1999 Fiction Finalists

The Book of Perceptions
by Truong Tran
photographs by Chung Hoang Chuong
San Francisco, USA: Kearny Street Workshop

An unusual and successful collaborative work about the immigrant experience pairing prose-poetry by first-generation Vietnamese American, Tran, with the contemplative photography of Chung Hoang Chuong. A highly personal exploration of cultural and sexual identity by an articulate young poet and an accomplished photographer.

The Spring Tone
by Kazumi Yumoto
translated by Cathy Hirano
New York, USA: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

An engaging novel for young adults about the reluctant transformation of a young Japanese girl to womanhood as she copes with her parents' troubled relationship, the death of her grandmother, and the complex emotions and situations her maturity brings to her previously simple life. Reveals an urban, middle-class side of Japan not often explored in Japanese literature in translation.

1999 Nonfiction Finalists

The Mummies of Ürümchi
by Elizabeth W. Barber
New York, USA: W.W. Norton

An expert on ancient textiles, Barber weaves a compelling story about her work to explain the astonishing 1994 discovery of 4,000-year-old Caucasian mummies, magnificently dressed and preserved, in the desert city of Ürümchi in Western China. This outstanding work of scholarship reads like a detective story with all the excitement of a good mystery.

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
by John Dower
New York, USA: W.W. Norton

Widely recognized as one of America's foremost historians of the second World War in the Pacific and author of the award-winning War Without Mercy, M.I.T. professor Dower illuminates how shattering defeat, followed by years of American military occupation, affected every level of Japanese society, and continues to inform its attitude on war guilt, democracy, and the breakdown of the postwar "capitalist development state." This outstanding book is easily approachable by a general audience.

Riska: Memories of a Dayak Girlhood
by Riska Orpa Sari
with Linda Spalding (editor)
Toronto, Canada: Knopf Canada

A member of the Dayak tribe, popularly - and perhaps unfairly - known as the "headhunters" of the rainforest in Indonesian Borneo, Riska offers a rare and fascinating glimpse of an indigenous Pacific culture until now portrayed only through the eyes of anthropologists. An important book, written with sensitivity and compassion for the people it depicts.