Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the MurasakiShikibu PrizeIntroducing Hiromi Ito, an award-winning Japanese author who has been compared to Haruki Murakami and Yoko Tawada.The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a womancaring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her agingparents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these twostarkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrativeabout what it means to live and die in a globalized society. Ito has been described as a "shaman of poetry" because ofher skill in allowing the voices of others to flow through her. Here she enrichesher semi-autobiographical novel by channeling myriad voices drawn from Japanesefolklore, poetry, literature, and pop culture. The result is a genericchimera--part poetry, part prose, part epic--a unique, transnational, polyvocalmode of storytelling. One throughline is a series of memories associated withthe Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the "thorns" of human suffering.