Asian fiction (3)
Discover the best Asian fiction books with our curated list of top-rated novels. Explore captivating stories from Japan, China, Korea, and more—perfect for fans of Asian literature and culture.
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A Dictionary of Maqiao
by Han Shaogong
From the daring imagination of one of China’s greatest living novelists comes a work of startling power and originality–the story of a young man “displaced” to a small village in rural China during the 1960s. Told in the format of a dictionary, with a series of vignettes disguised as entries, A Dictionary of Maqiao is a novel of bold invention–and a fascinating, comic, deeply moving journey through the dark heart of the Cultural Revolution. Entries trace the wisdom and absurdities of Maqiao: the petty squabbles, family grudges, poverty, infidelities, fantasies, lunatics, bullies, superstitions, and especially the odd logic in their use of language–where the word for “beginning” is the same as the word for “end”; “little big brother” means older sister; to be “scientific” means to be lazy; and “streetsickness” is a disease afflicting villagers visiting urban areas. Filled with colorful characters–from a weeping ox to a man so poisonous that snakes die when they bite him–A Dictionary of Maqiao is both an important work of Chinese literature and a probing inquiry into the extraordinary power of language.
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Empress
by Shan Sa
Empress Wu, China's only female emperor, rises from a humble clan and position of concubine to brave the intrigues, betrayal, and violence of the court to become the first Empress of China during the great Tang dynasty in seventh-century China.
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Three Generations
by Yom Sang-Seop
Touted as one of Korea’s most important works of fiction, Three Generations (published in 1931 as a serial in Chosun Ilbo) charts the tensions in the Jo family in 1930s Japanese occupied Seoul. Yom’s keenly observant eye reveals family tensions withprofound insight. Delving deeply into each character’s history and beliefs, he illuminates the diverse pressures and impulses driving each. This Korean classic, often compared to Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, reveals the country’s situation under Japanese rule, the traditional Korean familial structure, and the battle between the modern and the traditional. The long-awaited publication of this masterpiece is a vital addition to Korean literature in English.
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The Glass Palace
by Amitav Ghosh
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND LOS ANGELES TIMES “A rich, layered epic that probes the meaning of identity and homeland— a literary territory that is as resonant now, in our globalized culture, as it was when the sun never set on the British Empire.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her. The struggles that have made Burma, India, and Malaya the places they are today are illuminated in this wonderful novel by the writer Chitra Divakaruni calls “a master storyteller.” Praise for The Glass Palace “An absorbing story of a world in transition, brought to life through characters who love and suffer with equal intensity.”—J. M. Coetzee “There is no denying Ghosh’s command of culture and history. . . . [He] proves a writer of supreme skill and intelligence.”—The Atlantic Monthly “I will never forget the young and old Rajkumar, Dolly, the Princesses, the forests of teak, the wealth that made families and wars. A wonderful novel. An incredible story.”—Grace Paley “A novelist of dazzling ingenuity.”—San Francisco Chronicle
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Fragrant Harbor
by John Lanchester
It is 1935, and Tom Stewart, a young Englishman with a longing for adventure, buys himself a cheap ticket aboard the SS Darjeeling-en route to the complex and corrupt world of Hong Kong. A shipboard wager leads to an unlikely friendship that spans seven decades as Hong Kong endures the savagery of the Japanese occupation, emerging as a crossroads of international finance and the nexus of a world of warlords, drug runners, and Chinese triads.
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Masks
by Fumiko Enchi
A stunning and understated debut novel of seduction and infidelity about a woman who, devastated by the death of her son, takes an increasing interest in the personal affairs of her widowed daughter-in-law. Following the devastating death of her son, Mieko Toganō takes an increasing interest in the personal affairs of her widowed daughter-in-law, Yasuko. She skillfully manipulates the relationships between Yasuko and the two men who are in love with her, encouraging a dalliance that will have terrible consequences. Meanwhile, hidden in the shadows, is Mieko’s mentally-handicapped daughter, who has her own role to play in her mother’s bizarre schemes.
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Memoirs of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden
A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup, and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money that goes with it. In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction—at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful—and completely unforgettable.
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Inheritance: A Novel
by Lan Samantha Chang
In 1931 China, two young sisters, abandoned after their mother's suicide, promise never to leave each other. Set against the backdrop of political chaos and social upheaval, the story traces the echo of betrayal through generations and explores the elusive nature of trust.
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The Harmony Silk Factory
by Tash Aw
Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, and Anthony Burgess have shaped our perceptions of Malaysia. In Tash Aw, we now have an authentic Malaysian voice that remaps this literary landscape. The Harmony Silk Factory traces the story of textile merchant Johnny Lim, a Chinese peasant living in British Malaya in the first half of the twentieth century. Johnny's factory is the most impressive structure in the region, and to the inhabitants of the Kinta Valley Johnny is a hero—a Communist who fought the Japanese when they invaded, ready to sacrifice his life for the welfare of his people. But to his son, Jasper, Johnny is a crook and a collaborator who betrayed the very people he pretended to serve, and the Harmony Silk Factory is merely a front for his father's illegal businesses. This debut novel from Tash Aw gives us an exquisitely written look into another culture at a moment of crisis. The Harmony Silk Factory won the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award and also made it to the 2005 Man Booker longlist.
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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
by Dai Sijie
New York Times Bestseller Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is an enchanting tale that captures the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening. An immediate international bestseller, it tells the story of two hapless city boys exiled to a remote mountain village for re-education during China’s infamous Cultural Revolution. There the two friends meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, the two friends find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.
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Still Life With Rice
by Helie Lee
In this radiant memoir of her grandmother's life, Lee recreates a culture that is both seductively exotic and strangely familiar. Lee's desire to recover the family's history, as well as to understand the intricate weave of her own identity, results in the exploration of universal issues such as the complex nature of family relations and the rapidly changing lives of women in this century. of photos.
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Comfort Woman
by Nora Okja Keller
Possessing a wisdom and maturity rarely found in a first novelist, Korean-American writer Nora Okja Keller tells a heartwrenching and enthralling tale in this, her literary debut. Comfort Woman is the story of Akiko, a Korean refugee of World War II, and Beccah, her daughter by an American missionary. The two women are living on the edge of society—and sanity—in Honolulu, plagued by Akiko's periodic encounters with the spirits of the dead, and by Beccah's struggles to reclaim her mother from her past. Slowly and painfully Akiko reveals her tragic story and the horrifying years she was forced to serve as a "comfort woman" to Japanese soldiers. As Beccah uncovers these truths, she discovers her own strength and the secret of the powers she herself possessed—the precious gifts her mother has given her. A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller In 1995, Nora Okja Keller received the Pushcart Prize for "Mother Tongue", a piece that is part of Comfort Woman.
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The Bonesetter's Daughter
by Amy Tan
““As compelling as Tan’s first bestseller, The Joy Luck Club. . . No one writes about mothers and daughters with more empathy than Amy Tan.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer “[An] absorbing tale of the mother-daughter bond . . . this book sing[s] with emotion and insight.” –People Ruth Young and her widowed mother, LuLing, have always had a tumultuous relationship. Now, before she succumbs to forgetfulness, LuLing gives Ruth some of her writings, which reveal a side of LuLing that Ruth has never known. . . . In a remote mountain village where ghosts and tradition rule, LuLing grows up in the care of her mute Precious Auntie as the family endures a curse laid upon a relative known as the bonesetter. When headstrong LuLing rejects the marriage proposal of the coffinmaker, a shocking series of events are set in motion–all of which lead back to Ruth and LuLing in modern San Francisco. The truth that Ruth learns from her mother’s past will forever change her perception of family, love, and forgiveness. “A strong novel, filled with idiosyncratic, sympathetic characters; haunting images; historical complexity; significant contemporary themes; and suspenseful mystery.” –Los Angeles Times “For Tan, the true keeper of memory is language, and so the novel is layered with stories that have been written down–by mothers for their daughters, passing along secrets that cannot be said out loud but must not be forgotten.” –The New York Times Book Review “Tan at her best . . . rich and hauntingly forlorn . . . The writing is so exacting and unique in its detail.” –San Francisco Chronicle
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The Floating World
by Cynthia Gralla
Liza, a young American student in Japan, meets a group of neophyte geisha who practice a dark and violent art that draws Liza into a dangerous underworld that could claim her, body and soul.
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Breaking the Tongue
by Vyvyane Loh
"Dramatic....One of the most ambitious and accomplished debut novels in recent memory."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review.
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Snow Country
by Yasunari Kawabata
This masterpiece from the Nobel Prize-winning author and acclaimed writer of Thousand Cranes is a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan. • “Kawabata’s novels are among the most affecting and original works of our time.” —The New York Times Book Review At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages—a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.
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Plum Wine
by Angela Davis-Gardner
Bottles of homemade plum wine link two worlds, two eras, and two lives through the eyes of Barbara Jefferson, a young American teaching at a Tokyo university. When her surrogate mother, Michi, dies, Barbara inherits an extraordinary gift: a tansu chest filled with bottles of homemade plum wine wrapped in sheets of rice paper covered in elegant calligraphy—one bottle for each of the last twenty years of Michi’s life. Why did Michi leave her memoirs to Barbara, who cannot read Japanese? Seeking a translator, Barbara turns to an enigmatic pottery artist named Seiji, who will offer her a companionship as tender as it is forbidden. But as the two lovers unravel the mysteries of Michi’s life, a story that draws them through the aftermath of World War II and the hidden world of the hibakusha, Hiroshima survivors, Barbara begins to suspect that Seiji may be hiding the truth about Michi’s past—and a heartbreaking secret of his own.
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Middle Heart
by Bette Bao Lord Enterprises, Inc.
"TRULY MOVING . . . BETTE BAO LORD IS AT HER STRONGEST." --The Boston Globe In 1932, as China shamefully kowtows under Japanese occupation, three unlikely companions are fatefully bound by their steadfast patriotism: Steel Hope, heir to a once-great aristocracy; Mountain Pine, his crippled, scholarly servant; and Firecrackers, a poor gravekeeper's daughter. In a youthful pact, they call themselves "Brothers of the Middle Heart," vowing to defend their country to the end. Yet as war and, later, the Communist Revolution ignite, cruel circumstances separate them. One becomes a political leader, one a writer, one an actress. But despite incessant historical upheaval, their lives continue to intertwine in poignant, often tragic, ways. Enmeshed in a love triangle, they will live to see their loyalty to one another tested again and again. Through these three richly drawn characters, Bette Bao Lord re-creates the stirring drama of twentieth-century China. In vivid, haunting prose she evokes the outrages that marred fifty years of the Chinese people's existence--and illuminates the remarkable resilience that defines them to this day.
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Blue Poppies
by Jonathan Falla
Journeying to a remote Tibetan village to help construct a radio post, Jamie Wilson, a former WWII radio operator, falls in love with Puton, a widow banished by her people, but their growing relationship is threatened by the coming of Chinese forces, in a novel set against the backdrop of the 1950s Chinese invasion of Tibet. Reprint.
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Flashman and the Dragon
by George MacDonald Fraser
“Flashman strikes again… Wonderful… hilarious.”—USA Today Lusting after a clergyman’s wife, smuggling opium to Hong Kong, coupling with an Amazonian woman river pirate, groveling before a ruthless warlord, and becoming the sexual plaything of the most beautiful and evil woman in the world, Harry Flashman, the supreme antihero of the Victorian era, is ready to rise to the occasion to matter what depths of dishonor he must plumb. In this uninhibited and uproarious adventure, Flashman is once again at his irascible best.
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Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze
by Elizabeth Foreman Lewis
In the 1920's a Chinese youth from the country comes to Chungking with his mother where the bustling city offers adventure and his apprenticeship to a coppersmith brings good fortune.
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The Teahouse Fire
by Ellis Avery
This sweeping debut novel drawn from a history shrouded in secrets follows two women--one American, one Japanese--whose fates become entwined in the rapidly changing world of late-19th-century Japan.
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The Snow Fox
by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
A great samurai and a beautiful poet fall in love in this novel of medieval Japan that examines a renewed love that's fraught by the Japanese concept of "mono no aware"--life's ephemeral nature--that weighs on the lovers.