and now a famous film director. At the end of one of the cassettes, Goro remarks “So anyway, that’s it for today — I’m going to head over to the Other Side now. But don’t worry, I’m not going to stop communicating with you.” Immediately after, Goro throws himself out of the window of his high building. Kogito (an obsessive thinker, aptly named by his father from the phrase “cogito ergo sum”) engages in months of conversation with the dead Goro, playing snatches of the tapes, stopping them for his own response, and then continuing to hear his friend’s answer. When his wife suggests he needs to get away, he accepts a guest professorship in Berlin, where Goro had himself lived a few years back.

As an example of Oe’s method, take the chapter in which Kogito is being interviewed on television in connection with the Berlin Film Festival. There is a long section about how he gets to the interview, or almost doesn’t get to it: crossed wires with the person picking him up, confusion at the hotel where this is taking place, description of the technicians setting up the equipment in the hotel ballroom, the physical arrangement of the chairs, backdrop, camera, monitors, all in obsessive detail. And then, without further preamble, Kogito is shown a number of film clips on the monitor: samurai fighting off a peasant army, and a modern game of rugby football. He recognizes it as scenes from a book he had written, entitled Rugby Match 1860. In the novel, he had used the battle and the game as metaphors, but he intrigued by the decision of these filmmakers to film them literally, with an acute feeling for the Japanese atmosphere. He is told that what he has just seen is the only footage from the project so far shot, but the “young filmmakers” have run out of money; would he be willing to concede them the rights for free? Kogito’s translator warns him that he is being ambushed, but he agrees, and the chapter ends.

The core of this chapter, I believe, lies in one of its smallest details, the samurai film clip. Certain aspects of it reflect other images we encounter involving Kogito’s father, who appears to have been something of a philosophical leader of an ultra-right-wing movement opposing the Japanese surrender to the US. Kogito’s own politics, on the other hand, are liberal, so perhaps he is the Changeling of the title? (Or one of them, with Goro.) One begins to see that the whole novel is about change. In the background, there is the reconstruction of Japanese society after defeat. But this is worked out in terms of ideas — translation between languages, translation of one medium into another (writing into film or opera), and perhaps (as the example above would suggest) the handing over of ideas from one generation to another.

The fractal metaphor works on the personal level as well. From what I can gather, this novel reflects themes from every other book that Oe has written, and these in turn reflect the author’s life. His brother-in-law was indeed a famous film director, Juzo Itami, who committed suicide in a similar way. Like the fictional Kogito, Kenzaburo Oe has a son who was born brain-damaged, barely able to communicate in words, but who eventually found success as a composer. All Oe’s novels contain such a character, and the writer has spoken of his aim to give his son a voice denied to him in life. While the composer-son plays a relatively small role here, Oe shifts the relationship back a generation, as Kogito tries to understand the legacy of his own father and the huge changes between the Japan of his time and that of the present. The themes of rebirth and the passing of the torch between generations become clear only at the very end, but after so much mind-play they bring a lovely touch of simple human emotion. (Translated by Deborah Beohm.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press; 1 edition (March 16, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Kenzaburo Oe
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Japanese writers:Huraki Murakami Ryu Murakami Natsuo Kirino

Bibliography:

• Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (1958)
• Seventeen (1961)
• J (1963)
• A Personal Matter (1964)
• The Silent Cry (1967)
• Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (1969
• The Flood Invades My Spirit (1973)
• The Pinch Runner Memorandum (1976)
• The Game of Contemporaneity (1979)
• Sometimes the Heart of a Turtle (1980)
• Women Listening to the “Rain Tree” (1982)
• Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (1983)
• How Do We Kill the Tree (1984)
• Bitten by the Hippopotamus (1985)
• to My Sweet Bygone Years (1987)
• The Army of Quilp (1988)
• An Echo of Heaven (1989)
• A Quiet Life (1990)
• The Tower of Treatment and the Planet (1991)
• The Time That I Was Really Young (1992)
• The Crazy Iris: And Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath (1994)
• Somersault (1999)
• The Changeling (2000; March 2010 in US)
• Under the “Tree of Mine” (2001)
• The Infant with Melancholic Face (2002)
• The Children of 200 Years (2003)
• Farewell, My Books! (2005)
• The Beautiful Annabel Lee was Chilled and Killed (2007)
• The Death by Drowning (2009)

The Flaming Green Tree Trilogy:

• Until the Savior Gets Socked (1993)
• Vacillating (1994)
• On the Great Day (1995)

Nonfiction:

• Hiroshima Notes (1965)

“Over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night’s rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (JUN 30, 2010)

This is a modern, woolly mastodon of a book, a book with tusks and chewing teeth, a throwback to the most towering storytelling in literary history. But it is also a Seraph, a three-paired-winged novel that is full of zeal and respect, humility and ethereal beauty, an airborne creature that gave me five days in heaven. And, it is a sea serpent, because it lifted itself up like a column and it grabbed and swallowed me. Whole.

Pardon me while I gush; I bow to the spirit and heartbeat of David Mitchell, a force of nature who wrote this unforgettable, epic tale of adventure and colossal love. It is really…all about life and love. At turns knotty, briny, ribald, sensuous, fearsome, biting, daring, cerebral, grandiose, infinitesimal, and what did I leave out? It’s panoptic, and exquisitely poetic. The first page-and-a-half of chapter XXXIX rivals Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. It will make you laugh, it will make you weep, it will make your soul utter its secrets.

The novel starts with a birth, ends with a death, like bookends to all it contains. It contains two calendars, the Gregorian and the lunar. Time is an expanding and contracting entity in this story. In the strictest and most Western sense, it is linear. But when you are addressing a more Eastern orientation, as well as gestation and birth, the lunar calendar is more fitting. Mitchell makes them work, hand in hand, in alternating chapters.

The eponymous Jacob de Zoet, the Dutch Zeelander and clerk, is the strong and very moral center of this novel. Copper-haired and green-eyed, robust but reserved, he is a devout, sensitive, patient, tolerant, artistic, and keenly intelligent young man. He is sometimes troubled, and often prescient. He is posted indefinitely on the fan-shaped, artificial island of Dejima in the bay of Nagasaki with the Dutch East India Company’s warehouses and stock and motley crew, and the year is 1799.

At first sight, Jacob falls in love with Orito Aiwabaga, midwife and student to the scholarly Dr. Marinus. A burn scar on the left side of her face is no impediment to her beauty in the eyes of Jacob; his principled nature is his obstruction. I inhabited his quiet torment and pleaded with the pages to bring them together. I fell a little in love with Jacob myself–he transcended the fictional; I felt his hands.

Drawing on historical facts but twisting it into a magnificent, almost mythical tale, Mitchell casts a spell with words and images. His juxtapositions are painterly; the narrative is colorful with stylistic and linguistic leaps that keep you on your toes. This is a demanding novel. Mitchell stays one step ahead of the reader (but not arrogantly so), and he does it with brio. It is as if he is aware of what he needs to do to take you to the fathomless waters of his prose. He starts off with these tongue-slicing, lip-curling crazy names that may frustrate you initially, but it makes you slow…down…and pay attention to the minute details as well as the grand canvas.

I have rarely read a book (in third person point of view) that makes me feel so intimate with the author’s artistic strokes. It was as if he made a contract to take our senses, gradually tune us to his rhythms, and descend further and deeper. With not one stitch of self-consciousness, he envelopes you. And there are lovely sketches in the book that add dimension to the narrative.(I wish I knew who the artist was–is it Mitchell? His wife?)

There are three major shifts in the book. The first part sets up the tension and gives you the flow and rhythm and landscape of the novel, and introduces the Dutch and Japanese equipoise of politics that teeter-totters in this faraway place. The hierarchy of administrators, leaders, shoguns, samurais, medical practitioners, merchants, interpreters, servants, and slaves encompasses the serious to the sensational, and is often comically ingenious. This is also where I was most a tenant of Jacob.

The middle section focuses more on Orito, and has a feminine spirit to it, as well as cautiously moving into a thriller mode. And just when you think you got ahead of the author, he wrests that predictability away and keeps his promise to elevate his purpose.

The third section is the most challenging to read. It begins baldly but ambiguously, with a nautical saltiness that throws you off, and a gouty Captain with a morality of uncertain definition. You know where you are, but not why you are there and how it relates to the story and themes. The language is frequently idiomatic and the circumstances initially unclear. But, Mitchell doesn’t let you down. Everything gradually connects without artificial means. And the Captain’s closing thoughts stole my breath away.

This is as close to perfect as a novel can be. (You know there will be a movie–it is beautifully cinematic without being conventional.) You will close the pages, exalted. Jacob de Zoet and Orito Aibagawa will be eternally seared in your consciousness, and this story forever in your heart. A++

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 190 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (June 29, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Mitchell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Cloud Atlas Another MF review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

Bibliography:

• Ghostwritten (1999)
• number9dream (2001)
• Cloud Atlas (2004)
• Black Swan Green (2006)
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (June 2010) Commonwealth Prize

“”…he mulled over his long list of poor judgments and the human losses his inadequacy had caused.””

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (JAN 10, 2010)

Sugawara Akitada, an eleventh-century Japanese senior secretary in the Ministry of Justice, is determined to prove the innocence of two men: one, his current retainer who has been arrested for the murder of a blind woman, and two, a convict who died in exile. As he bails out Togo, his accused employee, and searches for deceased convict Haseo’s family, Akitada also contends with a contemptuous superior, Minister Sogo, and the persistent rumors of a small pox epidemic in the city.

All of these worries eat at his relationship with his only wife Tamako (unlike other men his age he hasn’t taken multiple wives — yet). Listening to her own women’s network, Tamako believes the epidemic is real and wants to protect their young son from exposure to it. But her husband, who functions in official circles in the capital and who gets out among the people more than she, insists that, since there has been no warning announcement by the government, those who leave the city out of fear of contagion are just foolishly causing panic. The rift between husband and wife grows as he rashly judges her actions and acts himself without consulting her. Feeling the distance, Akitada yearns for someone who can give him the warmth he once shared with Tamako and this leads him into a tempting situation with a beautiful woman who is already a wife of a powerful — and dangerous — lord. Akitada is a man from another culture and another time, but his tendency to discount his wife’s opinions and behavior, his focus on job and personal crusades while allowing vital domestic issues to fester, remind us that the centuries have not changed us human beings that much. For Akitada, his “poor judgments” will exact a heavy price on him, Tamako, and others. He truly desires to do the right thing but repeatedly speaks or acts precipitously. This Achilles’ heel of Akitada’s renders him a character whom the reader may long to guide out of his misconceptions. Alas, one can only stand by and watch the consequences.

About fifty years ago, Robert van Gulik authored a series about crime-fighting magistrate Judge Dee who lived in seventh-century China. One of these volumes was called The Chinese Maze Murders: A Judge Dee Mystery (Gulik, Robert Hans, Judge Dee Mystery.). I. J. Parker’s The Convict’s Sword follows, to a degree, in van Gulik’s footsteps. Although Judge Dee is a wiser man than Akitada, he also seems, by design, more god-like and less human. And Judge Dee is more secure professionally and domestically. It is interesting to compare van Gulik and Parker’s depiction of women. Herself a woman, Parker, in tune with the twenty-first century, compellingly shapes the chasm of communication between the sexes as her female characters inhabit the traditional roles but also emerge with distinct personalities and strong wills.

Containing martial arts and mayhem, drama, intrigue, and romance; The Convict’s Sword is many things including an intricate and absorbing mystery reaching in several directions (although, like many mysteries, the ultimate closeness of its human associations is a trifle too coincidental). This is an as-accurate-as- possible picture of life in Japan among a cross-section of the classes and a poignant look at a harried middle rank civil servant whose sense of duty blinds him. Blindness, this superior novel imparts, isn’t only a physical impairment. Highly recommended.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin (Non-Classics) (July 28, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	I.J. Parker
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Dragon Scroll Hell Screen

Bibliography:

• Rashomen Gate (July 2003)
• Hell Screen (September 2003)
• The Dragon Scroll (June 2005)
• Black Arrow (November 2006)
• Island of Exiles (September 2007)
• The Convict’s Sword (July 2009)
• The Masuda Affair (November 2010)
• The Fires of the Gods (April 2011)

“Mrs. Kobayashi’s purchases now lay, shrink-wrapped and waiting, inside her tiny icebox. Some of them, like the sweet bean condiments and slices of teriyaki eel (for restoring strength to tired bodies), were already laid out on the table along with the usual breakfast staples: sweet omelettes, hot rice in a linen-draped wooden tub, julienned carrots and burdock roots cooked in mirin and soy sauce, a tall tin of dried seaweed, umeboshi with shiso leaves. A stack of lacquered bowls awaited the miso soup, which would be prepared at the last minute with skinny enoki mushrooms and tender greens. Mackerel steaks, sprinkled liberally with salt and broiling on the grill, filled the house with their savory aroma.”

Book Review:

Review by Debbie Lee Wesselmann (OCT 12, 2009)

In her debut novel, The Favorites, gifted short story writer Mary Yukari Waters finds herself caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Her story of a Japanese family once torn apart by war and now living with the sacrifices of the past examines a culture that protects its “fermented emotions” from public view even though the story itself is meant for Americans, a culture that “believe(s) it is unhealthy to keep feelings inside.” And so Ms. Waters carefully constructs a novel devoid of obvious emotion for a readership that craves it.

Divided into four parts, The Favorites begins when fifteen year old Sarah Rexford and her mother Yoko arrive in their native Kyoto for the summer. Unbeknownst to Sarah, the real story began decades earlier, in the years of World War II when her family faced impossible choices and consequences. Decades later, everything seems perfectly balanced, especially to Sarah who is an outsider in her own extended family. She is a “half” — half-Japanese and half-American — and thus does not belong fully to either culture. However, as she navigates the complex family relationships, sees her mother for the first time as popular and widely admired in Kyoto, becomes reacquainted with her young cousins, and gets settled into her own childhood culture, Sarah begins to understand some deep truths about her extended family and where she belongs in its hierarchy. Her mother Yoko’s rebellious choice to marry American John Rexford and to live with him in “a small logging town, hours away from any city” becomes more puzzling to Sarah as her mother’s status becomes apparent. The magnetism of Yoko’s Japanese personality forms the undercurrent to this story of all the women in the Kobayashi and Asaki households.

Especially in the first section, which is nearly half the novel, Waters seems to be writing for middle school and high school readers. The cultural details of Japanese life sometimes seem designed to instruct rather than provide richness to the story itself, and Sarah’s observations lack the insight of maturity. The result is a somewhat superficial and undisturbed pond of narrative that tells of the family dynamics rather than allowing them to unfold. Part of this derives from Sarah’s point-of-view – her age and outsider status distance her — although most comes from the hidden emotions of the characters, women who rarely show glimpses of what lies behind their public masks. Sarah is simply not adept enough to read between the facial lines.

Fortunately, Ms. Waters leaves Sarah’s point-of-view for that of the other women as they struggle to come to terms with a new family tragedy. As Waters writes, “There is something bracing, almost exhilarating, about a catastrophe. Like a typhoon, it sweeps away the small constraints of daily existence. It opens up the landscape to bold moves and rearrangements that would be unthinkable in normal times.” The open secret between the Kobayashi and Asaki households takes on new significance as the emotional ties among the women are tested. These sections are both subtle and deeply insightful, with none of the blunt force teenage viewpoint that Sarah provides. Instead, the story acquires a delightful delicacy despite the emotions raging underneath. The most poignant moment in the novel occurs when these shifting “rearrangements” become irreversible, and a grief hidden for decades is finally acknowledged, not in group hugs or tears or overt displays of emotion, but in small gestures that have significance. This leave-taking of an outsider’s view gives The Favorites its power.

The most memorable characters are not Sarah or Yoko or even the matriarchs of the households but rather the un-favorites: stoic Momoko Nishimura and the flaky, fanatical Tama Izumi. Because they act so differently from everyone else and are denied entry, either by choice or not, to the inner circle, they provide an interesting counterpoint to the matriarchs. Mrs. Kobayashi, Sarah’s grandmother, is the most complex of the women since the burden of the past and the developments that ensue weigh most heavily on her. Sarah is less likeable, particularly when she turns out to be a somewhat bratty, self-involved adult whose knowledge of her native culture and the Japanese side of her family is not much more evolved than it was when she was fifteen. She is more concerned with her place in the family than with the family members themselves.

Ms. Waters is an excellent writer, and her accessible prose and characterizations carry this story forward with ease. Although it reads more like an extended short story than a complex novel, the way it comes together in the end, by bringing together the two characters who need each other most, offers the full satisfaction of a story well-told.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (June 2, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Debbie Lee Wesselmann
AMAZON PAGE:	The Favorites
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mary Yukari Waters
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Half-Half stories: Country of Origin by Don Lee Exit A by Anthony Swofford The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vasanji More set in Japan: Embracing Family by Nobuo Kojima Out by Natsuo Kirino Tokyo Fiancee by Amelie Nothromb

Bibliography:

• The Laws of Evening Stories (December 2002)
• The Favorites (June 2009)