The Thorn Puller

Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the Murasaki Shikibu PrizeCaught 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 throughline is a series of memories associated with the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the "thorns" of human suffering.

Product details

• Authors: It&, Hiromi Ito
• Assisted by: Jeffrey Angles (Translation)
• Publisher: Ingram Publisher Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 16.08.2022
• EAN: 9781737625308
• ISBN: 978-1-73762-530-8
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 210 mm x 20 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; FICTION / Biographical, FICTION / Literary, Fiction in translation, Japanese, FICTION / Asian American