Many Cats Manor

 

The Garden of Evening Mists, by Tan Twan Eng. Weinstein Books, 2012

 

Supreme Court judge Teoh Yun Ling was the sole survivor of a Japanese prisoner of war camp; everyone else, including her sister, was abused and raped and then killed, bodies put in a mass grave. After becoming a lawyer and then judge, she prosecuted the Japanese soldiers that could still be found in Kuala Lumpur. Now she is retiring, because of a creeping case of dementia and aphasia. Her story covers the time before the war, when she and her sister visited Japan and saw the gardens her sister fell in love with, but mostly settles after the war, when Yun Ling decides to have a Japanese garden created in memory of her sister. At the urging of Magnus Pratorius, a South African expat tea farmer, she meets Nakamura Aritomo, who was once Emperor Hirohito’s head gardener until he exiled himself. He refuses to take the commission, but says he will take Yun Ling on as an apprentice and she can learn through doing how to create a garden herself. Surprisingly, given her hatred for the Japanese, she accepts. She is to help develop Yugiri, the garden of the evening mists, the still point within a country roiling with guerilla violence.

 

While there are some violent events, such as the guerilla rebellion that leaves many of the colonists dead, most of the story about small things. The learning of how to borrow scenery in a garden, the art of setting stone, learning archery. It is about Yun Ling and Aritomo’s developing relationship. Yun Ling’s narration is oddly flat; is this because of the aphasia? Does she have PTSD? The dialog is often stilted. The story moves very slowly; it’s very heavy on descriptions. It jumps around in time. Aritomo, the most important person in the story other than Yun Ling, never comes to life. It’s weird; the book was annoying in ways but also oddly compelling and very, very beautiful. I often thought “Will this story ever end?” but still could not even think about putting it down. Four stars.

White Chrysanthemum, by Mary Lynn Brecht. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2018

In 1943, sixteen year old Hana is happy with her life as a newly fledged haenyeo woman, free diving for abalone, urchins, oysters, and more in the waters of Jeju, a small island off by what is now South Korea. All her life, Korea has been under Japanese occupation. Her people are required to speak Japanese and obey the Japanese soldiers. It’s a hard life, but her family is happy.

Then one day as she is swimming in to the shore, she sees a Japanese soldier making his way down the beach, where her little sister sits, watching their catch, hidden by some large rocks. It’s only a matter of minutes before he discovers Emi, and young girls are frequently taken by the soldiers, taken to be ‘comfort women’ in military run brothels. Hana runs to the beach, allowing herself to be taken instead. Thus begins her life in hell; life as a sex slave, raped over and over again by Japanese soldiers in a tiny room from which she’s rarely allowed out of.

The story alternates point of views between Hana as she strives to find a way to escape, and Emi, in 2011, who has never forgotten her sister and has never stopped looking for her. Her life, too, has been miserable; Korea’s constant state of occupation and war has not made life easy for anyone. Now she comes to Seoul, to see her grown children and to attend a Wednesday Demonstration- the weekly protest aimed at getting justice from Japan for the sex slave business they were in. She comes, hoping against hope to see her sister. Her children have no idea that their aunt was a sex slave; it shocks them when Emi finally tells them.

The story is, frankly, horrific. But while this volume is fiction, these things really happened to the people of Korea- and the other countries that were under Japanese occupation during this period. The book is really hard to read, because of the subject matter and the verisimilitude of the scenes of sexual violence, but it’s so well written that I just couldn’t put it down. My heart ached for Hana, and for Emi, too. Excellent book, five stars, but could be very triggering for victims of sexual violence.

Inheritance From Mother, by Minae Mizumura. 2012; Other Press English translation 2016

The Katsura sisters have long had an embattled relationship with their mother. Noriko Katsura, is an egotistical and selfish woman with a taste for the finer things in life, and little, if any, feelings for people. The sisters dream of the day when their mother will finally die, and her demands on them will stop.

This sounds horrible, especially in a society where children are expected to love, revere, and care selflessly for their parents. But for Mitsuki, the daughter on whom the majority of the burden falls on, it’s a chance to finally live her own life. As a child, she was neglected in favor of Natsuki, her more beautiful and talented sister. As an adult, her life is pretty much run by her husband, a fellow college instructor who wants a luxury condo- and is having (another) affair with a younger woman. What would Mitsuki do if she could make decisions without having to consider either of these people?

The first half of the book revolves around Noriko’s final hospitalization and death, and fills us in on the history of the Katsura family. The second half is what Mitsuki does after her mother’s death as she figures out what she really wants out of life. It’s fascinating reading the history of her family and how it was shaped by Japanese culture, as that culture itself changes through modernization and influences from the West. While told in third person, Mitsuki is the main focus of the tale. Mother/daughter relationships, marriage, aging, and sister relationships are all treated here with sensitivity and depth.

Bitter Winds: Book 3 in the Tales of the Scavenger’s Daughters, by Kay Bratt. Lake Union Publishing, 2014

I wasn’t aware that “Bitter Winds” was the third in a series when I ordered it; it works as a standalone novel but I think would have made more sense if it had been read in order. The cast of characters is large, and I spent a good bit of time thinking “Now, who is this person again?!?” But the story concentrates mainly on four characters: Lily & Ivy, twin teenagers, Lily being a blind violinist and Ivy her guide through life; Li Jin, who runs the shelter they all live in and acts as chef; and Sami, Li Jin’s friend from a previous book, who has led a thoroughly horrible life up to this point.

Lily wants to make some money by playing her violin in public (which is classed as begging by the Chinese government). When the police make a sweep to remove all the beggars from a festival, Lily gets separated from her sister Ivy. By happenstance she is found holding a leaflet for the forbidden Falun Gong sect, which means imprisonment in a mental hospital and possibly a stay in a ‘reeducation camp’, which carry a huge fine, instead of immediate release with a small fine. Meanwhile, Sami gives birth. She’s far from a natural mother, and wants nothing to do with the child. She also does nothing to help around the shelter, which is a communal situation. Li Jin is overworked, spending a lot of time trying to come up with the money to get Lily released. It’s a tense time for them all, with Lily and Ivy in some very scary situations. The ending is a surprise; we are led to think one thing will happen and it’s the opposite. It’s a bit of a deus ex machina, and I wished the details had been spelled out, but it works.

Li Jin is almost too good to be real, although without having read the first two books I could be missing a lot. Sami actually turns out to be the most interesting person in the end. Lily and Ivy are fairly well fleshed out, but no one is really developed all that well. Once again, I could be missing a lot because of this being the first of the books I’ve read. I’m not totally sure if I’ll seek out the others; it was a nice read but not really gripping.

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. Grand Central Publishing, 2017

Pachinko is a great big sprawling family saga set in Korea and Japan and spanning 70 years. Sunja is a teenaged girl living with her mother, who runs a boarding house in a fishing village in Korea. All Sunja knows is work, but she does not dislike this. It’s what her mother does, too. Then she meets a fish broker, a suave older man who seduces her, impregnates her, and then informs her he’s married. He says he’ll support her, but she wants nothing more to do with him. Her face is saved when a missionary staying at the boarding house says he will marry her and raise the child as his own. They move to Japan, where Koreans are looked down on. Thence starts a new round of endless working, something all the characters will know for all their lives, whether it’s physical toil or mental.

The tale follows Sunja and her family for four generations. I found the first half, which dealt mainly with Sunja and her sister-in-law who became her best friend, more engrossing than the latter half that was about her descendants. That section was interesting, but the stark contrast between Sunja, her mother, and sister-in-law and their husbands, and the younger generations was jolting. I just found the women more interesting than the men. They are so strong, mentally and physically. But their lives are very circumscribed compared to the men. The men are city people; the women rural in outlook even when living in the city.

As Koreans in Japan, they are considered visitors even when they were born there. There were jobs they could never have; it was illegal to rent to them. When a boy turns fourteen, he has to register, be fingerprinted and interviewed, and he has to ask for permission to remain in Japan, even though he was born there and has never been to Korea. This process will be repeated every three years. And this was in the 1970s, not the 1870s. Getting Japanese citizenship was extremely difficult. But Sunja’s family does get ahead, attaining a comfortable living.

This novel is both an absorbing tale of family dynamics and a fascinating look at another culture and time. It’s a big book, but I read it quickly, unable to put it down. The characters are so well developed that I really cared about them, especially Sunja and her sister-in-law. Sometimes I wanted to strangle one or another of the characters, because they are just totally realized humans. Excellent book.

China Dolls, by Lisa See. Random House, 2014

Meeting in 1938 at an audition for places in a chorus line at San Francisco’s soon to open Forbidden City nightclub owned by Charlie Low (the nightclub and Low were real), Grace, Helen, and Ruby quickly become fast friends. American’s of Asian parentage, opportunities are few for them in that era. Orientals weren’t hired as singers or dancers in Caucasian establishments; in a lot of states, intermarriage between Orientals and Occidentals (the old term used for whites that See uses throughout the book) was forbidden.

Grace is 17 and has run away from her violent father in the mid-West; she has never met another Chinese person other than her parents until she hits San Francisco. Helen has a well to do father who runs the family compound with an iron fist; her brother escorts her to and from work to ensure her virtue. Ruby’s parent’s live in Hawaii; she lives with her aunt and uncle and is a wild child compared to the other two; when she doesn’t make the cut at the nightclub, she joins a revue at the Exposition that has the girls virtually nude. Despite their differences in personality and origin and blow ups that left them not speaking for years at times, their relationship continues for 50 years. All three have secrets, and those secrets are frequently the source of their problems.

This was the most gripping book I’ve read in some time; it sucked me right in and didn’t let go until I’d finished it, which I did in one day. It’s women’s literature, it’s Asian-American literature, it’s historical fiction. See has, as always, put a huge amount of research into her book. Some of the Chinese-American entertainers from the era are still alive and See was able to interview them and get first hand information about what it was like: the prejudice; the cringe-worthy, self deprecating acts that made the Occidentals laugh; the Japanese-Americans were all treated as traitors after Pearl Harbor. I love this book.