by Kyoko Mori

Kyoko Mori was born in 1957 in Kobe, Japan, a city that is the setting for much of the novel. When she was just 12, Mori was devastated by her mother’s suicide. A year later her father remarried and the remarriage resulted in a less than happy home life for the author. Anxious to be away from home, Mori moved to the United States at the age of 16 to attend college. Some years later she received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, going on to become a teacher as well as a writer. A series of short stories written in graduate school would later evolve into Shizuko’s Daughter. Mori has also written Fallout, a collection of poetry (1994); The Dream of Water (1995), a well-received memoir about her travels to Kobe to visit family and bring closure...