Here is another Island Bookstore pick, which I discovered while browsing its excellent fiction shelves this summer: The Favorites by Mary Yukari Waters.
From Amazon:
In her exquisite first novel, Waters explores the complex relationships among three generations of women bound by a painful family history and a culture in which custom dictates behavior. Fourteen-year-old Sarah Rexford, half-Japanese and half-American, feels like an outsider when she visits her family in Japan. She quickly learns that in traditional Kyoto, personal boundaries are firmly drawn and actions are not always what they appear. Sarah learns of a family secret — an interfamily adoption arranged in the throes of World War II. Her grandmother gave up one of her daughters to the matriarch of the family, and the two families have coexisted quietly, living on the same lane. While this arrangement is never discussed, it looms over the two households. In this carefully articulated world, where every gesture and look has meaning, Sarah must learn the rules by which her mother, aunts, and grandmother live.
Delicately balancing drama and restraint, Waters captures these women — their deep passions and tumultuous histories — in this tender and moving novel about the power and beauty of mother-daughter relationships.
I can't find many reviews of The Favorites online – reader, blogger, or traditional - but here are links to a Newsday review and an L.A. Times review. Newsday said: "In this beautifully restrained novel, love is intense but in limited supply. Rationed, like rice during the war that dismantled Mrs. Kobayashi's idyllic life, love in The Favorites isn't earned so much as bestowed, the recipient lucky to be in the right place at the right time. And as situations – both familial and historical – shift, so too do allegiances. Here, everyone and everything is linked."
The L.A. Times praised Waters' skill with detail and character development, but was disappointed that the book wasn't emotionally richer.
Waters has also published a book of short stories called The Laws of Evening, which the L.A. Times calls "exquisite", "a collection of quiet, precise stories that brought the submerged trauma of postwar Japan to agonized life. Each story was an intimate ink drawing, expressing volumes of pain and stubborn hope with a few eloquent strokes.
I'd love to hear from anyone who has read either of Waters' books.