
Description
A Jewish girl from Cleveland meets a pregnant Texas belle over a package of dried squid in a Tokyo grocery store. Their common ground? Both newlyweds, married to Japanese men. Despite being unable to decipher the maps in Tokyo's train stations well enough to know where they're going, they abandon plans to cook dinner for their husbands (they don't know what half the things in the grocery store are anyway) and set off on a quest to find land. Will they find space for themselves, in a place where there's none? Will the Clevelander ever understand the haiku about cherry blossoms her husband reads to her in the bath? Will the women learn why, when you press a mysterious button in the restroom stall of a fancy Ginza department store, a tinny rendition of "Matchmaker Matchmaker" from Fiddler on the Roof is emitted from somewhere above the toilet seat? And will the Texan give birth on the Seibu Ikebukuro Line train? These stories chronicle the adventures of two card-carrying members of Tokyo's "Foreign Wives of Japanese" club at the height of Japan's economic boom years.
Product Details
Publisher | Mirror City Press |
Publish Date | July 15, 2018 |
Pages | 178 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9781732431904 |
Dimensions | 9.0 X 6.0 X 0.4 inches | 0.6 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
"Finding Land is a gem. An intimate, funny, fascinating collection of stories about adopted homes and otherness, about drifting in and out of love. A true joy to read." --Nathan Englander, recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and author of Dinner at the Center of the Earth
"The power of Marian Pierce's finely crafted, deeply compelling fiction is most distinctive in the maturity of its vision. What happens when roles are no longer defined by a single culture, no longer clear or communicable? Pierce offers a vision of how precarious, how tenuous our connections can be--to our habits, our identities, our beloveds, our deepest selves-- and also how tenacious. Questions of romance become small; unlikely connections with strangers, animals, and neighbors become large. Japanese haiku appear throughout like unexpected blossoms, and this novel is itself like a series of haiku--alert to human contradiction and the way our environments--among crows or snow or the pink rain of cherry blossom petals--shape and change us. How beautiful, this novel's arrival, from the deep heart." --Mary Szybist, winner of the National Book Award in Poetry for Incarnadine
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