From My Grandmothers Bedside: Sketches of Postwar Tokyo

In this small book of vignettes, Field (a professor of East Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, and author of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor) writes of the personal and political transformations she observed in Japan from the time of her childhood as daughter of an American G.I. and a Japanese woman in post-World War II Tokyo, to 1995 when she returned to Japan to take care of her grandmother who was immobilized and made mute by a series of strokes. Field's detailed then-and-now descriptions of her grandmother's backyard, the corner store, and her neighborhood in Tokyo provide a concrete counterpoint to her sometimes jangling combination of personal memories with political commentary. Her extremely knowledgeable and haunting observations on the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, on nuclear weapons testing, or even on the late photographer Domon Ken, are overwhelmed by much stronger familial themes. It is the immobile presence of her slowly dying grandmother, the feel of her oiled skin, the incised memory of her white apron, that anchors these anecdotes. These memories of her family are poignant, searching, despairing and loving, and she captures the feeling of what it's like to say good-bye to one who can no longer respond. In her preface she writes, perhaps as a rhetorical device, ""What disappeared from our world along with sad farewells?"" Two photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)