The Thorn Puller

Description

By (author) Ito, Hiromi; Translated by Angles Jeffrey

Short /annotation:

Introducing Hiromi Ito, an award-winning Japanese author who has been compared to Haruki Murakami and Yoko Tawada.

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Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the MurasakiShikibu Prize

Caught between two cultures, award-winning author Hiromi Ito tackles subjects like aging, death, and suffering with dark humor, illuminating the bittersweet joys of being alive.

The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a womancaring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her agingparents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these twostarkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrativeabout what it means to live and die in a globalized society.

Ito has been described as a “shaman of poetry” because of her skill in allowing the voices of others to flow through her. Here she enriches her semi-autobiographical novel by channeling myriad voices drawn from Japanese folklore, poetry, literature, and pop culture. The result is a generic chimera—part poetry, part prose, part epic—a unique, transnational, polyvocal mode of storytelling. One throughline is a series of memories associated with the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the “thorns” of human suffering.

Review quote:

“The Thorn Puller is a masterpiece… a novel about some of literature’s greatest themes—love, human connection, death, and the meaning of suffering.”

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Allison Fincher, Asian Review of Books

“A brilliantly poetic translation . . .  explored with biting humor and sharp wit.”

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Marissa Moss, New York Journal of Books

“In Ito’s literary vision, life unfolds more as a stream of language than a series of plot points. With each phase of life she records, Ito shows how language emerges from the rituals of social reproduction that mark the coming and going of generations, from childbirth to eldercare. “

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Eva Rosenfield, Chicago Review 

“A strong affirmation of life. Working collaboratively with the author, Jeffrey Angles, a recognized poet in both English and Japanese, has done a wonderful job translating this work. Ito is a poet of some renown… “Sometimes I dare to imagine I’m an independent woman,” says the narrator. Despite all the forces clamoring for her attention, she is, and that is both the strength and appeal of this novel.”

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Erik R. Lofgren, World Literature Today

“Overflowing and contradictory, worn down with fatigue, yet brimming with energy, The Thorn Puller combines a confessional story of a woman dealing with family commitments in two countries with vibrant excursions into Japanese folklore and history.”

—Richard Medhurst, Nippon.com

“With ruthless honesty and wicked humor, Ito exposes the frustration and inconvenience of being a caregiver, juxtaposing it with the sorrow of watching a loved one deteriorate.”

—Foreword Reviews, starred review

“Poet Ito makes her English-language fiction debut with a lyrical account of a woman caught between two cultures and her family’s demands … Fans of Japanese literature will enjoy this impressionistic project.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Ito”s chameleonic prose confronts mortality, cultural conflicts, religious comforts, and waning relationships, embellished with all manner of welcoming, unfiltered, surprisingly humorous honesty about the universally quotidian, from pimple-popping to good sex.”

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Terry Hong, Booklist

“The Thorn Puller is a beautiful work, sad and soothing all at once. It is a brave work, as Hiromi Ito shar