The Woman in the White Kimono: (A BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick)

Product Information

relate to today’s society in America? Are there ways in which cultural norms about race and gender impact our lives today? Y así, narrada entre estas dos líneas temporales, separadas en el tiempo y espacio, nos encontramos una emotiva novela que aborda la dureza del Japón de la posguerra desde un prisma muy humano.

He would trust Grandmother, as a woman, to know best. She has created a lie with more than feet; it has sprouted scandalous wings and flown beyond my forgiving reach. To imagine, my father knows otherwise is the foot of a lighthouse. Dark.” (pg. 208) This is a beautiful written book, in fact almost too beautifully written: in some places it felt like a fairy story. I found the first part a bit off-putting: there is an awful lot of sitting by a bedside watching a loved one suffering, which doesn’t move the story forward and is almost slushy in its portrayal of an end-of-life scenario.Book Review: One Hundred Merry Memories (An Aspen Cove Romance # 24) by Kelly Collins October 25, 2023 Read and listened to it at the same time and found that very effective especially as it was well read. I speeded it up to 1.5. At the end is a section written by the author on the inspiration behind the novel. It’s horrifying to learn that the place Naoko ends up at is based on a real place, and that the events that occur are also based on truth. It’s one thing to read a work of fiction that details these things, but to learn they actually happened?

The strongest part of the book is the writing. Ana Johns writes in such a tragically beautiful way that perfectly captures the mood of the story. Japan, 1957. Seventeen-year-old Naoko Nakamura’s prearranged marriage to the son of her father’s business associate would secure her family’s status in their traditional Japanese community, but Naoko has fallen for another man—an American sailor, a gaijin—and to marry him would bring great shame upon her entire family. When it’s learned Naoko carries the sailor’s child, she’s cast out in disgrace and forced to make unimaginable choices with consequences that will ripple across generations.

Each step I took brought me closer to my future and farther away from my family. It was a contrast of extremes in every sense, but I had somehow found my place between them. That was what Buddha called the middle way. The correct balance of life. I called it happy. A life with love is happy. A life for love is foolish. A life of if only is unbearable. In my seventy-eight years, I have had all three. It is terribly touching. It is uplifting in places, unbearably sad in others. I went through the entire spectrum of emotions reading it, and I felt desperately for Naoko, as well as for Tori. As readers, we are always one step ahead of Tori, thanks to Naoko’s narration. This might sound like it would be boring to read her parts, but that’s not the case. Tori’s story is mostly investigative, as well as discovering her new feelings towards her father. Naoko Nakamura’s arranged marriage to the son of a friend of her father’s is important to reinforce the status of her family in the community; however, Naoko loves another. She’s in love with a gaijin, an American sailor. Usually when in a time-split novel, I find myself enjoying one narration more than the other. This wasn’t the case with this book. I loved Tori’s investigative journalist mind, and her clear adoration for the father she is no longer certain she knew. I willed her on in her quest, and as a reader could feel the conflicts she felt as she dug further into Jimmy Kovac’s history. Meanwhile, Naoko’s narrative is fascinating. She is a naïve girl of seventeen, accidentally falling pregnant and then secretly marrying a foreigner – a taboo in 1950’s Japan. Consequently her life is made difficult, and she is found torn between her family values and love for her mother and brother, and the wonderful love she feels for Hajime, the American soldier whose baby she now carries. When the worst happens and her beloved mother dies, leaving Naoko suddenly the head woman of the household, her choice begin to unravel her life. Two more women’s fiction books have been accepted for publication in 2020 and 2021 respectively and she is currently working on a new novel.