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East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons
Writing in luminous prose, Liza Dalby, acclaimed author of Geisha and The Tale of Murasaki, brings us this elegant and unique year's journal-- a brilliant mosaic that is at once a candid memoir, a gardener's diary, and an enlightening excursion through cultures east and west. Structured according to the seasonal units of an ancient Chinese almanac, East Wind Melts the Ice is made up of 72 short chapters that can be read straight through or dipped into at random. In the essays, Dalby transports us from her Berkeley garden to the streets of Kyoto, to Imperial China, to the sea cliffs of Northern California, and to points beyond. Throughout these journeys, Dalby weaves her memories of living in Japan and becoming the first and only non-Japanese geisha, her observations on the recurring phenomena of the natural world, and meditations on the cultural aesthetics of Japan, China, and California. She illuminates everyday life as well, in stories of keeping a pet butterfly, roasting rice cakes with her children, watching whales, and pampering worms to make compost. In the manner of the Japanese personal poetic essay, this vibrant work comprises 72 windows on a life lived between cultures, and the result is a wonderfully engaging read.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published February 10, 2007
24 people are currently reading
342 people want to read
About the author
Liza Dalby
17 books201 followersWith its fascinating story of characters caught up in a world they themselves don't understand, Hidden Buddhas may well be Liza Dalby's best work yet. Besides taking us on a journey through little-known corners of Japan, it offers us an engaging and believable portrait of people driven to do things they may not have imagined." --Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha
According to esoteric Buddhist theology, the world is suffering through a final corrupt era. Many in Japan believe that after the world ends, the Buddha of the Future will appear and bring about a new age of enlightenment. Hundreds of temples in Japan are known to keep mysterious hidden buddhas secreted away except on rare designated viewing days. Are they being protected, or are they protecting the world?
From these ancient notions of doom and rebirth comes a startling new novel by the acclaimed author of Geisha and The Tale of Murasaki. Hidden Buddhas: A Novel of Karma and Chaos explores the karmic connections between Japanese fashion, pilgrimage, dying honeybees, bad girls with cell phones, murder by blowfish, and the Buddhist apocalypse. Something of a Buddhist Da Vinci Code, Hidden Buddhas travels through time to expose a mystery you will never forget."
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
April 6, 2015
The sake now drunk
let's get serious
about gazing at the moon
---Issa (1819)
We journey through a year as the author compares the changing seasons in China and Japan with what's happening in her own little corner of the world - Berkeley, California.
Though I normally find nature writing enthralling, Dalby succeeds in making the the majestic world around us sound...dull. Animals migrate, flowers bloom, whither and die. And then it all begins again twelve months later. Perhaps she lacks the soul of an artist or the skills of a poet, but her matter-of-fact descriptions left me unmoved. To be fair, my absence of interest in Asian culture may also have had something to do with my boredom.
I did, however, find this little twist on Valentine's Day rather interesting. In Japan when February 14th rolls around, WOMEN give chocolates to the men in their lives. Expensive chocolates. A poor working gal can expect to spend upwards of a hundred bucks on candy. The men are given a one month reprieve before they are expected to reciprocate on White Day:
Not accidentally, White Day chocolate comes in white boxes, precluding any temptation to recycle the red-boxed candy he already has.
There was no mention of this fact, but I'm willing to bet a lot of relationships dissolve between February 15th and March 13th. Just a hunch...
let's get serious
about gazing at the moon
---Issa (1819)
We journey through a year as the author compares the changing seasons in China and Japan with what's happening in her own little corner of the world - Berkeley, California.
Though I normally find nature writing enthralling, Dalby succeeds in making the the majestic world around us sound...dull. Animals migrate, flowers bloom, whither and die. And then it all begins again twelve months later. Perhaps she lacks the soul of an artist or the skills of a poet, but her matter-of-fact descriptions left me unmoved. To be fair, my absence of interest in Asian culture may also have had something to do with my boredom.
I did, however, find this little twist on Valentine's Day rather interesting. In Japan when February 14th rolls around, WOMEN give chocolates to the men in their lives. Expensive chocolates. A poor working gal can expect to spend upwards of a hundred bucks on candy. The men are given a one month reprieve before they are expected to reciprocate on White Day:
Not accidentally, White Day chocolate comes in white boxes, precluding any temptation to recycle the red-boxed candy he already has.
There was no mention of this fact, but I'm willing to bet a lot of relationships dissolve between February 15th and March 13th. Just a hunch...
February 16, 2010
While I loved the idea of this book, and liked the paragraph almanac descriptions and explanations of each different period of the year, the vast majority of this book is insipid.
What makes it a memoir, obviously, are the accounts from the author's own life. Here, we learn she picks up seaweed off the side of the road and makes spaghetti with it. Or that she has to wait a few years for her persimmon tree to bear fruit (And oh, the annoyance of squirrels! How positively dreadful.) and again and again the insinuation that Americans have it all wrong when it comes to our understanding of life. Yeah, I know, our culture and collective history isn't nearly as ancient or prescribed.
I was often pleased with her elucidation of seasonal cultural awareness with the Japanese. I could do without pretty much every single personal detail she injects into almanac, however. Which is 80% of its contents.
What makes it a memoir, obviously, are the accounts from the author's own life. Here, we learn she picks up seaweed off the side of the road and makes spaghetti with it. Or that she has to wait a few years for her persimmon tree to bear fruit (And oh, the annoyance of squirrels! How positively dreadful.) and again and again the insinuation that Americans have it all wrong when it comes to our understanding of life. Yeah, I know, our culture and collective history isn't nearly as ancient or prescribed.
I was often pleased with her elucidation of seasonal cultural awareness with the Japanese. I could do without pretty much every single personal detail she injects into almanac, however. Which is 80% of its contents.
January 3, 2016
I started out dipping into this book and last week decided I would read it through. I'm glad I did, because I really got the feeling of the ebb and flow of the seasons, based on the rise and fall of yin and yang influences throughout the year based on the ancient Chinese almanac. The Japanese adapted this to their own culture and climate centuries ago.
In this system of the almanac, the year is divided into 72 units of 5 days, each unit is named according to an observable feature of the natural world. For each 5 day period, Dalby writes a short essay, inspired by that feature. She wrote it over 2 years, one in Japan and one in her home in California, contemplating the changes taking place at that time and weaving stories from literature, traditional tales, her own life and the lives of friends into the theme for that period.
East wind Melts the Ice is the name of the first 5 day period, from February 5 through 9, and heralds the beginning of spring. Dalby explains the philosophical system underlying the Asian calendar, and keeps feeding us information all the way through as opportunities arise. The second is 'dormant creatures start to twitch'. Haiku and other poetry expressing the essence of seasonal features, phases of the moon, behaviour of animals and birds are included throughout.
Dalby's depth and breadth of knowledge is impressive. She is well-known for her writings on Japanese culture, and here she discusses evolution of Chines and Japanese script, shifts in word or character meanings over time, as well as why she has chosen particular phrases in translating poetry. For instance, the August 6-10 unit is called 'cool wind arrives'. she writes about it:
'The wind itself is invisible. We see the grass bend and ripple, or smell the ocean door the wind carries to our noses, or feel a cool sensation against our skin, or hear the tinkle of wind chimes. By its effect on other things we experience the wind.
Basho composed a haiku beginning with the arresting phrase "Color of the wind":
Fushoku ya shodori ni ueshi niwa no aki (Matsuo Basho 1694)
Color of the wind
sparsely planted
autumn garden
Fushoku has several layers of meaning including "weather", "scenery" and "view". Nuances even extend to "disposition," or "attitude"; but in the context of this haiku a literal "color of the wind" is meant as well'. And so on to talk about windflowers, wind chimes,and Lafcadio Hearn.
In an appendix, she explains that in the Japanese version of the book she wrote first, there were many things she did not need to spell out - the nature of the cherry blossom celebrations, or who Murasaki was. By contrast, in the version she wrote in English, there are aspects of American life and culture that she doesn't need to spell out, whereas the Japanese equivalents need to be explained. I found them all fascinating, as they are very different from the South Australian environment in which I live.
I plan to dip into this book on a continuing basis and my next journey through it will be to match the seasonal observations, northern vs southern hemisphere, and see what i can observe in my own beautiful part of the world.
In this system of the almanac, the year is divided into 72 units of 5 days, each unit is named according to an observable feature of the natural world. For each 5 day period, Dalby writes a short essay, inspired by that feature. She wrote it over 2 years, one in Japan and one in her home in California, contemplating the changes taking place at that time and weaving stories from literature, traditional tales, her own life and the lives of friends into the theme for that period.
East wind Melts the Ice is the name of the first 5 day period, from February 5 through 9, and heralds the beginning of spring. Dalby explains the philosophical system underlying the Asian calendar, and keeps feeding us information all the way through as opportunities arise. The second is 'dormant creatures start to twitch'. Haiku and other poetry expressing the essence of seasonal features, phases of the moon, behaviour of animals and birds are included throughout.
Dalby's depth and breadth of knowledge is impressive. She is well-known for her writings on Japanese culture, and here she discusses evolution of Chines and Japanese script, shifts in word or character meanings over time, as well as why she has chosen particular phrases in translating poetry. For instance, the August 6-10 unit is called 'cool wind arrives'. she writes about it:
'The wind itself is invisible. We see the grass bend and ripple, or smell the ocean door the wind carries to our noses, or feel a cool sensation against our skin, or hear the tinkle of wind chimes. By its effect on other things we experience the wind.
Basho composed a haiku beginning with the arresting phrase "Color of the wind":
Fushoku ya shodori ni ueshi niwa no aki (Matsuo Basho 1694)
Color of the wind
sparsely planted
autumn garden
Fushoku has several layers of meaning including "weather", "scenery" and "view". Nuances even extend to "disposition," or "attitude"; but in the context of this haiku a literal "color of the wind" is meant as well'. And so on to talk about windflowers, wind chimes,and Lafcadio Hearn.
In an appendix, she explains that in the Japanese version of the book she wrote first, there were many things she did not need to spell out - the nature of the cherry blossom celebrations, or who Murasaki was. By contrast, in the version she wrote in English, there are aspects of American life and culture that she doesn't need to spell out, whereas the Japanese equivalents need to be explained. I found them all fascinating, as they are very different from the South Australian environment in which I live.
I plan to dip into this book on a continuing basis and my next journey through it will be to match the seasonal observations, northern vs southern hemisphere, and see what i can observe in my own beautiful part of the world.
May 12, 2014
This is a book I delve into every now and then. It's not necessarily meant to be read linearily, but rather dipped into as it is a book about the seasons and the ways they are experienced in Asia (Japan mostly in particular as Dalby has spent many years studying its culture) and in Dalby's Berkeley residence in California. I've always admired the sensitivity the Japanese have to the seasons and this book forefronts this sensitivity splendidly, going into those particular details that make each season a poetic feast of natural imagery and tastes. As we are deep into summer, I delved into this book once again to rediscover some of those Japanese things that quintessentially mark summer -- fireflies, the eating of eel, firework displays, and fu-rin, or windbells.
May 3, 2016
I've loved everything I've read by Liza Dalby. The hardcover version is one of the most aesthetically appealing books I've come by. This is one of the few books that I'll keep for the permanent bookshelf.
One of my favorite pieces was about earthworms, or as referred to sometimes in Japan, "Little Dirt Dragons." Her description of the difference in meaning of "night crawlers" in Japan and the US was both funny and showed a little vulnerability on her part.
One of my favorite pieces was about earthworms, or as referred to sometimes in Japan, "Little Dirt Dragons." Her description of the difference in meaning of "night crawlers" in Japan and the US was both funny and showed a little vulnerability on her part.
January 14, 2008
This is a beautifully written book drawing from the ancient Chinese calendar, Japanese tradition, the natural world, and the author's accounts of how these intersect in her own life in Northern California. Perfect to read straight through, or to read throughout the year!
Read
July 22, 2022I came to this one after flipping through Dalby's Geisha book and really being struck again by how impressive the prose is. I wondered if she had written anything else. I believe Geisha came out of her studies as a graduate student at Stanford so it would be possible she didn't continue to publish books after that. Turns out she's written some more fiction and non-fiction, this book and a book on Japanese kimono. I am happy to say that the prose here did not disappoint, Dalby is a very skilled writer. Each paragraph is pithy, often packed with fascinating detail and enjoyable anecdotes. I'm impressed how she is able to rope in references to such a wide variety of writers, such as discussing Aristotles theories on certain animal's reproductive habits, etc. This book must have taken a tremendous amount of time and research. There's a number of lukewarm reviews here, and it seems this has to do mostly with people not finding what she is writing about interesting. I would say you should have some kind of interest in East Asian culture and for those with that interest, this is a singular work worth seeking out.
January 14, 2022
A really interesting read for anyone wanting to know more about all aspects of Japanese culture, but especially the relationship between Japanese people and nature/the seasons. Written from the perspective of an American, this is an accessible guide to the Chinese almanac adopted by the Japanese which splits the year into 72 micro-seasons.
March 10, 2023
Lovely - a sort of Asian / Western calendar of Dalby’s garden in California, a memoir of her time in Japan, and a nod to China’s influence, sprinkled with all sorts of interesting facts and haiku. Take your time and enjoy the journey. Best of all, the hard bound buckram book I read was itself a delight to look at and to hold.
April 12, 2018
A totally new way to look at the seasons and the calendar! I keep re-reading it all year for the appropriate dates.
April 25, 2012
The Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi in a famous letter to his friend and fellow poet Yuan Zhen noticed there was a disjunction between his own opinion of his work and the opinion at-large. Realizing that the public only liked a select portion of his body of work, Bai Juyi stated that "that which the people of this moment deem as heavy I deem as light." There is a similar disjunction in Dalby's "memoir": that which she deems insightful I deem trivial.
The source of the disjunction is apparent in the preface. Dalby tries to bring together two elements that are contradictory to each other. She explains that she is attempting to write a zuihitsu in English. A zuihitsu is often translated as a miscellany, a collection of random thoughts and writings. The premier examples of these in Japanese literature are The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon and Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenko. In contemporary American culture a zuihitsu might find its closest companion in freestyle rhyming. If Dalby had just tried to write a zuihitsu in English she might have had a better work (I am however highly skeptical of that). Dalby instead organizes her random sketches around the Chinese calendar laid out in the Annals of Lu Buwei (Lushi chunqiu). To Dalby, the Chinese calendar is the source of Japanese appreciation of the seasons and to draw upon it to frame this miscellany is natural. But this was not the Chinese calendar's purpose in the original Chinese context. The calendar in the Annals of Lu Buwei (which can be read in English as it has been translated) has the purpose of laying out the various rituals and duties the ruler must carry out to maintain order and harmony in the realm. In essence, the calendar is creating order to avoid chaos and randomness. Dalby has misread and misunderstood the calendar and then compounds this error by using the calendar as frame for a miscellany. So the work follows neither the structure of the calendar nor that of miscellany;it is trying to do both but fails to do either.
The stories Dalby relays in the "memoir" are largely uninteresting; there are some that are questionable (in the dual sense of the word, that is, they raise both questions and feelings of inappropriateness). One of these is when she attends a symposium at Stanford on the Royall Tyler translation of The Tale of Genji. For the symposium Dalby decides to dye her hair purple (murasaki) in honor of Murasaki Shikibu. Dalby is quite pleased with her action, but one can only wonder why she would do for an academic symposium. The significance of the act would either be lost on the scholars and graduate students in attendance or be regarded poorly by them (especially in light of the fact that the "Murasaki" of Murasaki Shikibu's name comes from the character in Genji, something Dalby herself should be aware of if, as she claims, she read Shikibu's diary.). Even more questionable is her discussion of arriving in Japan to attend university and yet knowing no Japanese. Dalby uses this story to explain how she came to study "traditional" arts such as flower arranging and cooking. But one is left wondering how she could've gotten into the quandary of going to a Japanese university to study while knowing no Japanese. Had she gone through the exchange program of an American university she would've been steered to an university with English language courses due to her lack of Japanese. On the other side of the coin, a Japanese program such as the Ministry of Education (Monbusho) would have administered a language proficiency exam and spotted that she knew no Japanese. So how exactly did she get herself in such a situation? And was going the route she did really a means of salvaging things?
This is not the only book of Dalby's in my library; I bought her Tale of Murasaki several years ago and have yet to bring myself to read it. In reading Easy Wind Melts the Ice I now see a justification for that decision. If the Tale of Murasaki contains a similar amount of problems as Easy Wind Melts the Ice reading the Tale of Murasaki would be even more painful than this "memoir" of Dalby. If Dalby can misread a Chinese calendar and zuihitsu as she does in the course of this "memoir," I could not bear to see the misread she does of the Tale of Genji and Murasaki Shikibu's own diary.
The source of the disjunction is apparent in the preface. Dalby tries to bring together two elements that are contradictory to each other. She explains that she is attempting to write a zuihitsu in English. A zuihitsu is often translated as a miscellany, a collection of random thoughts and writings. The premier examples of these in Japanese literature are The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon and Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenko. In contemporary American culture a zuihitsu might find its closest companion in freestyle rhyming. If Dalby had just tried to write a zuihitsu in English she might have had a better work (I am however highly skeptical of that). Dalby instead organizes her random sketches around the Chinese calendar laid out in the Annals of Lu Buwei (Lushi chunqiu). To Dalby, the Chinese calendar is the source of Japanese appreciation of the seasons and to draw upon it to frame this miscellany is natural. But this was not the Chinese calendar's purpose in the original Chinese context. The calendar in the Annals of Lu Buwei (which can be read in English as it has been translated) has the purpose of laying out the various rituals and duties the ruler must carry out to maintain order and harmony in the realm. In essence, the calendar is creating order to avoid chaos and randomness. Dalby has misread and misunderstood the calendar and then compounds this error by using the calendar as frame for a miscellany. So the work follows neither the structure of the calendar nor that of miscellany;it is trying to do both but fails to do either.
The stories Dalby relays in the "memoir" are largely uninteresting; there are some that are questionable (in the dual sense of the word, that is, they raise both questions and feelings of inappropriateness). One of these is when she attends a symposium at Stanford on the Royall Tyler translation of The Tale of Genji. For the symposium Dalby decides to dye her hair purple (murasaki) in honor of Murasaki Shikibu. Dalby is quite pleased with her action, but one can only wonder why she would do for an academic symposium. The significance of the act would either be lost on the scholars and graduate students in attendance or be regarded poorly by them (especially in light of the fact that the "Murasaki" of Murasaki Shikibu's name comes from the character in Genji, something Dalby herself should be aware of if, as she claims, she read Shikibu's diary.). Even more questionable is her discussion of arriving in Japan to attend university and yet knowing no Japanese. Dalby uses this story to explain how she came to study "traditional" arts such as flower arranging and cooking. But one is left wondering how she could've gotten into the quandary of going to a Japanese university to study while knowing no Japanese. Had she gone through the exchange program of an American university she would've been steered to an university with English language courses due to her lack of Japanese. On the other side of the coin, a Japanese program such as the Ministry of Education (Monbusho) would have administered a language proficiency exam and spotted that she knew no Japanese. So how exactly did she get herself in such a situation? And was going the route she did really a means of salvaging things?
This is not the only book of Dalby's in my library; I bought her Tale of Murasaki several years ago and have yet to bring myself to read it. In reading Easy Wind Melts the Ice I now see a justification for that decision. If the Tale of Murasaki contains a similar amount of problems as Easy Wind Melts the Ice reading the Tale of Murasaki would be even more painful than this "memoir" of Dalby. If Dalby can misread a Chinese calendar and zuihitsu as she does in the course of this "memoir," I could not bear to see the misread she does of the Tale of Genji and Murasaki Shikibu's own diary.
February 7, 2014
"East Wind Melts the Ice is a unique record of nature. In this beautiful journal Liza Dalby writes about the passing seasons, gardening (eastern and western), Japanese customs and a life lived between two cultures.
"Taking the seventy-two seasonal units of an ancient Chinese almanac as seeds, and growing them into a year's journal, Liza Dalby entwines personal experience, natural phenomena and ruminations on the cultural aesthetics of China, Japan and California. The short pieces that make up this almanac are written from Dalby's perspective as an anthropologist and gardener. They also draw on her experiences over the years she spent in Japan, where she first went to live when she was sixteen. She conducted fieldwork on a tiny island in the Inland sea, worked as the only non-Japanese geisha and painted her teeth black to recreate the courtly fashions of the eleventh century. Here she delves into memories of keeping a pet butterfly, roasting rice cakes with her children, watching whales and pampering worms to make compost. Together the pieces comprise seventy-two windows into a life lived in two very different worlds, resulting in a dazzling and down-to-earth mosaic-like memoir."
~~front flap
A lovely book, very delicate and very structured -- a mirror of Japanese culture and sensibility. I read each piece during the week it represented, and felt more atune to the seasons as I wandered through them.
"Taking the seventy-two seasonal units of an ancient Chinese almanac as seeds, and growing them into a year's journal, Liza Dalby entwines personal experience, natural phenomena and ruminations on the cultural aesthetics of China, Japan and California. The short pieces that make up this almanac are written from Dalby's perspective as an anthropologist and gardener. They also draw on her experiences over the years she spent in Japan, where she first went to live when she was sixteen. She conducted fieldwork on a tiny island in the Inland sea, worked as the only non-Japanese geisha and painted her teeth black to recreate the courtly fashions of the eleventh century. Here she delves into memories of keeping a pet butterfly, roasting rice cakes with her children, watching whales and pampering worms to make compost. Together the pieces comprise seventy-two windows into a life lived in two very different worlds, resulting in a dazzling and down-to-earth mosaic-like memoir."
~~front flap
A lovely book, very delicate and very structured -- a mirror of Japanese culture and sensibility. I read each piece during the week it represented, and felt more atune to the seasons as I wandered through them.
September 4, 2009
i picked this up at borders book sale for five dollars. i was very excited about the japanese and chinese influences and couldn't wait to jump into it. it's... not exactly my cup of tea (milk, please, and lots of it, sugar too.) only because of its heavy plant/insect-dominated content.
while i understand that this is a book about the seasons and will definitely contain nature, i was hoping for more skies, and scenery, and beautiful views, in lyrical language and whimsical writing.
that is not to say that i am disappointed with this book. it was a good read and i took my time to savour it. i liked that the author combined memories of different years (mostly 2003-2004) at the same time (of one week) into every "unit" that make up the 72 "units" in a year, so it felt like reading many different little stories; i liked the frequent haiku and the meaning behind them; i liked reading about her experience as a, and contact with, geisha; i liked the migratory whales and exquisitely-prepared o-bento.
while i understand that this is a book about the seasons and will definitely contain nature, i was hoping for more skies, and scenery, and beautiful views, in lyrical language and whimsical writing.
that is not to say that i am disappointed with this book. it was a good read and i took my time to savour it. i liked that the author combined memories of different years (mostly 2003-2004) at the same time (of one week) into every "unit" that make up the 72 "units" in a year, so it felt like reading many different little stories; i liked the frequent haiku and the meaning behind them; i liked reading about her experience as a, and contact with, geisha; i liked the migratory whales and exquisitely-prepared o-bento.
January 15, 2016
I should have added this back in February when I started it, since this collection has been my 2015 literary companion. Dalby writes short memoir essays observing nature in correlation with 5-day periods described in the traditional Asian calendar. She writes about Japanese almanac entries and often links them to Japanese haikus while providing insights into contemporary Japanese culture. There is much discussion of other Asian philosophies and themes as well so the reader learns how Chinese and Japanese philosophies have interacted and influenced each other for centuries. The book is a lovely and contemplative nighttime read that has focused my awareness and joy of noticing subtle shifts in nature throughout the year. Each essay is a little gift for myself every five days! I will likely read the whole cycle again when it starts in February.
November 13, 2011
This book contained a series of contemplative essays, based on an ancient Chinese almanac that divided the year into 72 periods of 5 days each. The author has studied Japanese culture extensively and weaves that into her Berkeley existence. I wanted to like this book more, and some essays were informative but it was really more like reading a really diverse, educated friend's blog. Sometimes worth the time, sometimes not.
May 15, 2014
I first came across Liza Dalby with her first book Geisha, which I loved and still own. East Wind Melts the Ice is a beautiful hardcover. The Chinese/Japanese people divide the year into 72 parts rather than the Western 12 month division. Each of Liza's 72 "essays" talk about the background of each separate division as well as including some personal event. She is funny and very interesting. I enjoyed this book immensely.
October 27, 2011
While the first half of this book moved very slowly, I found that the second half was entertaining and lovely. The essay about monarch butterflies was my favorite, followed by the sexy earthworms story.
June 14, 2011
This is really a wonderful book, if you enjoy these sorts of contemplative little essays. Dalby is a clever and sensitive narrator, and has a wonderful eye and ear, which she shares very deftly with the reader.
February 7, 2008
A book of 72 delightful short stories (seasons) intertwining Japan, China, gardening, poetry, and the natural world around us.
Want to read
March 20, 2008Highly recommended by one of the judges of the Kiriyama Prize.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews