The Annotated Nightstand: What Mike Fu is Reading Now, and Next

As Mike Fu’s novel Masquerade progresses, his protagonist Meadow Liu’s day-to-day becomes increasingly haunted. While digging around a friend’s sublet for something, he finds a book entitled The Masquerade from early 1930s Shanghai written by a man whose Chinese name is eerily similar to Meadow’s (Liu Tian).

As the Fu’s novel continues, the line blurs between Meadow’s world and the fictional masked ball. Or, as our narrator explains, Meadow “blames the book for his state of affairs.”

The state of Meadow’s affairs? After a decade in New York, “[How could] he have imagined when he first arrived that this was how things would turn out? Drinking alone in the home of a woman who has disappeared, living with her ghosts and her masks, while his own ghosts come back to haunt him.”

It takes almost the entire book to comprehend, in some small part, the missing woman with whom he finds himself intensely connected, the ghosts, the masks, the found novel, the lost lover—the last decade of Meadow’s life.

Suspense is “a state of agitation produced by the desire to know what the future holds. Because uncertainty is a fundamental part of the human condition, suspense is central to our emotional landscape,” writes Kathryn Schultz in a recent New Yorker article. “We can feel it about almost anything, at any scale of significance.” What is and isn’t a coincidence begins to dog Meadow for this very reason.

With the end of every chapter in Masquerade comes a chronological leap, or perhaps into the pages of the mysterious novel. As soon as we think we have some sharpened edges of a figure or story line, Fu thrillingly zips our focus elsewhere.

Yet some of the loveliest writing in the book lies in Fu’s descriptions of love and desire. The tenor of a touch, smelling a beloved’s pillow after he gets out of bed, sex that gives over to blissful exhaustion. “How delicious and thrilling the descent was,” Fu writes, “the body tumbling head over heels, metallic momentum in his belly.”

In Masquerade, we have a fizzy cast of characters from the missing magnetic artist; the queer wingman; the hetero buddy; the sweet boyfriend. “Masquerade captures that ephemeral blossom of youth,” says Xuan Juliana Wang of the book, “of carefree days bumming smokes from crushes and spilling cocktails on strangers, as well as the dreaded anticipation of loneliness and self-doubt on the last train home.”

On his to-read pile, Fu says,

I’m pretty omnivorous when it comes to my reading habits. Living overseas for the past four years, and as someone who’s constantly trying to downsize his library, I’ve developed a taste for older editions in particular. I love scouring the book section of any thrift store I come across when I visit the U.S. Besides that, I tend to dip into old faves pretty regularly. I remember loving the Bradbury book in middle school. A friend lugged this copy across the Pacific for me just recently, so I’m rereading most of these stories for the first time in a quarter-century. Am also constantly playing catch-up with Asian American fiction and trying to sharpen my middling Japanese skills by way of manga and the occasional novel.

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Ray Bradbury, I Sing the Body Electric! and Other Stories

“They make a fairly convincing pitch here. It doesn’t seem possible, though, to find a woman who must be ten times better than Mother in order to seem half as good…except, of course, in the Twilight Zone.” Thus begins the one episode of The Twilight Zone Bradbury wrote that was produced, and which became a short story that gives this collection its title. (Thank you, Walt Whitman.)

But apparently he retitled the short story “The Beautiful One Is Here” for a bit, so if you’ve struggled with titles, rest easy that so did one of the greats! In the 1969 review of the collection in the New York Times, Martin Levin wrote, “You never know what to expect among these fictional odds and ends by Ray Bradbury. A windup grandma on the Pinocchio plan. A humanoid Abe Lincoln. A baby born in—gulp—the fifth dimension or something.”

Elysha Chang, A Quitter’s Paradise

Publishers Weekly says of A Quitter’s Paradise:

Chang debuts with the understated and quietly devastating story of a grieving 20-something woman. In 2013 New York City, Eleanor Liu is on track to fulfill her late mother Rita’s low expectations, having dropped out of a neuroscience graduate program to work in her classmate-turned-husband’s lab.

But, bored and unfulfilled both matrimonially and professionally, Eleanor soon has an affair with a colleague. In the months following her mother’s death, Eleanor makes increasingly risky and bizarre choices, such as spending unsanctioned time with a primate from the lab, before decamping for her childhood home in New Jersey, where she goes through Rita’s belongings and begins to grasp a greater sense of her life.

Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection centers on people who cast themselves against the world in an attempt to find their place within it, whether through masochistic fetish play or alpha-male Stoicism (‘We’re going to grind our way to Eden…and THOSE are my goals, PERIODT’),” writes Luke Gair in his Sewanee Review staff pick.

Bound by the ligatures of depravity, degradation, and decadence, each of the seven stories portrays rejection as an obsessive impulse….The social apparatus of modernity is not so much fragmented as it is prolapsed, unsightly and struggling under the weight of its own decay. If our chronic online existence is like shouting into the void, then Rejection is the void shouting back.

Jose Ando, Jackson Hitori/ジャクソンひとり

Ando, a mixed-race man of Black and Japanese ancestry, attends to some of the particular issues of racism in Japan in this prestigious Akutagawa Prize-shortlisted debut novel. Kalau Almony, a translator of Japanese who lives in the country and is originally from Hawaii, says in his review of Ando’s book:

Jackson Hitori by Jose Ando starts with a gut punch, but the moment I knew this was going to be a really meaningful book was about 20 pages in when Jackson is stopped by a cop for riding his bike home. [T]his random police questioning is called 職務質問 shokumu shitsumon, and any Black or brown person living in Japan will tell you it’s regular practice. [R]eading this scene, I was taken back to all the times I was stopped by police for no reason, and realized that I had never seen shoku shitsu in a novel before.

Saki, The Story-Teller

Saki is a penname for the British Edwardian writer Hector Hugh Munro, who took up the alias when he teamed up with Francis Carruthers Gould to write political satire beginning in 1900. (Saki was the word for “cupbearer” in Edward FitzGerald’s famous translation Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam—if you want to go on a deep dive, enjoy this beautifully nerdy blog post.)

Munro continued to write stories, often with a sly man named Clovis Sangrail, that commented on his society under the shield of his hidden identity. Munro had other reasons to keep his record clean: he was gay at a time when suspicion for homosexual behavior was at a fever pitch, including the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde.

Stephen Moss writes in the Guardian on the centennial of Munro’s death:

Despite a coterie of literary fans, Saki’s icy, perfectly constructed short stories have been relatively little read over the past fifty years—years of smug belief in endless progress—but his tales, by turns malevolent and macabre, may be due a revival in our new age of exigency.

R.F. Kuang, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution

Kuang is author most recently of Yellowface, and the Poppy War trilogy prior to Babel. I’ll admit I inhaled Babel over a few days this summer—don’t let the fat spine scare you away!

Kurt Guldentops and Sungshin Kim write in their review in Los Angeles Review of Books,

Set in an altered 1830s Britain, the novel speaks to the historical imagination. The fantastic is used to demythologize the imperial past, with a magic system inspired by postcolonial thought. Even more ambitious is the novel’s literary play, which subverts the campus novel. These elements are blended together by Kuang’s writerly alchemy into a captivating whole.

Babel is mostly told from the perspective of Robin Swift, a Chinese-born boy brought to England by the eerie Professor Lovell after Robin’s mother dies in a cholera epidemic. The fact that Robin needs to pick his own name—adopting his last name from the author of Gulliver’s Travels—sets the stage for questions of identity and belonging. The professor, however, already has a destiny in mind for the boy: to study at Oxford University’s Royal Institute of Translation (nicknamed Babel, suitably housed in a tower) where he is himself working on the Chinese language.

Osamu Tezuka, Phoenix/火の鳥 (volume 10, “Life”/「生命編」)

Fu explained he has made his way through this twelve-part manga series through the year, ready to begin volume ten. The stories circle around reincarnation and immortality through a myriad of times (from historical past to fantastical future).

Tezuka was one of the premier manga artists in Japanese history, revolutionizing the art form beginning in the 1940s onward. (Even if you’ve never read manga or watched anime, you likely know Mighty Atom a.k.a. Astro Boy—that’s Tezuka.) The sparkly eyes we associate with anime are from Tezuka, which were apparently inspired by the fabulous eye makeup of the Takarazuka Revue all-women theater troupe he saw as a child.

While his work impacted the whole world, Tezuka’s reach within Japan is enormous. As stated in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, “Foreign visitors to Japan often find it difficult to understand why Japanese people like comic books so much….One explanation for the popularity of comics in Japan is that Japan had Osamu Tezuka, whereas other nations did not.”

Though he didn’t finish it before his death, Tezuka thought of the Phoenix series as his greatest life’s work, which he labored over periodically for almost four decades.