The Phoenix Tree: And Other Stories (Japan's Women Writers)

by Satoko Kizaki

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Summary

The stories in this collection have been acclaimed in Japan, but their appeal is universal. Each involves an orphaned adult, struggling since childhood to recover a sense of wholeness that seems lost in the past. The narrator of "Barefoot" returns from France to a Japan that had cast her out, unsure of whether she belongs anywhere. Mitsue, in the title story, must reexamine every assumption she has ever had about her life as she cares for her dying aunt and nurses a secret love for her married cousin. In "Mei Hua Lu" three generations of women link the protagonist to a long-ago death in a small Manchurian town. And in "The Flame Trees" a Japanese woman, pregnant with her first child in Southern California in the early I 960s, weighs her inner terror against the life of her baby. No plot summaries can really suggest the richness of Kizaki's prose, transmitted through the elegant, prizewinning translations of Carol A. Flath. The delicate layers of memory and experience that her words reveal create in the reader the sensation of participating in another person's dream. With the nuance and understated feeling of an Ozu film, these stories offer intimate glimpses of their characters' emotional lives that leave the reader wishing for more.

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