The Laws of Evening
Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In this dazzling debut collection, Mary Yukari Waters, a remarkably gifted, award-winning Japanese-American writer, opens a window onto a foreign culture as she reveals the universal humanity of her characters. These uncommonly elegant and assured stories explore Japanese society caught between the long shadow of World War II and the rapid advance of Westernization. The women and children who inhabit these crystalline tales have lost husbands and fathers in the war and now face a world dramatically altered by Western influence.
In "Aftermath," a mother watches her son play American dodgeball and eat Western food as she desperately tries to keep alive the memory of his father, who was killed in the war. "Since My House Burned Down" depicts a Japanese widow, permanently displaced from her kitchen by her daughter-in-law, reflecting on the deprivations of wartime as the acidic, foreign smell of tomato sauce wafts upstairs. In "Egg-Face," latent hope kindles for thirty-year-old, jobless Ritsuko when a matchmaker arranges for her to meet a handsome young man. And "The Way Love Works"explores favoritism in three generations of women when a Japanese American teenager returns to Japan with her mother.
These finely etched portraits of upheaval and renewal, estrangement and reconciliation, provide keen insight into the Japanese experience and sensibility. A virtuoso collection infused with a warmth that invites readers to feel at home in a world that might otherwise seem alien, The Laws of Evening will undoubtedly place Mary Yukari Waters in the company of our most revered writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The tension between tradition and the "white noise" of Western culture and technology in post-WWII Japan is captured with great poise and delicacy in this debut collection of 11 stories by Japanese-American Waters. As evidence of this clash of cultures, a television rests beside the widow Hanae's family altar in "Kami"; meanwhile, it is only the music of the traditional koto that is in sync with her biological clock (unlike "that tiresome Beethoven, who gives her a headache"). In many of the stories, women contemplate the untimely deaths of their husbands, brothers and fathers, and grow anxious as their children learn who Magellan was, how to use silverware and how to stomach alien foods. Makiko watches her son, Toshi, play dodgeball in "Aftermath," distressed by his willingness to " the ball at his former teammates without the slightest trace of allegiance," just as she is horrified by her nation's reverence for the American soldiers who killed her husband. "Shibusa" features a mother who cannot bear to meet the eyes of an old friend, whose startled look reminds her of her five-year-old's death in a bombing raid on her neighborhood. Several characters who escape death in combat fall victim to cancer or, in one case, food poisoning, which kills a set of identical twins and convinces their mother that imported bacteria is to blame for the tragedy in the title story. Wistful yet optimistic, these tales of inevitable cultural mutation, and of the unspoken fear and shame of an older generation wrenched from its prewar world, herald the arrival of a brave new voice that, like the characters herein, speaks with serenity from a "limbo for which there are no words."
