Odori
by Darcy Tamayose
ISBN 9781897151099 | 5.5" x 8.5" | TPB with French Flaps | $22.95
Categories:Fiction - Literary
Purchase:Local Bookstores | mcnallyrobinson.com | archambault.ca | amazon.ca | chapters.indigo.ca
Synopsis
Winner of the 2008 Canada-Japan Literary AwardIn the spring of 1999, Mai Yoshimoto-Lanier falls into a coma after her husband loses control of the old Ford and drives over a bridge into the Belly River. Eddie dies. But Mai falls into the world of her great-grandmother on the island of Hamahiga somewhere between heaven and earth.
Odori is a novel that navigates through the glorious Ryukyuan Kingdom and the Golden Era of the Sho Dynasty, through bloody World War II Okinawa, and over parched prairies of Southern Alberta’s Rainmaker Hills — all the while exposing human sorrows, indignities, idiosyncrasies, failed faiths, splintered spirits, and an island culture so resilient, so embedded it becomes mythical. It tells of Mai’s journey into the world of an old kataribe storyteller, the ghost of her great-grandmother, where she hears of Tree Gods, Sky Gods and human lumps of clay - where her mother’s poignant war letters tell of sights and sounds that singe a child’s soul. In this dream world she has fallen into, Mai allows her basan’s tumble of words to fall gently on her ear as she creates painting after painting, sketch after sketch.
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Reviews
"Tamayose's prose brims with lyrical display ... We're offered fevid reminders of nature's beauty every few pages ... Odori is finally a war novel, its point to seek meaning amid chaos, to show the exquisite and eternal amid the blood and brutality and death. Yet where Tamayose truly excels, where her writing seizes you (well, me) in mind and heart, is where mortal truths insist on breaking through her gauzy curtain." - The Globe and Mail
"When the worlds of language and art collide, a composition will not just speak to its audience, but will have the potential to touch the soul. Such is the work of Darcy Tamayose ... Odori is an experience for the senses; her words offer inspiration to the reader's imagination. The complexity of the tale she spins is deeply spiritual, personal, and relatable, weaving the history and culture of Japan with the life and struggles sustained in a Southern Alberta family." - Lethbridge Living
