{"product_id":"the-thorn-puller-hiromi-ito-9781737625308","title":"The Thorn Puller","description":"Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the MurasakiShikibu Prize\nCaught 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.\nThe 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.\nIto 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 chimera—part poetry, part prose, part epic—a 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.","brand":"Stone Bridge Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51079533330720,"sku":"9781737625308","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0753\/2812\/7264\/files\/9781737625308.jpg?v=1781381787","url":"https:\/\/bookcorner.com\/products\/the-thorn-puller-hiromi-ito-9781737625308","provider":"The Book Corner","version":"1.0","type":"link"}