Sweden - Exterminate All the Brutes et al.

Country: Sweden
Book: "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (Utrota varenda jävel)
Author: Sven Lindqvist, Joan Tate (Translation)
Publication Year: 1992 (1997)
Genre: History/Travelogue

Country: Sweden
Book: Five Major Plays/The Red Room (Röda rummet)
Author: August Strindberg, Carl R. Mueller/ Peter Graves (Translators)
Publication Year: 2000/2010 (1879)
Genre: Drama/Fiction

Country: Sweden
Book: Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in)
Author: John Ajvide Lindqvist, Ebba Segerberg (translator)
Publication Year: 2007 (2004)
Genre: Horror

Strap in. The first half of this one is going to be a trip. Not a scenic one either.

I first heard of Sven Lindqvist when Raoul Peck adapted his book, "Exterminate All the Brutes", into a four part documentary series, broadcast on HBO in 2021. Both book and TV series chart the route from Western European colonialism in the golden age of exploration all the way to the horrors of the Holocaust.

Lindqvist’s book is framed partly as a travelogue with heavy asides into the colonialism of the 19^th and early 20^th century. As Lindqvist expounds upon his thesis, he treks through countries that skirt the Sahara desert, travelling from Algeria in the north to Niger in sub-Saharan Africa. His digressions take us from the hot house of the Congolese rain forest to the furnaces of Auschwitz.

The book takes its name from a quote in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It is the conclusion drawn by Kurtz in his report to the company on how to deal with Africa. It is, Lindqvist argues, a recommendation Kurtz did not need to make because extermination was the standard policy of European colonialism in Afirca as elsewhere. Both Lindqvist and Peck note that much is left unsaid by Conrad, because most of his contemporary audience would have been well aware of European colonial atrocities.

Sven Lindqvist

An estimated 10 million people were murdered in the Belgian Congo in the early part of the 20^th century. Many were decapitated. Some had their heads mounted on wall displays for Europeans to pose in front of for photos. Even those who weren’t killed were often mutilated, their hands being cut off and collected in baskets if they didn’t gather rubber quickly enough for the colonialists’ liking.

Atrocities committed elsewhere were perhaps less voluminous, but no less brutal. The Germans held what was almost a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust in Namibia, building concentration camps and herding thousands into the Namib desert. None returned and little more than  bones were ever found.

The British and the French committed their own atrocities in their expansive empires. As we saw when we looked at Kenya (see: Kenya), after the war, after the Holocaust, Britain went right back to its old tricks, killing an estimated 50,000 Kenyans during the Mau-Mau Uprising and burning records and denying it for decades, until the surviving records were found in a warehouse and reality couldn’t be denied any longer.

Sven Lindqvist thesis is that Hitler and the Nazis were not some aberration of history. Their actions were the culmination of everything Hitler saw and admired about the British Empire. He couldn’t go west due to the Royal Navy’s domination of the seas and so he expanded east. The idea of Lebensraum, or living space, was fully inspired by what Britain and others had done in South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Not to mention the colonisation of the Americas, which killed tens of millions of people from slaughter and disease. Although Lindqvist constrains himself largely to Africa, Raoul Peck expands his thesis to include the Americas, and the United States in particular, with his small screen adaptation.

This is not to downplay or delegitimise what took place in Germany and Eastern Europe in the 30s and 40s. These are obviously unique events in history. The problem comes when we try to ring fence the events of the Second World War and attempt to see them as isolated incidents. Yet they are not isolated. They are the natural consequence of colonialism, as well as the apotheosis of two and half thousand years of Eurasian anti-Semitism. The Holocaust did not happen in a vacuum. It is the sharp end of myriad expulsions and pogroms committed against the Jewish people since the time of the Babylonian exile.

The mantra of the post-Holocaust world is 'Never again' and yet we have allowed it to happen time and again in Cambodia (see: Cambodia) and Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The United States killed millions in each of Korea (see: South Korea), Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (see: Vietnam) and Iraq, as well as facilitating genocides in other countries, most notably East Timor, where Indonesia killed a third of the population (200,000 people), all funded and armed by the US.

We see the same death and wanton destruction in Gaza and Lebanon, seemingly without anybody being about to stop it, despite being the ones supplying the bombs and the bullets. We say never again because it seems so much more civilised than admitting the reality that our post-war economies are largely built on and underpinned by the arms industry. Yes. “Never again” sounds less psychotic than, “Please sir, can I have some more?”

Colonialism never really ended, it was just placed under new ownership. The European colonial empires faded after the Second World War, largely thanks to bankrupting themselves fighting the Nazis. The USA enriched itself by converting much of its defunct industry into weapons manufacture and saw no reason to stop just because there was no longer a war. Hence the Cold War. Hence the War on Terror. These are not nothing, of course, but they are vastly overstated to justify spending more than half of the federal budget subsidising the US arms industry.

There is a growing trend in right wing western politics of crying ‘they’re erasing our history’ while simultaneously denying the facts of colonial history. Or skipping over many of the salient facts of the Nazi rise to power, inspired by European colonialism and American eugencism against its black population. There are many excellent corollaries against this historic myopia.  Sven Lindqvist and Roland Peck are just two voices amongst the cacophony of writers and film makers seeking to correct the mainstream narrative. They are also an excellent point of entry into these issues. We have already met others in this project. We will meet many more.

By comparison, the work of August Strindberg is somewhat sedate. Indeed, having read one of his novels, The Red Room, as well as several of his plays, I am struggling to find much to say about him. It is the downfall of attempting to write about an author several months after reading them. Yet there is truthfully little to tell.

Compared to his Nordic counterpart, Nowegian, Henrik Ibsen, there is no comparison. Ibsen’s plays are trailblazing and full of controversy (by the standards of their day). They inspired the likes of James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw. Strindberg did inspire Tennessee Williams, John Osborne and Ingmar Bergman amongst others, but whatever impact he may once have had seems to have been diluted by the passage of time and the more liberal sensibilities of the modern day. I don’t think the same will ever be said about Ibsen, any more than they are said about Shakespeare.

Which isn’t to start some kind of international incident between Sweden and Norway (I should have that power). There is plenty that Sweden does better than pretty much anyone else (all its heavy metal for instance). Ibsen is simply a better playwright than Strindberg. That is objectively true.

The Red Room is an interesting novel and the one for which Strindberg made his name. In many ways, it is in the same vein as many of the novels we have encountered in this project: The cavalcade of characters and incidents that coalesce into the novel’s climactic scenes. It’s a satire on Stockholm society at the end of the nineteenth century that bears comparison to any number of European satirists from Swift to Graham Greene. It is often referred to as Sweden’s first modern novel.

This is where you can see the influence of Strindberg on the likes of Ingmar Bergman. Although they are in very different genres, The Seventh Seal (and, by extension, films like Wings of Desire) surely contains DNA from The Red Room. As do many of Berman’s films, of which I have seen maybe half a dozen.

You don’t have to be head over heels in love with an artist to appreciate their place in the pantheon of art. Elvis and Jane Austin, for instance, have always left me somewhat cold. And yet I can appreciate them as links in a chain to music and literature that I do like.

The same is true of Strindberg. He is not quite Dickens, but then Stockholm is not quite London. Which is no sleight. The quality of life in Sweden and its Nordic neighbours is better than Great Britain or much of the Western world.

The Red Room is based on Strindberg’s impoverished years as he tried to become a writer. Yet you feel that his avatar, Arvid Falk, is never so destitute as Oliver Twist or Little Nell or any number of Dickens’s characters. Which, again, is no sleight.

Maybe you just have to be Swedish to truly appreciate his work. And maybe it’s the Joycean in me that gravitates towards Ibsen and his pronounced influence on all of Joyce’s work. We like what we like and no one should have to make excuses for that (almost no one). So let’s leave Strindberg undisturbed where he is and move on to another Swedish author called Lindqvist.

August Strindberg

John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 novel, Let the Right One In, is our first foray into horror. Ostensibly a vampire novel, it traces a series of murders in Strindberg’s Stockholm a century after The Red Room in the grime of the 1980s. Yet Let the Right One In is also about school bullying, social ostracism and the loss of the nuclear family. Indeed, the elements of vampirism are relegated to the background for much of the novel. I have yet to watch the film adaptation, but one would imagine the horror is brought more to the fore when trying to distillate a five hundred page novel into a two hour film (cf. any adaptation of Dracula).

I don’t know how much influence the book had on the Duffer Brothers, but you can certainly find the same elements in Stranger Things as Let the Right One In. The 1980s setting. The young female outcast with supernatural powers (compare Stranger Things’ El with Let the Right One In’s Eli). Despite taking place in Stockholm, Lindqvist’s novel has the same small town ambience as the fictional Hawkins, Indiana. The same is true of Dark, which is essentially Germany’s answer to Stanger Things and, by extension, Germany’s answer to Let the Right One In.

Having read (and watched) a lot of vampire fiction lately for a different project. I always enjoy how new writers add to the lore. Octavia Butler’s vampire alien species that came to Earth millennia ago in Fledgling. Vampires as feral creatures in the Mexican borderlands of the 1840s in Isabel Cañas’s Vampires of El Norte. The revenants of Neil Jordan’s 2012 film Byzantium with their long thumbnails instead of fanged teeth. Each mix and match bits of vampire myth: leaning into some; discarding others.

Let the Right One In has its own take on these tropes. Are vampires made or are they born? Is Eli even really a vampire? The elements of trans identity that one doesn’t often find in vampire literature (though I am sure that has changed in the 20 years since Let the Right One In was published).

Though to circle back to Sven Lindqvist and Exterminate All the Brutes, we should never forget the origins of vampire literature are based on anti-Semitic propaganda around the blood libel and other hideous conspiracies. When we think of the trope of the vampire repelled by the crucifix, it is a barely concealed commentary on Judaism’s perceived rejection of Jesus Christ as the one true Messiah. It is possible to reclaim these cultural items from their racist origins. However, like our colonial past, we must never lose sight of their dark origins, especially when bad faith actors seek to cloak them in long shadows.

Sweden sits up there in the near Arctic doing its thing. Like Finland (see: Finland), it doesn’t need to proclaim itself a great global power to regard itself a successful nation. Like all of Scandinavia, it has a much higher quality of life than anywhere else on Earth. People pay a much higher rate of taxation of course, but that’s what it takes to build a society built on something other than platitudes and demonstrably false soundbites. Other countries should take note, but of course they never will. Which is why we find ourselves where we currently find ourselves.

It seems like half the bands I listen to, like Opeth, Ghost, Goat and The Hives (amongst others), hail from Sweden. I have a tongue in cheek theory that like Douglas Adams’s Shoe Event Horizon, there will come a Swedish Rock Horizon, when it will become physically impossible for any rock band to come from anywhere other than Sweden. It has some great authors too of national and international importance. We are not done with Sweden. Not by a long shot. But as always, there are other places to visit. 

John Ajvide Lindqvist

Uzbekistan - The Railway et al.

Country: Uzbekistan
Book: The Railway (Железная дорога)/The Underground (Мбобо)/ The Dead Lake (Вундеркинд Ержан)
Author: Hamid Ismailov
Publication Year: 2006 (1997)/2015(2009)/2014(2011)
Genre: Fiction/Historical fiction

Uzbekistan is somewhat of a curiosity. It is one of only two double landlocked countries in the world (i.e. you have to travel through two other countries to reach a body of water that opens out into one of the world’s oceans). However, the other country with this dubious distinction is Liechtenstein (see: Liechtenstein), which is a tiny country in the Alps. It’s like comparing Kansas City with Colorado.

If the wider world has heard of anywhere in Uzbekistan then it will undoubtedly be Samarkand. Samarkand was an important settlement along the Silk Road that connected Europe to China. It has been a centre of Islamic scholarship for centuries. As we noted when we looked at Turkey (see: Turkey), the Persian poet, Rumi, moved to Samarkand with his family when he was about 5.

Samarkand, along with much of modern day Uzbekistan, was once part of the Persian Empire and part of Iran until Russia expanded its borders into Central Asia during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The city and country at large remained a part of Russia right through the Soviet era. The three books we will consider in this piece all take place (for the most part) during that era.

Hamid Ismailov was born in Kyrgyzstan in 1954, but moved to Uzbekistan as a young man. He lived there throughout the Soviet regime, but was forced into exile in 1992 following the election of Islam Karimov as the first President of the newly independent country.

Karimov remained President for 25 years until his death in 2016. His reign was marked by corruption, censorship and torture and extrajudicial killing. Election results regularly exceeded 90% in Karimov’s favour. In 2002, his security forces were said to have executed two prisoners by boiling them alive. Despite this, the US occupied an air force base in the country for four years from 2001-2005 during their operations in Afghanistan.

 
Hamid Ismailov left Uzbekistan after he was accused of seeking to overthrow the government (“Unacceptable democratic tendencies” was the phrase they used). He settled in the UK, where he worked for the BBC World Service, becoming a Writer in Residence in 2010. He speaks and has written in numerous languages, including Uzbek, Russian, Turkish, French and German. For the most part his books are written in Uzbek and Russian and have been translated into English by other writers.

All of three books under consideration here have elements in common with one another. The central character in each is a child. All of them feature railways of one kind or another. However, each is set in a different country of the USSR. The Underground takes place exclusively in Moscow. The Dead Lake is principally set in Kazakhstan. Only The Railway features Uzbekistan, mostly the fictitious Silk Road town of Gilas. However, even here the book crosses oceans as part of its sprawling narrative.

Ismailov wrote The Railway when he still lived in Uzbekistan. It was published in Russian in 1997 with the English translation coming out in 2006. Despite having written an Uzbek version, Ismailov’s novel, like all of his novels, remains banned in Uzbekistan. He often publishes his books via Facebook in order that Uzbek readers have access to them.

The Railway is one of those novels, like A Grain of Wheat (see: Kenya) or The Forty Rules of Love (see: Turkey), that uses multiple narrators and Point of View characters to create a composite picture of the people and community featured. Central to the story is the unnamed boy, whose italicised narrative runs through the book between its tragicomic set pieces.

The literal railway is also central to the novel as the first line connecting Central Asia to Russia is being constructed. It pulls like a magnet with many of the stories culminating and concluding in the vicinity of the iron tracks.

Gilas is a multicultural town of Uzbeks, Russians, Tartars, Armenians, Chechens, Persians, Germans and Ukrainians. There is a large Jewish population. Also a sizable Korean community, due to the very real fact that when thousands of Koreans fled to Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula during World War Two to escape the Japanese, Stalin had them sent to Uzbekistan because he was as paranoid of them as he was of everyone else.

As translator, Robert Chandler, says in his Preface to the novel, “Gilas is a Noah’s Ark of humanity – and a microcosm of the Soviet Union.” Like a Soviet Leviathan or Moby Dick. Or, an overlong Bob Dylan song with a cavalcade of characters, the roll call of whose names goes on for pages before the book even begins.

The Railway can also be seen, like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (see: Dominican Republic) as a history of Uzbekistan and Russia during the first half of the 20^th century as told through it characters. Like Diaz’s book, the novel revolves and recirculates through time, picking up threads as it goes. Like The Great Reclamation (see: Singapore), there is a point in the past beyond which it will not go. For Heng’s novel, that is 1965. For Ismailov it is the end of the Stalinist era and, presumably,. the birth of Ismailov himself (Ismailov was born the year after Stalin died).

Chandler notes in his Preface that the Uzbek capital of Tashkent was regarded as a cosmopolitan city in the years immediately following the Second World War. Gilas  is said to be located  not far from the capital. Characters in the novel travel to the UK and the USA and make the Hajj to Mecca. For all that we think of the Soviet Union as inward facing and inaccessible, life at the margins of the regime are portrayed as broadly tolerable.

Communism is a constant presence of course, but the communists are lampooned like everyone else. As Jean-Jacque Rousseau understood, the larger an empire grows, the harder it is to control and disseminate the message of any central authority. Technology makes this easier to achieve, as we see with China’s mass surveillance systems, but in the Uzbekistan of the first half of the 20^th century, communism had to compete with Islam, Christianity, Judaism and centuries of Central Asian tradition and folklore. It’s strict enforcement was then somewhat diluted.

The Underground is a different beast entirely; set as it is in Moscow, the belly of the Russian bear. The novel is told in the first person by Kirill, or Mbobo, the son of Siberian mother and an African father, who was conceived during the 1980 Moscow Olympics. As we learn in the opening passages, Kirill’s mother died when he was 8 and he died 4 years later. His ghost or soul tells his story more than a decade after his death.

As the railway is a metaphor in The Railway, here the Moscow Metro is a metaphor in The Underground. Each passage of text is sub-titled with the name of one of the stations that make up the Moscow underground system. Though as the narrative rattles past the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, the stations start to be renamed, foreshadowing Kirill’s fate. He refers to his mother as Moscow, which is another obvious metaphor for the decline of the state in the dying years of the Soviet Union.

As a child of an African father, Kirill’s dark skin marks him out in the capital of Russia. He is subjected to frequent racist abuse and even uses racist terminology to refer to himself. As his mother is Siberian in origin, he is doubly prejudiced against. His mother drinks and flits between two different lovers.

The tragedy of Kirill is despite the disadvantages and prejudices he faces, he is academically gifted and reads books far beyond his years. One of his ‘uncles’ calls him Pushkin. in reference to the Russian novelist, Alexander Pushkin. Like the unnamed mother and daughter of Soviet Milk (see: Latvia), the collapse of the Soviet regime comes too late to offer salvation. If salvation was ever even possible in the heart of Russia. Unlike Latvia and other countries that gained their independence, the bulk of the former Communist republic lurched from the collapse of the Soviet regime, to economic collapse and financial looting by its oligarchs to the coming of Putin and the return of political oppression.

In The Dead Lake, we travel to Kazakhstan and the shadow of the Russian nuclear weapons programme. The narrator meets a young violin player while travelling through the country by train. Although he appears to be a child, he is in fact 27. As they travel on though the country, Yerzhan tells his story.

As the atomic tests produced great pools of contaminated water, the locals were forbidden from approaching them. One night Yerzhan dives into one to impress the girl next door with whom he is in love. His curse in to never age, even as she grows into a woman and drifts from his grasp. The narrator doubts the veracity of the boy’s tale, but when he meets two relatives at the end of the line, neither of whom he has seen in many years, the story seems to be verified.

It’s a Central Asian fable, like those we found in Bhutan (see: Bhutan) and Iceland (see: Iceland) and found through the stories of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson. The Tales of the Arabian Nights and many other besides.

Indeed, all of the Ismailov’s books feature folk and fairy tales told to children. The Dead Lake becomes the snake eating its own tail as the story of Yerzhan takes the form of a story told to Yerzhan. But then Ismailov’s books often seem like stories told to his own young self. Yerzhan, Kirill and the unnamed boy of The Railway feel like facets of the author himself.

Hamid Ismailov’s own story is one we have encountered too many times on this journey so far. The writer forced into exile by invasion, civil war or the sheer paranoia of the ruling autocracy. Unlike the rest, Ismailov has been unable to return to Uzbekistan since he left more than 30 years ago. Even the writers we encountered in Afghanistan (see: Afghanistan), have been able to return to their homeland at various stages. Though that now seems impossible for the foreseeable future. The freedom to create and express oneself remains a distant dream for many in the world. Which makes voices like Ismailov’s all the more important.

Uzbekistan seems a curiosity, but it’s repressive government is sadly more the rule than the exception. It might be one of only two double landlocked countries in the world, but there are many more doubly landlocked from truth and freedom of expression. If this project has any one aim, it is to shine a torch on the dark, oppressive corners of our world. Hamid Ismailov and his contemporaries are the motes of light without which thiat task would be impossible.

Hamid Ismailov

 

Singapore - Rainbirds et al.

Country: Singapore
Book: Rainbirds/The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida/Watersong
Author: Clarissa Goenawan
Publication Year: 2018/2020/2022
Genre: Fiction

Country: Singapore
Book: Suicide Club/ The Great Reclamation
Author: Rachel Heng
Publication Year: 2018/2023
Genre: Science Fiction/Historical Fiction

Singapore, it is fair to say, is a country punching above its weight. Since achieving independence in 1965, the small island state has grown into one of the richest countries in Asia. Along with South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, it was named as one of the four Asian Tiger economies, but has since outstripped its contemporaries in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

This is not without its problems. Island states generally become wealthy by serving as tax havens for the mega-rich and Singapore is no exception. However, it is also one of the world’s most important trade ports and an international centre for banking. Unsurprisingly, it is also one of the most expensive places in the world to live.

In turning to our Singaporean authors, we find something of that spirit of internationalism. Indeed of the five books under consideration, only one is actually set in Singapore. That novel, The Great Reclamation (see below), will at least tell us something of the history of country.

Clarissa Goenawan is perhaps the perfect Reading the World author. Born in Indonesia to Singaporean parents, she lives in Singapore, but has presumably spent time living in Japan. given that each of her three novels published since 2018 is set there. It isn’t easy finding information on Goenawan’s biography online, which, given the issues facing females writers that we have identified elsewhere in this project, is probably for the best. Despite being set in Japan, all her books were originally published in English.

Having read a reasonable amount of contemporary Japanese literature in the recent years, it is easy to see in Goenawan’s work many of the same tropes and social concerns found in the work of native Japanese authors. Of course, no one writing fiction set in Japan can escape the influence of Haruki Murakami (see: Reading Murakami). Yet it is possible to find in Goenawan novels connective tissue to modern Japanese authors such as Sayaka Murata, Banana Yoshimoto, Mieko Kawakami, Natsuko Imamura, Natsuo Kirino and Yu Miri (see: South Korea) amongst many others. How many of these authors Goenawan is aware of or has read is anyone’s guess.

Her first novel, Rainbirds, published in 2018, is in one sense a murder mystery in the same vein as Natsuo Kirino’s 2003 novel, Grotesque. When Ren Ishida’s sister is murdered in a provincial town, he must travel there to put her affairs in order. However, he ends up accepting a temporary position as a tutor at the same school in which his sister worked. As he comes to know the residents of the town, its dark underbelly reveals itself, offering tantalising clues to the circumstances of his sister’s murder.

It’s good first novel, rich in detail and characters. The rich politician who offers Ren free accommodation in return for reading to his listless wife. Rio; the student with whom he forms a strange friendship. There are also dreams and flashbacks to growing up with his sister, Keiko.

That said, the entire novel is told in flashback. The events take place n the 1990s and Ren narrates the tale much in the same way as Toru Watanabe in Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, looking back after many years. Like many of Murakami’s novels, the conclusion is deliberately ambiguous. It is for the reader to decide what conclusions to draw.

2020’s The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is perhaps Goenawan’s most Murakami-esque novel. Certainly many of the same elements are there. Self-harm and the supernatural. Lonely male characters. Bars and the culture around them. Traumatic school experiences. Characters coming to terms with sex and sexuality. Love affairs that lead to the ruination of friendships. Characters running away to some isolated place in Japan to hide and find or destroy themselves.

None of these things are unique to Murakami’s novels of course, but par for the course in Japanese and South East Asian literature. The supernatural is employed at various points in the work of many of the writers mentioned above: Although writers like Natsuo Kirino are able to introduce the viscerally horrific and grotesque without reference to the supernatural.

Indeed, for most of The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, the supernatural is entirely absent and the novel is again reminiscent of Norwegian Wood in many of its elements. It also has elements of Greek tragedy in that we are told about Miwako Sumida’s death in the novel’s prologue. The narrative then spins back in time to show how the tragedy unfolded. The supernatural only comes into play in the novel’s third act.

On balance, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is Goenawan’s most accomplished novel of the three (although, as the first novel of hers I read, this might be a case of the First Love or Point of Entry Fallacy). Unlike the previous novel, it is told in the 3^rd person with the point of view switching to different characters as the novel proceeds. Despite the tragedy that underpins it (perhaps, in fact, because of it), it is also the book with the most clear conclusion. Which might also be its most un-Murakami-like feature. In the land of Haruki Murakami, ambiguity is king (see: Reading Murakami for more on this). It is a reminder that South East Asian literature is not defined by one man. Other Japanese writers (and novels set in Japan) are available.

Goenawan’s third novel, 2022’s Watersong, is a melding of many of the elements of her first two books. The 3^rd person narrative shifts between characters, but does so more haphazardly than the linear progression of The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida. The novel opens in Akakawa, the provincial town of Rainbirds, but shifts to the centre of Tokyo for the lion’s share of the novel.

Shouji Arai is forced to leave Akakawa when he strikes up a friendship with the wife of one of the town’s most powerful men, who is physically abusive to her. He is forced to leave his girlfriend, Yoko, behind, who disappears. A shadowy voice on the phone threatens to kill him if he continues to search for her. The years pass away as he works as a journalist and becomes embroiled in a complicated platonic relationship with Liyun after she moves into his apartment. She occupies much of the novel’s second act.

As a child, Shouji was told by a fortune teller that he will meet three women with water symbols in their names (i.e. the Kanji pictograms used in Japanese script and borrowed from Chinese). One of these three women might be his soul mate. One might also drown, as seen in a recurring dream that prompts his mother to take him to the fortune teller in the first act.

Where The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida was largely unambiguous, many elements of Watersong are vague and, like Rainbirds and the oeuvre of Haruki Murakami, one is left to draw one’s own conclusions.

It is another novel that opens in the mid-90s and runs to beyond the millennium. It allows for noir-ish throwback plot devices like Shouji using pay phones to try and contact Yoko and being threatened by the voice on the phone. Set any nearer in time and much of the mystery could be solved through Facebook, Twitter and Zoom.

Clarissa Goenawan

All in all, Goenawan’s three published novels are well written and a welcome additions to the sum of fiction set in Japan. There is some overlap between them, but that is to be expected. Everyone from writers to rap artists have hooks and tropes to which they return time and again. Try reading all 44 of Philip K Dick’s novels. for instance, and you will find so much bleed between them that they are difficult to separate out from one another (like the tenuous reality of many of his books bleeding into the real world). I look forward to seeing what  Clarissa Goenawan does next.

Rachel Heng’s two published novels occupy the years either side of the world in which Clarissa Goenawan’s books are set. The second, The Great Reclamation, takes place in Singapore between 1942 and 1965. Her first novel, 2018’s Suicide Club, takes place in New York in the not too distant future.

In this version of NYC, people now live for centuries. Certain lucky individuals have the chance to live forever. However, their behaviour is heavily proscribed. When ‘Lifer’, Lea Kirino, is hit by a car, she is suspected of attempting to harm herself and is placed in special measures and monitored.

The accident is triggered by the apparent vision of her long dead father. However, it is no vision and as he is revealed to be alive and re-enters her life, her world starts to fall apart. The titular Suicide Club is revealed to be a secret society dedicated to risk and the rejection of immortality. She enters their circle to bring them down, but comes to sympathise with their cause.

Suicide Club is a meditation on the concept of everlasting life. It asks the question: how much life is too much? For all that religion promises immortality in the everafter, does anyone really want to live forever in anything so sterile as the heaven that is portrayed in most religious texts (as Talking Heads put it, ‘Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing. nothing ever happens’)?

Extending one’s lifespan by a few centuries, even a millennium or two, might be desirable. Anything beyond than that and surely boredom would be bound to set in (look at the listless, sterile lives lived by half the vampires in vampyric fiction). Seemingly even the prospect of immortal life is too much for many ‘Lifers’ to bear. Hence the Suicide Club.

Like Watersong, it’s a decent first novel. Like Goenawan’s proximity to Murakami, Suicide Club has similarities with many of Philip K Dick’s best meditations on the future of humanity’s relationship with medicine and technology (although obviously many PKD’s references have not aged well). Whether humanity will survive long enough to worry about such matters is something which has still to be decided. If AI doesn’t get us, our self-destructive instincts just might.

And so we come, finally, to Singapore and Heng’s 2023 novel, The Great Reclamation. Rather like Junot Díaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (see: Dominican Republic), The Great Reclamation is a historical novel told through the lives and relationships of one family.

Ah Boon is born to a fisherman family during the 30s in the declining years of the British Empire and its hundred year sovereignty over the island. In 1942, the Japanese invade and occupy Singapore and carry out the kinds of atrocities committed throughout their sphere of influence.

As a child, Ah Boon has little interest in fishing, preferring to play with his neighbour, Siok Mei. However, as the post war period begins and they grow older, Siok Mei becomes part of student protests against the government. Ah Boon submits to his fate to be a fisherman like his father, but soon becomes jaded and instead applies for a job with the same people to whom Siok Mei and her activist boyfriend are opposed.

The Great Reclamation refers to the land reclamation projects carried out by the Singaporean government from the early 1960s. which have increased its land mass by more than 20%. Similar to the projects carried out in the Netherlands in the previous centuries. Except, instead of dykes and dams, Singapore used sand to increase its land mass, to the point where many of its neighbouring countries (Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia) have banned or restricted the sale to Singapore of sand (which is the start of tongue twister if ever there was one). Singapore has also attempted to merge some of the smaller surrounding islands with the mainland.

This effort placed the government in direct conflict with the fishermen and other Singaporeans who had lived in and around the coastline for generations. Many were relocated to government built housing, but these, at least to judge from events in the novel, were poorly ventilated. It should be remembered that Singapore lies just one degree above the equator. It is therefore a hot and humid country. Ah Boon’s Uncle refuses to relocate, preferring to feel the sea winds coming in through the floorboards of his beachfront home.

Ah Boon’s talent as a child and into adulthood is his ability to find mysterious islands that seem to move with the phases of the moon. He is thrown into conflict between his community and his employers, who want to mine the islands for their sand; between his unrequited love for Siok Mei and Natalie, his wife and former boss. As the book concludes in 1965 with Singaporean independence as an island and city state, Ah Boon finally picks a side. The rest is history.

In terms of this project, The Great Reclamation is clearly the best of the five books we have considered. We travel to learn something about other parts of the world and Heng’s 460 page novel certainly delivers on this remit. However, I have a soft spot for Japanese literature and The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is a fine example of the genre, even if Goenawan is not a native Japanese writer. The two books therefore sit at the top of the pile, not that such considerations are particularly relevant. Opinions are only ever subjective and what appeals to me might not be what appeals to you.

What is less of an opinion and more objective is how gratifying it is to find two Singaporean women writing and releasing novels. All five of these books came out within five years of one another from 2018 to 2023. Hopefully one can look forward to many more novels in the coming years. I seem to say this with each new country we visit, but it remains a truth universal: I will be reading Clarissa Goenawan and Rachel Heng’s books long after this project ends.

Rachel Heng