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11 of 12 found the following review helpful:
 A complex, sad and intimate view of non-belonging Jul 25, 2004
By Lynn Harnett
In this intensely personal memoir Kyoko Mori visits her home town of Kobe, Japan, in an attempt to come to terms with her mother's suicide and her estrangement from her father.
She came to America at 20, seven years after her mother's suicide, and even then knew she would never return for more than a visit. Her memoir begins with an account of the immediate aftermath of her mother's death - the shrouded atmosphere of shock and grief, her maternal grandparents gentle consideration, her father's jarring insensitivity.
It then jumps to 1990, as Mori, now an American, readies for departure from Green Bay, Wisconsin, where she teaches creative writing at the university. She has always been ambivalent about the country of her birth. When people ask her if she 'goes back,' she winces at their terminology and replies, ' 'I'd like to visit sometime, but there are other places I'd rather travel to if I had the money.' '
The trip is a sabbatical, justified as research for her stories and poems. She will spend four weeks sightseeing. Letters to her family are only sent from the airport: 'I could never get on the plane this morning if I had to see my family first thing upon arrival.' The people she has arranged to meet on arrival are, instead, Americans living in Japan and it is an American family she stays with.
Mori skims over her four weeks traveling. She remains an outsider, treated as a foreigner. The Japanese she meets don't even expect her to speak Japanese. The reader pictures her in her American running shoes and sports clothes, a contrast to the Japanese women in dresses and lipstick, aloof in her tourist personna. But Mori begins to think she would feel alien anyway, even if she had not become so determinedly American. Kobe, where she grew up, is a modern, westernized city with little of Japanese tradition about it. The private school she went to, run by westerners, encouraged her non-conformist creativity. Even Japanese art does not move her.
Upon her return to Kobe she agonizes over calling her father. She longs to see her other relatives - the maternal grandmother, aunts and cousins her father had forbidden contact with at the age of 13. Her paternal aunt and cousin who gave her so much sympathy and love in the difficult years after her father remarried. But she is Japanese enough to know that she must call her father first otherwise the others will feel awkward.
The narrative is haunted by the guilt and grief she still feels over her mother's suicide, the bitterness she carries for her father. Until we meet him, it's easy to feel impatient with Mori as well as sympathetic. Sure, he was a cold, even viscious parent - depriving her of family, threatening to take her out of the school she loved, beating her for speaking her mind, full of psychological cruelties - but she also provoked him with her rash impetuosity. Perhaps Mori should be an adult about it and reconcile. How can he hurt her now?
Then we meet her father and his callous behavior is as breathtaking as it is sad. The stepmother really is like something out of Grimm's fairytales. In their presence Mori becomes like a child again but the years have taught her restraint. Reuniting with her other relatives, she finds it frustrating that Japanese language and custom makes emotional expression difficult. But in the end she also finds a delicacy, even a liberation, in this. Breathing room.
Mori's language is simple, unadorned, affectingly graceful. Her narrative engages the emotions as it struggles with big questions of coming of age and coming to terms with anguish that will never be resolved. In the end she remains an alien in her birthplace and the reader understands a little more about what that means.
7 of 7 found the following review helpful:
 We can't go home again. Oct 20, 1997
Water, life-giving source of comfort and sustenance, is among the most maternal of symbols on the island nation of Japan. In her new memoir, Kyoko Mori explores the loss of her mother, her childhood and ultimately, her native heritage, as a result of the behavior of an abusive father and stepmother. "The Dream of Water" is a search for the soul and essence of the mother she once found lying on the floor with a plastic bag over her head and a natural gas tube in her mouth.An American citizen, the Japanese-born Mori has lived in the US since her late teens and teaches creative (English) writing at St. Norbert¹s College in Wisconsin. "The Dream of Water" tells the story of her first trip back to Japan since leaving 13 years before. None of us can go home again, and Mori is no different; but the book shows we can reach better a understanding of our past using the knowledge and experience of years.As Mori visited with what remained of her family and friends, she saw them now through the eyes of a self-confident adult from a radically different culture. Even this self-confident adult, however, had trouble with a father who decided to leave for a nap thirty minutes into her first meeting with him in years.The deliberate ambiguousness of Japanese language and culture is the basis of much current misunderstanding and apparent callousness when Japanese and Americans communicate. Although Mori had developed a strong dose of American assertiveness, the Japanese language she learned as a child lacked the words to civilly inquire why: why did you drive my mother to suicide? why did you cut me off from her family? why do you continue to criticize my looks, my work, my worth?We learn from this book that child abuse is not limited to America, nor is physical abuse necessarily worse than emotional abuse. This brilliant girl's pain has had a lasting effect on the woman. Though well written, it¹s not a fun book. It is often bleak and sad.Mori's first book, the fictional "Shizuko's Daughter" (Ballantine, 1993), dealt with the life of a twelve year old Japanese girl following the suicide of her mother and abuse at the hands of a distant father and an evil stepmother. It¹s easy to see the common influence for both books in her early experiences.With luck, the "The Dream of Water" will also serve to wash away the author¹s pain and help her produce more good writing on a different topic. -- End --
9 of 10 found the following review helpful:
 Mixed Feb 26, 1999
I've never read a book where my feelings toward the story and the author kept rising and dipping, over and over. On the one hand, Mori is a beautiful writer. Her words are lyrical, and she tells a good, even suspenseful story. At times I didn't want to put the book down.Alternately, there were at least 3 times--and I'm only halfway through the book--where I just wanted to slam the book down, thinking, OK, enough is enough. Her bitterness toward her father, stepmother, and even the Japanese culture manifests itself in--simply put--whining. It isn't that I'm not sympathetic--indeed, I can relate to alot of the issues she talks about; it's the reason I wanted to read her story--but, like the other reviewer wrote, enough is enough. She refuses to let go or at least try to understand or come to terms with her pain. It's family-bashing and Japan-bashing with no grey in between. At many points the book reminds me of an unconstructive, dragged-out heart-to-heart with a friend who goes over every angry detail for the upteenth time. The only reason I tried to plow through this was my hope to see that "breakthrough." Now that I've read the other reviewer's comment that it doesn't ever come, I think my time will be better spent reading other books.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Going home isn't always easy Aug 17, 2001
By MegaMegaWhiteThing!
The prevailing message of Kyoko Mori's work is "going home is never easy." She never actually says it outright, however, instead opting to weave her life in America with her abused childhood and the people she encounters on her eight week trip to Japan. The story did not strike me as being "whiny" in any way, shape, or form. "Whiny" is a term better left for books that I have read that involve people complaining about their comfortable lives of little or no strife with their surroundings. Ms. Mori had valid points to discuss, even if they were depressing. A deeper message lies in the book -- you cannot change people. A perfect example is Hiroshi Mori, her father. Even as an old, sickly man, he has had no remorse or second - thoughts about the pain he has put his only daughter through, instead remaining a selfish, self centered old man. Her writing style is rich and filled with long, poetic sentences, and I wish she was *my* creative writing teacher. She fails to be self-pitying and offers her humility to the reader by gently feeding it to them, not pounding out paragraph after paragraph of remorse and sorrow. I enjoyed her anecdotes about her childhood and her (limited) memories of her family, and this book is just as good, if not better, than the other works she has written. It's so nice to have read such a consistently well versed author.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 Emotional and Provocative Jun 28, 1999
The Dream of Water" was chosen by my teacher to read in our 12th grade English class. There was a big gap between those who loved it and those who thought it was simply a waste of time. People who enjoyed the book really got into the story right away. It's not a very difficult book to read. However, if after reading a few chapters, it seems boring, I suggest finding a different book to read. I think it is wonderfully written, very provocative. Kyoko has a way of writing that engages the readers. Her emotions are expressed very strongly and magnificently.
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