The Dream of Water: A Memoir - Softcover

Mori, Kyoko

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0449910431 ISBN 13: 9780449910436

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 1996

Synopsis

"POETIC . . . REMARKABLY HONEST . . . Mori describes her experiences with an admirable mixture of forthrightness and restraint."
--The Wall Street Journal
In an extraordinary memoir that is both a search for belonging and a search for understanding, Japanese-American author Kyoko Mori travels back to Kobe, Japan, the city of her birth, in an unspoken desire to come to terms with the memory of her mother's suicide and the family she left behind thirteen years before.
Throughout her seven-week trip, Kyoko struggles with her ever-present past and the lasting guilt over her mother's death. Although she meets with beloved cousins and other relatives, she agonizes over the frustrating relationship she barely maintains with her fierce father and selfish stepmother. Searching for answers, Kyoko attempts to find a new understanding of what her father is really like, and how it has affected her own place in two distinct worlds. As her time to leave draws near, Kyoko begins to understand that her family connections may be a powerful cry of the heart, but it is the new world that has given her escape from a lonely past and the power to believe in herself.
"[A] COMPELLING MEMOIR . . . LYRICAL."
--Seattle Times-Post Intelligencer
"ASTONISHINGLY BEAUTIFUL . . . Through the clarity filters the beauty of a large heritage that Mori is by now too American to share, but still Japanese enough to appreciate its redeeming value and to be in some measure restored by it."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"MAGICAL . . . ENLIGHTENING."
--San Francisco Chronicle

About this title

About the Author:

Kyoko Mori is the author of three nonfiction books: Yarn: Remembering the Way Home; Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures; and The Dream of Water. Mori’s essay “Yarn” was selected for The Best American Essays 2004 and Polite Lies was shortlisted for PEN’s Martha Albrand Nonfiction Award.

From Kirkus Reviews:

In a poetic and emotionally charged account of a journey back to her native Japan, Mori creates beautiful scenes even as she uncovers painful truths about her family and her past. Not knowing what else to do for a sabbatical, novelist Mori (Creative Writing/St. Norbert's College; Shizuko's Daughter, 1993) applied for a grant to travel to Japan, which she had left 13 years earlier, when she was a junior in college. This chronicle covers her departure from her adopted America; her rediscovery of her hometown of Kobe; her reacquaintance with the land and people she had so eagerly fled; and her remembrances of a childhood that included her mother's suicide when Mori was 12 and her father's subsequent beatings and cruelties (he forbade Mori to see her mother's relatives and, whenever his new wife threatened to leave because of Mori, would menace his daughter with a meat knife). Her book, which begins like entries in a conscientious traveler's journal, soon becomes a memoir wrought with suspense and wisdom. Will she contact her father? Will she understand her parents' early love for each other and their subsequent loss? In her initial encounters, Mori has difficulty communicating: Not only is her Japanese rusty, but she also respects the customs of Japanese restraint. So she says little and later dwells on what she should have said. But after visiting her mother's grave and relatives, she arrives at an emotional watershed. The book becomes richly rewarding as Mori opts for the most complicated, interesting, and difficult answers. She has an acute eye for metaphors. Some are delicate--like a stone slab at the bottom of a temple gate over which people step because it is a bad omen to touch it. Others, like the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (whose victims include her relatives), are explosive. This beautifully written voyage through a ``legacy of loss'' is a trip well worth taking. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0449910431
• ISBN 13: 9780449910436
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288