Kyoko Mori

While excelling as a student and athlete, twelve-year-old Japanese girl Yuki Okuda struggles to come to terms with her mother's suicide, her father's coldness, and her stepmother's outright hostility.

Shizuko's Daughter

The Dream of Water

Shizukon tytär

Susan Sontag

Joyce Carol Oates

Virginia Woolf

Judith Ortiz Cofer

Jamaica Kincaid

Joan Didion

Jenny Diski

Elizabeth David

Annie Dillard

M. F. K. Fisher

Gretel Ehrlich

Anne Fadiman

Elizabeth Hardwick

Cynthia Ozick

Margaret Cavendish

Rebecca West

Alice Walker

Linda Hogan

Zora Neale Hurston

Elizabeth Bowen

Fanny Fern

Eliza Haywood

Sara Suleri

Grace Greenwood

Charlotte Lennox

Margaret Fuller

Vernon Lee

Eliza Lynn Linton

Lydia Maria Child

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Harriet Martineau

Gail Hamilton

Frances Brooke

Mary Russell Mitford

Frances Power Cobbe

Zitkala-Sa

Alice Meynell

Louise Imogen Guiney

Ann Plato

Agnes Repplier

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Judith Sargent Murray

Elisabeth Woodbridge Morris

Gertrude Bustill Mossell

Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi

Of Women and the Essay brings together forty-six American and British women essayists whose work spans nearly four centuries. The contributions of these essayists prove that women have been significant participants in the essay tradition since the genre’s modern beginnings in the sixteenth century. Many of these essayists, such as Eliza Haywood, Fanny Fern, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Agnes Repplier, and Alice Meynell, achieved significant success as writers within whatever essay form ruled the day; others bent the rules, though often imperceptibly, to make room for themselves. Collectively they represent a missing piece in the larger history of the essay. In Of Women and the Essay Jenny Spinner contextualizes the broad range of literary essays included within the chronological development of the genre. She makes a compelling argument that women have constructed their own tradition in the essay genre, often utilizing periodic traits of the essay to their own advantage. At the same time, she suggests that the personal essay’s demands on the essayist required both a public and personal authorization that proved challenging for women essayists in general and for women of color in particular. The appendix catalogs the works of nearly 200 female essayists and should inspire further reading. As a whole, the volume lifts women writers from the cutting-room floor of essay scholarship and returns them to their rightful place in the essay canon.

An Anthology from 1655 to 2000

Of Women and the Essay

After her mother abandons them, fifteen-year-old Megumi tries to understand her father's need for his mistress while dealing with her own aching isolation.

One Bird

A jewel of a book . . . a work of art (The New York Times Book Review). A young Japanese girl must deal with the suicide of her mother--and the hostility of her father and stepmother. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year. A Publishers Weekly Editor's Choice Best Book of 1993.

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. Japan is the land Mori fled as a teenager, seeking to escape from her cold, abusive father and her manipulative stepmother. It is the country she spend her adult life putting behind her, but it is also her homeland. As she searches through familiar neighborhoods and on distant islands, she is constantly aware of the culture she abandoned and the one she has adopted. Pushed by the sights and sounds of contemporary Japan into her interior world of memory and dreams, she also looks out toward the daylight land of America. A personal journey of discovery that is also an exploration of national difference, The Dream of Water explores intimate emotions that reveal profound cultural truths.

A Memoir

Shizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori An ALA Best Book for Young Adults A New York Times Notable Book After her mother's suicide when she is twelve years old, Yuki spends years living with her distant father and his resentful new wife, cut off from her mother's family, and relying on her own inner strength to cope with the tragedy.

A memoir of crossing cultures, losing love, and finding home by a New York Times notable author. As steadily and quietly as her marriage falls apart, so Kyoko Mori's understanding of knitting deepens. From flawed school mittens to beautiful unmatched patterns of cardigans, hats and shawls, Kyoko draws the connection between knitting and the new life she tried to establish in the U.S. Interspersed with the story of knitting throughout, the narrative contemplates the nature of love, loss, and what holds a marriage together.

Remembering the Way Home

Yarn

Twelve essays by a Japanese-American writer about being caught between past and present, old country and new.

On being a Woman Caught Between Cultures

Polite Lies

Maya Ishida is no stranger to sorrow. Torn from her artist father in her native Japan, raised by her cold, ambitious mother in Minneapolis, she has finally put together a life with few disruptions: a safe marriage and a quiet life weaving clothes in a country studio. The past is no more than a story she vaguely remembers; the present is a gray landscape of solitary pleasures and modest expectations. After her father dies, Maya is pulled back into the memory of their parting. In his many stories of Orpheus and Eurydice and of the tennyo, a mythic Japanese figure, he had taught her that love means making the sacrifice of letting go. And so she had walked away from him without looking back. Twenty-four years later, holding her father's last sketch, Maya knows she can avoid looking back no longer. She must question her placid marriage, her decision not to become an artist, and even the precarious peace she has made with her mother before she can be released--to feel passion, risk change, and fall in love. Kyoko Mori's young adult novel, Shizuko's Daughter, was hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "a jewel...one of those rarities that shine out only a few times in a generation." In Stone Field, True Arrow, her first novel for adults, she sheds brilliant light on eternal questions about life and love.

A Novel

Stone Field, True Arrow

Kyoko Mori

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