The Dream of Water is set in Japan, the country of Mori's birth, and it flashes between Japan of the 1970s when Mori was young, to Japan of 1990, the year she decided to return to her homeland and deal with her painful childhood memories. Mori uses the Japanese setting to emphasize how deeply Japanese beliefs molded her viewpoint on life, and she uses the natural features of the land to emphasize the mix of beauty and pain that tie her forever to her.

culture. Mori travels to her old home and to her grandparents' home, and she wanders the familiar streets hoping for some sort of resolution. Feeling like an outsider in her own land, she stays with friends rather than with her father, and she gains new insights into the "foreign" world she left behind.

Touching down in Japan after twenty years in America was a difficult...