Gail Tsukiyama’s faithful readers likely will be horrified when I say that Tsukiyama’s latest novel, “The Street of a Thousand Blossoms,” reminds me of James Michener’s books.
Although he still holds the record for number of books sold in the U.S., Michener is largely dismissed these days. The truth is, his ponderous novels taught a generation of Americans about Hawaii and Chesapeake Bay and even Colorado. You never finished a Michener book without learning an extraordinary amount about his subject.
That’s the case with “The Street of a Thousand Blossoms.” Readers will finish it with a fine understanding of sumo wrestling, the Noh Theater and Japan during World War II. Where the comparison between the two authors falls down, of course, is the writing. Michener was a competent, if somewhat pedestrian, writer, and his books went on forever.
Tsukiyama, whose books are shorter – maybe too short for some fans – writes with eloquence and feeling. Her prose is so finely wrought that you smell the rotting persimmons and the sawdust from wood being sanded in a mask shop. You are chilled by the mist rising in a Japanese mountain valley and even feel the heat and stench of the flames consuming parts of Tokyo during a World War II firebombing. This book is a feast for the senses.
“The Street of a Thousand Blossoms” is the story of two brothers who are raised by their grandparents after the deaths of their parents.
Hiroshi, the older boy, plans to become a sumotori, while his brother, Kenji, dreams of one day making masks for Noh performers.
But the war cuts short their hopes. Hiroshi’s interview at the sumo training school is on Dec. 7, 1941 – Pearl Harbor Day. With the onset of war, the school is closed. Soon after, Akira, Kenji’s mentor, shuts the mask shop and flees to a remote mountain village.
Too young to join the military, the boys spend the war years caring for their grandparents and fighting to stay alive. Some of Tsukiyama’s best writing is her descriptions of the deprivations of the war years – the struggle for food, the greed and corruption of local officials, the fear of enemy bombs and the fires that consume not just buildings but also people.
Paralleling the stories of the boys in this multilayered novel are the lives of sisters Haru and Aki, whose mother burns to death in a fire-bombing. Their father heads the sumo school that Hiroshi attends at the war’s close. And there he falls in love with the fragile Aki. Their stories, along with those of the grandparents, Akira the mask-maker and Mika, the woman Kenji loves, are expertly intertwined.
Toward the end of the book, sisters Haru and Aki, shopping in downtown Tokyo in 1965, hear a boiler explosion rip through the air. Without thinking, the older woman grabs for her sister with hands scarred by a World War II fire. But the younger one slips through the grasp and cowers in a doorway, her hands over her head.
Although this scene takes place 20 years after the end of World War II, it reminds the women that they are never free of their memories of those terrible days. The war is as much a character in “The Street of a Thousand Blossoms” as the people.
Tsukiyama’s first book, “Women of the Silk,” about the Chinese silk industry before World War II, established her as a writer of note. She added to that reputation with subsequent books, including “The Samurai’s Garden.” “The Street of a Thousand Blossoms” is better even than those earlier works. Tsukiyama has the soul of a storyteller.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver-based novelist.
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FICTION
The Street of a Thousand Blossoms
By Gail Tsukiyama
$24.95
