KDL Recommends

Twenty years after turning to teaching after being spurned by her Chinese opera troupe for disfiguring her understudy with boiling water in a fit of jealous rage, Xio Yanqiu returns to the stage in a new version of the cursed opera, “The Moon Opera,” fully believing that she has become transformed into the immortal moon goddess she is playing.

Two half brothers born to a powerful general, one to the general’s wife and one to his mistress, know nothing of each others existence. One is driven to glorify his father, the other wants revenge.

This is a savvy novel dealing with city life, commodity culture, marriage, forgiveness, and acceptance.

Li X’ia, the daughter of concubine who society dooms to become one herself, escapes foot binding and work on a silk farm to fall in love with an English sea captain, Ben Devereux, and have a daughter, Siu Sung, whose adventures will carry her from remote mountains to perilous cities on the eve of World War II.

His real name is Toshio Manahan, but everyone calls him Japino because he’s half-Japanese half-Filipino. Japino reveals the troubling world adolescence we are all familiar with, in a most foreign atmosphere of local guerrilla warfare and a state run by corrupt policemen, in Garsaponga, a rural village in the tropical mountains of the Philippines.

Seeking her fortune in Beijing, Fenfang Wang leaves her rural farm to pursue her dreams in the city, lands a job as a film extra, falls for two unsuitable young men, and finally finds her true calling.

The first year on the job a young idealistic teacher, tries to persuade a shy, virtually autistic boy called Tetsun to give up his obsession for flies. She changes her mind when she becomes aware of the breadth and depth of his knowledge of various flies. When a local food-processing factory begins to suffer from a fly problem, it is young Tetsun to the rescue, vindicating his teacher’s belief in him.

Expertly interweaving the real and the unreal, Naoko involves a working man, Heisuke, whose wife dies in a bus accident. His young daughter survives, but seems to be inhabited by her mother’s personality.

Spanning some forty years, from the Communist Civil War through the Cultural Revolution, this acclaimed Chinese novel follows the life of Fugui, the spoiled son of a wealthy landlord, as he squanders his family’s fortune, takes up a career as a puppeteer, loses his wife and children to the ravages of famine, and is transformed into a simple peasant.

The arrival of a “cousin” from mainland China, arranged by Mama Wong to serve as a nanny, throws the household of Carnegie Wong, a second-generation Chinese American, his WASP wife Blondie, and their three children into turmoil.

In 1968, teenager Mona Chang and her family discover a confusing new world filled with ethnic complexities when they move to exclusive Scarshill, New York.

When exchange students Ralph and Teresa Chang and their friend Helen have to stay in the United States after the Communists take control of China in 1948, they decide to follow the American dream while retaining their Chinese values.

In the 1960s on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Beijing intellectual Chen Zhen undertakes a spiritual journey into the world of the nomadic Mongols, a dying culture that honors the endangered Mongolian wolf and follows a philosophy about maintaining a balance with nature.

Assigned to care for his fiancee’s father, Professor Yang, after he suffers a stroke, Jian Wan is disturbed when the professor begins to rave against his family and colleagues, and takes great risks to uncover the truth.

In the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Nan Wu, who had studied in the U.S. in the mid-1980s, leaves China with his wife and son to seek the freedom of the West, embarking on a migration that takes them through the heart of contemporary America.

Captured by enemy forces, Yu Yuan, a Chinese army officer serving in Korea in 1951, takes on the role of interpreter due to his proficiency in English, a role that places him in a conflict between his fellow prisoners and their captors.

After strangling her husband, Masako Katori, a middle-aged wife and mother working the night shift at a Tokyo factory, enlists the aid of four co-workers to conceal the crime.

Twelve strangers are kidnapped and spirited away to Australia where they discover they have been recruited into a savage reality show that makes Survivor look like an episode of MTV Cribs.

A deciding event in a yakuza mobster’s career leaves this gangster reflecting upon his life and the events leading up to this moment.

A towering masterpiece of the hardboiled genre, The Cage is at once a searing portrayal of the violence of the Japanese underworld and a tender mediation of the ties of love and friend that can save men from madness-or plunge them deeper into it.

A story of an ex-con painter who, in searching to elevate his art, takes on two students to literally explosive effect.

After Mongaul attacks the kingdom of Palos, Guin, a trained warrior with a cat-like facade, must rescue the “twins of Parros” held hostage by the Mongaul patrol, and subsequently work to fight off the enemy.

The sole heir to the House of Omura, a venerable family of Kobe sake brewers, nineteen-year-old Rie hears but cannot heed her mother’s advice: that in nineteenth-century Japan, a woman must “kill the self” or her life will be too difficult to bear. In this strict, male-dominated society, women may not even enter the brewery—and repressive tradition demands that Rie turn over her family’s business to the inept philanderer she’s been forced to marry. She is even expected to raise her husband’s children by another woman—a geisha—so that they can eventually run the Omura enterprise. But Rie’s pride will not allow her to relinquish what is rightfully hers.

A tale set in modern Beijing follows a detective’s search for a missing artifact, in a case that illuminates less-favorable aspects of Chinese culture and the detective’s own family during the Cultural Revolution.

When Mei receives a call from the chief executive at Guanghua Record Company, she learns that one of Mr. Peng’s top starlets—the beautiful pop star and troubled, mysterious Kaili—has been missing for four days. Mei must find the starlet while keeping up the record company’s facade that nothing is amiss.

After the Japanese conquer Manchuria in 1932, Steel Hope and his servant, Mountain Pine, become friends with Firecrackers and they soon discover that Firecrackers is female.

The Mandarin Chinese family of Spring Moon, of the House of Chang, follows traditional Chinese ways from 1892 until 1927, when new ideas change their lives.

Rei Shimura, a Japanese American woman living with her Scottish boyfriend, acquires a beautiful chest of drawers that turns out to be a Pandora’s box of mystery, theft, and murder.

A fictional portrait of the last empress of China follows Orchid, a beautiful teenager from an aristocratic family, who is chosen to become a low-ranking concubine of the emperor and rises to a position of power in the Chinese court.

Follows the last empress of China, as Empress Orchid copes with tragic personal losses as she struggles to save her crumbling empire.

This provocative paranormal police procedural examines the dark side of Japanese society as seen through the eyes of two very different women.

Ostracized for her illegitimacy and tolerated for her piano talent, young Satomi finds her precarious position threatened by her sensuous mother’s ambitions and makes a drastic decision to start over in America, where years later her choices are echoed in the life of her own daughter.

In the tradition of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, here is a new classic about the bride who’s no longer sure what to think. If you’re marrying into a Japanese household with a history, then brace yourself: some surprising truths lurk around the corner.

This second installment of the popular Japanese series finds The Shark embroiled in a conflict among a professional Taiwanese killer, called “The Poison Ape”; the Taiwanese detective who pursues him; and the hard-hearted boss of the Taiwanese mafia. At stake: Shinjuku, the already treacherous streets of which will seem like an esplanade compared to the battlefield they will become if war breaks out between the Japanese and Taiwanese mafias.

A story told from five different points of view, chronicles the experiences of Japanese Americans caught up in the nightmare of the World War II internment camps.

Inspector Chen investigates a young woman, the granddaughter of an actress who was once close to Mao, who may be in possession of an object that would bring dishonor to the Chairman’s memory.

In the aftermath of a woman’s brutal attack in 1701 Japan, samurai detective turned chamberlain Sano Ichiro suspects the true motives of a formerly exiled rival who has been oddly cooperative, a situation that is further complicated by a relative’s disappearance.

As the conflict between Sano Ichiro and his enemies escalates, the samurai detective and his wife, Reiko, are called in by the shogun to investigate a mysterious skeleton, in a case that forces them to confront long-buried secrets.

A historical thriller filled with political warfare and edge-of-your-seat sword fighting, a Japanese counterpart to the romantic adventures of the medieval knights whose chivalry is rivaled only by their prowess at battle.

When the Japanese decide to honor their military treaty with Germany by sending a few Zeros for their allies to study, they face the prospect of flying the planes over hostile territory, including the Soviet Union, in order to successfully make the delivery.

When the U.S. ambassador’s son is found dead, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Stark teams up with Chinese police detective Liu Hulan to uncover a conspiracy within modern China that lies behind a series of high-profile murders.

Chinese police detective Liu Hulan and attorney David Stark journey deep into China when Hulan goes undercover in the factory of an American corporation.

In seventeenth-century China, three women become emotionally involved with “The Peony Pavilion,” a famed opera rumored to cause lovesickness and even death.

A story of friendship set in nineteenth-century China follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language.

Cuicui worries about her grandfather’s looming death and whether she will find true love while growing up in a quiet rural town in China.

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, two boys are sent to the country for reeducation, where their lives take an unexpected turn when they meet the beautiful daughter of a local tailor and stumble upon a forbidden stash of Western literature.

Birthday is Koji Suzuki’s return to the Ring universe, a collection of short stories focusing on the female characters with a theme of birth.

The conclusion of Suzuki’s Ring trilogy is a highly cerebral metaphysical thriller—one that once again turns the story inside out in a self-referential swirl not unlike the one that gives rise to consciousness itself.

What if your soul mate isn’t encountered once in a lifetime but once in millennia? From the unique imagination of the author of the Ring trilogy, which inspired blockbuster films on both sides of the Pacific, comes an unconventional love story that finds the Japanese master delivering a pure page-turner outside the horror genre.

It begins with a woman’s search to find her husband, who disappears after watching a TV show. She enlists the aid of a friend, and together they discover that the famous female personality of the TV show disappeared after the same evening’s broadcast as well. The duo’s search leads to a battle within a religious cult. Each answer brings only more questions, until the story’s stunning final solution is revealed.

Journalist Kazayuki Asakawa’s investigation into the sudden deaths of four teenagers from heart failure leads to an isolated cabin containing a videotape warning of death in seven days unless certain, now missing, instructions are not followed.

Yuki Asakura, a financial columnist, tries to uncover the facts surrounding the mysterious death of her brother, who was found dead in his apartment, apparently from starvation.

Returning to Tsurugi City with her eleven-year-old daughter to care for her ailing father, a famed sword maker, Chigiri Yamazaki, a divorced, single mother, takes it upon herself to preserve her father’s failing business and is reunited with Go Imai, a freelance documentary filmmaker visiting Tsurugi where twenty-five years earlier he had done a story on Chigiri’s father.

The post-modern Japanese writer serves up a novel that is written in chapters as short as a few paragraphs that tells the story of a gang that kills American presidents.

Over the course of one fog-shrouded year, mother and daughter find what they share in their bones through heredity, history, and inexpressible qualities of love.

Encompassing two generations and a rich blend of Chinese and American history, the story of four struggling, strong women also reveals their daughter’s memories and feelings.

A Chinese immigrant who is convinced she is dying threatens to celebrate the Chinese New Year by unburdening herself of everybody’s hidden truths, thus prompting a series of comic misunderstandings.

Pei travels with a young orphan named Ji Shen to 1930s Hong Kong, where they receive help from a British woman, but experience the chaos of the Japanese occupation.

Stephen, 20, leaves Hong Kong for Japan to recuperate from tuberculosis just as the Chinese prepare to invade, and in a small town, he develops strong relationships.

Raised by loving and traditionally minded grandparents, Japanese youths Hiroshi and Kenji are forced to put their dreams on hold in the wake of World War II and find their destinies intertwining with those of a famous sumo master’s daughters.

In 1958, notified that her husband, a doctor in the Chinese army has been killed in action in Tibet, Shu Wen joins the army, determined to go to Tibet to uncover the truth, only to find herself alone in Tibet, embarking on a thirty-year nomadic odyssey in a novel based on a true story.