When the tigers become rats
Jake Adelstein
With Yakuza: A 400-Year History of the Japanese Underworld, Andrew Rankin provides the clearest and best-sourced narrative history of the yakuza in English.
Category: Reviews
The Hong Kong story in fiction
Jennifer Eagleton
As authoritarian control makes it increasingly difficult to engage in ‘hard’ resistance and confront power directly, fiction can step in to tease out the things that might otherwise go unsaid.
On their own terms
Calla Lim
The lives and experiences of queer Singaporeans should not be ignored any further, and books like SQ21 – Families and Fearfully & Wonderfully Made place these stories front and centre.
Dancing in shackles
Martin Laflamme
Read together, three books on China take us through short-lived periods of openness, political shifts, and reminders that present realities may not last forever.
Survival requires small fictions
Shumin Tan
Adorable by Wan Phing Lim makes attempts to make sense of things visible: coping mechanisms appear not as background habits but as part of the very fabric of social reality.
Messy realities
Ja Ian Chong
Works like Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia highlight how prone people everywhere can be to excess, even violence, as they pursue competing political visions and ambitions.
No one owes you a living
Kirsten Han
Singapore proudly declares itself a “pro-family” nation. But in Unease: Life in Singapore Families, Teo You Yenn uncovers a sense of unease among Singaporean parents from all walks of life.
The way of the sword
Simon Rowe
The three volumes of Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi: The Novel contain a rollicking yarn with a cast of colourful characters that swirls about its nucleus, Musashi, with curious and often calamitous results.
Power, concentrated
Theodore Pham
The General: Vietnam in the Age of Tô Lâm shows that not even foreigners or non-Vietnamese speakers have immunity from the iron fist Tô Lâm, the Communist Party of Vietnam’s general secretary.
Philippines: the dramedy
Sol Iglesias
Beyond Geopolitics: The Philippines in the New Marcos Era is a good guide to the first half of the Marcos Jr administration, and much of what is written on corruption, political dynasties, elite competition, and debilitated institutions helps to explain present circumstances.
Remembering is a political act
Atika Shubert
In contexts where public narratives are written and rewritten according to the whims of those in power, and selective amnesia is imposed upon the population, remembering becomes a political act.
Sense and nonsense
Dương Mạnh Hùng
In Nguyễn Bình Phương’s 1994 novel, The Young Die Old, magical realism thus functions as a mirror for a society in anguish
What is Asia?
Isaac Neo
Is the twenty-first century an Asian one? According to former Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan, this is entirely the wrong question to be asking.
Of mothers and memoirs
Sanjita Majumder
Mother Mary Comes To Me is Arundhati Roy’s most astute political act; in it, she fearlessly makes her most intimate confessions and, by doing so, reclaims the conditions under which she can be known.
Was Tojo Hideki the main villain?
Sayaka Chatani
Is Tojo Hideki a “Great Man” who single-handedly determined the course of history, or is he merely a character in a bigger story, a reflection of many crashing political and social forces?
Writing back
Bhuchung D. Sonam
Packed with prose, poetry, stories, and reportage, Ocean, as Much as Rain is essential reading for all Tibetans and for anyone who wants to understand what it means to live under colonial occupation.
Goodness worth waiting for
Max Loh
DELAY: A Comics Anthology is a timely salve in an era where artists are facing an existential battle against artificial intelligence and digitisation.
Keeping secrets
Michael D. Barr
The publication of The Albatross File: Inside Separation is very welcome for those with an interest in the Singapore story—though less for the hitherto secret documents it reproduces and more for the hitherto secret oral histories.
Flooding the streets
Lorence Lozano
Arnold Is A Model Student shines a light on an unfair system, challenging the notion of what it means to be a “model” within such broken structures.
Saving the pantun
Ken Kwek
Chan Eng Thai the man may steel himself against disappointment by adopting the pose of a fatalist, but Chan the poet wields his words with a vigour that stubbornly defies the fading of the light.
Moving beyond
Soobin Kim
By making Kintsugi, Lim Ji-soo found a way to tell her story of surviving sexual assault.
Power and conquest
Soham Gadre
Ferdinand Magellan was a famous explorer, but Diaz makes it clear that his film isn’t some graceful portrait of the man.
Trading words for bullets
Oliver Raw
There’s poignancy in the idea of artistic ambition sacrificed for something as fundamental as war. And Myanmar embroiled in civil war, it’s perhaps only natural that poets, like many of their countrymen, have taken up arms.
New springs
Kirsten Han
We don’t know how history will remember or talk about the Milk Tea Alliance. But it isn’t the only recent manifestation of transnational solidarity with the youth at its core.
“I am Chinese”
Frankie Huang
Tyrus Wong’s extraordinary 106 years on earth, told in meticulous detail by Karen Fang, is a story of resilience and triumph.
Small things
Paul French
With When Sleeping Women Wake, Emma Pei Yin takes her place in a long-running and constantly evolving tradition of Chinese female-centred historical fiction.
Pragmatic idealism
Isaac Neo
An idealistic and highly personal approach to foreign policy is what sets Tommy Koh apart from many of his fellow luminaries in Singapore’s diplomatic sphere.
Cybercrime unchained
Nick J. Freeman
Cybercrime is a big business, and some of its leading perpetrators are playing a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities in Southeast Asia.
Pol Pot’s guests
Colin Meyn
Meeting with Pol Pot adds to Rithy Panh’s resume as the most prolific maker of films about the regime that took his family and terrorised his country.
The ink that never dries
Alfian Sa’at
By writing poetry from death row, Pannir Selvam Pranthaman sets out to prove that he’s more than just a condemned prisoner.
Memories of disaster
Shu-Mei Huang
As discussions of a so-called nuclear power renaissance resurface, Return to Fukushima pushes us to (re)consider not only the ways we live but also the exploitative systems through which energy is produced and consumed.
Those who left on those who stayed
Will Nguyen
Claudia Krich’s Those Who Stayed: A Vietnam Diary is an invaluable primary source for those studying regime change, documenting firsthand the disintegration of the South Vietnamese government and the coalescence of a byzantine military administration in its wake.
Taiwan’s historical burden
Jacques van Wersch
The conceit of Chris Horton’s Ghost Nation is that most of the world treats Taiwan like it doesn’t exist, and he makes the case that Taiwan deserves bolder recognition.
After the Malaysian ‘gay novel’
Alicia Izharuddin
The exploration of a character’s sexuality in Tash Aw’s latest novel has triggered backlash among conservatives in Malaysia, but pushing back in today’s fraught times is itself a complex undertaking.
Silencing
Paul French
For English language readers outside China, these translations of The Running Flame and Soft Burial help to reframe Fang Fang as a writer of more than Wuhan Diary.
Lying flat in Qing China
Sebastien Smith
As an attempt to preserve what is gone, Shen Fu’s writing endures as a reminder to treasure what we still have and what we will someday mourn.
A party man
Martin Laflamme
Despite enduring humiliation, punishment, and incarceration, Xi Zhongxun’s loyalty to the Party—and even his “emotional attachment” to Mao Zedong—never wavered.
Reflections on a golden period
Kenneth Barrett
Stephen Simmons has produced an important record, with a wealth of historical information, that highlights the work of artists during the Sangkum era.
Clerical politics
Michel Chambon
With both humanist insight and historical precision, Paul P. Mariani shows how Bishop Louis Jin Luxian was, above all, a Jesuit of his time.
Resurrection
Tse Hao Guang
Waves Rising beautifully commemorates Ho Poh Fun’s life’s work, perhaps feeling like it needed to smoothen out some things bubbling just under the surface.