Book Review: Street of a Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama

The Street of a Thousand Blossoms, a novel by Gail Tsukiyama, follows the lives of two ordinary boys growing up in Tokyo, their hopes and dreams and their experiences from 1939 through war in the 1940s and new lives in the modern Japan of the 1960s.

Tsukiyama tries to portray the lives of the ordinary Japanese and how they might have been affected by the war. The two brothers have different goals - Hiroshi dreams of becoming a famous sumo wrestler and Kenji learns to hand craft masks used in Noh theater. Their lives are changed and affected by the war thought they are not an integral part of it.

A novel from a Japanese-American author who has written five other novels including Women of the Silk and The Samurai's Garden.