From My Grandmother's Bedside: Sketches of Postwar Tokyo - Hardcover

Field, Norma

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520208447 ISBN 13: 9780520208445

Publisher: University of California Press, 1997

Synopsis

From My Grandmother's Bedside is an experiment in genre, a moving and evocative reflection on contemporary Japan, human desire, family relations, life, and death. Norma Field, the daughter of a Japanese woman and an American G.I., and author of the acclaimed In the Realm of a Dying Emperor, returned to Japan in 1995 to tend to her slowly dying grandmother, who had been rendered speechless by multiple strokes. What she finds—both in the memories of her childhood in her grandmother's household and in the altered face of postmodern Japan—forms the substance of her narrative that transcends both memoir and essay to reveal, through crafted fragments, a refraction of the whole of Japan.

Having spent her childhood in Japan and her adulthood in the United States, Field speaks from the position of one who straddles two worlds. Her testimony is highly personal, her voice is intimate, her observations are keen and clear. She juxtaposes details from daily life—conversations overheard on the subway; arguments between her mother and aunts; the struggle to feed, bathe, and care for her grandmother—with observations on the political and social changes that have transformed Japan. She shows how the belated coming to terms with the war and continuing avoidance of the same are intimately related to the look and feel of Japanese society today. She gently folds back the complicated layers of blame and responsibility for the war, touching in the process on subjects as diverse as the effects of the atomic bomb, comfort women, biracial/bicultural families, the farewells of Kamikaze pilots, and the dehumanizing effects of Japan's postwar economic boom. A recurrent theme is the observation of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war.

From My Grandmother's Bedside is also a contemplation of the many facets of language: the kinds of language with which her grandmother's illness has been negotiated, the wordless language her grandmother speaks, her own relationship to these languages. Through it all runs the realization that the personal and the political are perpetually entangled, that past and present converge and overlap.

About this title

Review

Japan is not what you would call a direct culture. Refined through centuries of close living, honed over the years to a subtle edge, Japanese communication tends toward the gentle allusion and the discreet sign as opposed to the blunt, brash, in-your-face openness that often characterizes American interchanges. So it's appropriate that Norma Field's portrait of postwar Japan emerges indirectly from her personal tale of family duty. It's the summer of 1995, and Norma Field, the product of a Japanese mother and occupation GI father, has returned to Japan to care for her grandmother, who has suffered her second stroke. As Field concentrates on learning to read the signals of her grandmother's stroke-impaired face--the almost imperceptible difference between the nod "yes" and the nod "no"--she digresses in a series of short vignettes. Field reminisces about her childhood (taking loyalty oaths in the American Embassy, sharing the warm futon with her aunts and grandmother in the Eight-Mat Room), ponders death with dignity versus putting feeding tubes up her grandmother's nose, sees anew the photography of Domon Ken in an exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, and observes visiting American businessmen misunderstanding Japanese hospitality. Neatly compartmentalized like a lacquered bento box lunch, the whole is much more than a sum of the beautifully crafted parts. Thoughtful and moving, Field's untraditional memoir provides insights into both American and Japanese histories and cultures. Delve into her observations on the long flight to Narita and your whole visit will be enhanced by Field's appreciation of the personal Japan that lies beneath the surface.

From the Inside Flap

"Norma Field's free-form memoir has the excitement of Picasso's cubism and the aching sweetness of a Japanese folk song. Her salute to her grandmother is a love poem to all those old ones who have survived the storm and are dying with grace."—Studs Terkel

"Norma Field is marvelous on the harder edges of 'peace and prosperity.' I like her lambent style, her Janus-facing cultural insights, and her power to create a scene, to move her reader as well as to challenge and instruct."—Marilyn Young, author of The Vietnam Wars

"That life is reponsible to and for its time, that families and nations have histories entangled in pain: this is the insight at the heart of Norma Field's sad and honest book."—Edwin Cranston

"What I loved about 'From My Grandmother's Bedside' was the way the author's mother and grandmother come to seem mythic by the end. They become larger than life, and through the power of Norma Field's writing, they enlarge the reader as well. This book should serve to remind each of us that by allowing ourselves to be led through our daily existence by our innate dignity and courage, we can at the end of our lives look back and say we have achieved a type of greatness."—Cynthia Kadohata, author of In the Heart of the Valley of Love

"Norma Field's vignettes are as full of astute illuminations as they are sustained, throughout, by a poignant lyricism. She makes autobiographical writing seem deceptively easy. That ease is, in fact, the mark of a consummate writer."—Rey Chow

"I love the specificities of this book—the transitional clack and clatter of wooden clogs on paved Tokyo streets, electric futon dryers, an air-raid shelter camouflaged by azaleas and fragrant daphnes, awkward pronouns of commitment and blame in a Nagasaki Day speech, a baby toothbrush inserted tenderly between the thin lips of a dying grandmother. This is the komorebi—the spilling sunlight—that Norma Field shines on postwar Japan."—Cathy Davidson

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0520208447
• ISBN 13: 9780520208445
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 204