Wonderfully literate and full of Japanese culture and history. I'll be reading her other books. ( )

A Japanese-POV, teenage romance history of horror and recovery with some chaste babymaking and a kiss or two, but they were long after the bombs and firestorms over Tokyo. A tour of tradition with sumo stables and noh masks, a trainride to the mountains and Nara, hunger during the War, and everyone being better than anyone should. OK, a couple of bad guys but not many.

An orange soda of a book. Sweet and easy to sip at on a hot day. But not filling.

BTW even though Michael Chabon blurbed the book, it has no flashy writing. It plods on cliche after cliche, and never gallops, rears up, or takes a bad turn. ( )

The Street of a Thousand Blossoms – Gail Tsukiyama
4 stars
The orphaned brothers, Hiroshi and Kenji, are being raised in a traditional Japanese household by their grandparents. Their story begins in 1939 and continues through the war and its aftermath. Considerably different in appearance and temperament, the brother’s choose traditional careers during the years of Japan’s greatest upheaval. Hiroshi becomes a famous Sumo wrestler while Kenji becomes a master craftsman of Noh masks. The story follows their family through tragedies and triumphs that parallel the reconstruction of postwar Japan.

The book begins in 1966 as Hiroshi is retiring from a victorious sumo career. Although the rest of the story is told in present tense there is a sense of distance and nostalgia throughout. Events progress fairly rapidly through the decades. Sometimes, I felt I wanted a bit more detail. Tsukiyama tends to depict a climatic event, such as a bombing, an accident or a death, and then shift scenes fairly quickly to show how the character has been affected by the event years later.

I found this book very hard to put down. All of the characters felt authentic. They had a completely universal familiarity of people who suffer and survive the hard times. Like,The Book Thief, this book shows how common citizens suffer in a country controlled by on oppressive, militaristic government. The dual careers of Sumo and Noh Theater were perfect to convey the atmosphere of Japan during the 1950’s as the country began to recover its pride and identity.
( )

This is the story of two brothers, Kenji and Hiroshi, who have been raised by their grandparents after their parents died. The story spans nearly thirty years and includes quite a large cast of characters, including the men's loves, their grandparents, their work role models. There is a lot to be learned about Japan during and after WWII and about sumo wrestling. I would give this a 3.5 if it were possible and wish I had liked it more but there were so many characters that the book had to run quite long to flesh them all out but it was hard to really attach to any of them. ( )

This is the story of two brothers, Kenji and Hiroshi, who have been raised by their grandparents after their parents died. The story spans nearly thirty years and includes quite a large cast of characters, including the men's loves, their grandparents, their work role models. There is a lot to be learned about Japan during and after WWII and about sumo wrestling. I would give this a 3.5 if it were possible and wish I had liked it more but there were so many characters that the book had to run quite long to flesh them all out but it was hard to really attach to any of them. ( )