 | Plum Wine Subjects: Women teachers; College teachers; Female friendship; Atomic bomb victims; Psychological fiction Japanese; Inheritance and succession; Translating and interpreting; Americans; As this enthralling novel opens, Barbara Jefferson, teaching English in Japan in 1966, receives a bequest from her Japanese fellow teacher and mentor, Michiko Nakamoto, a Hiroshima survivor who has just died of cancer. Barbara's superiors arrive at her apartment bearing Michi-San's gorgeous tansu chest, filled with bottles of homemade plum wine dated by year. After a short, perfectly rendered struggle with the elder Japanese teachers over the possession of the wine, Barbara discovers that the rice paper wrappings of each bottle contain a portion of the story of Michiko's life. Barbara's path through the texts, which she cannot translate herself, forms the rest of the novel. As Barbara delves into Michi-San's life and loves, an odd triangle forms between Barbara, Michiko and Michiko's childhood friend Seiji, a man who is between the two women in age, and who translates some texts. Author of Felice and Forms of Shelter, Davis-Gardner handles the Japanese mores of the time expertly, and the dialogue spoken by non-native English speakers is pitch perfect. She quietly wows with this third novel, which features a wonderfully inventive plot and a protagonist as self-possessed as she is sensitive. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved Angela Davis-Gardner is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, Felice and Forms of Shelter . Her short stories and personal essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines including Shenandoah and The Greensboro Review . She is professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University. |
