A Reader, Revived

Rambling through time, book by book.

Hello again. Some of you may be totally blanking on who I am or how you got here. No worries. That same confusion sweeps over me, too, from time to time. I’m a fiction writer, Chinese-English translator, and editor in Tokyo. Appreciate your opting into receiving a little missive from me once in a while, but no hard feelings if you ever want to exit.

It’s taken me almost half a year to find the wherewithal to write. Well, that’s not true—I’ve been churning away at a new manuscript and busying myself with various professional commitments. What I mean is I haven’t had the compulsion to jot down my mental notes in Substack for some time (familiar story).

One wholesome and welcome side effect of becoming a more diligent writer in the past years is that I’ve necessarily revived my voracious appetite for reading. Not that I ever fully lost it, but there was a time—in my twenties, in New York City—when I read considerably less than I do now. Too busy living, let’s say, too scatterbrained.

I started keeping a private Google Doc as a reading log almost ten years ago. I have a Goodreads account, but never really got into participating in the ratings industrial complex (a topic for another time). In the years before the pandemic, I averaged around a dozen books a year. In 2021, that number soared to thirty. And then it has crept up consistently to reach just over fifty in 2024.

Included in this most recent figure are Japanese books and manga, a few volumes of poetry, and book-length translations of Taiwanese comics I was commissioned for. (What is translation if not the closest kind of reading?)

My road back to being an avid reader has coincided with living in Tokyo, where I’ve not only been inspired to improve my Japanese skills, but found myself joining a handful of book clubs. It all started when a friend introduced me to the Koen Book Club in summer 2022. My own trajectory has spiraled and splintered since then into several other book-based social venues. It’s really nice to be able to commune over an act as solitary as reading.

I wanted to write about a few of the memorable books that I’ve read so far this year. A few months ago, I devoured Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021) with a group of colleagues, and not only did the book enlighten me on Wittgenstein’s philosophies of language, but I was also thoroughly moved by her vignettes of living, learning, and growing as a person in Japan.

Barton is an award-winning translator of Japanese literature, including such titles as Asako Yuzuki’s Butter and Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. As a memoir, Fifty Sounds deftly moves between a range of emotional registers, from the comedic and playful to the sensual, provocative, and downright existential. Barton’s musings on language, culture, and otherness are so astute and self-aware. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone with a passing interest in modern Japan, translation, or language learning—or just a story about the unexpected attachments that shape our lives and sometimes set us on a whole new course.

In the realm of fiction, I finally finished reading Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams (Random House, 2023) in April. Park’s Matryoshka doll of an epic sprawls over 500+ pages, rife with the absurdities of fate, pseudonyms and alter egos, speculative histories and imagined otherworlds. I’m absolutely fixated on names when it comes to my own fiction, and delighted in finding plenty to resonate with in this book. And as a dilettante academic with broad interest in East Asian history, I enjoyed worming through some of the wildest incidents in transpacific geopolitics from the 19th and 20th centuries in Park’s book-within-a-book.

There’s a lot going on here, much of which requires a deliberate pace of consumption that feels very much at odds with the freneticism of contemporary living. In return, Same Bed Different Dreams will tickle your brain in all sorts of places and make you consider how individual and collective histories are braided into the everyday. Also, I can’t help but think that it would make a sick anime.

This year, I’m trying to read one Japanese book a month to elevate my vocab or whatnot, and have so far enjoyed lighter fare like 『魔女の宅急便』 by Eiko Kadono, the book that Kiki’s Delivery Service was adapted from, as well as the weird flash fiction of Haruki Murakami and Shigesato Itoi in 『夢で会いましょう』. The latter book takes the form of a dictionary, each story manifesting as an entry loosely related to a katakana loanword or phrase, from “asparagus” and “blue suede shoes” to “etiquette” and “city boy.”

Have also been plowing through genre fiction in translation—the likes of Keigo Higashino and Seishi Yokomizo, for research—and would welcome any recommendations of this nature. 😇

Read anything good lately?