Product Description

    Barbara Jefferson, a young American teaching in Tokyo in the 1960s, is set on a life-changing quest when her Japanese surrogate mother, Michi, dies, leaving her a tansu of homemade plum wines wrapped in rice paper. Within the papers Barbara discovers writings in Japanese calligraphy that comprise a startling personal narrative. With the help of her translator, Seiji Okada, Barbara begins to unravel the mysteries of Michi's life, a story that begins in the early twentieth century and continues through World War II and its aftermath.
     As Barbara and Seiji translate the plum wine papers they form an intimate bond, with Michi a ghostly third in what becomes an increasingly uneasy triangle. Barbara is deeply affected by the revelation that Michi and Seiji are hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, and even harder for her to understand are the devastating psychological effects wrought by war. Plum Wine examines human relationships, cultural differences, and the irreparable consequences of war in a story that is both original and timeless.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #117723 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 332 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. As this enthralling novel opens, Barbara Jefferson, teaching English in Japan in 1966, receives a bequest from her Japanese fellow teacher and mentor, Michiko Nakamoto, a Hiroshima survivor who has just died of cancer. Barbara's superiors arrive at her apartment bearing Michi-San's gorgeous tansu chest, filled with bottles of homemade plum wine dated by year. After a short, perfectly rendered struggle with the elder Japanese teachers over the possession of the wine, Barbara discovers that the rice paper wrappings of each bottle contain a portion of the story of Michiko's life. Barbara's path through the texts, which she cannot translate herself, forms the rest of the novel. As Barbara delves into Michi-San's life and loves, an odd triangle forms between Barbara, Michiko and Michiko's childhood friend Seiji, a man who is between the two women in age, and who translates some texts. Author of Felice and Forms of Shelter, Davis-Gardner handles the Japanese mores of the time expertly, and the dialogue spoken by non-native English speakers is pitch perfect. She quietly wows with this third novel, which features a wonderfully inventive plot and a protagonist as self-possessed as she is sensitive. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Seiji, a potter, tells Barbara, a young and lonely American teaching at a Tokyo university, that it is a tradition in Japan to write about the year past as the new year begins. This practice was cherished by Michiko, a professor who befriended Barbara, and by Michiko's mother before her, as Barbara discovers after Michiko's sudden death and surprise bequest to Barbara of a wooden chest containing bottles of plum wine, one for each year from 1939 to 1966, the present, each wrapped in paper covered with writing. Unable to read Japanese, Barbara asks Seiji to translate the papers, unaware that he and Michiko are hibakusha, Hiroshima survivors. As she and Seiji embark on a painfully complicated love affair, Barbara struggles to understand the horror of what Michiko and Seiji suffered at the hands of her countrymen while her students question her about America's escalation of the war in Vietnam. Davis-Gardner's exceptionally sensitive and enveloping novel illuminates with quiet intensity, psychological suspense, and narrative grace the obdurate divide between cultures, the collision between love and war, and, most piercingly, the horrific legacy of Hiroshima. But Davis-Gardner's ravishing tale also celebrates the solace of stories, and the transcendent bonds people form under the cruelest of circumstances. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Durham Herald Sun 
 "A delicate and moving story about self-discovery and the search for understanding in the face of the cruelty human beings can inflict upon each other. [Davis-Gardner] treats each of her characters and settings with the quiet dignity considered such an integral part of the Japanese culture, even as she reveals their fears and their flaws. Her style is as spare and graceful as Japanese calligraphy, each word a purposeful and precise stroke evoking a world steeped in tradition trying to come to grips with the chaos of a new age." Durham Herald Sun
\n
\n"Plum Wine illuminates the difficult process of\ndiscovering the careful balance between knowledge and inexperience,\ninnocence and clarityŠ. [Angela Davis-Gardner] displays just the\nright touch in her multilayered third novel, "Plum Wine,"\nnever once losing the powerfully bare quality of a soft brush on rice\npaper."-News and Observer\n\n\n",0] ); D(["ce"]); //--



News and Observer 
 "Plum Wine illuminates the difficult process of discovering the careful balance between knowledge and inexperience, innocence and clarity. [Angela Davis-Gardner] displays just the right touch in her multilayered third novel, "Plum Wine," never once losing the powerfully bare quality of a soft brush on rice paper."



Bookslut.com, April 2006
"Davis-Gardner is an excellent tour guide: her vivid descriptions and lucid explanations of all things Japanese are nearly enough to make you impulsively purchase a plane ticket. Visions of elaborate tea ceremonies, emerald evergreen branches and the golden plums that make Michi’s wine make Plum Wine sensual, inviting, illuminating. The reader will pick up a few bits of vocabulary, and perhaps an appetite for eel, mochi cake, and most certainly the sweet drink that gives the book its name."

Customer Reviews

Overcoming our past
This love story confronts the issues of how our own personal pain from past experience affects our ability to love in the future. The setting of this book takes you to post Hiroshima Japan. The affects on the people of this place and how it has affected others around the world. Not only does it look at war it also embraces the issues that are placed on children who are not given the love that most children take for granted. Sometimes we can overcome our past and sometimes we cannot. I especially liked the setting of Japan and the descriptions of the beauty of the land. Being able to have a small window into the world of another culture was a pleasure for me. While this was a Love Story it was more about our ability to look at what responsibility we each have to take in our own personal decisions. I believe this to be the best part of this book. While the stories themselves were adequate it was the ability to cause the reader to explore their own feelings regarding themselves and the world that truly made it worth the read.

Reading Between Cultures
I throughly enjoyed this book. Since I lived six years in Japan (from 1993-99) while immersing myself in the culture, I was delighted to see the accuracy of Angela's DAvis-Gardner portrayal Japanese way of thinking and relationships. The story caught me up in its suspense as I read on to discover where Barbara was going to find intimacy and how she'd manage these strange cross-cultural relationships, and what the writing on these plum wine bottles revealed. Descriptive language in this novel was beautiful and some passages brought an amused smile to my lips.

I was astonished by the range of reviews by others. Several talked about how they couldn't understand how Barbara could be attracted to Seiji. Some found both characters unsympathetic or shallow. I don't find fault with these characters but with others reading and understanding of these two protagonists.

I think critics who are harsh on these characterizations haven't lived alone in a foreign land and felt the keen loneliness inherent in that situation, especially in a land where the ideal of men and the values they lives by (work has priority over relationships, relationship with mother has priority over spouse) are so different than western values.

Both Barbara and Seiji were sympathetic characters for me because I understood and felt their dilemmas and could see the cross-cultural issues at play. I could understand how Barbara would waver between going along with Seiji's ways and trying to change him to American romantic ideals.

I thank Angela for a compelling read that enlightened me to the shame and sadness experienced by survivors of Hiroshima.

Expected more, not enough depth
Maybe my expection was too high. The story did not have enough depth and seemed to be written for "easy reading" level. Did not keep my interest although I completed the book.