The Thorn Puller
Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the Murasaki Shikibu 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.
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"The Thorn Puller is a masterpiece... a novel about some of literature's greatest themes--love, human connection, death, and the meaning of suffering."
--Allison Fincher, Asian Review of Books
"A strong affirmation of life. Working collaboratively with the author, Jeffrey Angles, a recognized poet in both English and Japanese, has done a wonderful job translating this work. Ito is a poet of some renown... "Sometimes I dare to imagine I'm an independent woman," says the narrator. Despite all the forces clamoring for her attention, she is, and that is both the strength and appeal of this novel."
--Erik R. Lofgren, World Literature Today
"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
"A glorious, immersive read, packed with laugh-out-loud moments and the kind of reflections that anyone who has married across cultures will recognize."
--Iain Maloney, Metropolis
"Absurdly comedic and heartbreaking... The Thorn Puller is an enjoyable and affecting narrative about the meaning of living and aging in our globalized era."
--Bonnie Nadzam, Lion's Roar
"With frank, humorous prose that sinuously morphs into the musical cadence of poetry, The Thorn Puller tackles subjects like aging, death, and suffering from a transnational perspective that also illuminates the bittersweet joy of being alive."
--Alyssa Pearl Fusek, Unseen Japan
"With a great deal of arresting material, The Thorn Puller is a fascinating piece of work."
--M.A.Orthofer, The Complete Review
"The Thorn Puller is a benchmark book. Some reviews compare Hiromi Ito to Haruki Murakami and Yoko Tawada, but make no mistake, Ito is her own person, with her own style, and she sets her own standard for storytelling that will be a measure for aspiring authors."
--Linda Gould, White Enso
"Expansive and brilliantly crafted... I was enthralled by The Thorn Puller for its melodic, mesmerising voice, for the wisdom it imparted, and Ito's inescapable creative genius."
--Elizabeth Meehan, Litro Magazine
"The sparks of humor fly as Japanese medieval narrative and Judeo-Christian culture collide in modern-day domestic disputes. Ito may have written this book in prose, but we never forget that she's a poet. There is a special music even in the complaints, scolding, arguments, phone conversations, and gossipy moments. As the narrative unfolds, Itō draws not only upon voices of her family members and others around her, she gathers in countless voices, including those of the dead. And how wonderful to find the rhythm of the Japanese reproduced so marvelously in this translation!"
--Yoko
