LITMIR.BIZ

A young mother fights impossible odds to be reunited with her child in this acutely insightful first novel about an intercultural marriage gone terribly wrong. Jill Parker is an American painter living in Japan. Far from the trendy gaijin neighborhoods of downtown Tokyo, she’s settled in a remote seaside village where she makes ends meet as a bar hostess. Her world appears to open when she meets Yusuke, a savvy and sensitive art gallery owner who believes in her talent. But their love affair, and subsequent marriage, is doomed to a life of domestic hell, for Yusuke is the chonan, the eldest son, who assumes the role of rigid patriarch in his traditional family while Jill’s duty is that of a servile Japanese wife. A daily battle of wills ensues as Jill resists instruction in the proper womanly arts. Even the long-anticipated birth of a son, Kei, fails to unite them. Divorce is the only way out, but in Japan a foreigner has no rights to custody, and Jill must choose between freedom and abandoning her child. Told with tenderness, humor, and an insider’s knowledge of contemporary Japan, Losing Kei is the debut novel of an exceptional expatriate voice. Suzanne Kamata 's work has appeared in over one hundred publications. She is the editor of The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and a forthcoming anthology from Beacon Press on parenting children with disabilities. A five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, she has twice won the Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest.

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Pearl Dubois is a Southern belle. She was born in New Orleans to a prominent and wealthy family. During the Second World War, she wants to help the Allies. She lands a job in Paris working for the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS is the first spy agency in the United States. Its goal is to gather intelligence about the Germans and to win the war. Pearl convinces her boss to send her on a secret mission. She will bring photos of German spies to General George Patton, who is stationed near the Belgian border. On the way to the general’s camp, Pearl and three companions are ambushed by Nazi soldiers. She becomes a prisoner and must survive by her wits until she can plot her escape. Based on the real-life experiences of Gertrude Sanford Legendre, the first woman to be captured as a spy during WWII, Pearl’s adventures are both riveting and inspiring.

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The American writer Suzanne Kamata had lived in Japan for more than half of her life, yet she had never explored the small nearby islands of the Inland Sea. The islands, first made famous by Donald Richie’s The Inland Sea 50 years ago, are noted for displaying artwork created by prominent, and sometimes curious, international artists and sculptors: Naoshima’s wealth of museums, including one devoted to 007, Yayoi Kusama’s polka dot pumpkins, Kazuo Katase’s blue teacup, and a monster rising out of a well on the hour in Sakate, called “Anger at the Bottom of the Sea”—to name a few. Spurred by her teen-aged daughter Lilia's burgeoning interest in art and adventure, Kamata sets out to show her the islands’ treasures. Mother and daughter must confront several barriers on their adventure. Lilia is deaf and uses a wheelchair. It is not always easy to get onto – or off of – the islands, not to mention the challenges of language, culture, and a generation gap. <i>A Girls’ Guide to the Islands</i> takes the reader on a rare visit by a unique mother and daughter team.

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