The Thorn Puller

October 10, 2022
Poet Ito makes her English-language fiction debut (after the poetry collection Wild Grass on the Riverbank) with a lyrical and discursive autofictional account of a woman caught between two cultures and her family’s demands for caretaking. Poet Hiromi Ito at 50 splits her time between California, with her third husband and children, and Kumamoto, Japan, where she visits her elderly parents. During one trip, a series of medical appointments reveals her mother has had a stroke, which upends Hiromi’s plans to return to the U.S., even when her much older husband needs emergency bypass surgery. Meanwhile, Hiromi’s young daughter, Aiko, begs for a digital pet, and Hiromi recounts visits to a temple dedicated to the bodhisattva Jizo, who promises to pluck the thorns of suffering from devotees. Chapters slowly cycle through Hiromi’s mother’s deteriorating condition, Hiromi’s rancorous relationship with her husband, and her encounters with fellow Japanese poets. When Aiko is 13, she bonds with a puppy Hiromi adopts, and the financial and emotional cost of her trips mount. With vivid depictions of aging bodies and precise excavation of fraught relationships, Ito builds an intimate study of feminized labor. Fans of Japanese literature will enjoy this impressionistic project.

December 1, 2022
"Sandwich generation" refers to adults responsible for both aging parents and growing children. Lauded Japanese poet and writer Ito's fictionalized alter-ego is stuck in a triple-decker. Above are her partially paralyzed mother in a geriatric clinic, her father struggling alone, and her third, 28-years-older husband. Below are three daughters, the youngest just 10, the middle struggling in college. Exacerbating the caregiving demands are 9,000 miles as Ito is pulled back and forth between her parents in Kumamoto, Japan, and California, her home for almost 20 years. Originally serialized in Japan in 2006-7, when Ito was in her early fifties, her inviting autobiographical novel, presented with third-person chapter titles and first-person intimacy, arrives stateside smoothly translated and warmly introduced by professor and poet Angles. Ito gained renown in the 1980s for candidly highlighting pregnancy, childbirth, and female sexuality in her poetry. Her chameleonic prose (each chapter ends with influences and inspirations) 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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