Fiction | Japan
A Little Darkness (extract) Banana Yoshimoto
I wandered slowly among the graves, the sun beating down hard on everything. I passed by Evita’s grave again, looking at all the different dedications and at the sparkling flecks in the granite. Then I sat down to rest for a while on the root of an enormous tree. The faint breeze dried my sweat. Why do graveyards always have trees like this, with branches that droop down low to the ground? Are they here to comfort the dead, or do they grow so large by sucking up their energy?

Memoir | China
Grandma's Casket Wen Huang
When I was nine, I slept next to a coffin. It was a heavy pinewood box covered in traditional Chinese carvings. It belonged to Grandma. My father had it made for her seventy-third birthday and referred to it as ‘shou-mu’, which means something like ‘longevity’, but it was still the casket in which Grandma would be buried and I slept next to it every night. I could tell no one about it because there was superstition involved, and superstition was forbidden.

Interview | South Korea
Chang-Rae Lee Anis Shivani
There were some protests in New York, boycotts of Korean stores, greengrocers, so those were the kinds of things that more pointedly influenced what I was writing. The profound eruption of racial tension was definitely on my mind. And there was also a lot of stuff in terms of immigrants. There was the Golden Venture, where the Chinese were smuggled over on a big boat and washed ashore. Many of them died. So there was a lot of tumultuous activity.