​The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan is about a Malay family living both before and during the Japanese occupation. Two storylines parallel each other, the first in which the mother, Cecily, helps an undercover Japanese officer, Fujiwara, thwart Britain’s stronghold on the country. Cecily provides information to Fujiwara from her husband who works closely with the municipal government. They learn there is a plan to build a port, so Cecily and Fujiwara concoct a scheme to gather as much information as they can on when/where it will be built. Eventually, the constructed port goes up in flames and Fujiwara evades detection by leaving. Along with their schemes, Cecily and Fujiwara begin to have an intimate relationship. Fujiwara then returns with a woman, Lina, who once lived in Bintang, but left because her first husband had been accused and killed for starting the fire. Lina and Fujiwara return, where Fujiwara continues to gather information, while having an affair with Cecily. Both Lina and Cecily become pregnant, and both have girls. However, Fujiwara leaves right before Lina gives birth. Lina waits for Fujiwara to return before giving birth, which starves the child of oxygen, and the midwife has to pull the baby out, scarring her head forever. Lina then dies as Cecily helps her create names for their children.
 
Years later once the Japanese occupy Malay, they take Cecily’s son, Abel, and force him to work at a camp building a railroad for transport. At the camp, Abel is beaten, raped, and thrown into a chicken coop where he becomes an alcoholic. Abel is then forced to kill the person who took him from his home. He meets a slightly younger boy, Freddie, who likes to draw and who helps Abel in his drunken stupor. As the war begins to wane, Freddie leads the rest of the boys in creating an exit plan while Abel is barely able to stay alive. Once Japan surrenders, Britain bombs the camp they stay at, killing Freddie in the process. Finally, Abel returns with Freddie’s drawing to a home that has seen so much loss.
 
In the time of Abel’s disappearance, the two remaining children, Jasmin and Jujube, try to survive under the occupation. Jujube works at a teahouse serving Japanese soldiers where she meets Takahashi, a school teacher, who is not violent like the rest of the men. They begin to have a friendship, though it’s strained when Takahashi discusses his daughter back in Japan. Cecily, knowing that young girls are taken by soldiers to be workers at a brothel, disguises Jasmin as a boy, cuts her hair short, and hides her in the basement when soldiers come by. One day, another girl, Yuki, finds Jasmin in the basement where they begin to have a friendship. Jasmin then leaves the basement with Yuki where they go to the brothel where Yuki is held. After returning, Jujube finds out Jasmin has been leaving the basement where she becomes furious and that causes Jasmin to run away. Jasmin goes to a storeowner to get Yuki’s blood off her pajamas where she meets Fujiwara. Fujiwara takes her into a mansion where she stays most of the day and at night returns to the brothel to meet with Yuki. Jasmin convinces Yuki to join her at Fujiwara’s mansion where they get discovered by Cecily who was looking for her daughter. Fujiwara returns to the house as well where it is revealed that Yuki is his daughter he had with Lina and they fight about what is to happen to the girls. As the adults talk, Jasmin and Yuki run away to the brothel, but once it’s set on fire they hunker down in a wheelbarrow where they are burned alive. Fujiwara, Cecily, and Jujube run to the fire and search for the daughters, but soon realize they have been burned up. In the end, once Abel returns, they watch as Fujiwara surrenders. Finally, the family receives a letter from Takahashi with flowers drawn in calendar dates and they hang it next to the drawings and the tin with bones the family believes are Yuki and Jasmin.
 
This novel is deeply tragic, devastating, and powerful in the way it renders the occupation, the violence, and the relationships of the characters. It confronts questions of colonialism, and shows that any occupation completely devastates a people. The novel also weaves the past and the present seamlessly through Cecily and her children’s eyes. I am completely floored at the depth and breadth of which these characters are explored and how they confront oppression in all of its forms. While reading, I was reminded of the novel Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim which also confronts Japanese occupation and violence, though in Korea. I am utterly astounded at both how Chan wrangles the subject matter and how she explores how the characters navigate devastation.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Blackouts by Justin Torres is a novel about a young man returning to the bedside of an older gay gentleman who is dying. It’s a story framed within the context of both a conversation as well as archival images and text that is blacked out. The discussions of the men range from the author and researcher, Jan Gay, and her work in the book Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns all the way to their own lives, their sexual encounters, and loves they experienced. In the end, the old man, Juan, begins to forget everything, and then dies in the young man’s arms one night.
 
What Torres does absolutely well here is the blurring of fiction and non-fiction—of lies and truth. Jan, the book, the studies, and some of the characters are firmly from history. However, Torres plays with us when the speaker discusses Juan and if he ever met/talked with him. Though, I don’t feel that whether Juan existed or not is what’s important, rather it was the connection the speaker and Juan had and their conversations which provided an outlet for them to digest their lives. I also found some of the novel’s framing to be interesting, particularly when they start describing their lives and memories as movie scenes. The novel feels as though we are peeking into such private moments, and I appreciate the vulnerability and humor of the characters.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburō Ōe follows the lives of fifteen reformatory boys as they are transported to a village to bury animals and then abandoned. They arrive at the moment where a soldier has defected and the remaining soldiers are sent out to look for him. The soldiers aren’t able to find the defector, but a larger more pressing matter occurs when a woman and loads of animals show up dead with bloated stomachs. The villagers see this as a plague that they must escape, so one night when the boys are left in an unlocked shack, the villagers leave. The next day, the boys find the village empty and learn that the exit out of the village is blocked off by a guard, so they are stuck there. While in the village, the boys gather food from the houses and try to survive in the cold winter. They go ice skating in the center square, they kill birds and have a feast, and the main character meets and then has sex with a girl that was also abandoned. The defected soldier is shown to them by one of the village boys, Li, who had stayed behind. The main character’s brother then finds and adopts a dog, but when it bites the girl, she comes down with the plague and eventually dies with the defector caring for her. The boys believe the dog had the plague, which causes one of the boys, Minami, to kill it. Then the main character’s brother runs away and never be seen again. The next day, the villagers return to berate and throw the boys into a shack, while the men search and find the defector. The villagers stab the defector and then send him with the military police, while the rest of the boys are beaten into submission and told to never mention the plague or their abandonment. The main character retaliates, which causes the villagers to send him away where they try to kill him. The novel ends with the main character on the ground in the forest ready to take on the villagers searching for him.
 
Ōe never seems to disappoint, and even with such a heavy and depressing book, there are beautiful moments and relationships that blossom. I was also intrigued with the way Ōe approaches the characters’ sexualities. One of the main characters, Minami, is shown as explicitly gay, discussing having sex with soldiers, doing his “morning make-up” which involves his butt, and his blunt lewd comments. There are other moments of sexual ambiguity among the boys watching their erections in a group together and displaying their penises to villagers. And it also occurs when the main character and the defector “…tasted a small miserable pleasure in each other. Silently we bared our poor goose-pimpled buttocks, losing ourselves in the motion of cunning fingers.” The main character’s sexuality is even more ambiguous when it’s shown he also thinks about and has sex with the girl. This openness to sexuality, particularly in the fifties when this was published in Japan, does seem quite out of the ordinary, but not an outlier (as one only has to look at Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask). It’s a dark book that gets worse as it goes, in displaying the villager’s brutality and the way life affects each character. However, it’s one that will stick with me.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​The Company of Strangers by Jen Michalski is a collection of short stories about frayed relationships, queerness, and the ways in which love inhibit and enhance life. I particularly enjoyed ‘The Loneliest Creature on Earth’, ‘The Long Haul’, ‘The Company of Strangers’, ‘The Goodbye Party’, and Scheherazade’. I loved the way ‘Goodbye Party’ provides an outlet for Sam’s grief through the dogs that will be put down and how he contemplates how his wife’s passing will affect his son.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​The Pearl and The Red Pony by John Steinbeck are two novellas focusing on the lives of people in California. The Pearl is about an indigenous couple whose child is stung by a scorpion, so they request the aid of a doctor. However, the doctor only treats patients who can pay, and the family, Kino and Juana, are poor. To see if they can find money to pay, they go out into the bay and dive for pearls where Kino discovers one the size of an egg. From then on, people of their village and the town try to steal the pearl or kill them. The doctor returns to help the sick baby, but is really out to get the pearl. Kino first tries to sell it to the pearl buyers in the town, but they give him a terribly low price, so he decides to go to a city in the north to sell it. Before they go, their home is burned down, and they must evade trackers until they reach a cliff. Kino understands they will soon find him and Juana, so Kino decides to kill the trackers at night. Kino crawls down from the cliff, and attacks the men, but a rifle goes off in the direction of the cliff. Once Kino kills the three trackers, he returns to Juana and their hidden child, but find that the child has been shot in the head. Kino and Juana return to their village where they lost their home, boat, and now child. They arrive to the shore and, knowing that the pearl has only brought with it evil, throw it back into the water.
 
The Red Pony is about a boy, Jody, who lives with his family on a ranch. One day, his father gets him a pony for him to take care of. However, when it rains, the pony comes down with an illness it can never recover from. All the while, the ranch hand, Billy, reassures Jody the pony will survive. Following this, an old man arrives to their ranch claiming he lived there before and plans to stay there. Jody’s father, Carl, is reluctant to house the man and tells him he can only stay the night. The next morning, one of their oldest horses is gone with the man. After seeing how well Jody treated the pony in its illness, Carl decides to breed one of their horses and give the colt to Jody to care for. Jody takes a female horse to another ranch where it’s breed, and Jody impatiently waits for the colt to be born. One morning, Billy wakes up Jody telling him the horse is about to give birth. Though, as Billy is prepping, he realizes the colt is turned the wrong way around, and must kill the mother horse and cut open its belly to allow the colt to survive. Finally, later on at the ranch, Jody’s mother gets a letter saying their grandfather plans to arrive. Jody is excited while Carl dislikes the grandfather’s stories because he’s told them many times before. Thus, Carl believes the old man is living in the past. In the end, the grandfather explains that the stories weren’t exactly what he wanted to convey, but rather the feeling of being a leader of a strong team.
 
These two stories were striking in the way they rendered setting, dialogue, and people with precision. I was drawn into the tragedies of both stories, and liked the way The Pearl zoomed out in time in the end to frame the story as a legend. The Red Pony also does something interesting in that each section felt like its own small story, and I wasn’t sure if some of the characters/ideas would come back. What happened to the old man who stole the horse and rode into the ridge above the ranch? Does the colt survive after its birth, and why doesn’t it pop up later on? There are a lot of things left unresolved, but I felt that it worked. I really enjoyed this read although both stories described loss after loss without much reprieve.
 
Final Rating: 4/5