5 Asian Short Story Books to Read Right Now

If you are severely lacking the time to sit down and read a whole book, there are short stories to the rescue. You can bite into a story with your evening tea and then forget all about it and perhaps later, few mornings later, read another one. Here are the best Asian short stories published in early 2020. You will find yourself immersed in folktales from India (Stories from Marwar), ghost stories from Japan (Where the Wild Ladies are) and a mix of the surreal and real in Malaysia (Lake like a Mirror). Or why not indulge in some literary travel in Asia? Visit China through The Book of Shanghai anthology or read about Indian Nepalis in The Colours of Kanchenjunga.

And just in case you have a little more time at hand, check out these 18 Asian Books Published Now that are Too Much Fun to Read. Simply perfect for the dreary life locked indoors. On to the stories.

Short Stories from Asia

Most stories in the anthologies and short story collections, come in different flavours. You might read a literary story and then come across a dystopian one. Or sometimes you will have ghosts and talking animals stopping you midway. Excellent thing to be surprised like that.

1.Timeless Tales from Marwar by Vijethan Detha, translated from the Rajasthani by Vishes Kothari

I cannot resist a good book of folktales and Timeless Tales from Marwar was god-sent. India has a rich oral storytelling tradition and these translated folks and myths of the state of Rajasthan are binge worthy. Timeless Tales from Marwar turned out to be mad fun, filled with bizarre stories and strange characters. Like your typical folk tale collection, there are evil witches, wicked step mothers, miserly rich men, clever animals, honest farmers, and handsome men. There are aunts who make their nephews moto-tajo (and he promises several animals that they can eat him after he gets fat), lice who drag women to other rooms while they sleep, animals who talk (the joy! I miss reading these good old stories that we love as children), nephews who turn to peacocks, and lice (there are a tad too many lice stories, mind you) who turn into rubies. Being from the south of India, I was skeptical whether the stories from the Thar region would resonate with me — translating folk tales is always tricky — but I was thrilled that Kothari’s impeccable translation (including those of the rhymes) elevated the reading experience. I found myself reading these folk tales late into the night and then repeating them all over again to my husband.

Timeless Tales from Marwar is a compilation from the much-celebrated Batan ri Phulwari ‘Garden of Tales’ — a fourteen-volume collection written by Vijaydan Detha over a span of nearly fifty years. Vijaydan Detha is of the foremost storytellers of Indian folktales. He is the recipient of the Padma Shri award, Sahitya Academy awards and also a nominee in the 2011 Nobel Prize for literature. Read this for the rich imagery and for your routine dose of glorious bed time stories.

Rating : 4.5/5

2.Where the Wild Ladies are by Matsudo Ako, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton

I had expectations of these stories being fierce and bitter. Where the Wild Ladies are, after all, was blurbed as ‘feminist retelling of traditional ghost stories’ from Japan. But I was surprised to find myself washed over with an emotional range and entertainment factor that I little expected. Here ghosts and humans have a symbiotic relationship; sometimes they simply exist, at other times nudge the other towards some kind of decision making. An aunt-ghost visits a woman who got dumped and has been getting her body hair removed to feel better, two saleswomen circle a man with a very unusual sales pitch, a woman in a castle falls in love with a falconer, a woman falls in love with a skeleton that she fished at the riverbed, a ghost watches over a child as its mother resorts to prostitution to survive.

The stories in the collection are adapted from rakugo (an oral storytelling session in Japan where a lone storyteller verbally narrates a story with minimal or no props) and folk legends. The list at the end of the book acknowledging the originals that inspired the stories is useful — I hope to read them one day and compare with these retellings. A Fox’s Life deserves a special mention as a liberating read about a woman, who is actually a fox, go through a life of misogyny and societal expectations, and then to leave it all only to find that she is in fact a fox. Female ghosts and woman, both feature in meaty, wholesome roles that makes Where the Wild Ladies are an absolute delight among Asian short stories. Characters re-appear and are connected to a mysterious factory run by a mysterious man, Mr. Tei. The stories are thought provoking in the underlying questions they raise about gender roles, patriarchy and power imbalances. The ghosts in this collection are less monstrous and sparkling with human-like emotions of all kinds. You’ll find yourself warming up to them and wanting to know more about why they behave so. Where the Wild Ladies are is an auto-buy if you are looking to explore more short stories from Asia. Read for Japanese yokai (ghosts) in modern setting and stories that very quietly surprise you.

Rating : 4/5

3.Lake like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce

Lake like a Mirror is a great book to read if you are looking for weird, strange short stories from Asia. They are not all weird though. Some are a reminder about the religious and cultural oppressions faced by many even today. A woman who applies to renounce Islam is rejected by the court and put in an institution. A Chinese teacher teaching at a multi ethnic Malaysian school is faced with charges of promoting homosexuality when she makes her students read E. E. Cummings. Brothel owners, mistresses running hair salons, women trying to break free and teachers star in these stories. Fong’s surrealism jumps on you unwarned. A woman vomits balloons. Frog-like guardian angels appear. Women perform exorcisms. With many of the stories, I desperately wanted more — I could feel the bubbling, strange surreal-ness frothing to come to the surface. But the stories in Lake like a Mirror are still enjoyable be it for the depiction of religious and cultural tensions between the Chinese and Malay community, the struggles of women in navigating public spaces or for Fong’s beautiful, sharp sentences.

Read the story Lake like a Mirror on Granta magazine here.
Rating : 3.5/5

4.The Book of Shanghai, Edited by Jin Li and Dai Congrong

The Book of Shanghai is the latest among the city series published by Comma Press. Last year I listed their Book of Tehran in my list of excellent translations from 2019. A woman frequents a coffee shop and strikes a friendship with a stranger and they ultimately dance together (Woman Dancing Under Stars by Teng Xiaolan, translated by Yu Yan Chen). Ah Fang’s Lamp, one of my favourites, by Wang Anyi, translated by Helen Wang is about an unremarkable apartment in a street and the way the narrator gets interested in the life of the residents and a fruit vendor. It makes you wonder how casual everyday encounters sit deep in our minds. Family memories (Snow by Chen Danyan, translated by Paul Harris), family conflicts (Bengal Tiger by Xia Shang, translated by Lee Anderson, lost mobile phones (The Lost by Fue Yuehui, translated by Carson Ramsdel) and novelists who live in attics (The Novelist in the Attic by Shen Dacheng, translated by Jack Hargreaves) make appearances. The collection ends with a sci fi story State of Trance (by Chen Qiufan, translated by Josh Stenberg) about the end of the world as it is taken over by AI. The Book of Shanghai is an eclectic mix of old and new, a burst of genres, and a juxtaposition of different lifestyles in a bustling city where unfortunately many characters are often gripped by loneliness.

5.Colours of Kanchenjunga, edited and translated by Sharda Chhetri

Colours of Kanchenjunga is a collection of thirty Nepali stories about ordinary men and women. Most stories are set in the early Independence period, so through these stories we stumble across people and a land caught between the old and the new. I have not read many books from the Nepali language, so the foreward by Manprasad Subba was informative. Subba notes that the authors included in this anthology led their literary career in Darjeeling, except Parijat who migrated to Nepal in her teens. Many stories in this collection focus on ordinary people, their dreams and aspirations. They fall in love, commit adultery, elope with lovers, and write letters to former lovers. The stories differ in flavour and time period — the 1968 flood and landslide that crashes a man’s dreams (The Plum Blossoms by Gabriel Rana) sits smugly with another story about a bitter woman alleged to be a witch who kills small children (When God was trampled in the Darkness by Bhanu Chhetri) — which occasionally makes it a jarring experience for the reader. However, these short stories from Asia shine either in the domestic setting or a larger geography that mingles hope and tragedy and in the unique culture of Indian Nepalis that they present. The stories in Colours of Kanchenjunga are a mix — some wonderfully arresting and some forgettable — but they present a rustic lifestyle and humans who simply live their lives.

Rating : 3/5

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