Memoir of my Mother : East-West Correspondence

The book commemorates her mother’s life whose love shone throughout her childhood. Now, after her death and as she in her senior years, recollects her mother’s Christian Faith and Love actualized in her life make her see a glimpse of the light and hear echoing her song in her heart. The first two-thirds of the book describes changing seasons of nature and seasonal phases of human life put in a parallelism. Provided with mother’s letters sent over forty years across 5000 miles from Okinawa to the US, the poems written by the author over the years as she moved living with her husband from Hawaii, Kansas and Montana, and quoting ancient Japanese waka and haiku poems. In so doing, the book expresses her gratitude to her mother and to her island of Okinawa. The last one-third section is about her After-Thoughts of writing the book. In the end part she quotes the three questions from Martin Buber’s (1996) book “I and Thou”. The first question is ‘How can we incorporate into the world of the basic word which lies outside language?’ The second question is ‘How can we hold our perfect and whole relation with the You?’ The third question asks “What is it that is eternal: ‘primal phenomenon, present in the here, of what we call ‘revelation?’. With given revelations from her mother’s life and writing this memoir is a way to find the truth and freedom. A true Japanese Christian woman’s story.