The Thorn Puller
Department
World Languages and Literatures
Document Type
Book
Files
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 through line is a series of memories associated with the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the "thorns" of human suffering.
Call number in WMU's library
PL853.T56 T6513 2022 (Waldo Library WMU Authors Collection, First Floor)
ISBN
9781737625308
Publication Date
2022
Disciplines
Fiction | Japanese Studies
Recommended Citation
Itō, Hiromi and Angles, Jeffrey, "The Thorn Puller" (2022). All Books and Monographs by WMU Authors. 878.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/books/878