Showing results by narrator "Ami Okumura Jones" in All Categories

When her mother emigrates to China for work, twenty-year-old Chizu moves in with 71-year-old Ginko, an eccentric distant relative, taking a room in her ramshackle Tokyo home, with its two resident cats and the persistent rattle of passing trains. Living their lives in imperfect symmetry, they establish an uneasy alliance, stress tested by Chizu's flashes of youthful spite. As the four seasons pass, Chizu navigates a series of tedious part-time jobs and unsatisfying relationships, before eventually finding her feet and salvaging a fierce independence from her solitude.

When Hirase, a young woman from Tokyo, arranges an appointment with the Go-Between, she doesn't expect a teenager to show up. Dressed preppy-style in a duffel coat and carrying a notebook, he invites the dead back into the real world - at least, this is what Hirase has pieced together from his website page. Ushered into a luxury hotel to await her meeting, the Go-Between lays down the ground-rules: the reunion lasts one evening under a full moon; the dead person cannot be called back by anyone else, and may refuse to meet.

With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters - born to the same father but different mothers - struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. While Momoko, their father's first child - haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together - seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances.

Sadako Teiko Okuda was living in Osaki-shimo, an island off the mainland of Japan, when the bomb hit Hiroshima on the 6th of August 1945. Even sixty kilometers from the city, it was clear something horrific had happened. There was a blinding flash and the window next to Sadako smashed, a shard of glass leaving a painful burn on her neck. Soon, news came that her niece and nephew who lived in Hiroshima were missing. There was only one thing she could do—leave the relative safety of the island and set off into the city to find them.

On the 14th of August 1941, a Polish monk named Maximilian Maria Kolbe was murdered in Auschwitz. Kolbe's life had been remarkable. Fiercely intelligent and driven, he founded a movement of Catholicism and spent several years in Nagasaki, ministering to the 'hidden Christians' who had emerged after centuries of oppression. A Polish nationalist as well as a monk, he gave sanctuary to fleeing refugees and his death was no less remarkable: he volunteered to die, saving the life of a fellow prisoner. It was an act that profoundly transformed the lives of two Japanese men.

Early one morning, at the close of St Colibri’s carnival, a young female steel pan player is found dead beneath a cannonball tree. It is a discovery that will transform the lives of everyone on this small island.

Sisters Rei, Kiki and Ai have always had to look out for one another—but life has taken them on very different paths. Eldest daughter Rei is spiky and sensible, distracting herself with an all-consuming job at a financial corporation in London. Big-hearted Kiki is a single mother in Tokyo, juggling the demands of her young son and the cantankerous elderly residents of the retirement home she works in. The free-spirited youngest, Ai, is a Japanese pop idol who has found fame and fortune but lost herself along the way.