DISCOVERIES

Love in a Fallen City

Eileen Chang, translated from the Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury

New York Review Books: 322 pp., $14.95 paper

EILEEN CHANG, born in Shanghai, died at 75 in Los Angeles. Famous in China for her stories and essays, collected in “Romances” (1944) and “Written on Water” (1945), she fled communism in the 1950s for a life of quiet anonymity in the U.S. Her father was an opium addict from a Qing dynasty family, her mother modern and European-educated. Chang’s sensual writing has elements of both worlds: the smoky, formal world of respect for tradition and the irresistible, harshly lighted future. Her story “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier” opens: “Go and fetch, will you please, a copper incense brazier, a family heirloom gorgeously encrusted now with moldy green, and light in it some pungent chips of aloeswood. Listen while I tell a Hong Kong tale, from before the war.”

Chang’s work is full of glamour and worldly things (quilted Korean silk, diamond bracelets, cloisonne); it’s unsurprising that, for the U.S. Information Service in the ‘50s, she wrote two anti-communist novels, “The Rice Sprout Song” and “Naked Earth.” The four novellas here first appeared in “Romances.” Of its debut, she wrote, “[G]et your fame early in the game! Get it late, and the pleasure’s lost its punch.” Her writing brims with homesickness -- for beauty, for sounds and smells no longer of this world. Thus ends “Love in a Fallen City”: “When the huqin wails on a night of ten thousand lamps, the bow [draws] forth a tale too desolate for words -- oh! why go into it?”

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Mishima’s Sword

Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend

Christopher Ross

Da Capo: 262 pp., $26

SEPPUKU: There is “a definitive form to follow when doing this,” writes Christopher Ross in this story of his journey into the heart of Japan. Here is how to assist someone who has cut open his own stomach: It requires “considerable skill and nerve, as you must cut the neck but stop the blade just short of completely severing it, so that the flap of skin at the throat remains intact, allowing the head to flop neatly onto the suicide’s chest.”

“Mishima’s Sword” is more than it claims; it’s not so much a quest for the antique sword used to complete the seppuku of writer Yukio Mishima as it is a romp through Japan’s underworld and a search for the sources of violence in Japanese culture. Failing to find the sword, Ross decides it was more real as “an archetype.... Something that could never be completely lost or fully destroyed. Or ever, really, possessed.” He is fascinated by Noh, by how to tie the underwear known as fundoshi (Mishima said it embodied the “national spirit”), by Mishima’s handwriting, his retreat from the world after an appalling childhood, his obsession with beauty. He discusses the “balance of the mind” artists return to after the madness that inspires them. The heel of Mishima’s right shoe was more worn than the left: “An artist is ... someone who dwells, out of balance, in the interior world of his own mind.”

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The Crimson Portrait

A Novel

Jody Shields

Little, Brown: 298 pp., $23.99

THIS World War I novel is as full of emotional detail as “The English Patient.” Catherine’s husband has died in the war and her house outside London is turned into a military hospital. She falls in love with Julian, whose face is bandaged. Aided by artists and surgeons, she remakes her lover’s face in her husband’s image. Their relationship is the electric core of Jody Shields’ novel; each meeting has a shivering charge: “Julian wouldn’t let her touch his face but worshipped hers with his hands and eyes.... She knew every expression his half face could command, except one. The lost, unguarded expression of intimacy.” There are many such moments: quiet crescendos, the elaborate fears of people in love. A reader expects nothing but the worst at every turn. Shields plays with our certainty that everything good will eventually be destroyed.