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Takarabe Toriko was born in 1933 in Niigata
prefecture. Two months after her birth, she left with her parents
to live in Manchukuo. Following repatriation with her family in
1946, she went on to become one of Japan’s most eminent poets. She
is particularly noted for her evocations of her youth and has
received numerous prizes for her work over a long career.
Phyllis Birnbaum is a novelist, biographer,
journalist, and translator. Her translation Confessions of Love, a
novel by Uno Chiyo, won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize
for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Her most recent
biography is Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy: The Story of Kawashima
Yoshiko, the Cross-Dressing Spy Who Commanded Her Own Army.
[In one scene] the details, including the smells in the room, are
then piled on one after the other with sickening realism, but this
is how Takarabe writes: the rawness of the prose stresses the
brutality, and when we realize that this is an eleven-year old
experiencing these things and remembering them so graphically at
such a distance in time, the fact that these people are Japanese no
longer matters. This is refugee life at its worst. . . . Takarabe's
effectiveness as a writer lies in her description of contrasts and
her understanding of what happens in a child's mind as she
experiences various things.--John Butler "Asian Review of
Books"
This 2005 novel, recently translated into English for the first
time, provides the key to Toriko Takarabe's poetry and childhood,
both of which were defined by Japan's brief colonial adventure in
Manchuria. . . . The images of death are powerful and terrifying .
. . Equally dark is the psychological portrait of the child Masuko
descending into a self-centered struggle for survival, scrounging
for scraps among corpses. A powerful and important book.-- "The
Japan Times"
Toriko's novel is a powerful evocation of a period in which
Japanese colonists, Russian hunters and merchants, Communist
Chinese agents, Indigenous local populations and Chinese urban
elites co-existed in an awkward, frontier-style peace . . . Heaven
and Hell packs a powerful punch. Toriko succeeds remarkably in
reconstructing her child's-eye perspective of life in the colonial
settlements and then the war. . . . Heaven and Hell is an important
read: a superb autobiographical novel depicting a still
controversial period of Asian history, and a poignant portrayal of
colonialism and the myriad tyrannies of which its legacy is
comprised, all contained within an intelligent, compelling,
perfectly crafted child's-eye narrative.-- "PopMatters"
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