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Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the MurasakiShikibu Prize Caught between two cultures, award-winning author Hiromi Ito tackles subjects like aging, death, and suffering with dark humor, illuminating the bittersweet joys of being alive. The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a womancaring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her agingparents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these twostarkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrativeabout what it means to live and die in a globalized society. Ito has been described as a shaman of poetry because of her skill in allowing the voices of others to flow through her. Here she enriches her semi-autobiographical novel by channeling myriad voices drawn from Japanese folklore, poetry, literature, and pop culture. The result is a generic chimerapart poetry, part prose, part epica unique, transnational, polyvocal mode of storytelling. One throughline is a series of memories associated with the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the thorns of human suffering.
Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the MurasakiShikibu Prize
Caught between two cultures, award-winning author Hiromi Ito tackles subjects like aging, death, and suffering with dark humor, illuminating the bittersweet joys of being alive.
The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a womancaring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her agingparents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these twostarkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrativeabout what it means to live and die in a globalized society.
Ito has been described as a shaman of poetry because of her skill in allowing the voices of others to flow through her. Here she enriches her semi-autobiographical novel by channeling myriad voices drawn from Japanese folklore, poetry, literature, and pop culture. The result is a generic chimerapart poetry, part prose, part epica unique, transnational, polyvocal mode of storytelling. One throughline is a series of memories associated with the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the thorns of human suffering.