This is real history. Drawing on impeccable Japanese-language first-hand documents, Kathryn Meyer has given us a story never before told in English. She sets the action in the larger context of events in Asia and in North Manchuria as World War II approached, yet she also recounts the scenes of alleyway sex that provided enough cash for another hit of ... Read moreopium. Written in a lively and colorful style, this is a book you won’t be able to put down.
Ronald Suleski, Suffolk University, Boston Life and Death in the Garden is riveting. Kathryn Meyer leads readers on a tour de force visit to a long-forgotten Manchurian ghetto in which people sought any means possible to survive foreign occupation, economic dislocation, and social decline. This is history at its best, teeming with characters that Meyer carefully recreates to locate in their local, national, and international contexts. Their lives are as fascinating as they are tragic and they bring to life this time and place with unprecedented clarity. Meyer’s decades of research are reflected in equal measures of effective storytelling and historical reconstruction. An outstanding addition to the growing fields of Manchurian and Manchukuo studies, her book will inspire great interest in a part of China most often overlooked. And it is a great read.
Norman Smith, University of Guelph; author of Intoxicating Manchuria: Alcohol, Opium, and Culture in China’s Northeast Here is something new: a history of hell frozen over. Kathryn Meyer takes us on a Dickensian tour of Harbin’s "Garden of Grand Vision," a frigid Manchukuo slum where thieves snatched rags from the dying; pimps beat fourteen-year-old prostitutes; and everyone sought oblivion in narcotics, sex, and gambling.  Along the way she tells of the dismemberment of China, the perils of frontier migration, the workings of underground economies, and the collapse of Japanese imperialism, blending a unique microhistory with a narrative of one of history’s great tragic dramas.
David Courtwright, author of Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World Show Less