Mako Yoshikawa

This is a story of 2 step-sisters, Rei and Claudia, who were brought together with Claudia's father left her mother to marry Hana, Rei's mother. It's a story of the effects of the Hiroshima blast on people who weren't even in the city that August in 1943. It's a story of forgiveness and letting go. But most of all, it's a story of love and recognizing it as something to protect and cherish.

Rei and Claudia were once each other's soul sisters, but haven't seen each other in 17 years after Hana left their father. Claudia, who hated Hana for breaking up her original family, now finds herself emulating her stepmother, and having an affair with a married man with 2 children. Rei finally contacts Claudia and arranges to meet her, but she has a secret that she thinks Claudia now needs to know.

It's a story of 3 women, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, coming together at last in the acknowledgement that no matter how it came about, they are family.… (meer)

In this novel, Mako Yoshikawa continues to explore the theme of family relationships — especially those between mothers and daughters — which was the theme of her first novel, “One Hundred and One Ways.”

This time there are additional explorations about what constitutes a family, in spite of cultural differences, as well as the ethical implications of having an affair with a married man and breaking up his home. Both books are built up on the stories the characters tell each other about their family relationships.

The story in this novel describes how Rei and Claudia become stepsisters when Claudia’s father Henry falls in love with Rei’s mother Hana and leaves his wife to marry her. In spite of Claudia’s dislike of Hana for breaking up her parents’ relationship, and in spite of the cultural differences between the two families, she and Rei become as close as twins. They are constantly together until Hana and Henry mysteriously break up just as the girls are entering puberty. Afterwards there is no contact between them for many years.

The story shifts back and forth from these childhood years to the present, when Rei suddenly reappears in Claudia’s life. They both have stories they need to reveal to each other as they become reacquainted. Claudia has found the love of her life, but he is married. So Claudia must come to terms with her hypocrisy and her conflicting emotions about coming between her love and his family. Rei is recovering from skin cancer, which precipitated her mother’s revelation about her past, causing a rift between Rei and her mother.

How do people overcome the distance of time, secrets and rigid beliefs? By listening to each other’s stories and by the act of forgiving.… (meer)

Here we have another book about love - love not only between men and women, but also love between mothers and daughters. So far so ordinary, you might think. After all, what is a novel without some kind of relationship? And, as usual, love must never come easy. Thus the relationships in this novel are all fraught with failures to communicate. However, this debut novel breaks some new ground, and the narrative is “masterfully” written. (Sorry, but I can’t think of the “mot juste.”)

The story is told from the first-person perspective of Yukiko “Kiki” Takehashi, a doctoral student living in New York City. She is recovering from the death of one boyfriend, Phillip, and trying to have a normal relationship with her fiancé, Eric, whom she suspects of having a “Asian girl fetish.” In between the episodes that she relates about her life, she also tells us about her namesake, her grandmother Yukiko, who lived the life of a geisha in Japan before the Second World War. And we also learn about Grandmother Yukiko’s daughter and Kiki’s mother, Akiko, who is living frozen in time due to being abandoned by her husband, Kiki’s father, whom she had run away to marry against her mother’s wishes.

In addition to the cross-cultural, cross-continental, time-spanning stories being related, there is also an element of magical realism. Phillip has come back from the dead and appears sporadically, but persistently, in Kiki’s apartment. What does he want? Why doesn’t he speak to her? Why can’t she release her memories of him so that she can pursue a normal life?

Kiki dreams about meeting her grandmother someday, and as she dreams she thinks of all the things she would like to say to her and ask her. One of these questions is: “What price a woman’s life, if all it consists of is loving one man forever?” Later she reflects on the “bleak possibility that all is not perfect in the best of all possible loves; that in the happiest of all marriages, regret is still a fact, sacrifice still a necessity.”

All in all, a very entertaining first book, and now I am off to find her second novel, “Once Removed,” published a few years after this one.… (meer)