- All articles

All articles

- 2023: The Year in Translation(s)

- Podcast with Scott D Seligman, author of “Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China”

- New Book Announcement: “Tear-Drenched Earth: Cinema and the Partition of India” by John W Hood

- “India’s Military Strategy: Countering Pakistan’s Challenge” by S Kalyanaraman

- “From From” by Monica Youn

- “Music Making in Iran from the 15th to the Early 20th Century” by Amir Hosein Pourjavady

- New Book Announcement: “Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu” by Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

- 2023: Highlights of a year in podcasts

- “The Black Lizard” by Edogawa Rampo

- “The Book of the Činggis Legend: A Critical Edition of a Seventeenth-century Volga-Turkī Source”, edited and translated by Mária Ivanics

2023: The Year in Translation(s)

A 2023 round-up of reviews of works in translation from Japanese, Korean and Chinese through Turkic and Spanish: fiction, poetry, non-fiction, classics and folk-tales.

Japanese

Chinese

Korean

South, Southeast & Central Asian

Rest of World

Podcast with Scott D Seligman, author of “Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China”

Moderne Hotel, Harbin, built by the Jewish entrepreneur Joseph Kaspe

On an August night in 1933 Harbin in then-Japanese controlled Manchuria, Semyon Kaspe, French citizen, famed concert musician, and Russian Jew, is abducted after a night out. Suspicion falls on the city’s fervently anti-semitic Russian fascists. Yet despite pressure from the French consulate, the Japanese police slow-walk the investigation—and three months later, Semyon is found dead.

Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China, Scott D Seligman (Potomac Books, October 2023)

The abduction, murder and trial catch the world’s attention right as Japan is trying to win international support for the puppet state of Manchukuo—and it’s the subject of Scott Seligman’s latest book, Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China.

In this interview, Scott and I talk about Harbin, the major players in Semyon’s abduction and murder, and how the investigation and trial became an international sensation.

Scott D Seligman is a writer and historian. He is the national award-winning author of numerous books, including The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City (Potomac, 2020), The Third Degree: The Triple Murder that Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice (Potomac, 2018), and The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo (Hong Kong University Press, 2013).

Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.

New Book Announcement: “Tear-Drenched Earth: Cinema and the Partition of India” by John W Hood

Tear-Drenched Earth: Cinema and the Partition of India, John W Hood (Orient BlackSwan)

The trauma of Partition is an indelible part of the collective memory of the citizens of India and Pakistan and, later, Bangladesh. With over 15 million displaced and several million dead on both sides of the Radcliffe Line, this massive exodus remains forever a black mark in history. Partition and its aftermath have been central to much of subcontinental cinema, and found frequent and varied representation on screen. Tear-Drenched Earth looks at landmark films from the 1950s to the 2010s that depict aspects of the Partition, such as Gandhi, Chinnamul, Meghe Dhaka Tara, Viceroy’s House, Tamas, Garm Hawa, Pinjar and Toba Tek Singh.

Focusing on films that highlight the tragic absurdity of a historic catastrophe unprecedented in scale and devastation, and the unimaginable horror of its consequences, John W. Hood studies the ways in which it affected lives on both sides of the divide. He examines the ideas of nation, self, faith, identity, family, love, home and memory in the wake of Partition, and shows how religion and politics are inextricably linked and how they shaped Partition violence. He also reflects on how the newly-drawn borders of the newborn nations created and reinforced notions of the Other that fostered a blind lust for revenge and mindless violence which continued long after Partition, as witnessed in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the 2002 Godhra massacre.

Poignant, insightful and compelling, this book will interest Indian film buffs and general readers as well as students of film studies, culture studies, Indian history and the Partition.

Tear-Drenched Earth: Cinema and the Partition of India by John W Hood

Orient BlackSwan, November 2023

“India’s Military Strategy: Countering Pakistan’s Challenge” by S Kalyanaraman

The late S Kalyanaraman was one of India’s foremost strategic thinkers until his untimely death in 2022 due to complications from COVID-19. He worked as a research fellow at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. His last book, India’s Military Strategy, concisely explains and assesses the evolution of India’s military strategy towards Pakistan as manifested in their repeated clashes between 1947 and the early 21st century.

Kalyanaraman approaches India’s military strategy from a solid grounding in the strategic thought of Clausewitz, Jomini, Delbruck, Mahan, Corbett, Douhet, Billy Mitchell, Liddell Hart, Fuller, Brodie and Schelling, among others. There are references sprinkled throughout the book to the writings of Edward Luttwak, Hew Strachan, Theodore Ropp, John Mearsheimer, Ashley Tellis, and Geoffrey Till. And he does not neglect the strategic thinking of Indian scholars such as K Subrahmanyam, Arjun Subramaniam, Jasit Singh, Sandeep Unnithan, and Vijay Sakhuja. His framework for analysis is three-pronged: policy, strategy, and doctrine:

Policy determines the political aims to be attained. Strategy translates political aims into military objectives, determines the form of war (defensive or offensive) to be waged, and evolves an overall plan for the application of military force. Doctrine governs how the armed services apply force to attain the military goals flowing from the overall military objectives.

India’s Military Strategy: Countering Pakistan’s Challenge, S Kalyanaraman (Bloomsbury Academic India, December 2023; Bloomsbury, February 2024)

Kalyanaraman distinguishes between doctrines for land warfare, naval warfare, and air warfare. In a democracy like India’s, civilians set the policy, while strategy and doctrine are formulated and implemented in a collaborative manner by political and military leaders. Ideally, policy provides the guidance for strategy and doctrine, Kalyanaraman understood, however, that strategy and doctrine can influence policy formation.

The India-Pakistan rivalry has its roots in British imperialism, religious divisions, and geopolitical competition. Kalyanaraman writes that the rivalry has been sustained by “three inter-related factors…: incompatible conceptions of national identity, Pakistan’s quest for parity with India, and the conflict over ‘Kashmir’”. He provides charts to show the evolution of the shifting military balance over seven decades of conflict. And he places the India-Pakistan rivalry within the context of domestic politics in India and Pakistan, India’s territorial disputes with China, the US-Soviet Cold War, the South Asian nuclear stalemate, and the post-Cold War struggle with jihadist terrorism.

Kalyanaraman separates India’s military strategy towards Pakistan into three phases: a strategy of exhaustion from 1950 to 1970 in which India strove for “strategic success” with the goal of achieving a favorable balance of power with Pakistan; a strategy of annihilation in the 1971 war which resulted in the independence of East Pakistan as Bangladesh; and a strategy of limited war against a nuclear-armed Pakistan, which carried over into the post-Cold War struggle against Pakistani-supported jihadists.

The author devotes chapters to what he calls the “half-war” of 1947-48, which resulted from “the catastrophic communal violence unleashed by the division of Punjab into Indian and Pakistani portions”, which spawned disputes over Junagadh, Hyderabad, and especially Jammu and Kashmir—the latter state which shares borders with both countries; the 1951 crisis over Jammu and Kashmir, which shaped India’s force structure in the 1950s; the 1965 clash of arms which began as a dispute over the Rann of Kutch and expanded thereafter; the 1971 fighting in East Pakistan in the midst of Pakistan’s civil war; the 1999 Kargil War (again involving Jammu and Kashmir); and the struggle against jihadists based in Pakistan which continues to this day.

Kalyanaraman was not confident that the sources of the India-Pakistan rivalry would go away, so he counseled India’s leaders to strengthen the strategy of limited war, which has a precise and limited objective and is fought with limited means in a confined geographical region. It sounds so simple, but as Clausewitz noted, even the simplest things in war are difficult.

Francis P Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War. His writings appear in The Diplomat, Joint Force Quarterly, the University Bookman and other publications. He is an attorney and an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University.

“From From” by Monica Youn

Monica Youn (photo: Sarah Shatz)

Deeply experimental, creative and thought-provoking, From From by leading Korean-American poet Monica Youn, looks at the complexity of race through myths, history and popular culture, comparing the ways “otherness” is seen in both East Asian and Western cultures and norms. Through these complex, original and tragic-comic poems, the poet explores the deep roots of human fear or hysteria against other bodies.

Throughout the collection, there are mini sequences of poems that draw from Greek mythology and yet these are poems that examine or revisit body metaphors. Some of the poems capture the people’s irrational fear against “the Other”. For instance, in “Study of Two Figures (Midas/Marigold)”, King Midas has the power to transform or stain everything with an “other” color, which becomes for the people a source of anxiety: “Everything he touches turns yellow. / We are meant to understand this as a form of death.”

In “Study of Two Figures (Agave / Pentheus)”, Youn offers a retelling of the Greek myth. In the original story, Dionysus places Pentheus under his spell, convinces him to spy on the Theban bacchants, and leads him to his death at the hand of his own mother, Agave. Here, we see how both the mother and the son try in their own ways albeit not successfully to rid themselves of the embarrassment or shame of thinking or feeling something Asian in them:

Sorrow found the Asian thing embarrassing.

We’re not that kind of Asians said Sorrow.

From From, Monica Youn (Carcanet, May 2023; Graywolf, March 2023)

One of my favorite poetic sequences in the collection is “Deracinations: Eight Sonograms”, in which we regard the deeply-rooted prejudices and anxieties around race or racial divides. In “2. Education”, a poem within the sequence, an Asian girl complains to her mom about being misunderstood at school, where she is subjected to racial injustice yet cannot bring herself to explain she’s Korean not Chinese, and how the poem ends with the mother’s clarity:

[…] And don’t talk

like a know-nothing American kid:

it’s not karate. It’s tae kwon do.

In “3. Culture”, we are offered a glimpse into the inter-generational space where we witness the impact of otherness in how things or people are labelled or named, and the danger of being consumed, exoticised or orientalized:

‘[…] Overseas,

they’re called K-drama. This one’s

a number-one hit in China!

Similarly, in “6. Epicanthic”, the daughter resists the temptation of looking like yet another Korean girl made beautiful through cosmetic surgery:

For the last time, Mom, the answer

Is No. I’m not going to cut

up my face, let them scissor

my eyelids, chisel my chin.

As such, stereotypes or expectations are imposed from both outside as well as inside the ethnic minority, coming from—in this case—either the assumptions from the Asian parents or community, or else from the exoticist perspective from the White majority.

The section “Western city” deals with the commonality of exploitation and questions the causes of unfairness or power imbalance in society. For example in “Study of Two Figures (Ignatz / Kraft)’, we appreciate one’s inability to comprehend the situation objectively because of the prejudiced ways of looking and interpretation of “truth”, of the colonizing of spaces:

We are told to read the figure as white.

In order to read the figure as white we must read the blank background as white.

We have often been told that blankness means whiteness.

But this does not help us understand what it is that the figure fears.

Repeating the same motif “we are told”, the poet points out the danger of self-deprecation, or one’s inability to recognize, witness or react to the forms of micro-aggressions among the ethnic minority community, showing us how such humbling or passivity can only lead to more suffering, deepen fear or injustice or misunderstandings.

In the collection, we see the power of irony in unraveling the fraught assumptions in definitions we readily accept, such as nationhood. In “Studio”, we see an angry doctor who “wants to convince / America or those he thinks of as / America he surveys his ocean […]”

In the third section of the book entitled “The Magpies”, one realizes that there is so much at stake in the use of language, and so much power that might be lost or gained. Magpies are seen as harbingers of luck in East Asian stories but perceived as the opposite of such in Europe. In the sequence of fables about magpies, Youn translates immigrant lives into surreal fables, prompting the reader to challenge stereotypes, to reinterpret the injustice behind seemingly innocent acts. In “Parable of the Magpie and the Mirror”, we catch a glimpse of one’s challenge to navigate a society steeped in prejudices.

In the long prose poem inspired by a Korean film The Throne, “Detail of the Rice Chest”, Youn raises the issue of allowing chinks in the walls of such a chest where multi-legged insects enter it.

None of the Fresh Off the Boat are fresh off the boat. Nearly all of them were born in America. By pretending to be foreign, they make English-speaking audiences feel more American.

My parents are not fresh off the boat. They have been in America for more than fifty years. They speak both Korean and English.

The speaker perceives the discrepancy between how an immigrant looks on TV, and how her own family looks. Here, it exposes the problem of self-deprecation as defence mechanism and the harm in remaining silent against unjust portrayals of migrants (“I have called myself a gook many times.”) and how unconscious we are in subjecting ourselves to stereotypes and racist labels: “[a] television is a box that allows us to put people inside it.”

At the end of the collection, the lyric essay “In the Passive Voice” examines research on migration and race, the distorted truths around unfair immigration laws and racial violence, looking at how the passive voice is used in exclusionist laws, especially the contexts in which immigrants were “brought” into the country, obliterating the rationale for it as cheap labor for the country. At the same time, there is this temptation to fit into the model minority, as in: “I am polite. I am evasive. I keep my head down.” Sometimes, the fear to be seen as a minority is also manifested in the choice of pronouns, how “I use the pronoun ‘they’ rather than the pronoun ‘we’’’ as it “reflects my discomfort with including myself in the ‘they’.”

What is at stake then, is not just one’s own fate but the whole community. By not speaking up against racial injustice or aggressions, one is perpetuating such harm to many others.

Weaving history, myths, literature, films, historical accounts with personal encounters, Youn takes away the many guises of racism, whether tragic or comic, as the poet traces through history and modern life the origins of such anxieties, while protesting against self-perpetuating beliefs and acquiescing silences, which will not take the problem away.

Jennifer Wong is a Hong Kong poet now residing in London. Her books include Goldfish (Chameleon Press), Diary of a Miu Miu Salesgirl (Bitter Melon Poetry) and 回家 Letters Home (Nine Arches Press).

“Music Making in Iran from the 15th to the Early 20th Century” by Amir Hosein Pourjavady

Persia, polychrome tile, 19th century (via Wikimedia Commons)

The history of Iran’s rich musical culture presents a paradox. On the one hand, there is a distinctive Persian style of music, different from its Arab, Turkish, Central and South Asian neighbors. It has its own modes, its own vocal styles, its favorite instruments, its own performance genres. On the other hand, for many centuries the frontiers of Iran were fluid; a series of wars and revolutions transported its cultural centers from east to west and back again. At times the royal court existed only in camps, and indeed the musicians, dancers and singers lived in tents as well. Foreign invasions and conquest of adjacent countries brought a steady supply of musicians from exogenous traditions: Indians, Georgians, Armenians. And from time to time, Islamic rigorism banned music altogether. So what is Iranian music and how did it survive over the centuries?

Music Making in Iran from the 15th to the Early 20th Century, Amir Hosein Pourjavady (Edinburgh University Press, December 2023)

Iranian music is based on modes, which can be described as on a continuum between scales and melody, richer than the former but not as individual as the latter. Traditions prescribed the sequencing of the modes, and also their tempos. Within the expected sequences of modes and rhythms, musicians invented, giving listeners an entertaining blend of expectation and surprise. Music served many different social functions in Iranian culture, including military music using sonorous reeds and kettle drums, court music that replicated the harmonies of the celestial spheres, joyful dance music to celebrate Now Ruz, weddings and circumcisions, and sentimental music for amatory poetry. Each genre used appropriate modes and rhythms, and the same acoustic psychology would have underpinned Iranian music for thousands of years.

Against this bedrock of sound, the music terminology employed to explain music in Iran has changed greatly. Pourjavady attributes this to the political and cultural turmoil that played out in Iran over the last 500 years. In the earlier centuries, polymaths like Marâghi provided a theoretical basis for Iranian music: an elaborate and consistent description based on mathematics. In the Timurid era, with its emphasis on classification and canons, this academic tradition (which Pourjavady calls “systematizing”) wielded much influence. Gradually, however, practicing musicians paid less attention to theory, inventing their own, less systematic terminology, which is difficult for us to understand in the absence of aural examples.

This shift from theory to practice became a chasm in the 18th century, when Iran suffered the greatest disruption since the time of the Mongols. The Afghans, Russians and Turks occupied and plundered most of the country. A courtly center ceased to exist. The music that emerged after this dark period reflects almost entirely practice and apprenticeship. As Tehran became the political and cultural capital of a newly-constituted empire, the scattered musicians migrated there and started new schools of performance. One of these musicians, Mirza Abdollah Farahani, called his music “Radif”, and this name has stuck to what is now considered Iranian classical repertory. Radif means “sequence”. While Mirza Abdollah used many ancient model sequences, he classified which sequences should appear in which order, and defined how an individual concert should be organized. It’s a little like the imposition of the sonata form in Western music under Haydn and Mozart. This means that a Radif concert does not sound at all like the music played for Tamerlane. But just as Mozart could sneak in a traditional Länderle melody, so an ancient model sequence like “shur” is common to both the current Radif and Iran’s lost classical music.

To understand the persistence of Iranian music traditions, Pourjavady evokes its courtesan culture in some detail, devoting an entire chapter to this. The imperial courts had a tradition of training concubines, that is, slaves and lesser wives of the shah, who played music for the harem. Accomplished (male) teachers taught these women. As the shah’s private property, they were forbidden to give public performances. For street celebrations, the shah paid equally erudite courtesans to entertain his subjects. These women gained tremendous notoriety. Shah Abbas sent two famous courtesans to accept the surrender of Kandahar as a special humiliation for the defeated Mughals. It is easy to imagine that the courtesans acted as a ballast for Iranian musical culture in its darkest hours. When Nader Shah careened like a comet across the battlefields of Asia, he brought hundreds of courtesans with him. The ability to make music, even during bloody wars, brought a measure of safety to these cultured women.

Music Making in Iran presents a complete, if sometimes slow going, account of this great musical culture, and clarifies the shifting meaning of the terms over time—making it easier to understand older accounts of Iranian music and its relationship to other musical traditions of the Middle East. Good use too is made of western accounts of Iranian music, showing that European visitors of the 16th and 17th century found both charm and challenge in appreciating it.

David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019). His forthcoming book Horse Power will be published by WW Norton in 2023.

New Book Announcement: “Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu” by Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu, Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Orient BlackSwan, November 2023)

Symbols of Substance is a groundbreaking analysis of the political culture and political economy of the small Nayaka states that emerged and flourished in the Tamil country in the 16th and 1th centuries. An unusual product of triple authorship, the book examines how such states emerged, what their ideological moorings were, and what they have left us in terms of a cultural heritage.

In so doing, it overturns the cliché of a South India in terminal decline after 1565, which had long dominated the narratives of both historians and popular writers. In the decades since its original publication in 1992, Symbols of Substance remains an indispensable reference for the study not only of South India but of early modern state formation in South Asia.

Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu

by Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Orient BlackSwan, November 2023

2023: Highlights of a year in podcasts

Another bumper year of podcasts. Here is a selection of a dozen highlights from short stories and pop-classics in translation to biography, history, society and the arts. Click on the speaker to hear the podcast … or download (and subscribe!) from your favorite podcast app.

- Steve Kemper, author of Our Man In Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor

- Mai Nardone, author of Welcome Me to the Kingdom

- James M Zimmerman, author of The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China

- Philip Snow, author of China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord

- Robert Hillenbrand, author of The Great Mongol Shahnama

- Vaudine England, author of Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong

- Authors from the Boss Fight Books series on classic video games, from Super Mario Bros 3 to Majora’s Mask

- Jeffrey Angles, translator of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again by Shigeru Kayama

- John Zubrzycki, author of Dethroned: The Downfall of India’s Princely States

- Susan Blumberg-Kason, author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China

- Hugo Wong, author of America’s Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream

- Elise Hu, author of Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital

“The Black Lizard” by Edogawa Rampo

Edogawa Rampo

Edogawa Rampo (or Ranpo) was one of the most prolific Japanese mystery and crime writers of a century or so ago, and his work has remained in the public eye, whether in Japanese film, manga, video games, or translations. Born Taro Hirai, in 1923 he made his literary debut under a pen name chosen in homage to his literary hero, Edgar Allan Poe. He went on to write dozens of novels, novellas and short stories.

In the 1930s, he introduced a detective character named Akechi Kogoro, who appeared in several mystery novels, one of which was the 1934 The Black Lizard, later made into a film in 1968. In 2006, Ian Hughes translated into English Rampo’s novels, The Black Lizard and Beast in the Shadows, appearing together in one volume and published in Japan. Hughes’s translation of The Black Lizard is now newly-published separately; the story doesn’t seem to have lost any of the mystery, intrigue, or playfulness that made Rampo popular a hundred years ago.

The Black Lizard, Edogawa Rampo, Ian Hughes (trans) (Penguin Modern Classics, October 2023)

The story opens at a Christmas Eve party in Ginza, identified—in the only indication that this story takes place long ago—as “the largest and most prosperous part of the Imperial City”. Rampo goes on to describe the rainbow of neon lights and tens of thousands of passersby. It’s at this party that the villain of the story is introduced.

A single woman stepped lightly into the centre of the crowd as they parted to let her pass. She wore a black evening dress with a black hat, black gloves, black stockings, and black shoes. Totally framed in black, her vivacious and beautiful face was thrilled, flowering like a red rose.

She goes by the name of Dark Angel, but soon the title of the book will become apparent. As the Dark Angel seems to magically transform from her all-black ensemble into a glittery spectacle of pearls and diamonds, the black lizard tattoo on her left arm shines in the spotlight. It’s especially pronounced because she’s not wearing any clothes and there’s nothing else on her besides the bright jewels.

The Dark Angel is an exhibitionist, and she’s also a thief and the queen of the underworld. When she learns that an acquaintance named Jun’ichi has killed a rival and the rival’s girlfriend, she puts a plan into place in which she will hide him while he helps her carry out one of her biggest heists to date: the robbery of Japan’s largest diamond and the kidnapping of the diamond merchant’s daughter.

This heist is the backbone of the story. The Dark Angel assumes the name of Madame Midorikawa and always makes a striking appearance, no matter her name or which disguise she hides behind.

Wrapped in furs, Mme Midorikawa stood for a moment, and then a man stepped out and joined her. An older man, maybe about forty, with a stiff, pointed moustache, dark goatee, and large horn-rimmed spectacles. His thick, heavy coat with collar did not completely hide the striped formal pants he was wearing, making him look like, perhaps, a politician.

The man Midorikawa arrives with is Jun’ichi. The pair checks into a hotel to carry out the diamond theft and the kidnapping of the diamond merchant’s daughter, Sanae, also staying at the hotel. Standing in the way of this scheme is Rampo’s ace private detective, Akechi Kogoro.

Midorikawa and Akechi meet at the hotel and make a wager. If Akechi cannot save Sanae and the diamond, he will give up his career as a private detective. And if he can save the day, Midorikawa will give up her extensive jewelry collection. The two play a game of cat and mouse; just when it seems as if Midorikawa has gotten away with her crime, Akechi shows that he’s been on her trail all along. The plot twists through numerous adopted personas and disguises, all while Midorikawa’s real plan begins to surface.

Rampo is a master storyteller and Hughes’s translation makes it easy to keep track of the characters, their alter-egos and the many twists and turns the story takes from Tokyo to just outside Osaka. The book is a treat for fans of mysteries and crime novels. A classic is just that: a classic.

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong.

“The Book of the Činggis Legend: A Critical Edition of a Seventeenth-century Volga-Turkī Source”, edited and translated by Mária Ivanics

Baskirs, print ca 1835 via Wikimedia Commons)

Genghis Khan established the greatest land empire ever known. His heirs saw to it that his accomplishments be remembered in a number of now classic works, like the Secret Histories of the Mongols, the Compendium of Histories by Rashiduddin, and Juvayni’s History of the World Conqueror. But souvenirs of Genghis Khan also survived in folk tales of the Tatar peoples, where they were transformed for cultural and political purposes, as shown in Mária Ivanics’s masterful editing of The Činggis Legend.

These tales survive in manuscripts from the 17th and 18th century. The copyists demonstrate good handwriting and a command of the languages of high Muslim culture: Turkish, Persian and Arabic. With a gap of 500 years from the events described, they made errors in transcription of unfamiliar, especially Mongolian words. Nevertheless they faithfully recorded a number of historic elements, even when these clashed with Islamic orthodoxy. It was more important for the copyist to emphasize their identity as heirs of the Golden Horde, than to fit their stories into a Muslim worldview.

The Book of the Činggis Legend: A Critical Edition of a Seventeenth-century Volga-Turkī Source, Mária Ivanics (ed, trans) (Brill, December 2023)

In common with the “scientific” histories of Rashiduddin and Juwayni, Genghis Khan’s origins are described as nothing short of miraculous, difficult to square with Islamic beliefs. Genghis Khan proceeds from not one but two virgin births, that of his grandmother and of his mother. The grandmother’s story recalls that of Danae, shut away in a tower by her emperor parents to protect her from the world, she falls pregnant from a sunbeam. This princess of the west is then sent in a sealed ship to the far ends of the earth, where she marries a local khan. Her son dies before he can impregnate his wife, but his seed descends in a sunbeam and generates Genghis Khan. This emphasizes Genghis Khan’s claim to world domination, since his great grandparents are described as emperors. It also underlines his connection to a solar dynasty, since in two generations his progenitors are the sun itself. What the folk story misses is the origin of the name Genghis Khan, since it attributes this name to him at birth, rather than his given name, Temüjin.

Likewise inconsistent with Islamic orthodoxy, but more realistic, the tale describes the agency and freedom enjoyed by Mongol women, which probably continued among the pastoralist Turks of the Golden Horde. When Genghis Khan returns from exile to take control of his people, he has his enemies massacred, along with all their families. A woman takes pity on four little boys, and hides them in her tent. When Genghis Khan discovers this treachery, he angrily summons her to surrender the boys, but is not prepared for her appearance. “No one had seen such a beautiful [woman] person at that time. She was born to be so beautiful by God’s command. She had hair the length of forty fathoms and her two nurses carried it after her on a golden tray.” The lovestruck Khan forgives her and asks her to become his wife. Readers of the Secret History of the Mongols will recognize the strong-willed Börte Khatun as the beautiful heroine of this story. She bears Genghis Khan four sons, who carry on his line.

Linking the legendary times of Genghis Khan with their present, the narrators attribute to the world conqueror the bestowing on each clan their ancestral battle cry (uran, compare with original Hungarian “Hoorah”), their totemic bird and tree, and their horse brand or tamgha. These are the most tangible signs of their identity, of belonging to one people. In this way, the legacy of Genghis Khan stays on as a lived environment.

The narrative moves on to the career of Timur-e Lang, which poses a problem for the Genghisid-centric story. Although Timur probably came from middle-ranking beys in the service of the Genghisids, the narrative here describes him as a scrappy ragamuffin who assembles a gang of young toughs and takes over from the legitimate khan in a roadside ambush. Thereafter, however, the figure of Timur that emerges in this tale is consistent with his own official histories, like the Zafarnama of Yazdi and Hafez-e Abru. The iron emir is ruthless with his enemies. He spares from annihilation one group of pastoralists only on condition that they convert to Islam. During another massacre he kills all those people who accuse him of evil or cruelty, but pardons a group who acknowledge that he is merely the instrument of God’s wrath. However when Tamerlane’s reign is over, a legitimate Genghisid replaces him.

For centuries thereafter, the heirs of Genghis Khan remain an essential element in the governance of the steppe. His descendants provide the all-important function for pastoralist peoples, to assign pastures to each clan. When the Tatar khans grow too weak to enforce their judgment, their people began to ask Moscow’s Tsar to adjudicate. They address Ivan the Terrible as a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, since they cannot conceive of a powerful monarch without this lineage.

The epopee of Genghis Khan and his heirs draws to a close as the Russians take on this ever greater role in governing the steppe. Many Tatars convert to Christianity. Despite the revolts of the Bashkirs and of Stenka Razin the Russians occupy Tatar capitals, including Kasimov, Kazan, Astrakhan and Azov. Halley’s comet passes through the sky, heralding even darker days to come.

Mária Ivanics’s edition, with a facsimile of the manuscripts, a transcription into Latin letters, translation and erudite notes makes this work accessible to a wide range of readers. It contains a treasure trove of insight into the culture of Russia’s Tatar people, and the lasting legacy of Genghis Khan in Russia.

David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019). His forthcoming book Horse Power will be published by WW Norton in 2023.

Table of Contents

Asian Review of Books: 28 Dec, 2023

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