This is going to be a somewhat terse review, since I've had a long month, a long week, a long day, and am tired and using my godfather's computer because mine is in for repairs to the motherboard.
Back in the 1980s, Kyoko Mori, a Japanese immigrant working through college and grad school in the United States wrote various short stories, in English but with a very distinctly Japanese sensibility, about a girl called Okuda Yuki whose mother Shizuko commits suicide when she is twelve years old. There were different points of view in the different stories, with mostly 'Yuki chapters' but also some 'Hanae chapters' (Yuki's stepmother) and 'Masa chapters' (Yuki's grandmother). As time wore on the stories took on the character of an overall arc, which in the early nineties Mori welded into a novel that she titled Shizuko's Daughter, which follows Yuki's path through hatred and resentment of her father and stepmother to acceptance of her position in a family.
There's a lot to love about how Shizuko's Daughter pans out, such as the way it manages to be fiercely tradition-positive without being at all reactionary, the amazing relationships between the female characters, the snapshot of life in suburban seventies Japan (hint: It rhymes with Bevolutionary Boad), and the absolutely lovely writing (a sample passage, from a chapter in which Yuki, a runner in middle school at this point, develops her first crush on a fellow runner named Sachiko: 'The hurdler had long hair--Yuki imagined it would come down to her waist when she had it loose--which she wore in a thick ponytail, baring her long white neck. Her skin was fair even after a season of track practice in the sun. As she passed Yuki, she smiled, her lips curving upward just a little, not showing her teeth at all. Yuki smiled back and then looked down at her own knees....Her face felt hot.' From a chapter in which Yuki destroys a science lab project at her school to make an art project out of it: 'Moving silently, Yuki got the lid from the desk, washed and dried it, and put it back on the jar. The maple leaves and the pine needles had filled the jar almost to the top. She placed the jar carefully in the center of the desk among the scalpels and the microscopes. Then she took the empty colander and walked to the window, crawled through, and sat for a moment balanced on the edge, swinging her legs. She looked right and left. Nobody was in sight. First, she tossed the colander, which landed on the edge of the concrete path. The next moment, she pushed off with her arms and jumped out. She landed neatly on her two feet beyond the bushes and picked up the colander. Then, grasping it like a baton, she sprinted toward the woods for more maple leaves like clustered flames, pine needles that smelled of mountain air. Her ten minutes were long since used up. Miss Sakaki would fail her for today's assignment. Still, she would return in time to fill the tables with color. She began to smile as she ran.'). The book made me cry at many, many, many points, most of them in a good way, although the first four or so chapters of the book are truly dismal, as are both of the Hanae chapters.
Speaking of Hanae, she's another great thing about the book. She is so despicable. Initially she comes across as a stereotypical evil stepmother without much to her, but later we get to see what goes on inside her head. It is not pretty, but she becomes less of a caricature while remaining just as repulsive. It actually works really well.
The one issue that I have with the novel is the way a particular character near the end is presented. I don't have any problems with the character themself--in fact I actually like them a lot--but they come across to me as something like a Western lead character who stumbled into a supporting role in a Japanese story by mistake. If you read the book, and know me, you should end up with a pretty clear idea of who I mean and why I find what's done with them slightly (but not extremely) problematic, particularly given the focus on Yuki and Sachiko earlier in the book. It's a problem that could easily be resolved by either removing a single sentence, or tacking the character in question more firmly into Yuki's family somehow (this would work because of the tradition-positive and in particular family-based theme of the book), but as it is, what happens with this character leads to a somewhat uncomfortable lack of ambiguity in the end of the novel, and it just feels a little strange to me.
The best-written and most lovable character is probably Masa, Yuki's grandmother and Shizuko's mother. She doesn't appear much interacting with her daughter, since most of the flashbacks of Shizuko are Yuki's rather than hers, but it's obvious how very much she loved her. Shizuko has some flaws, most notably the fact that she killed herself despite having a preteen daughter who was very close to her (which is a pretty serious flaw, to be honest), but by and large she's presented as a very good, very loving person who had the misfortune to exist in (as they say) a world she never made, kind of like something between Anna Karenina throwing herself under the train and that guy jumping off the cliff early on in Madlax. Masa having raised Shizuko, and having a strong, fifty-year-long at the least relationship with her husband Takeo, and dealing with Yuki throughout an extremely unpleasantly (though understandably) self-pitying period in her early teenage years, and growing flowers and painting and doing crafts, comes across as pretty close to an ideal paragon of the values that the book espouses, but like Hanae in the other direction her point-of-view chapters make her a lot more interesting than a simple perfect exemplar would be.
Shizuko's Daughter is overall an incredibly good novel, the only problem that I had with it coming in one minor aspect of the role of one supporting character who shows up towards the end. This is considerably less problematic than I find the vast majority of things that I read. It's gorgeously written, with vibrant, engaging characters and images, and has an absolutely beautiful and very hopeful message in the end. And now what I really want is to find and read Mori's other work.
Allowed by the conductor to get on the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority bus despite not having enough money and being at the very edge of the PVTA service area at best, they settled down into two isolated seats at the very back, their heads resting against the cold metal behind them as they listened to the power train’s almost maternal hum. They went through the fields south of Bernardston and down the old streets of Greenfield. Past there, they crossed the big river at Turners Falls, where it fell over the power-dam in triple cataracts. South of Sunderland they got off and looked down past Amherst to the distant humps of the Holyoke Range. The hills north of the Quabbin were blazing with foliage to the east beneath the morning sun.
