Shizukos Daughter Published 1993 I ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kyoko Mori was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1957 and

immigrated to the United States in 1977, at the age of twenty. She attended St. Norberts College in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Mori is a naturalized American citizen and disdainful of the social restrictions placed upon women in Japan; she considers herself more American than Japanese. She had a difficult life growing up in Japan; when Mori was just twelve years old, her mother committed suicide which left her to live with her father and stepmother, who were cruel and abusive to her. In 1993 Mori published her first novel, Shizukos Daughter, which is an autobiographical work based on her own unhappy childhood. She followed this novel with The Dream of Water, a memoir that further recounts her difficult life following her mothers suicide. Shizukos Daughter won the New York Times Notable Book of the Year award and Publishers Weeklys Editors Choice Best Book of 1993. Mori has also published poetry and short stories in literary journals and magazines, and she wrote one more young adult novel, entitled One Bird, then a book of essays comparing life in Japan and America entitled Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught between Cultures. Her books have been translated into Japanese and published in Japan, and she frequently makes comments for Japanese magazines and newspapers on the role of women in both American and Japanese society. II OVERVIEW Shizukos Daughter is the story of twelve-year-old Yuki, a young girl struggling to understand her mothers suicide and find the strength it takes for her to overcome the mental anguish she suffered in the years following her mothers death. Yuki was very close to her mother, and she finds it nearly impossible to relate to her father, who is unloving and cold to her, and to her fathers new wife who wishes to obliterate all ties to Shizuko. The novel details Yukis grief and the painful circumstances in which she must come of age. She feels alone in the world, alone in her adolescence and alone in her grief, and she struggles to find the inner strength it takes to make sense of the world and transcend the restrictions of Japanese society. Yuki does maintain a satisfying relationship with her grandparents, but for a long time she is forbidden to see them. She gradually learns to derive comfort from art and from creating for herself a world that adds color and vibrancy to her drab existence. The novel spans the seven years following Shizukos suicide, from the time Yuki is twelve to the time she turns eighteen and finally breaks free from her father and stepmother and leaves Kobe to attend art school in Nagasaki. By the end of the novel, things are looking up for Yuki. She has managed to tap her strengths and pursue her own life and talents; she has rebuilt a relationship with her grandparents; and she has developed a close relationship with a young man whom she cares for very much. Shizukos Daughter is a kind of Cinderella story, and it is both a problem novel and a commentary on the issues and cultural restrictions that affect women in Japanese society. The novel is as much about strength and survival as it is about pain and suffering. After years of living a miserable life, Yuki manages to affirm her creative talent and follow her dream of a happy, liberated life. III SETTING Shizukos Daughter is set in Japan in the 1970s. Mori uses place and time to emphasize how Japanese beliefs affected women of three generations; Yuki, her mother Shizuko, and her grandmother Masa. It seems obvious that Mori intends to emphasize how the restrictions of

Japanese society affect these women, but an analysis of Moris use of nature imagery also reveals how these women recognized forces at work in the world that helped them find meaning in life. From far back in antiquity, the Japanese recognized spirit in the natural world, and they considered nature full of benevolent force. Mori reveals a world of beauty in nature that the Japanese hold dear, but she stresses the difficulty it takes to discover beauty in life and she emphasizes the struggle women must go through to add meaning to their world. She uses descriptions of the landscape to acknowledge the pervasive belief in the life force in nature and the recognition of life force that enables some women to find that meaning. Masa clings to Buddhist religious doctrine, and she derives comfort from worshiping the ancestors. She takes comfort in her garden, and Shizuko and Yuki both take comfort in the vivid colors they see in nature. Though Shizuko finds that the unhappiness in her life forces her to choose death over life, she gives Yuki the ability to live by revealing to her the vitality in the natural world. The belief in spirit is not an overt theme of the novel, but we come to understand that Japanese philosophy molded these womens beliefs. We realize that Yuki too can derive comfort from the knowledge that all of nature contained spirit and life, and that she too will choose life as well. A particularly poignant scene from the novel involves Yukis distress over dead frogs her teacher intends to dissect in biology class. Yuki collects maple leaves outsidebeautiful, colorful maple leavesand on an impulse she removes the dead frogs from the jar in the lab and replaces them with the leaves. She has replaced death with life, literally and symbolically. Throughout the novel Mori contrasts life with death, the beauty of the land with the ugliness of Yukis world. Shizuko gives Yuki the ability to find beauty in life and to re-create by reproducing the landscape in her art. IV THEMES AND CHARACTERS The novel centers on Yuki Okuda, twelve years old at the start of the story and the only child of Shizuko and Hideki. She is strong; she is talented; she is smart and athletic; and she has a close, loving relationship with her mother, Shizuko. Though the novel centers around Yuki, it begins with Shizuko, who is alone in the house preparing to die. She is dreaming of her childhood and of her daughters childhood, mingling them together as if they were one in the same. She speaks to Yuki on the phone, writes her a note, and then turns on the gas in the kitchen. When Yuki returns home, she finds her mother, and from that point on, the vivid colors that defined Yukis world with her mother start slipping from her life like nectar from a sieve. The novel moves from Shizukos suicide, to the wake, and then on to Yukis fathers wedding. He marries his longtime mistress Hanae just one year after Shizukos death, something considered shocking and outrageous in Japanese society. Yuki considers her fathers marriage an assault on her mothers memory. Hideki and Hanae carry the assault further by refusing to speak Shizukos name, by refusing to acknowledge Yukis grief, and by obliterating color from her life and turning her world to gray. The memories Yuki has of times with her mother are vivid and full of color. By contrast, the gray, drab world after the suicide makes her mothers memory come alive and makes Hanae and Hideki seem more dead than Shizuko. Hidekis aloofness is stressed from the start of the novel. Mori mentions that during the time directly following Shizukos death, Hideki rarely talked to Yuki. There were no hugs, there was no mutual grieving, and there were no comforting words. Yuki spent these first days with Aya, her mothers sister, and even though Aya loved Yuki she expected her first and foremost to behave. Aya commended Yuki for being good and brave, and Yuki knew what was expected of her; she had no choice but to hold her tears and her grief inside and to live with her own torment. If Hideki felt grief over his wifes death we do not see it until later in the novel. Neither he nor

anyone else gave Yuki the freedom to express her sadness or to truly mourn her mothers death. Hideki simply went through the motions of mourning, and Yuki was clearly expected to do the same, as if the pain and suffering she truly felt had to be buried, and the act of grieving carried out as nothing more than a formality. Yuki must rely on her own devices to get by in the world, and Mori endows her with the strength necessary to do so. We understand that she will persevere and that she has the ability to work through her feelings of hopelessness. Yuki is willful and can clearly take care of herself. But in being so strong willed, so intelligent and assertive, she breaks tradition and strays from the subservient role expected of traditional Japanese women. Hanae, her fathers wife, cannot seem to tolerate Yukis behavior and feels that the child needs discipline. After all, children are not to look people in the eye, not to speak their minds, and they are required to be respectful of their elders. Hanae complains to Hideki that Yuki is growing up to be a close, sly person, and Hideki does nothing to discipline her. Hidekis lack of involvement begins to grate on Hanae, and she gets more and more frustrated with her new family. Hanae says that Shizuko did not teach Yuki any manners; but Yuki says that her mother taught her truly valuable lessons Hanae would never learn. Shizuko taught Yuki how to put color in her world, how to draw and paint, and how to recognize flowers and tell stories from memory. In essence, even though Shizuko was unable to be happy in her own life, she taught Yuki how to create happiness in hers. In Moris book of essays entitled Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught between Cultures, she surmises that fitting into Japanese society requires a careful decoding of polite lies that mask true feelings. Shizuko could no longer live this lie so she chose to die, but Yuki chooses to simply disregard convention. Hanae too is driven by convention. She is concerned with appearances. She does not want people to know that she and Yuki do not get along, and she feels that any contact Yuki maintains with Shizukos family announces to the world that Hanae and Hideki cannot provide for the childs needs. In truth, they fail even to recognize Yukis emotional needs. This makes it difficult for Yuki to work though her grief and to keep her mothers memory alive. Needing desperately to maintain her connection to Shizuko, Yuki buys bright clothes with money she earns working at the library. Hanae had gotten rid of all the embroidered dresses that Shizuko had made for Yuki and replaced them with sensible clothes, dark and dull and large enough for Yuki to grow into. Yuki begged Hanae not to take away her clothes, telling her that they are all she has left. Then in a moment of anger and frustration, Hanae pushes Yuki down the stairs. Hanae justifies her actions by telling herself that Shizuko was crazy, and that she fears Yuki will be crazy as well. She insists on obliterating Shizukos memory. Not only does she throw away the embroidered clothes, but she also breaks the colored dishes that Yuki and Shizuko enjoyed together. Yuki begins to paint, as if subconsciously trying to put color back into her life. Yukis memories of the broken dishes and of falling down the stairs haunt her, and she fears that these incidents and all the things that had happened to her in the last three years might crowd up on her mind and erase her memories about her mother, the way you could record over something by mistake on a tape recorder. This is when Yuki begins to draw her clothesthe colored clothes she had when her mother was alive that she did not want to forget. She kept a sketchbook locked up in her desk, and she took it out and made colored drawings of the clothes, of the tea set, of the glazed plates and the pottery that her stepmother had discarded. This appears to be a turning point in the novel. Yukis art becomes a path toward healing as well as a a tool of remembrance. It leads the way back but also points a way forward, toward reconciliation with the world.

We never develop any sympathy for Hanae, but we do get the feeling that her anger also stems from living in a restrictive society. Like Shizuko, she feels at the mercy of Hidekis inattentiveness, and she feels as if she cannot fill the role of traditional Japanese wife and mother. Having lived eight years as Hidekis mistress, she was never in a position to have his baby until she was too old to do so. In traditional societies, barrenness is considered shameful, and Hanae takes her anger out on Shizuko and Hideki. She is ever resentful of Shizuko for denying her the baby, and she deeply regrets that Hideki never allowed her to give birth while she was still young and able. Hanae contrasts sharply with Shizuko, yet both of them fall prey to the same restrictions. Shizuko died because she was unable to live with those restrictions, and Hanae turned into a bitter woman because of them. These restrictions adversely affect all of the women in the novel. Being the only child, Yuki belonged to her father; there was no question about that, and being allowed to visit with her mothers parents would make their family look bad. But when Yuki gets an invitation to her aunt Ayas wedding, her father agrees to let her go. He explains it like this: Your aunt Aya . . . took care of you for a year. Im obligated to her because of that. I have to let you go to her wedding so our debts can be even and I wont owe her anymore. Children, as well as wives, are a mans property in Japan. Conventions mean everything. We understand that appearances are important, and Hidekis new wife Hanae is so concerned with appearances that she disregards needs and feelings. She is portrayed as shallow and harsh, and we know that Yuki will never be able to bond with her. Hideki shows a more vulnerable side after Yuki leaves for Nagasaki. A chapter has closed on his life; Hideki is left alone with Hanae, and thoughts of his daughter bring him nothing but a useless sense of guilt. We learn then that he feels guilty for keeping Yuki away from her grandparents simply because Hanae was afraid of what people might think; that people would see the continued contact between Yuki and his former in-laws as an admission of blame on his part for his first wifes death. So here we learn that Hideki is a slave to convention too. He had to bow to Hanaes wishes, he says, because everybody knew that his first wife had committed suicide. He could not add to that disgrace by having his second wife run away. He then explains what this would mean in Japanese society. People would no longer give him the benefit of the doubt. They would no longer assume that he had been unlucky in his first marriage that he had married an unstable woman who would have killed herself no matter who her husband was. If Hanae were to leave, he would be expected to step down from his supervisory position. A man who had had two wives and could not control either of them was not fit to supervise other men. The emphasis here is clearly on his failure to control these women, not on his failure to love them. He knows Hanae loves him, but years of conditioning left him incapable of feeling love in return. In an incident that occurs just a few days before Yuki leaves for Nagasaki, she goes up to the attic to weed through boxes of her mothers clothes and take with her what she can before her stepmother throws the clothes away. She takes beautiful dresses and shirts and kimonos with hand-dyed patterns. These things mean nothing to Hanae, but to Yuki they are a connection to her past and to the possibility of a beautiful world. Yuki begins reminiscing of times with her mother, and of giving a speech on Monets painting, Gladioli. This memory sheds light on what Shizuko gave to her daughter. Yuki tried to describe the painting, but became so overwhelmed by it that she could find no words to describe it. She sat down saying nothing at all, but only feeling as though she was filled with the bright blue and green brushstrokes on Monets canvas. Shizuko gave to Yuki an appreciation and a talent for art, but she gave her much more than that.

Shizukos daughter learned to see the beauty in life, and was thus able break the ties that bound her and create her own happiness. V LITERARY QUALITIES One of the most striking elements of Moris novel is the interweaving of several viewpoints. It seems at first that perhaps she should have told the story strictly from Yukis viewpoint, yet she succeeds in revealing Yukis thoughts and desires as well as Shizukos feeling of hopelessness, Hidekis feelings of guilt, and Hanaes feelings of frustration and anger. The novel begins with a third person narrative from Shizukos viewpoint, and does not switch to Yukis until after her mothers death. Later, Mori tells the story from Hanaes viewpoint, from Hidekis, then from the viewpoints of Masa and Takeo, Yukis grandparents. It is interesting how this interweaving of viewpoints drives home Moris message. We come to understand that all these characters are victims of the same suppression; they all feel bound to social conventions that conflict with their own needs and desires. The contrast between the restrictive social mores and the need for self-actualization alludes to the larger contrast Mori recognizes between life and death. Mori tackles the theme of life versus death by setting up a series of contrasts that define Japanese life. She contrasts the world of Shizuko with the world of Hideki and Hanae, but she does this by making Shizukos world a world of color and substance and Hideki and Hanaes a world of dullness and discontent. She contrasts the value system that prevents Hideki and Hanae from living a happy life with the value system that Yuki embraces, one that bucks the system and enables her to find beauty in life. Yuki has a profound respect for life and eventually becomes a vegetarian, reasoning that she could never eat meat because she could never kill anything. This seems to contrast with her mothers willingness to simply give up and die. Yet we begin to see that Shizuko had this same respect for life but was simply unable to transcend the boundaries that made her feel more dead than alive. Yuki transcends those boundaries. The color imagery that defines Shizukos world permeates the novel. Shizukos world is full of colorthe maple leaves a part of her life with Yuki, as were her dishes, her scarves, her handdyed clothing, and the flowers that she and Yuki enjoyed together. By connecting color to Yukis life with Shizuko and grayness to her life with Hanae and Hideki, Mori lets us know that Yuki needs to put color back into her life to keep her mothers memory alive. After Shizukos death, as Yuki watched her aunt Aya locate something suitable and dark for Yuki to wear for the wake, she said that she watched her aunt close the door on a closet full of brilliant colors. She was to wear an ugly gray choir outfit, one that she and her mother had laughed at because of its drabness. This drabness would be her world for a long time, until she discovered the healing power of art and learned how to put color back into her life. VI SOCIAL SENSITIVITY Mori seems hostile to Japanese society, and rightly so, given the fact that she based Yukis story on her own tortured childhood. This book could be classified a problem novel, or a Cinderella storya young girl with a cruel stepmother breaks away from a miserable home life and finds true happiness. But more than that, the book is a social commentary on the oppression that molds a womans life in Japanese culture. Yuki suffers guilt after her mothers death, and she questions herself. She had been the one to find Shizuko, but why had not she returned home earlier that day? Why did she not check her mothers breathing right away? Yuki goes through the stages of grief, trying desperately to resolve her pain and confusion. She knows logically that her mother meant to kill herself and that her mother did not mean to hurt her. But at the age of twelve, she must work through these feelings alone. She is cut off from her mothers family immediately; her

mothers parents Masa and Takeo, and from Aya, whom she loves very much. After Shizukos death, Yuki spends days in her room alone, and we begin to see the severity of the situation. The pressures placed on women to discount their feelings and conform to set social codes can easily lead to a sense of hopelessness. Mori intends to clarify for us what is expected of women in Japanese society. In the first chapter Mori emphasizes the restrictive role women must play. Shizuko, in reminiscing about her mother-in-laws death, remembers that cleaning out her grandmothers clothes and jewelry bothered Yuki, but Shizuko told her that such things were womens work, dealing with the consequences of other peoples deaths, their mistakes, broken promises. This womans work was a burden; Shizuko was burdened with it, and Yuki would be also. But we understand that Shizuko considered simply being a woman too big of a burden to bear. Yuki would grow beyond that. She is stronger than her mother, and Shizuko knows that. She had asked her daughter once if she could go on if anything ever happened to her mother, and Yuki told her she could. Shizuko believed her, and because of this, she chose to die rather than to continue living an unbearable existence. While Mori seems to bash Japanese society, she gives Japanese women the depth and substance necessary to free them from stereotyping. These women are complex and intelligent, portrayed as victims of a restrictive society rather than a part of it. Yuki refuses to be a victim. She is independent and refuses to take money from Hideki and Hanae for college. She works every night shelving books at the library so she can pay for her own schooling. This kind of independence is not traditional in Japanese society, but Mori wants us to realize that it should be, and that it is a womans right to fight for that independence and to hold nothing but her own values dear. Her grandparents tell Yuki she must show Hideki and Hanae respect because they are her parents. But Yuki does not respect them, and says so. How can I respect them? she says to her grandmother. They show no respect for me or for my mother, or for you. Her grandmother has this notion of respect ingrained in her and is shocked when Yuki tells her How I treat them is really none of your business anyway. However shocking, Yukis independence and fortitude is what saved her. Mori says in her book of essays entitled Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught between Cultures, that having a conversation in Japanese is like driving in the dark without a headlight . . . every moment I am on the verge of hitting something and hurting myself or someone else, but I have no way of guessing where the dangers are. She is speaking about the ambiguity of the Japanese language, and about the pressures they face in a changing world traditional Japanese values contrast with modern ideas and expectations of women. Yuki does not fit in the traditional Japan of the 1970s. She is assertive in a society that demands her to be submissive. She is intelligent in a society that fails to recognize intelligence in women as an asset. Shizuko felt stifled in this society also, but she felt helpless to move out of it and helpless to buck the system. Yuki recognizes at one point that she and her mother are both moving on. Both of them, in their own way, transcended the boundaries that held them captive. VII TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What is the meaning of the title? 2. Do you think Mori seems hostile to Japanese culture, and if so why does she? 3. What parts of Japanese culture do you think Mori finds comforting? 4. Do you think that Yuki will ever be able to have a relationship with her father? 5. Do you think that Yuki will be able to have a satisfying relationship with Isumo?

6. Do you think Moris decision to tell the story from multiple viewpoints was a good one? Why or why not? 7. How do you perceive the relationship between Yuki and Sachiko? 8. How do you perceive the relationship between Shizuko and Mr. Kimura? 9. How well do we get to know Shizuko as a character even though she dies at the beginning of the book? 10. What is the meaning of Shizukos dream at the beginning of the novel? VIII IDEAS FOR REPORTS AND PAPERS 1. Research and write about the role of women in Japanese society today. 2. Trace Yukis movement through the stages of grief to chronicle her journey to accept her mothers suicide. 3. Write a paper about Japanese family values. 4. Address the issue of the cultural ban that prevents Yuki from seeing her mothers family. 5. Research and write about the social restrictions in Japan. 6. Compare and contrast marriage in Japan with marriage in the United States. 7. What is the Japanese Code of Silence and how does it relate to the novel? 8. Mori tells a part of the story from the viewpoints of three women from different generations. What do we learn about the role of women from Shizuko? Yuki? Masa? 9. Write a paper explaining ancestor worship in Japanese religious thought. 10. Discuss the ways in which Yuki strays from the role of a traditional Japanese woman. IX RELATED TITLES A series of essays written for adults rather than for young adults, Mori's Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught between Cultures offers commentary on Japanese social life and a comparison of how the social mores differ for women in America and women in Japan.