Book Review: The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama

The samurai's garden has a pond with carp, a wooden bridge, pine trees, among other things, and is in a small town near the sea, a couple of hours from the city of Kobe.

The novel The Samurai's Garden is written by Gail Tsukiyama, an author who has a Chinese mother and Japanese father and who lives in California. Her novel is set in Japan, and is about a Chinese man who grew up in China but who is visiting his father in a small seaside town near Kobe to get away from the war back home and to recover from tuberculosis. Ironically, the war at home in China is the Sino-Japanese war, when the Japanese take over Peking and eventually Shanghai, and later, Hong Kong.

The young man is taken care of by a taciturn man, who has served his father's family for years and who loves to garden. While convalescing in Japan, the young man meets and gets to know two young girls who live in the small town as well as a woman who lives in a leper's colony but who comes to help the "samurai" caretaker with the gardening.

That's where I am at the moment in the book. There are many sections that are quotable, though I haven't included here any quotes from the Samurai's Garden. I can only say that the peaceful environment of the garden, with a convalescing Chinese man being taken care of by a quiet and sensitive Japanese gardener is in direct contrast to the situation in China, which they hear about in the news and from letters.

I'm fascinated by stories of Shanghai during the late 1930s under Japanese occupation, from all points of view.

Also reading The Stone of Heaven about an emperor's obsession with jadeite, a green stone found in the southwest of China. Many of the pieces he had carved are in Beijing's Forbidden City.

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.