Dornauszieher

There is the ailing husband, thirty years older, a Jewish artist; there are the three daughters with eating disorders and puberty worries, the sick parents, and all of this in a constant back and forth between California and Japan, where the author is a famous poet. The everyday life of a woman who struggles to balance her roles as the only daughter, as a wife and mother, as a writer, and as an intellectual. A life full of energy and contemplation, a life between cultures, generations, the familiar past, and the vibrant present. Intense moods and compact descriptions of nature alternate with absurd situations. Hiromi Ito reports on this in her own unique style, heavily influenced by oral storytelling, with echoes of fairy tales, Buddhist legends, literature from East and West, as well as modern poetry, rap, and advertising slogans.

It’s no wonder that Japan's most famous women's activist, sociologist Chizuko Ueno, wrote in her afterword to the novel: “In a dead end? There’s only one solution – Hiromi Ito!”.