The Thorn Puller by Hiromi Ito, translated by Jeffrey Angles (Stonebridge Press)

Hiromi Ito is a woman caught in a situation that’s a familiar scenario for many middle-aged women. She’s a mother whose youngest daughter is ten. She’s a wife whose husband is aging more quickly than she is. She’s a daughter whose parents can no longer take care of themselves unassisted. But Ito faces a complication that most of her counterparts don’t. She lives in California and her parents are in Japan.

Daily phone calls aren’t enough. Ito’s mother frequently begins these conversations with “When are you coming back to Japan?” This is a journey Ito makes several times a year, arriving in a fog of jet lag to face a city she abandoned long ago, and a new medical emergency that only she can cope with. Confronted with her past, a complicated present, and what will eventually be her own future, she does her best to make her parents comfortable. At the same time she  takes care of her youngest daughter, who often accompanies her to Japan. Meanwhile she receives querulous phone calls from her husband who complains that he’s ill, her four-month absence is much too long, and isn’t it time for her to come home?

No wonder Ito becomes preoccupied with Jizo, the god who protects travelers, comforts children, and removes “the thorns of human suffering.” Although she’s no longer religious, she carries the rituals with her, clapping her hands to summon a god, tossing a coin as an offering, acts done reflexively when she passes a shrine. Visiting a temple where Jizu is venerated, she buys the amulet that’s said to banish pain, burns incense before the deity’s statue, and washes herself in the smoke, telling herself the smoke is what she believes in. She needs something to work with because her tasks never end--coming and going, back and forth, phrases repeated in Japanese and in English throughout the narrative.

This threatens to be a bleak and hopeless novel but that isn’t what this is. The author says it’s a long poem and she should know. Not only is The Thorn Puller based heavily upon her own life while using her own name, Hiromi Ito has been a well-known Japanese poet for the past forty years, famous for writing frankly about experiences that are exclusively female. 

Although American reviewers have categorized this book as a novel--or even worse, as “autofiction”--Ito’s U.S. publisher has refused to put it into any sort of pigeon hole. The cover bears only the title, the author, and the translator; not even the copyright page gives a name to what The Thorn Puller might be.

A poem? A memoir? A series of meditative essays? A novel dripping with surrealism? Every reader is given the chance to assign a name to what they’ve read. It’s a work that’s puzzling and at times repetitive, steeped in folklore and skepticism, with actions not usually encountered in fiction nor admitted to in personal essays. While taking an unflinching look at the cruel way that bodies age, Ito moves into her final pages with an examination of dying, observing that “everyone who dies is experiencing it for the first time.” Unlike pregnancy that  comes with books like Lamaze Technique for Dummies, death has no instruction manual. But, Ito suggests without ever saying so directly, perhaps it’s death that’s the true thorn puller.~Janet Brown