I've been around the Asian scene most of my adult life, and I'm happy to say that I have met a lot of Asians. They don't think of themselves as Asian, typically. They think of themselves as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, whatever. To get even pickier, they often differentiate themselves within that national label. As I sat around the rural Japanese home of a distant relative of my Japanese-American wife, I was told that the discussion was about how they weren't sure that the people who lived on the other side of the hill were Japanese. After all, you could hardly understand what they were saying.

We, however, resident in the United States or some other non-Asian nation, think of all of these people as, essentially, one race—Asian. What we cannot easily see is that the differences are cultural not racial. But that's also why they blend so easily into the new race—Asians—for us, because they take on a very strong measure of our culture, too. I suppose we can say that Chinese who come here as adults are Chinese forever, but their kids aren't. And their kids certainly aren't.

So we look to find aspects of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai culture within our own culture, one that has been not only enriched but changed by their incorporation within us. The Western mystery novel is a great equalizer. Only the most serious folks dare claim no interest in reading these (they'll watch a movie, though), and when the subjects and environment of one or more of those Western novels is some kind of Asian, we are witnessing a new world. Perhaps, the new world.

For me, mysteries aren't so much about the mystery (which I often forget hours after finishing the book) but about the road traveled from page one through the last page, and all the people we meet along the way, and all the interesting observations about these people to which we are privy.

It's one of the primary contributions reading makes in our lives, I think. We can easily attribute "the storage of knowledge" to books, but most of us read novels. There's knowledge there, too, of course, but it's the kind you get while sitting in a cafe in Paris watching people walk by or listening to them at the tables near you.

But in our Asian world, we're at a cafe in Beijing or Tokyo or Bangkok or Pyongyang. And someone has just died...