As a fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteer author, I’ve read, enjoyed, and reviewed several of Madeen’s books. “True Tales from Borneo to Japan” caught my attention since Borneo was the first site the Peace Corps offered me, although when I applied, all slots were filled, so I followed his trail. Also, I became aware of his appreciation for Joseph Conrad and shared his fascination with “The Heart of Darkness.”
I appreciated Madeen’s deliberate retracing of Conrad’s footsteps. In the opening chapter, In Conrad’s Wake, Madeen travels from Singapore to Berau in Kalimantan (Borneo), a reminder of Conrad’s seafaring voyages. He visits the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, where Conrad’s presence lingers in literary lore, and explores the Berau River, a site Conrad navigated during his early career. Madeen’s encounters with local figures—such as descendants of merchant families and rajahs—blur the line between Conrad’s fictional characters and historical reality. These journeys highlight how Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly and Lord Jim were rooted in the landscapes and cultures of Southeast Asia.
Madeen’s prose often mirrors Conrad’s atmospheric style. In Borneo, he describes mist rising from the rainforest as “the dream tug of Joseph Conrad’s fiction.” He follows Conrad’s expressed belief in the power of the written word: “to make you hear, to make you feel. It is, before all, to make you see.” This homage underscores how Conrad’s vision of Asia continues to inspire contemporary travelers, while Madeen’s own reflections complicate and enrich that legacy by foregrounding local voices and modern realities.
Eric Madeen’s book is more than a collection of travel essays—it is a meditation on literature, legacy, and the lived experience of crossing cultures. Madeen, an award-winning author and professor of American literature in Tokyo, situates his journeys within the shadow of Joseph Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness and other works continue to shape how we imagine colonial encounters and the mysteries of Asia. The book’s essays, spanning Singapore, Borneo, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and Japan, are written with lush prose that fuses Conrad’s literary sensibility with Madeen’s own eye for detail and cultural nuance.
Beyond Conrad’s trail, Asian Trail Mix offers vivid portraits of Asia’s diversity. The novice monks at play in Luang Prabang, Laos, and the hustling pedicab drivers in Ho Chi Minh City brought back memories of my journeys through Vietnam and the treks across Elephant Island in Thailand.
These essays are not mere travel sketches; they are layered with literary and historical resonance, often juxtaposing Conrad’s colonial-era gaze with Madeen’s own cross-cultural encounters.
Madeen’s long residence in Japan—nearly three decades as a professor at Tokyo City University and Keio University—anchors the book. His essays on Japan reveal both the outsider’s perspective and the insider’s intimacy. He writes of Okinawa’s spirit, Tokyo’s urban dynamism, and the subtleties of Japanese rituals with the authority of someone who has lived and taught within the culture. He fulfills a challenge Paul Theroux made to him to “write of the inner life of the Japanese,” blending comparative culture with personal narrative.
Madeen’s Peace Corps service in Gabon, Africa, where he built a primary school, shaped his worldview and his first novel. That experience informs Asian Trail Mix by grounding his Asian travels in a broader ethic of service and cultural engagement. His writing is not just about exotic landscapes but about human connection, resilience, and the interplay of history and literature.
Asian Trail Mix succeeds as both travel literature and literary homage. By retracing Conrad’s journeys through Singapore and Borneo’s Berau River, Madeen situates himself within a lineage of writers who grapple with Asia’s complexity. Yet he also transcends Conrad by weaving in his own Peace Corps ethos, his long immersion in Japan, and his sensitivity to contemporary Asian cultures. The book is a testament to how travel writing can honor literary traditions while offering fresh, lived perspectives.
About the Author
Eric Madeen is an associate professor of modern literature at Tokyo City University and an adjunct professor at Keio University. He’s an award-winning, unclassifiable author of six books, and his writing has been published widely — in Time, Asia Week, The East, Daily Yomiuri, Tokyo Journal, Kyoto Journal, Metropolis, Mississippi Review, ANA’s inflight magazine Wingspan, Peace Corps Worldwide, Japanophile, Yomimono, The Pretentious Idea, Tombstone Epitaph, several anthologies, academic journals, therein his seminal essay “Under Western and Eastern Eyes” jointly published by the Ministry of Education of the Western Federation, Russia, and the Joseph Conrad Foundation, USA, and so on.
For two-plus years, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Francophone Gabon, Africa, where he built a primary school complex in an equatorial village surrounded by rainforest. This mind-blowing experience inspired his first book, “Water Drumming in the Soul: A Novel of Racy Love in the Heart of Africa,” which resonates with the personal and passion all the way through to the heart-wrenching end. His recently released sixth book, “Tokyo-ing! Three Novellas,” chimes with anyone even remotely interested in Asia’s most dynamic metropolis.
His novel about Japanese immigration is set in the historically rich city of Yokohama. It is entitled “Tennis Clubbed, Snubbed and Rubbity-Dub Dubbed,” which challenges an ancient culture’s barriers to the “gaijin” (outsider) on and off the courts. Before that is the high-octane thriller “Massage World.” By turns erotic and exotic, but always zesty, its plot twists and linkage are tight and full of surprises … peopled as it is with a rogues’ gallery found in the nether reaches of a Dionysian dream. Finally, there’s the travelogue “Asian Trail Mix: True Tales from Borneo to Japan,” which scales down the sprawl of Asia by laser-focusing on the unique and revelatory, from novice monks at play in northern Laos to cyclo drivers braving the mean streets of Saigon. Eric Madeen resides in Yokohama and invites you to drop by at www.ericmadeen.com.
About the Reviewer
Mark D Walker was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala and spent over forty years helping disadvantaged people in the developing world. Walker’s three books are: Different Latitudes: My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond; My Saddest Pleasures: 50 Years on the Road, named Best Travel Book of the Year, and he’s working on an expanded edition. The Guatemala Reader: Extraordinary Lives and Amazing Stories won the BookFest Award for Nonfiction Travel. He’s written 80 book reviews, and of his 30 published essays, two were recognized by the Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing. He’s a contributing writer for the “Arizona Authors Association Digest,” “The Wanderlust Journal,” “Literary Traveler,” and “The Great Writers You Should be Reading. “His wife and three children were born in Guatemala. You can learn more at www.MillionMileWalker.com