The Thorn Puller

Hiromi Ito is an award-winning author who explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges of caring for two families in a globalized society. She channels various voices from Japanese folklore, poetry, literature, and pop culture to create a unique, transnational, polyvocal mode of storytelling. The novel follows a woman's memories of the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the "thorns" of human suffering.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 280 pages
Publication date: 06 January 2023
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press

Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the MurasakiShikibu Prize, Hiromi Ito is a writer who deftly handles subjects like aging, death, and suffering with dark humor, illuminating the bittersweet joys of being alive. Her first novel to be published in English explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about what it means to live and die in a globalized society.

Ito has been described as a "shaman of poetry" due to her ability to allow the voices of others to flow through her. Here, she enriches her semi-autobiographical novel by channeling myriad voices drawn from Japanese folklore, poetry, literature, and pop culture. The result is a generic chimera—part poetry, part prose, part epic—a unique, transnational, polyvocal mode of storytelling. One throughline is a series of memories associated with the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the "thorns" of human suffering.

Dimension: 203 x 139 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781737625308