The Dream of Water: A Memoir - Hardcover

Mori, Kyoko

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805032606 ISBN 13: 9780805032604

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1994

Synopsis

In 1990 author Kyoko Mori returned to her native Japan to visit the "landscape of my childhood." There - looking for the house in which her mother killed herself, running on land that was once water, and retracing childhood train trips to her grandparents' farm - she relived the memories and uncovered the secrets that unlocked her past. In The Dream of Water, a series of chapters that are themselves "small perfections," she leads us to the "larger happiness" of an autobiography that is also a work of art.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"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 the Author:

Kyoko Mori teaches creative writing at St. Norbert's College in DePere, Wisconsin.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0805032606
• ISBN 13: 9780805032604
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 275