The Thorn Puller (Paperback)
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Description
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.
About the Author
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.