"The Steamy East" column
The articles featured here are from "The Steamy East", a newspaper column that ran for two years on the Monday Arts page of the Mainichi Daily News. The first of dozens of installments appeared on 25 August 1986, and the last installment came out on 26 September 1988.
The articles, which examine topics more than review stories, will take you on a tour of the great cities of the Far East -- as some Eurocentric alien novelists still refer to China, Korea, and Japan in fictional works inspired by these remote centers of steamy Oriental life. Today the Orient is more intimately called Asia, and its easternmost region is more commonly described in Asiacentric geographies as East Asia.
Your guide, Mark Schreiber, is a voracious collector and reader of English fiction set in Asia, and a veteran reviewer of such fiction. Schreiber warmed up to "The Steamy East" with a shorter series entitled "Beyond the Yellow Peril", which ran on the Monday Arts page of Mainichi Daily News from 16 July through 8 October 1984, and with a mini-series of four variously titled articles which ran on the same page from 23 December 1985 through 13 January 1986.
William Wetherall
First posted circa 1995
Updated 27 February 2009