Rohinton Mistry writes what could be called Neo-Realist novels, in honor of the simple, rending tales of struggle and affliction that distinguished the Italian films of the early Fifties (and continue to this day in, say, the films coming out of Iran). Though Mistry has lived in Toronto since 1975, when he emigrated at the […]

“I opened my eyes, in no hurry to wake up. The memory that started off my Sunday was Dona Maura’s fingers on the table. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. It didn’t work. It was after eleven and I’d slept enough. The light that worked its way through the venetian […]

The foreigner in Japan, more than anywhere, stands at the edge of an intimacy that is closing slowly in his face. He walks along a beach, perhaps, as darkness falls, with a young, a beautiful girl, and they talk of loneliness, and all the places he has seen, the nights. The girl offers to introduce […]

If writing were a religion, V.S. Naipaul would be its most steadfast monk. Arriving in Oxford in 1950, as an 18 year-old scholarship boy from Trinidad, he already looked old beyond his years, haunted by an outsider’s uncertainties and yet determined to make his way in the world. After his father died three years later, […]

Several years ago, a book arrived on my doorstep, and it was like no other novel I could remember reading. Its characters were all spirits of a kind, rootless, and drifting far from home, and all of them had gathered, like partial ghosts, in a shelled nunnery at the end of World War II. At […]

When you step into a classic ryokan, or traditional Japanese inn, you step into decades, perhaps centuries, of silence. I was reminded of this as soon as I returned, not long ago, to Tawaraya, a nineteen-room inn that sits on a tiny lane of lanterns near the heart of old Kyoto. Though the place is […]

In Shanghai, just behind the area where elderly couples gather each day at dawn to go through the ghostly motions of Tai Chi, cranes are busy erecting the world’s tallest building, to go with the tallest tower in Asia and the largest department store on the continent. In downtown Toronto, on a jam-packed sidewalk, a […]

For many of us, Japan has come to mean crowded trains, high-tech gadgets, efficient systems, cool reserve–a neon blur, in the imagination, of pencil-thin high-rises in which traders in dark suits mutter into cell phones. Or, if not the hard realism of Tokyo’s office blocks, then the gossamer romance of Kyoto’s teahouses, all exquisite restraint […]

The 9-year-old Cuban boy with the cataract in his eye showed me the condoms he had used as balloons at his birthday party. He pulled out the single stick of gum he’d been chewing for a week. He brought over the two tattered photo albums he’d stuffed with pieces of Carnation labels, stickers that said […]

“The minimizing of entry red tape reveals that you are expected and welcome to this land of gorgeous adventure and the limber elbow,” notes the 1938 Blue Guide to Cuba in summoning Americans to the nearby island. Nowadays, of course, the situation is different. For more than two decades, Cuba has been virtually off limits […]