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The Thorn Puller.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Ito, Hiromi.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Aging parents--Japan--Fiction.
- Aging parents.
- Japanese Americans--Fiction.
- Japanese Americans.
- Families--Fiction.
- Families.
- Japan.
- Genre:
- Domestic fiction.
- Fiction.
- Novels.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (300 p.)
- Edition:
- 1st ed.
- Place of Publication:
- La Vergne : Stone Bridge Press, 2022.
- Language Note:
- In English, translated from Japanese.
- Summary:
- Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the MurasakiShikibu Prize. Introducing Hiromi Ito, an award-winning Japanese author who has been compared to Haruki Murakami and Yoko Tawada. The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about 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 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.
- Contents:
- Ito returns to Japan and finds herself in a real pinch
- Mother leads Ito from Iwanosaka toward Sugamo
- Ito crosses the ocean and the slope of the underworld, throwing peaches
- The peach Ito threw rots, and she becomes a beast once again
- Evil flourishes, but Ito encounters Jizo in broad daylight
- Ito goes on a journey, making a pilgrimage to Yuda Hot Springs
- With tongue intact, Sparrow chases the old woman away
- The rainy season continues, and Mother suffers on her deathbed
- Ito travels west, blooms, and then wilts away
- Fishing with cormorants, Ito hears of the merits of coming and going
- Oh, ears! Listen to the sound of sadness trickling in the urinal
- Smoke rises from Urashima on a clear autumn day
- A lump is removed, Ito meets a demon and the sparrow-dog devotees
- Ito again finds herself in a real pinch and dashes through darkness for her child
- Driven by despair, the female followers of the thorn puller attack Ito's husband
- Good and bad ways of dying, a poet stares death in the face
- Ito grows ill, a bird transforms into a blossom, and the giant trees stay unchanged.
- Notes:
- Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.
- ISBN:
- 1-7376253-1-8
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