The Thorn Puller
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the Murasaki
Shikibu 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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Ito makes her English-language fiction debut (after the poetry collection Wild Grass on the Riverbank) with a lyrical and discursive autofictional account of a woman caught between two cultures and her family's demands for caretaking. Poet Hiromi Ito at 50 splits her time between California, with her third husband and children, and Kumamoto, Japan, where she visits her elderly parents. During one trip, a series of medical appointments reveals her mother has had a stroke, which upends Hiromi's plans to return to the U.S., even when her much older husband needs emergency bypass surgery. Meanwhile, Hiromi's young daughter, Aiko, begs for a digital pet, and Hiromi recounts visits to a temple dedicated to the bodhisattva Jizo, who promises to pluck the thorns of suffering from devotees. Chapters slowly cycle through Hiromi's mother's deteriorating condition, Hiromi's rancorous relationship with her husband, and her encounters with fellow Japanese poets. When Aiko is 13, she bonds with a puppy Hiromi adopts, and the financial and emotional cost of her trips mount. With vivid depictions of aging bodies and precise excavation of fraught relationships, Ito builds an intimate study of feminized labor. Fans of Japanese literature will enjoy this impressionistic project.
