Series: Weatherhead Books on Asia

A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On by Dung Kai-cheung is a playful and imaginative glimpse into the consumerist dreamscape of late-nineties Hong Kong. First published in 1999, it comprises ninety-nine sketches of life just after the handover of the former British colony to China. Each of these stories in miniature begins from a piece of ephemera,...

Friend by Paek Nam-nyong is a tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the story unfolds into a broader consideration of love and marriage. The novel delves into its protagonists' past, describing...

In novels such as Silence, Endō Shūsaku examined the persecution of Japanese Christians in different historical eras. Sachiko, set in Nagasaki during the painful years between 1930 and 1945, is the story of two young people trying to find love during yet another period in which Japanese Christians were accused of disloyalty to their country. In the 1930s, two young...

Soft Burial by Fang Fang begins with a mysterious, nameless protagonist. Decades earlier, she was pulled out of a river in a state of near-death; upon regaining consciousness, she discovered that her entire memory had been erased. The narrative follows her journey through recovery as she takes a job as a housekeeper in the home of a powerful cadre, marries...

An office worker who has no one to eat lunch with enrols in a course that builds confidence about eating alone. A man with a pathological fear of bedbugs offers up his body to save his building from infestation. A time capsule in Seoul is dug up hundreds of years before it was intended to be unearthed. A vending machine...

Park Wan-suh is a best-selling and award-winning writer whose work has been widely translated and published throughout the world. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary account of her experiences growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability. Park Wan-suh was born in...

Available for the first time in English, Azaleas is a captivating collection of poems by a master of the early Korean modernist style. Published in 1925, Azaleas is the only collection Kim Sowol (1902-1934) produced during his brief life, yet he remains one of Korea's most beloved and well-known poets. His work is a delightful and sophisticated blend of the...

Vasily Eroshenko was one of the most remarkable transnational literary figures of the early twentieth century: a blind multilingual Esperanto speaker from Ukraine who joined left-wing circles in Japan and befriended the famous modernist writer Lu Xun in China. Born in a small Ukrainian village in imperial Russia, he was blinded at a young age by complications from measles. Seeking...

"She knew that if she didn't say her piece, that flame would never be extinguished; even after death, it would continue raging." The Running Flame opens with its protagonist in prison awaiting execution, desperate to give an account of her life. Yingzhi, a girl from the countryside, sees opportunity in the liberal trends sweeping across China. After high school, she...