Almost off-topic : Asian Books

When you are in Tokyo, you wake up in the morning, wake up the computer and quickly start reading the newspaper of your home country 10 000 km away, there is a telling of how the Internet has been reshaping the story of being abroad, nostalgia and the cures of it. This is a story I have not yet read about. Anyway, sometimes you get uneasy with the fact that here seems less a matter than over there. But between here and over there lays a huge gap needing sometimes to be plugged in, a look at another "ailleurs" and the languish of all the elsewhere one can't be.

I have been following Scholars without Borders' blog for a few years now and I recently placed my second order. It definitely took its time to land here, but receiving a package from India, weird packing method as seen form the kingdom of wrapping, Japan, using a variety of rope belonging to the past, is still a mighty exotic experience, in fact, exoticism in it purest, juvenile form, just like receiving stamps from many unknown regions of the world like Japan was a thrilling and a day-dreaming inducing event a long time ago. A package from Amazon feels tasteless, generic, globalized these days. Not from India.

The covers have a thin layer of something like invisible dust. They are telling stories even before opening the pages. One of these book I am trying to keep virgin for days coming to be spent in a hospital is "Fossilization in Adult Second Language Acquisition" by ZhaoHong Han. Reading from the first pages is something reassuring to know, that SLA for adults is bound to failure in most cases. But failure has many meanings, and I shall know more about it soon.

There are other trails to follow to keep an eye on Asian books - in English that is, like these two : The Asian Review of Books and the Asia Times Online Book Reviews. Not a surprise but very few books about Japan are covered by those media. There are far more books published about Asia without Japan, than books specifically covering Japan. And Japan still doesn't feel to belong.

To finish with today's post, I looked around in the piles of books around the rooms and luckily dug out one of the books purchased the first time from India. "Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land" is a children book about dignity. It tells about circumstances that seem very far away an harsh. The graphics are beautiful as well as the text uplifting.