Dinah has moved to Japan to teach English, following the suicide of her brother Michael, a child musical prodigy as freakish as Mozart, who speaks to her from beyond the grave. Her new friend Yasuko has experienced her own loss – her 21-year-old son Jun has vanished. Yasuko, it turns out, can speak to and influence animals – an ability acquired at 13, through a backstory involving horrific child abuse – and she decides to reactivate her long-suppressed abilities. Unfortunately, the magical realism feels berserk and barely controlled, prone to ornamenting and occluding rather than illuminating the connections between extraordinary talent and mental illness, or between suffering and wisdom, that underlie the novel.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
I Seek a Kind Person
Julian Borger, John Murray, $34.99

In August 1938 an advertisement appeared in what was then the Manchester Guardian asking for a kind person to adopt an 11-year-old Viennese boy. The boy was Robert Borger, the ad was posted by his distraught parents, and Robert’s story – combination memoir and investigative reporting – is told by his journalist son, Julian, in admirably restrained, often deeply moving prose. Manchester had the biggest Jewish population outside London and the ads, to save Jewish children in Nazi Austria, were common. Robert grew up in Wales, but the shadow of those years never went, and he took his own life in 1983. This is to an extent, though, a group portrait, Borger tracing the lives of other Jewish children who appeared in the paper, often with startling tales. It’s also a disturbing portrait of the transition of a Jewish friendly Vienna to the Anschluss.

The Night Parade
Jami Nakamura Lin, Scribe, $45

Japanese American author Jami Nakamura Lin writes in a combination of memoir and study – it’s a “speculative memoir” – that she is trying to find “the blade that will cut my Gordian Knot”. As a child, she was steeped in Japanese mythology, and in her recollections of growing up with bipolar (undiagnosed for a long time) she returns to those tales as a way of seeing her condition in universal terms, figures from Japanese myth often emerging as psychological, as much as cultural archetypes. Like the Yokai, for example – monsters with which humans do battle, as someone might do battle with their personal demons – Jami Nakamura Lin suffered severe mood swings, suicidal impulses and depression. Epic in structure, this is, as much as anything else, a simply written, often poignant examination of “the things we fear and do not understand”.

Art and Politics
Josephine Caust, Routledge, $35.99

In the film Shakespeare in Love an actor asks a man why he is attending a play rehearsal, the man replying, “I’m the money”. While it may be a relatively popular view that artists – and Australians have always had an ambivalent attitude to them – love starving in their garrets, the fact is they need money. Although the focus is overwhelmingly on Australia, this academic study gives us a quick history of the arts and the state, Athenian dramatists such as Sophocles, for example, being bankrolled by the state. Josephine Caust examines funding from colonial times to the present, looking at the different attitudes of varying governments, incorporating examples of control and censorship and the neoliberal notion of the arts as a business. Although this is to a degree specialist, it also covers the nuts and bolts of artistic creativity that everyone should be aware of.

The Food Adventurers
Daniel E. Bender, Reaktion, $44.99

When celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain ate a cobra’s heart in Vietnam, he was demonstrating how global travel had changed mainstream ideas about food, but also, in the spirit of latter-day Conradian venturer, carrying with him the residue of colonialism. Daniel Bender, professor of food studies at Toronto University, charts the way travel (especially the pre-war around-the-world variety) transformed what we eat. In the 19th and early 20th centuries travellers were warned off local food, but this gradually changed, especially in the Cold War years, when food, especially from the former “Far East”, became synonymous with culinary exotica and eating the “other” became fashionable. There are characters aplenty, such as pioneering Austrian travel writer Ida Pfeiffer, in this entertaining study of tourism and galloping gourmets.

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