Honor roll:Kiriyama Prize for Fiction or Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Each of these books has been nominated for a Kiriyama Prize for Fiction or Nonfiction. They are ranked by honors received.
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The Electrical Field: A Novel
When the beautiful Chisako and her lover are found murdered in a park, members of a small Ontario suburb in the 1970s must finally acknowledge certain inescapable truths about one another and the way their community has been shaped by the dark shadow of World War II internment camps.
With all the suspense of a psychological thriller, The Electrical Field slowly exposes all those implicated in the murders—particularly Miss Saito, the novel’s unreliable narrator, through whom we gradually discover the truth. Like Kazuo Ishiguru in A Pale View of Hills, Kerri Sakamoto invokes a Japanese sense of the relativity of memory and reliability of consciousness. Miss Saito, middle-aged, caring for her elderly, bed-ridden father and her distracted younger brother, on the surface seems to be a passive observer. But her own disturbed past and her craving for an emotional connection will prove to have profound consequences.
A masterful and elegant story of passion, memory, and regret, The Electrical Field reaches deep into the past and into Canada’s communal response to war.
My Year of Meats: A Novel
When Jane Takagi-Little finally lands a job—producing a Japanese television show sponsored by BEEF-EX, an organization promoting the export of U.S. meats—she takes her crew on the road in search of all-American wives cooking all-American meat. Over the course of filming, though, Jane makes a few troubling discoveries about both. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, in Japan, Akiko Ueno watches My American Wife! and diligently prepares Coca-Cola Roast and Panfried Prairie Oysters for her husband, John, (the ad-agency rep for the show’s sponsor). As Akiko fills out his questionnaires, rating each show on Authenticity, Wholesomeness, and Deliciousness of Meat, certain ominous questions about her own life—and the fact that after each meal she has to go to the bathroom and throw up—begin to surface.
A tale of love, global media, and the extraordinary events in the lives of two ordinary women, counterpointed by Sei Shonagon’s vibrant commentary, this first novel by filmmaker Ruth L. Ozeki—as insightful and moving as the novels of Amy Tan, as original as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. or John Irving—is a sparkling and original debut from a major new talent.
In 1868, Japan abruptly transformed itself from a feudal society into a modern industrial state. In 1945, the Japanese switched just as swiftly from imperialism and emperor-worship to a democracy. Today, argues Patrick Smith, Japan is in the midst of equally sudden and important change.
In this award-winning book, Smith offers a groundbreaking framework for understanding the Japan of the next millennium. This time, Smith asserts, Japan’s transformation is one of consciousness—a reconception by the Japanese of their country and themselves. Drawing on the voices of Japanese artists, educators, leaders, and ordinary citizens, Smith reveals a “hidden history” that challenges the West’s focus on Japan as a successfully modernized country. And it is through this unacknowledged history that he shows why the Japanese live in a dysfunctional system that marginalizes women, dissidents, and indigenous peoples; why the “corporate warrior” is a myth; and why the presence of 47,000 American troops persists as a holdover from a previous era. The future of Japan, Smit suggests, lies in…
Audrey Hepburns Neck: A Novel
Offering a unique perspective and unusual insight into modern Japan and its wartime past, Audrey Hepburn’s Neck is also a shrewd study of cross-cultural obsessions, and of erotic, romantic and familial love.
The American author Alan Brown crosses both racial and cultural lines to tell his story through the eyes of a young, handsome Japanese cartoonist, Toshiyuki (“Toshi”) Okamoto, who traces his strong attraction to Western women bock to his ninth birthday, when his mother took him to see Audrey Hepburn in the movie “Roman Holiday.”
Leaving behind a sad, silent childhood—which was spent living in two rooms above the family noodle shop on an isolated peninsula in the far north of Japan—Toshi moves to Tokyo to pursue his career. There he falls under the spell of three Americans: his best friend and confidante, the generous and extroverted Paul, a gay advertising copywriter who has plenty of his romantic mishaps with Japanese men; Jane, his glamorous but emotionally unstable teacher at the Very Romantic English Academy, with whom Toshi has a hazardous sexual affair; and,…
Cambodia: Report From a Stricken Land
In Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land, former Southeast Asia correspondent for the New York Times and Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Kamm gives a clear and definitive history of contemporary Cambodia from 1970 to the present. For more than thirty years, Kamm’s high-level political and military connections allowed him unparalleled access to the leaders who shaped Cambodia into what it is today. Bringing to this work a unique expertise on Southeast Asia, he provides a poignant but clear-eyed portrait of a people and a beleaguered and complex country. For the first time, Kamm offers Western readers a much-needed analysis and understanding of those thirty turbulent years of revolution, invasion, coups d’etat, and genocide.
Galapagos: Islands Born of Fire
Ever since the days of Darwin, the Galapagos Islands have captured the imagination of the world. This book captures the ethereal—even haunting—quality of these islands, in words and pictures, like none other before it. For author Tui De Roy it is the culmination of a life’s work: thirty-five years of exploring and recording the secrets of Galapagos.
As well as visiting the coastlines, with their cold seas and burning rocks, sea lions and marine iguanas, the reader is taken into active volcanic calderas, where life hangs in the balance each time the volcano remakes itself; follows the seasons of the giant tortoise; dives into the twilight world of sperm whales and hammerhead sharks; and treads on still-steaming volcanic ground so new it has never felt a human footfall. Ten photo essays showcase the special birds and animals that make the Galapagos their home.
The text flows from an intimate knowledge of, and deep love for, the Galapagos and the quality of the imagery reflects the author’s recently awarded place as one of the world’s top twenty wildlife photographers. As the…
Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia
McDonald’s restaurants are found in over 100 countries, serving tens of millions of people each day. What are the cultural implications of this phenomenal success? Does the introduction of American fast food undermine local cuisines, many of them celebrated for centuries? Does it, as some critics fear, presage a homogeneous, global culture?
Earlier studies of the fast food industry have emphasized production, focusing on labor or management. This book takes a fresh approach to the industry by concentrating on the perspective of the consumer. It analyzes consumers’ reactions to McDonald’s in five East Asian cities: Hong Kong, Beijing, Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo. The book argues that McDonald’s has largely become divorced from its American roots and become a “local” institution for an entire generation of affluent consumers in Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo.
Localization is not, however, a one-way process; the corporation has also had to adapt in order to flourish in new settings. The book demonstrates how consumers, with the cooperation and encouragement of McDonald’s management,…
Under the Red Flag: Stories
Set in the northern Chinese provincial town of Dismount Fort, these twelve stories offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives of peasants, soldiers, workers, and party officials during the Great Cultural Revolution. This was a time of social upheaval reaching into every home, when the Red Guard could drag a woman accused of prostitution through the streets; when a man trying to honor his mother’s dying wish runs up against party orthodoxy.
Ha Jin has been compared to the late Isaac Babel for his spare evocation of ordinary lives caught up in the flux of vast social movements. He is a writer of stark power, simple beauty, and poignant irony, whose themes of personal honor in the face of political rectitude are unmatched in American literature today.
The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders
Donald Denoon, Malama Meleisea, Stewart Firth, Jocelyn Linnekin, Karen Nero
The Pacific Islands can be seen to be linked by commerce, Christianity, colonialism, world wars and the nuclear experience. Equally, they can be seen as isolated societies, and have often been represented as such by Western explorers and anthropologists. Both interpretations carry weight, as societies struggle separately to preserve or regain autonomy or band together in regional associations.
The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders addresses these irresolvable and recurring tensions, and encompasses the entire range of human experience in the region.
Chinese Opera: Images and Stories
Chinese Opera looks at Chinese society through an exciting series of photographs of operatic performances from many regions of the country. The book introduces the reader to this unique theatrical form and tells the traditional stories that are its narrative foundation.
Siu Wang-Ngai’s extraordinary images, taken in existing light during performances, lovingly reveal the visual excitement of Chinese opera and point to the differences in costuming and presentation that distinguish each regional style and character type. Through Peter Lovrick’s engaging text, Chinese Opera provides a brief anecdotal history of the development of Chinese opera and introduces a language of theatrical convention entirely new to the Westerner. It also identifies the hallmarks of the dozen or so regional opera styles found in this collection. As well, the book arranges the stories in a rough chain of being, from heaven, through the whole social structure on earth from emperor to outlaw, to ghosts in the nether world, offering a revealing view of Chinese social tradition and experience. Chinese opera…
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