Shizuko's Daughter

Shizuko's Daughter PDF Author: Kyoko Mori
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466876743
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
Shizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori An ALA Best Book for Young Adults A New York Times Notable Book After her mother's suicide when she is twelve years old, Yuki spends years living with her distant father and his resentful new wife, cut off from her mother's family, and relying on her own inner strength to cope with the tragedy.

Lost Leaves

Lost Leaves PDF Author: Rebecca L. Copeland
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824863399
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Most Japanese literary historians have suggested that the Meiji Period (1868-1912) was devoid of women writers but for the brilliant exception of Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896). Rebecca Copeland challenges this claim by examining in detail the lives and literary careers of three of Ichiyo's peers, each representative of the diversity and ingenuity of the period: Miyake Kaho (1868-1944), Wakamatsu Shizuko (1864-1896), and Shimizu Shikin (1868-1933). In a carefully researched introduction, Copeland establishes the context for the development of female literary expression. She follows this with chapters on each of the women under consideration. Miyake Kaho, often regarded as the first woman writer of modern Japan, offers readers a vision of the female vitality that is often overlooked when discussing the Meiji era. Wakamatsu Shizuko, the most prominent female translator of her time, had a direct impact on the development of a modern written language for Japanese prose fiction. Shimizu Shikin reminds readers of the struggle women endured in their efforts to balance their creative interests with their social roles. Interspersed throughout are excerpts from works under discussion, most never before translated, offering an invaluable window into this forgotten world of women's writing.

Polite Lies

Polite Lies PDF Author: Kyoko Mori
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0449004287
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
In this powerful, exquisitely crafted book, Kyoko Mori delves into her dual heritage with a rare honesty that is both graceful and stirring. From her unhappy childhood in Japan, weighted by a troubled family and a constricting culture, to the American Midwest, where she found herself free to speak as a strong-minded independent woman, though still an outsider, Mori explores the different codes of silence, deference, and expression that govern Japanese and American women's lives: the ties that bind us to family and the lies that keep us apart; the rituals of mourning that give us the courage to accept death; the images of the body that make sex seem foreign to Japanese women and second nature to Americans. In the sensitive hands of this compelling writer, one woman's life becomes the mirror of two profoundly different societies.

One Bird

One Bird PDF Author: Kyoko Mori
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466876735
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
I try to see him among a migrating flock--he will take the loneliness of my room on his long journey; each whistling note he makes will be a little of my sadness falling over the ocean, to be swallowed in the clash of waves and the commotion of many birds flying. "Tell me the truth," demands fifteen-year-old Megumi Shimizu as her mother hurriedly packs. But her mother refuses to admit that she is leaving forever--leaving her husband to his mistress, her home to her silent, resentful mother-in-law, her daughter to survive, if she can. Angry at everyone's polite lies, Megumi realizes that she has a secret of her own: Even though she goes to church, to Bible study class, and to the Christian Girls' Academy, she no longer believes in God. Only Dr. Mizutani, the "spinster lady" veterinarian, tells the truth, and she warns that single birds without their mothers often die. In One Bird, a coming-of-age novel about mothers and daughters, about best friends, boyfriends, and families, Kyoko Mori uses folktales, images of birds, and details of bird life to explore the bonds of love that go deeper than lies. As Megumi learns how to care for injured waxwings, crows, sparrows, and one abandoned grosbeak, she begins her own flight toward truth, and toward home.

The Dream of Water

The Dream of Water PDF Author: Kyoko Mori
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466876727
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
In 1990 author Kyoko Mori returned to her native Japan to visit the "landscape of my childhood." There--looking for the house in which her mother killed herself, running on land that was once water, and retracing childhood train trips to her grandparents' farm--she relived the memories and uncovered the secrets that unlocked her past. In The Dream of Water, a series of chapters that are themselves "small perfections," she leads us to the "larger happiness" of an autobiography that is also a work of art. Japan is the land Mori fled as a teenager, seeking to escape from her cold, abusive father and her manipulative stepmother. It is the country she spend her adult life putting behind her, but it is also her homeland. As she searches through familiar neighborhoods and on distant islands, she is constantly aware of the culture she abandoned and the one she has adopted. Pushed by the sights and sounds of contemporary Japan into her interior world of memory and dreams, she also looks out toward the daylight land of America. A personal journey of discovery that is also an exploration of national difference, The Dream of Water explores intimate emotions that reveal profound cultural truths.

Yarn

Yarn PDF Author: Kyoko Mori
Publisher: Gemma
ISBN: 1934848638
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
A memoir of crossing cultures, losing love, and finding home by a New York Times notable author. As steadily and quietly as her marriage falls apart, so Kyoko Mori's understanding of knitting deepens. From flawed school mittens to beautiful unmatched patterns of cardigans, hats and shawls, Kyoko draws the connection between knitting and the new life she tried to establish in the U.S. Interspersed with the story of knitting throughout, the narrative contemplates the nature of love, loss, and what holds a marriage together.

12 Multicultural Novels

12 Multicultural Novels PDF Author: Monica Wood
Publisher: Walch Publishing
ISBN: 9780825129018
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
Incorporate multicultural literature easily into your English program! Vivid stories that captivate the imagination and expand cultural understanding offer effective teaching strategies. This literature guide; gives you effective teaching strategies and complete material for 12 novels by writers from diverse cultures and ethnic backgrounds. The novels are: Ellen Foster, Reservation Blues; Shizuko's Daughter; The House on Mango Street; Somewhere in the Darkness; Make Lemonade; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; MAUS: A Survivor's Tale; The Long Season of Rain; Jesse; Allegra Maud Goldman; and The Dreams of Mairhe Mehan. Included for each novel are chapter-by chapter synopses, teaching notes, discussion questions and suggested responses, and a reading quiz and answer key.

Stone Field, True Arrow

Stone Field, True Arrow PDF Author: Kyoko Mori
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1466876298
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
Maya Ishida is no stranger to sorrow. Torn from her artist father in her native Japan, raised by her cold, ambitious mother in Minneapolis, she has finally put together a life with few disruptions: a safe marriage and a quiet life weaving clothes in a country studio. The past is no more than a story she vaguely remembers; the present is a gray landscape of solitary pleasures and modest expectations. After her father dies, Maya is pulled back into the memory of their parting. In his many stories of Orpheus and Eurydice and of the tennyo, a mythic Japanese figure, he had taught her that love means making the sacrifice of letting go. And so she had walked away from him without looking back. Twenty-four years later, holding her father's last sketch, Maya knows she can avoid looking back no longer. She must question her placid marriage, her decision not to become an artist, and even the precarious peace she has made with her mother before she can be released--to feel passion, risk change, and fall in love. Kyoko Mori's young adult novel, Shizuko's Daughter, was hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "a jewel...one of those rarities that shine out only a few times in a generation." In Stone Field, True Arrow, her first novel for adults, she sheds brilliant light on eternal questions about life and love.

Edo Kabuki in Transition

Edo Kabuki in Transition PDF Author: Satoko Shimazaki
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Book Description
Satoko Shimazaki revisits three centuries of kabuki theater, reframing it as a key player in the formation of an early modern urban identity in Edo Japan and exploring the process that resulted in its re-creation in Tokyo as a national theatrical tradition. Challenging the prevailing understanding of early modern kabuki as a subversive entertainment and a threat to shogunal authority, Shimazaki argues that kabuki instilled a sense of shared history in the inhabitants of Edo (present-day Tokyo) by invoking "worlds," or sekai, derived from earlier military tales, and overlaying them onto the present. She then analyzes the profound changes that took place in Edo kabuki toward the end of the early modern period, which witnessed the rise of a new type of character: the vengeful female ghost. Shimazaki's bold reinterpretation of the history of kabuki centers on the popular ghost play Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan (The Eastern Seaboard Highway Ghost Stories at Yotsuya, 1825) by Tsuruya Nanboku IV. Drawing not only on kabuki scripts but also on a wide range of other sources, from theatrical ephemera and popular fiction to medical and religious texts, she sheds light on the development of the ubiquitous trope of the vengeful female ghost and its illumination of new themes at a time when the samurai world was losing its relevance. She explores in detail the process by which nineteenth-century playwrights began dismantling the Edo tradition of "presenting the past" by abandoning their long-standing reliance on the sekai. She then reveals how, in the 1920s, a new generation of kabuki playwrights, critics, and scholars reinvented the form again, "textualizing" kabuki so that it could be pressed into service as a guarantor of national identity.

Dear Zoe

Dear Zoe PDF Author: Philip Beard
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440649545
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
DON'T MISS THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING SADIE SINK OF STRANGER THINGS! Dear Zoe is a remarkable study of grief, adolescence, and healing with a pitch-perfect narrator who is at once sharp and naive, world-worried and self-centered, funny and heartbreakingly honest. Fifteen-year-old Tess DeNunzio hasn't been the same since she lost her sister Zoe to a hit-and-run accident on September 11th—when it seemed like nothing mattered except the tragedies playing out in New York and Washington. Dear Zoe is Tess's letter to her sister, written as a means of figuring out her own life and her place in the world—and the result is a novel of rare power and grace that tells us much about ours.