Early in the last century, Ayyad, “Westernized , Anglophone, and Protestant to boot,” heads to Sudan to make his fortune, arriving there at a significant moment in that country’s history: Anglo-Egyptian armies have restored Sudan to its more powerful northern neighbor, itself still, of course, very much under British sway, after the revolt of the Mahdi, but imperial control has not yet been fully established; there is room for individual initiative and adventure . Ayyad acquires the palace of the title and decides to break it down into its constituent elements and take it home on the backs of a fleet of camels. Triumphs and mishaps ensue, but the final pages narrate Ayyad’s arrival near Beirut and his meeting the young woman he will marry. She will become the grandmother of the very narrator attempting to re-create imaginatively the experiences of his ancestors, with little to go on. It is one of the novel’s pleasures that its story takes place against pivotal moments of the half-mythic history of northern Africa and the Middle East: in addition to the aftermath of the disaster at Khartoum there are references to “the fabulous encounter between the black tribes and the crests, crimson capes, and eagles of Rome,” to Stanley finding Livingstone and Emin Pasha, and to the Arab Revolt of 1916, with Samuel Ayyad encountering T. E. Lawrence in an (apparently inconsequential) meeting in Prince Faisal’s camp. Another reliable source of delight is Majdalani’s writing, constantly alive and entrancing in Edward Gauvin’s translation. One reads of “a group of riders [getting] a shard of sunlight in the eye . . . gazelles galloping by, slow snooping hyenas, . . . stilted ostriches”—and much, much more. M. D. Allen University of Wisconsin–Fox Valley Junji Ito. Dissolving Classroom. Trans. Melissa Tanaka. New York. Vertical Comics. 2017. 174 pages. Dissolving Classroom is the sixth volume to translate Japanese mangaka Junji Ito’s probing visions of the horrifying and the weird into English. Despite its title, Dissolving Classroom departs the school setting by the end of the first of five interlocking stories to explore a nightmare landscape of devil worship, dissolving bodies, brain-slurping sisters, public apology, and the quotidian dangers of human interaction. The manga tracks as everyone met by high schooler Yuuma Azawa and his middle-school sister, Chizumi, dissolve or are disfigured by the “evil electromagnetic waves” connecting Yuuma and the devil. Yuuma melts brains by apologizing to people (usually for his sister’s stalking habit) or praising their beauty, providing Yuuma exquisite pleasure as his connection with the devil grows stronger. Exploiting a theme of unnatural sickness running throughout Ito’s manga, the result is an epidemic of people dissolving across Japan. Death by apology and praise in Dissolving Classroom becomes the locus of critiques of contemporary Japanese society. Chizumi, for example, is at her most monstrous not when licking “people juice” but when she dolls herself up for a crush, a gesture to the perversity of adolescent girls’ sexualization. Public apology is equally lambasted as the manga is bookended with public apologies by Yuuma that lead to disastrous consequences and that question the sincerity and purpose of apologies by public figures that have become popular in Japan, for example J-pop singer Minami Minegishi’s 2013 filmed apology for having sex with her boyfriend. But while Dissolving Classroom offers some poignant critique, it is atypical of Ito’s oeuvre. As an artist, Ito’s horror departs from fare that merely shocks, grosses out, and makes uncomfortable as the genre’s Keigo Higashino The Name of the Game Is a Kidnapping Trans. Jan Mitsuko Cash Vertical When a hard-charging advertising executive is pulled off a huge campaign at the request of the client’s privileged son, he passes on good living as the best revenge and joins with the man’s unrecognized daughter in a scheme to even the score. A popular Japanese author of crime novels, Higashino doesn’t disappoint with this plot-driven, sleek novel of low-down crime in the world of high business. Trevor Herriot Towards a Prairie Atonement University of Regina Press Herriot builds on a legacy of successes in raising awareness about the...