East Asian literature is redefining the global canon. While the United States slides into a form of governance that resembles authoritarian farce — tariffs yoyoing up and down, economic policy underpinned by punishment, leadership reduced to a reality TV show staged in Gotham — its closest ally is following on obediently. Britain is playing its usual role of being America’s poodle while the mainstream Media promotes Nigel Farage who is obligingly on standby with power-hungry Tories joining his political masquerade.
Against this backdrop of nostalgia, menace and bombast, young Anglophone readers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are looking to the Far East where the pressures the West is only beginning to acknowledge are lived with, negotiated and endured. Readers are gravitating towards literatures that have not got lost in a hall of mirrors of the Self. Writers in Japan, Korea and Taiwan have long understood what it means to live after the end of freedom which the West has taken for granted for so long, and is now losing.
These younger readers tend to be less loyal to the Western canon. East Asian fiction may have a parallel modernity to that of the West, but its very own vision of politics and systemic control; gender and social issues; of violence entwined with poverty, or of violence masked by politesse; has a special appeal. It offers a singular, deeply human perspective that interrogates power, technology and women’s place in society, while dismantling colonial ways of othering. Familiar debates are seen through a different lens, breaking free of the Western echo chamber.
A goddaughter said to me that the novels she has read so far feel familiar in their humanity, yet are bleak, real and funny in an entirely different register. The characters are complex and refreshingly anti-therapeutic. Like many of her generation (and mine too) there is a profound anxiety around climate change, systemic control, post-capitalism and tech surveillance — crystallised in works like The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, or refracted through nightmarish and otherworldly experiences, as in Hiromi Kawakami’s short-story collection Record of a Night Too Brief. Uketsu’s Strange Pictures draws on the psychological and analytical logic of drawing tests to probe the human psyche, while The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, melds mathematics, memory and human connection. This unsentimental literature is anchored in the present, juxtaposing imagined, surreal worlds with recognisably contemporary angst.
East Asian Literature: Three Novels, Three Worlds
Here are three special picks: one each from Taiwan, Korea and Japan.
Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel by Yang Shuang-zǐ Tr. Lin King
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2026
Taiwan Travelogue is alleged to be an authentic “lost” Japanese colonial-era diary dating from 1938 written by Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese novelist, translated into Chinese by Yang Shuang-zi. It is in fact an extremely clever, layered deception, showing how language is power and history a text to be contested.
“After my novel was adapted into a film, my royalties saw a notable increase. Leading up to my Okinawa trip, magazines I’d never worked with came to my door offering, quite literally, handfuls of cash.”
To assist her on a tour of Taiwan, Chizuko hires Wang Chizuru, a local Taiwanese woman, as her interpreter and guide. The pair relish street food and opulent feasts as they go on their way, savouring the “exotic” tastes and smells of traditional Taiwanese cuisine (different to that of “civilised” Japan of course). Chizuko, the privileged colonizer asks Chizuru, the colonial subject: “Do you not think that my appetite is like that of a monster’s?” To which the response is a polite dimpled smile. This sets the tone since, although a potentially romantic bond forms as they travel, their imbalanced status is ever present and enforced by Chizuko’s unwittingly patronizing viewpoint.
Chizuru the guide is seen through a romanticized, paternalistic lens. Chizuko seems well-meaning but is blinded by her imperial privilege. To satisfy Chizuko’s expectations Chizuru performs her take of what it is to be Taiwanese. Cooking and eating unite the two cultures that cannot truly understand each other. There is a series of descriptions of a wide range of dishes – so much for the insatiable greed of the colonizer . . .
Chizuko the novelist also lectures as she tours, attends tea parties and banquets. Her descriptions of her writing habits are imbued with a subtle air of self-importance. “Chi-chan began staying until evening on my writing days. If I happened to see the word “noodles” in my notes and called out that I wanted noodles, by dinnertime she would deliver clam and egg noodles along with grated yam noodles. In the Christian Bible when God said ‘let there be light’, there was light. When I said ‘let there be vermicelli noodles, rice noodles, thick starch noodles, egg-drop udon noodles’, Chi-would light up the dinner table with my fulfilled wishes.”
By the end of the trip, Chizuko believes she had formed a life-changing bond with her guide and that their time together became a pure friendship transcending their positions as colonizer and colonized. However, this is trounced by the modern-day Translator’s Note at the end of the narrative, which reframes everything you have just read. It turns out the intimacy within the text is largely absent from Chizuko’s later published works and memoirs. So the deep bond was a colonial fantasy, Chizuko being “in love” with a version of Chizuru created in her head. Added to which, the fictionalized version of the translator, Yang Shuang-zi, admits to filling in missing gaps.
Ultimately, the novel leaves you retracing every meal and conversation, wondering what, if anything, was real, and how much was shaped by how the colonizer chose to remember it. That lingering discomfort and the deliberate ambiguity, bolstered by the disorienting footnotes, push you to question your own assumptions. What reads like a literary game is a lesson in how authority is applied. If you read Eland Books reprints — charming, eccentric, untroubled by their imperial assumptions — you’ll recognise the register immediately.
We live in a world of contested facts, unstable archives and weaponised interpretation, so Taiwan Travelogue is a perfect, timely read. By inhabiting the early-twentieth-century travelogue genre, only to dismantle it rather than indulge in nostalgia, Yang Shuang-zǐ pulls off a masterful coup.
Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan Tr. Chi-Young Kim
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023
“She wasn’t a show-stopping beauty, and was unremarkable other than her exceptionally wide rump, but a man walking down the street would always turn to look at her; it was because she emitted a certain mysterious scent.”
Three women are at the centre of this sprawling, multi-generational epic: two are born before the Korean war, and one a daughter born afterwards; all are embroiled in the mythical forces of nature and destiny. Through their stories we see what it means to be part of the cycle of nature. A blend of magical realism, folklore and harsh industrial history, I loved Whale and could not put it down.
The central figure, Geumbok, leaves her village with a fishmonger whose trade she transforms thanks to her business acumen. After seeing a whale rise up from the ocean’s surface, she becomes obsessed with its scale and power. She moves from the coast to the inland village of Pyeongchang which she transforms from a dusty backwater into a thriving industrial town by creating a massive brick factory, and builds an opulent, whale-shaped cinema.
Geumbok’s rise to power was facilitated by the discovery of hidden gold in the ramshackle house she moved into. It was formerly the home of an angry one-eyed crone who started with nothing and accumulated a hidden fortune through spite and cunning. She had regularly beaten her one-eyed daughter, conceived with a halfwit, who fled to live with a beekeeper. The house is in fact cursed.
Geumbok introduces coffee to the citizens as a high-status form of sophistication and they become addicted to the bitter black liquid. Her café becomes the centre of the town: a hub of gossip, business deals and secrets. She sits at the centre of this web, knowing everything about everyone. The café replaces the old communal spaces and drinking traditional tea or rice wine; it represents the Westernization and industrialization of the Korean soul.
As the town prospers, the characters’ lives become entangled with a bizarre supporting cast: twin sisters who share one soul, a man who communicates with spirits, and various lovers and rivals.
Geumbok uses her sexuality as a tool of social mobility to escape poverty. Sex is a raw, transactional power and a catalyst for change; a means to an end. Throughout her various business ventures, she strategically navigates relationships with useful or powerful men to gain resources and protection. By maintaining a level of emotional detachment, she ensures that while men possess her body, she possesses their influence and money. By the end of her life, she views her former sex appeal used to manipulate men as something she no longer needs, trading it in for authority; and she begins to physically transform into a man. Whether she is fighting the patriarchy or simply assimilating into it is a debateable aspect of the novel. She is a force of nature who realizes that in her world, to consolidate power, she needs to transcend her own gender.
A restless entrepreneur who transforms a rural backwater into a bustling empire, Geumbok’s ambition comes at the cost of both her true identity, and her connection to her daughter Chunhui — a mute, massive reminder of biological womanhood, who communicates with elephants and possesses a remarkable ability to fire the perfect brick.
The story mirrors South Korea’s rapid shift from a folk-driven, rural society to a cold, industrial powerhouse. Individual lives are bent, crushed, or erased by immutable forces. Whale is realistic about power and survival. Violence and trauma are passed on from one generation to the next. After a series of disasters, there is no happy ending.
Chi-Young Kim’s translation in smooth, idiomatic English is strangely beautiful. It is both cynical and conspiratorial in tone; earthy and poetic. It slips effortlessly from lyricism to grit, from drama to magical-realist dreamscape. She conveys a sense of deep-seated grief and resentment without ever indulging in excess or sentimentality.
Butter by Asako Yuzuki Tr. Polly Barton
“Hearing you talk about Kajii made me anxious. I felt like you were being consumed by her, just like her victims. Although, really, that’s just a fancy way of saying I was just jealous.”
The runaway bestseller in translated literature over the past three years, Butter is inspired by Japan’s real-life ‘Konkatsu Killer’ case. The story centres around the controversial figure of a female serial killer awaiting trial in Tokyo Detention House. Manako Kajii had seduced three men she met online with her home cooking just before each one died in odd circumstances. Mr Motomatsu: insomniac; Mr Miimi: high blood pressure; Mr Yamamura: exhausted by his work at a think tank. The public is fascinated by the fact that Kajii does not fit the stereotype of a femme fatale since she is middle-aged, loud and plump, yet exerts such a firm hold on men they become obsessed with her.
Rika is a hard-working reporter in a male-dominated office and visits Kajii in Tokyo Detention House with the aim of interviewing her. Journalists are usually turned away, but Rika gets in thanks to the advice of her good friend, Reiko, by writing to the lonely serial killer with a recipe for boeuf bourguignon.
Reiko, is married to Ryōsuke and is obsessed with being a “good wife” and starting a family, enduring endless fertility treatments. She is fascinated by the idea of Kajii — a woman who lives entirely for her own pleasure.
Manako Kajii hates are “feminists and margarine”. For a gourmet cook, life inside is a culinary desert. A relationship based on food and swapping recipes develops between Kajii and Rika, who begins to cook and eat rich food, putting on weight. As she experiences the transformative, almost addictive nature of the food, the narrative begins to unfold like a dark, obsessive MasterChef series. Rika is desperate to uncover the truth about Kajii: is she a manipulative monster, or a liberating mentor teaching self-love?
As Rika puts on weight and becomes more assertive, demanding more from life, this changes the dynamic of her on-and-off relationship with her colleague, Shinoi. He expects Rika to be thin, efficient and undemanding. She begins to realise that men like Shinoi don’t appreciate a woman with a real “appetite”.
Rika, Reiko and Kajji are very different women from different backgrounds but they’re all lonely and fighting misogyny, fatphobia and self-erasure as a way of metabolising power in order to succeed, each in her own way. Kajii uses food and her culinary skills as a form of power, defiance and self-expression. How much appetite can a woman display before it becomes criminal? Butter represents indulgence, authenticity and true pleasure, contrasted against fake margarine, reflecting Kajii’s anti-feminist yet self-empowering worldview.
The inclusion of Helen Bannerman’s 1899 colonial text The Story of Little Black Sambo is a deliberately provocative act, echoing the novel’s preoccupations with consumption, transformation and hunger. It evokes colonial economies of appetite and excess: who gets to consume freely, and who is consumed instead?
Polly Barton’s translation is cool and fun; aloof and teasing; essential qualities in a novel which courts excess. To maintain such a fine balance is no mean feat.
Film, TV, games, pop culture and online fandom may have opened the door to Far Eastern literature, but the trend is real and not just a passing bubble. Nielsen IQ Book Data shows that nearly 48% of translated fiction buyers in the UK are under the age of thirty-four. While 53% of translated fiction buyers actively seek a ‘challenging read,’ signalling a growing appetite for wide-ranging literary voices. Welcome news for ambitious writing.
BUY Record of a night too brief
BUY The Housekeeper and the Professor
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