The Thorn Puller
Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the MurasakiShikibu Prize
Introducing Hiromi Ito, an award-winning Japanese author who has been compared to Haruki Murakami and Yoko Tawada.
The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about 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.
'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.' — Terry Hong, Booklist
Hiromi Ito came to national attention in Japan in the 1980s for her groundbreaking poetry about pregnancy, childbirth, and female sexuality. After relocating to the U.S. in the 1990s, she began to write about the immigrant experience and biculturalism. In recent years, she has focused on the ways that dying and death shape human experience. English translations include Killing Kanoko and Wild Grass on the Riverbank.
Jeffrey Angles is a writer and professor of Japanese at Western Michigan University. He is the first non-native poet writing in Japanese to win the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, a highly coveted prize for poetry. His translation of the modernist classic The Book of the Dead by Shinobu Orikuchi won both the Miyoshi Award and the Scaglione Prize for translation.
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