Borrowed Island: Forty-Two Stories From a Visitor Who Forgot to Leave

Borrowed Island: Forty-Two Stories From a Visitor Who Forgot to Leave is not a continuation but a second, standalone offering. Drawing from memory, personal photo archives, and a writer’s inner reservoir, Randip Sahu returns not to Japan but to the rich impressions it left behind.

In forty-two vignettes and stories arranged across eight thematic movements, the author re-enters the layered heart of Japan—a place where silence speaks, shadows remember, and vending machines dispense parables with their canned coffee. From calligraphy and spirit festivals to Tokyo alleyways, teenage rebels, and Hiroshima’s haunting aftermath, the collection moves between the ritual and the rebellious, the ancient and the hypermodern. This hybrid form—part memoir, part imaginative leap—is shaped by the limits of the eye and the boundlessness of recall. One lens is lived, the other conjured. Together, they offer both clarity and complexity. Borrowed Island is not a guidebook. It’s an act of re- exploring. Of listening inward. Of not quite saying goodbye.

*********************************************

Randip Sahu, a former Army officer, has become a full-time writer and traveller. He has authored the bestselling books The Honour Code and The Japan Parallax: Thirty-Six Stories From the Floating World, a lyrical debut in travel literature.

Borrowed Island is his third book and his second book on Japan. It is an even deeper immersion into the stories that lie beneath the surface of silence.

When not flitting between Pune, Toronto, and Vancouver, he sings, plays golf, and gets lost in libraries.