The Phoenix Tree: And Other Stories (Japan's Women Writers) - Softcover

Kizaki, Satoko

Softcover

ISBN 10: 4770017901 ISBN 13: 9784770017901

Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc, 1993

Synopsis

The stories in this collection have been acclaimed in Japan, but their appeal is universal. Each involves an orphaned adult, struggling since childhood to recover a sense of wholeness that seems lost in the past. The narrator of "Barefoot" returns from France to a Japan that had cast her out, unsure of whether she belongs anywhere. Mitsue, in the title story, must reexamine every assumption she has ever had about her life as she cares for her dying aunt and nurses a secret love for her married cousin. In "Mei Hua Lu" three generations of women link the protagonist to a long-ago death in a small Manchurian town. And in "The Flame Trees" a Japanese woman, pregnant with her first child in Southern California in the early I 960s, weighs her inner terror against the life of her baby.

No plot summaries can really suggest the richness of Kizaki's prose, transmitted through the elegant, prizewinning translations of Carol A. Flath. The delicate layers of memory and experience that her words reveal create in the reader the sensation of participating in another person's dream. With the nuance and understated feeling of an Ozu film, these stories offer intimate glimpses of their characters' emotional lives that leave the reader wishing for more.

About this title

About the Author:

Satoko Kizaki was born in 1939 in Shinkyo in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. At the age of five, she moved to Japan's Toyama Prefecture, a place that was later to become the setting for "The Phoenix Tree." Graduating from college with a degree in English, she married and lived in France and the United States for a total of 15 years with her husband, a plant physiologist. Her first story, "Barefoot," written after her return to Japan in 1979, received Bungakukai Magazine's annual Award for New Authors and was nominated for the coveted Akutagawa Prize in 1980. After her stories received consecutive yearly nominations for the prize (one of these was "Flame Trees"), "The Phoenix Tree" was awarded the Akutagawa Prize in 1985. The stories in this volume are selected from the three short-story collections Kizaki has published in Japanese. Kizaki's other book in English is The Sunken Temple.

Carol A. Flath, the translator, is an assistant professor of Russian language and literature at Duke University. She began her study of Japanese in 1983, and in 1988 her translations of Satoko Kizaki's "Barefoot" and "The Phoenix Tree" won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature awarded by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University. Flath is also the translator of Kizaki's The Sunken Temple. She lives with her husband, a specialist in Japanese economics, and their son, Nicholas, in Raleigh, N.C.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

That midnight, with the words "But I am here" spoken in the intense white light of the delivery room, Makiko had made a promise to that little person wailing in his feeble voice. There he'd been, peacefully dozing inside the soft, dusky womb, when suddenly he was flung out--against his will--into a world where every imaginable danger waited for him. He was faced with the cruel task of growth. The thin little windpipe, which could have clogged up so easily, suddenly had to take in the rough outside air. The internal organs, no bigger than a fist, would start digesting food. The little living being waved his feeble arms and legs in protest. Poor thing: turning all red over demands that no one would grant. Makiko, imagining herself in the little being's place, mumbled the words, "It would be easier to die," that kept repeating themselves to her. It would have been easier not to have been born.

"You have to live."

The new, unfamiliar idea dazzled her. In order to protect the living thing that was even more helpless than herself, she had to go on living. How had she wound up shouldering this enormous, unimaginable burden? Now she absolutely must keep on living. She had destroyed the possibility of escaping through death. Why hadn't she thought it all over carefully before? Motoo had originally not shown any interest in having children. Though, in contrast to Makiko, he had had a happy childhood, he often said that he had no confidence in the way human society was headed. He especially didn't want a boy; "I can't even look at them, poor things," he had said. But neither of them had even thought of plucking and discarding the life that had sprouted in her womb. It was probably unrelated to the fact that abortion was strictly forbidden in France, where she had gotten pregnant; it was strange--the thought hadn't even crossed their minds. But, though the danger that Makiko personally knew was enough to fill the world all by itself, there was in addition all the suffering that only men could experience. If you looked at it this way, this little thing might well regret the very fact of his birth. And how could I possibly answer him if he did regret it, if he asked me why I had brought him into this world? Makiko's confused mind and exhausted body heaved with the strain.

About this edition

• Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 4770017901
• ISBN 13: 9784770017901
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 242