The Strangeness of Beauty (Norton Paperback Fiction) - Softcover

Minatoya, Lydia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393321401 ISBN 13: 9780393321401

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Synopsis

"Minatoya offers a tenderly packaged gift. Unwrapping it is a pleasure." ―Austin Chronicle

A quietly daring exploration of art, family, culture, and conscience, as three generations of women, American and Japanese, face a strained reunion in pre-World War II Japan. Etsuko and her six-year-old motherless niece return from jazz-age Seattle to the ancient Japanese household of Etsuko’s mysterious samurai mother. With Japanese militarism mounting, the women must learn to make peace in an absorbing tale where mothers are childless, warriors are pacifists, and beauty is found in the common and the small.

About this title

Review:

At first blush, Lydia Minatoya's novel The Strangeness of Beauty would seem to be pretty standard fare: three generations of Japanese women struggle to understand and love one another. Sounds like generic women's fiction, but in Minatoya's hands, it becomes something quietly distinctive. Minatoya has a taste for the in-between. In this, her first novel, mothers are not mothers, Americans are Japanese, and warriors are pacifists.

Etsuko and her sister Naomi move with their respective husbands from Kobe to Seattle in the 1920s. When Naomi dies in childbirth, the widowed Etsuko becomes the baby's surrogate mother. The two return to Japan, where the girl, Hanae, can receive the education in subtleties that is her heritage as a member of a samurai family. The young American girl finds the chores and trials of samurai life enraging. "Take sweeping the garden path with a light bamboo broom: the point isn't just to clear off debris. Designed to develop dedication and spiritual depth, the real task is in repeating the activity--morning and dusk, over and over, for decades--until she learns to leave light, flowing impressions on the soft surface earth."

Just as patiently, Etsuko and Hanae must learn the secrets of their family. There's quite a bit of familial breast-beating, sure, but it's leavened by the perspective of Etsuko, a bumbling, sweet-tempered antiheroine of a narrator. The book comes alive as the two women, trapped in the liminal state of exile, neither American nor Japanese, learn to wrest the best from both worlds. As Japan teeters on the brink of war, Etsuko and Hanae apply their samurai-warrior sense of honor to fighting for peace. Minatoya (author of the acclaimed memoir Talking to High Monks in the Snow) never settles for black or white. She always strives for that more difficult place: the gray area. --Claire Dederer

About the Author:

Lydia Minatoya won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and notable-book citations from the American Library Association and the New York Public Library for her memoir. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0393321401
• ISBN 13: 9780393321401
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 383