Inheritance From Mother by Minae Mizumura

Inheritance From Mother by Minae Mizumura

Now in paperback, this Osaragi Jiro Award-winning novel demystifies the notion of the selfless Japanese mother and the adult daughter honor-bound to care for her.

Mitsuki Katsura, a Japanese woman in her mid-fifties, is a French-language instructor at a private university in Tokyo. Her husband, whom she met in Paris, is a professor at another private university. He is having an affair with a much younger woman.

In addition to her husband's infidelity, Mitsuki must deal with her ailing eighty-something mother, a demanding, self-absorbed woman who is far from the image of the patient, self-sacrificing Japanese matriarch. Mitsuki finds herself guiltily dreaming of the day when her mother will finally pass on. While doing everything she can to ensure her mother's happiness, she grows weary of the responsibilities of being a doting daughter and worries she is sacrificing her chance to find fulfillment in her middle age.

Inheritance from Mother not only offers insight into a complex and paradoxical culture, but is also a profound work about mothers and daughters, marriage, old age, and the resilience of women.

Minae Mizumura is one of Japan's most influential writers today. She was born in Tokyo and relocated to Long Island, New York, with her family when she was twelve years old. She went to Yale College and Yale Graduate School to study French literature. Her other works include A Real Novel, which won the Yomiuri Prize, Zoku meian (Light and Dark Continuing), which is a sequel to Natsume Soseki's unfinished classic Light and Dark, and Shishosetsu from left to right (An I-Novel from Left to Right), which is an autobiographical work. Columbia University Press published her most recent English work, The Loss of Language in the Age of English, in 2015.

She is based in Tokyo. Juliet Winters Carpenter attended the University of Michigan and the Inter-University Institute for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo, where she studied Japanese language and literature. Carpenter is the only person to have won the Japan-United States Friendship Commission Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature twice, for her translation of Kobo Abe's novel Secret Rendezvous in 1980 and for her translation of Minae Mizumura's A Real Novel in 2014-2015.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781590519851
ISBN 10	159051985X
Title	Inheritance From Mother
Author	Minae Mizumura
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Other Press LLC
Year published	2019-04-09
Number of pages	464
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.