skopia
Bandits waylay a bride bound for a leprous distiller, and the son conceived in the sorghum grows up under Japanese occupation. Mo Yan makes rural Shandong's violence gorgeous and unbearable at once.
The dead man narrates his own murder, and so do a coin and a tree, in the Istanbul of 1591 where painting a face as the eye sees it is treated as blasphemy.
Joji, a Tokyo engineer, takes home a fifteen-year-old cafe waitress to raise into a Western-style wife, and she ruins him instead. Naomi became the emblem of Japan's modern girl and scandalized older readers.
Azaro is an abiku, a spirit child who keeps refusing to die, and Okri sets him loose in a Nigerian slum where ghosts crowd the bar and political thugs hand out poisoned milk.
Ahmet Shabo returns from an Ottoman war to a Sarajevo where his family has died of plague and one honest sentence ruins a man. The marriage he makes there is his only refuge.