The Phoenix Tree: And Other Stories

by Satoko Kizaki

The stories in this collection have been acclaimed in Japan, but their appeal is universal. Each involves an orphaned adult, struggling since childhood to recover a sense of wholeness that seems lost in the past. The narrator of "Barefoot" returns from France to a Japan that had cast her out, unsure of whether she belongs anywhere. Mitsue, in the title story, must reexamine every assumption she has ever had about her life as she cares for her dying aunt and nurses a secret love for her married cousin. In "Mei Hua Lu" three generations of women link the protagonist to a long-ago death in a small Manchurian town. And in "The Flame Trees" a Japanese woman, pregnant with her first child in Southern California in the early I 960s, weighs her inner terror against the life of her baby. No plot summaries can really suggest the richness of Kizaki's prose, transmitted through the elegant, prizewinning translations of Carol A. Flath. The delicate layers of memory and experience that her words reveal create in the reader the sensation of participating in another person's dream. With the nuance and understated feeling of an Ozu film, these stories offer intimate glimpses of their characters' emotional lives that leave the reader wishing for more.

Genres: Japan, Short Stories, Fiction, Japanese Literature

242 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Rural Soul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read Urdu translation, thanks to Mashal Publications for making best foreign literature available for Urdu readers.
I would difeneitely say that these are best of writings which I ever read by any Japanese writer. I have one or two novels under my belt by Haruki Murakami and some other random short stories from Japan as well.
All four stories have an aura of sadness that reader will have to cross to feel it all. All stories have an orphaned protagonist with the confusions of life, death, love and identity.
As the beloved translator added in His preface,
"Who am I? Where are my roots? Anyone who lived far away from his homeland, later asks these questions from himself."
All the stories don't have any moving plot but distracted and scattered memories. Choosing protagonists as orphans certainly has something to do with writer's own life.
Anyone who's going to read this book might find it slow and depressive but this is all its all about. Life is always like this. Make yourself ready to read about a darker part.

[Taleesha · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title story ( found at the end ?) was stunning but the first three felt bothersome to get through. The Phoenix Tree alone would get 5/5.