White Wings and Other Writings

A bereaved pigeon searches for his mate in a mirror. A woman watching her mother’s illness discovers an unexpected depth of love. In a public garden, painters, children and a former prime minister pass through the fading autumn light.

Miyamoto Yuriko follows the emotional force of ordinary objects: a handful of coins, a slice of stale bread, flowers at a sickbed. Her recollection of her grandmother’s death joins candor about a difficult relationship with a tenderness that refuses easy consolation.

The collection turns outward to a boy raising funds for Belgian orphans and a first-person account of returning to Tokyo after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. Fear, rumor, bereavement and the desire for social renewal remain together in the narrator’s experience.