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Linda Watanabe McFerrin, author of Namako: Sea Cucumber and The Hand of Buddha "Holly Thompson has a gift for bringing the mind's eye to focus on the details of the moment, whether it be the relentless falling ash of Kagoshima, or a snack of grilled squid legs and barley tea. Her tale of lost companionship, guilt, and redemption takes place against a minutely and lovingly woven tapestry of daily life in modern Japan." Alex Kerr, author of Lost Japan "ASH takes the expatriate-in-Japan novel way beyond the genre into the realm of lasting art. A gorgeous debut!" Leza Lowitz, The Japan Times "ASH is a wonderfully insightful first novel about a young woman living within two cultures. Thompson adeptly explores the lasting bonds of friendship and the courage needed to face the past in order to embrace the future." Gail Tsukiyama, author of Women of the Silk and The Samurai's Garden
Caitlin Ober is back in Japan, teaching English in remote Kagoshima, opposite the increasingly active volcano Sakurajima. Beneath ominous clouds of ash, Caitlin travels her school rounds, swims intently, hangs with a group of windsurfers, all the while concocting lies and self-deceptions to prevent a tragic childhood incident from intruding on her present. Then, in an ash-coated garden, Caitlin encounters a half-Japanese teenager, Naomi, who seems to require Caitlin's rescue. Together they travel to Kyoto during the summer festival of O-Bon, when the spirits of the dead revisit the living. There, amid bonfires, temple rites, and ghostly memories, Caitlin bravely begins to embrace her future.
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Holly Thompson, the author of Ash, grew up in New England and graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in biology. She'd not given Japan a passing glance until she approached her husband-to-be in a Maine island pub, intrigued by his footwear (geta) from his time spent in Japan. After teaching science for two years, she made her first move to Japan in 1983 and stayed three years--teaching English, writing, and beginning her exploration of the less traveled corners of the Japanese archipelago. She later received her Masters degree from New York University's Creative Writing Program and after settling in the New York area for a number of years, uprooted and moved back to Japan with her husband and their two children. Her articles on such Japanese cultural issues as O-Bon festival rituals, tatami manufacturing, midwifery, and wedding customs, as well as on historic travel destinations, have appeared in magazines and newspapers in the United States and Japan, and her short stories have been published in The Broken Bridge anthology, Wingspan and various literary magazines. Her fiction tends to explore differences of sensibility, orientation and expression between Japanese and Americans and the impact of cross-cultural stress on personal lives. Characters include foreigners in Japan struggling to navigate a society lacking familiar referents, Japanese in the United States assimilating one moment and bowing to Japanese tradition the next, and children of intercultural marriages coping with often opposing identities. She currently teaches at Yokohama City University and lives and writes in Kamakura.
| Read the opening section of Ash |