James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award for Science Fiction and Commonwealth Writers' Prize Winner, 2001
Sunburst Award Nomination for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, 2002
From the award-winning author of Chorus of Mushrooms, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canadian Region and was co-winner of the Canada Japan Book Award, The Kappa Child is the tale of four Japanese Canadian sisters struggling to escape the bonds of a family and landscape as inhospitable as the sweltering prairie heat.
In a family not at all reminiscent of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, four Japanese-Canadian sisters struggle to escape the bonds of a family and landscape as inhospitable as the sweltering prairie heat. Their father, moved by an incredible dream of optimism, decides to migrate from the lush green fields of British Columbia to Alberta. There, he is determined to deny the hard-pan limitations of the prairie and to grow rice. Despite a dearth of both water and love, the family discovers, through sorrow and fear, the green kiss of the Kappa Child, a mythical creature who blesses those who can imagine its magic...
Reviews:
"A fairy tale that's well worth the wait. . . .Goto handles her theme with lightness and a sense of compassion that is, sadly, rare in contemporary fiction."
-- Alberta Views
"Highly imaginative."
-- World Literature Today
Excerpt:
We sat, beside the sweet, greenish water, the air cooler and almost comfortable. Sat so still and silent that the frogs poked their noses from bent blades of grass, looking for delectables. Between batches of algae, long, bent, insectile legs skittered in pools of liquid surface, the water indenting beneath their splayed feet. The consistency of skin. The roaring wind roared, but it also blew the mosquitoes all the way into Saskatchewan. How beautiful the land was. Had been beautiful before Laura Ingalls ever noticed, before her Pa plowed it under. I tipped backward, arms held over my head. The prairie grass bristled and jabbed but I didn't care. The sky floated so high I was sucked upward with the vertigo and didn’t want to come back.
"You a boy or a girl?" Gerald inquired.
"You Blood or Japanese?" I retorted.
"Humph," he acquiesced.
Creeeek, creeeek, the frogs resumed.
Close by, a fat bee dropped into a cluster of canola. A bird speck flew by, dipping up and down. My eyes filled diamond bright and the light of summer burst into fragments.
Hiromi Goto was born in Japan and moved with her family to British Columbia, Canada, when she was three. Her parents are mushroom farmers, and she spent most of her childhood living in rural areas. This experience, she says, continues to be a source of inspiration in her writing. Her work also is influenced by her father''s stories of life in Japan, which she grew up hearing.
Goto's first novel, Chorus of Mushrooms, received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canadian Region and was co-winner of the Canada Japan Book Award. Her short stories and poetry have been widely published in literary journals.
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