Stone Field, True Arrow
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Simple language and strong emotion are effectively used to relate the story of Maya Ishida, a 35-year-old Japanese-American woman who must confront her painful past in order to re-evaluate her safe but soul-crushing present. Maya works as an artisan, weaving cloth and making clothes. She's married to high school English teacher Jeff and they live placidly in Wisconsin, near her childhood friend, Yuko. When Maya is informed that her father, whom she hasn't seen for 25 years, has died in Osaka, it is the enclosed drawing that jars her memory: her artist father drew a picture of the day 10-year-old Maya left Japan to move to Minneapolis with her mother, Kay, who had abandoned her husband and Maya three years earlier. Maya attempts to understand why, after she moved to the States, she never heard from her father again; why the letters she wrote him were returned unopened; why he allowed her to be raised by cruel, selfish Kay, who has tried to erase every trace of her Japanese origins and encourages her daughter to do the same. In the process, Maya comes to terms with her passionless marriage, learning to cope with the fear of being alone and falling in love for the first time. This first foray into adult fiction by YA author and memoirist Mori (Shizuko's Daughter; The Dream of Water) is graceful in its simplicity of language and in the subtle way in which Eastern and Western folk tales are interlaced with the plot line. The pace of the book is perhaps too leisurely, maintaining a calm, unruffled tone even at the emotional apex, but despite the mannered structure, Maya's cultural identity and family history are lucidly invoked, and her struggle emerges as a universal one. 5-city author tour.
