Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures
Ebook
Ebooks are designed for reading and have few connections to your library.
Overview
Twelve essays by a Japanese-American writer about being caught between past and present, old country and new.
In this powerful, exquisitely crafted book, Kyoko Mori delves into her dual heritage with a rare honesty that is both graceful and stirring. From her unhappy childhood in Japan, weighted by a troubled family and a constricting culture, to the American Midwest, where she found herself free to speak as a strong-minded independent woman, though still an outsider, Mori explores the different codes of silence, deference, and expression that govern Japanese and American women’s lives: the ties that bind us to family and the lies that keep us apart; the rituals of mourning that give us the courage to accept death; the images of the body that make sex seem foreign to Japanese women and second nature to Americans. In the sensitive hands of this compelling writer, one woman’s life becomes the mirror of two profoundly different societies.
- Title: Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures
- Author: Kyoko Mori
- Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 277
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781429934770, 9780805040791, 080504079X, 1429934778
- Resource ID: LLS:9781429934770
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-21T11:41:05Z
Kyoko Mori was born and raised in Kobe, Japan and moved to the United States as a teenager. Now a professor of Creative Writing, she has published her poetry and short stories in leading magazines such as The Kenyon Review, The Apalachee Quarterly, and Beloit Poetry Journal. She is the author of two novels for young readers, One Bird and Shizuko's Daughter, which was chosen as a Best Young Children's Book by The New York Times. She has also written two memoirs for adults, Polite Lies and The Dream of Water.