Stone Field, True Arrow


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.







Shizuko's Daughter


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.




A Studio of One's Own


Book Description

This working space is a measure of the claim that the artist makes upon the world."--Jacket.




Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature


Book Description

Traces American writers whose roots are in all parts of Asia, including China, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East.




Polite Lies


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


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.




Cutting for Stone


Book Description

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.




Arrows


Book Description

Dance prodigy Karma Clark's unrequited love for Danny is unbearable until Aaryn, son of Cupid, returns to try to fix his mistake and ends up falling in love with Karma, now a teenage mother.




The Dream of Water


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.