"My mother seemed like a broken mechanism. She wasn't ill, but something inside her had simply stopped working." With great restraint, discretion, and poetry—the three parts of the book bear titles like "Beneath the Flowers," "Moonlight," and "On the Snow"—the author traces his mother's backward journey from awareness into the loss of every landmark that had once oriented her.
The author shares with his brother and sister a new and unwelcome task: to care for and accompany this "new mother." In meticulous detail, he recounts not only the logistics of how the siblings rotate hosting her, but more importantly the struggle within his own heart as he grapples with a situation spiraling beyond his control, one that embarrasses and confuses him. He asks himself a thousand questions: "Why does she repeat the same phrases over and over?" "How can the mother who exasperates her children seem almost at ease with her grandchildren?" "Why does she keep saying the name Shunma—a childhood friend she had once loved?" Only filial love can answer where his mother has become lost. What strikes the reader is the distant, unfamiliar horizon: we are in Japan, and many details make us feel like outsiders, even as we find ourselves drawn to a civilization so far removed from our own.
M. B., 2010