Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the Murasaki Shikibu 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.
HIROMI ITO came to national attention in Japan in the 1980s for her groundbreaking poetry about pregnancy, childbirth, and female sexuality. After relocating to the U.S. in the 1990s, she began to write about the immigrant experience and biculturalism. In recent years, she has focused on the ways that dying and death shape human experience. English translations include Killing Kanoko and Wild Grass on the Riverbank.
JEFFREY ANGLES is a writer and professor of Japanese at Western Michigan University. He is the first non-native poet writing in Japanese to win the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, a highly coveted prize for poetry. His translation of the modernist classic The Book of the Dead by Shinobu Orikuchi won both the Miyoshi Award and the Scaglione Prize for translation.
Title: The Thorn Puller
Author: Ito, Hiromi
ISBN: 9781737625308
Binding:
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Publication Date: 2023-01-26
Number of Pages: 280
Weight: 0.3401 kg
Overflowing and contradictory, worn down with fatigue, yet brimming with energy, The Thorn Puller combines a confessional story of a woman dealing with family commitments in two countries with vibrant excursions into Japanese folklore and history.
-Richard Medhurst, Nippon.com
With ruthless honesty and wicked humor, Ito exposes the frustration and inconvenience of being a caregiver, juxtaposing it with the sorrow of watching a loved one deteriorate.
-Foreword Reviews, starred review
Poet Ito makes her English-language fiction debut with a lyrical account of a woman caught between two cultures and her family's demands ... Fans of Japanese literature will enjoy this impressionistic project.
-Publishers Weekly
Ito's chameleonic prose confronts mortality, cultural conflicts, religious comforts, and waning relationships, embellished with all manner of welcoming, unfiltered, surprisingly humorous honesty about the universally quotidian, from pimple-popping to good sex.
-Terry Hong, Booklist
Absurdly comedic and heartbreaking... The Thorn Puller is an enjoyable and affecting narrative about the meaning of living and aging in our globalized era.
-Bonnie Nadzam, Lion's Roar
With frank, humorous prose that sinuously morphs into the musical cadence of poetry, The Thorn Puller tackles subjects like aging, death, and suffering from a transnational perspective that also illuminates the bittersweet joy of being alive.
-Alyssa Pearl Fusek, Unseen Japan
With a great deal of arresting material, The Thorn Puller is a fascinating piece of work.
-M.A.Orthofer, The Complete Review
The Thorn Puller is a benchmark book. Some reviews compare Hiromi Ito to Haruki Murakami and Yoko Tawada, but make no mistake, Ito is her own person, with her own style, and she sets her own standard for storytelling that will be a measure for aspiring authors.
-Linda Gould, White Enso
Expansive and brilliantly crafted... I was enthralled by The Thorn Puller for its melodic, mesmerising voice, for the wisdom it imparted, and Ito's inescapable creative genius.
-Elizabeth Meehan, Litro Magazine
The sparks of humor fly as Japanese medieval narrative and Judeo-Christian culture collide in modern-day domestic disputes. Ito may have written this book in prose, but we never forget that she's a poet. There is a special music even in the complaints, scolding, arguments, phone conversations, and gossipy moments. As the narrative unfolds, Ito draws not only upon voices of her family members and others around her, she gathers in countless voices, including those of the dead. And how wonderful to find the rhythm of the Japanese reproduced so marvelously in this translation!
-Yoko Tawada, author of The Emissary
Ito's work, which has long drawn us in, reaches a crescendo here, working off a base in fractured daily life: minefields of love and hate, frailty and death, identities and languages heard and unheard, a clash of cultures and religions in the context of the day by day. And all of this she sets against deep images of Japanese lore and literature, ancient and immediately modern, prose transformed into poetry: a contemporary master at the height of her many long-honed powers.
-Jerome Rothenberg, editor of the poetry anthology Technicians of the Sacred
When she was young, Hiromi Ito wrote about sex, menstruation, and childbirth. Later she wrote about child-rearing, affairs, and menopause. In The Thorn Puller she has written about parental caregiving and aging. Poets are amazing--their experiences become art, and what's more, Ito has created a completely original literary style, which no one could imitate even if they tried. The Thorn Puller is a great achievement.
-Chizuko Ueno, author of The Modern Family in Japan
