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by Elisabeth Wilkins Lombardo (Author)
As he stumbles through an afterlife he never believed in, scientist Kenzaboro Tsuruda must make sense of his life and confront his family's secrets in order to save his ancestors from becoming Hungry Ghosts--a Buddhist state of purgatory. Meanwhile, his daughter, wife, and sister-in-law struggle with their own loss and take turns sharing their point of view to gradually reveal their family's shameful history--including when, during WWII, Kenzaboro sent his wife, Satsuki, to live with family near Hiroshima, where her rape by his brother resulted in the birth of their only child, Haruna.
Spanning the years during WWII and its horrific ending after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima up to Emperor Hirohito's death in 1989, The Afterlife of Kenzaburo Tsuruda paints a beautiful and haunting portrait of ancient and modern Japan as seen through the eyes of one family as they reconcile loss, shame, honor, death, and, finally, redemption.Author Biography
Elisabeth Wilkins Lombardo was awarded the 2009 PEN/New England Fiction Discovery Prize for the unpublished manuscript of her novel, Obon. She went to Japan as an exchange student in college and stayed for ten more years, traveling extensively throughout Asia from her home in Kobe, Japan, where she worked as a radio and TV personality, teacher, and writer. Her prize-winning essay about the Great Hanshin Earthquake, "After the Quake," was translated into Japanese and subsequently published in an anthology of the same name. Her stories have been published in The Japan Times, The Daily Yomiuri, Mothering, Motherhood (Singapore), and Kansai Timeout. Elisabeth received her MFA from the Stonecoast Creative Writing Program in 2005. At the time of her death in 2015, Wilkins Lombardo was the editor of Empowering Parents, an award-winning online parenting magazine with a growing international readership of more than 500,000. She lived in Cape Elizabeth, Maine with her husband and son.
