One Chrysanthemum

Joan Itoh Burk, who is a member of my online writing group, has just published her first novel. She'd written the novel before joining the group, so we can't take any credit for it, but we're very proud of her. Here's what I wrote in Eye-Ai magazine:

"Misako Imai has the gift of second sight – or maybe it’s a curse. At the beginning of Joan Itoh Burk’s astonishing debut novel, One Chrysanthemum, as the wind of a typhoon “dances a garbage can down a dark Tokyo street,” Imai has a vision of her husband with another woman. She realizes that he lied to her when he told her he would be staying late at the office on account of the weather. Another storm, a year before, churned up the bones of a young woman from the pond waters at a nearby museum. Misako’s grandfather, a Buddhist priest, has been keeping the bones in his temple, while he tries to figure out what to do with them. Throughout the following chapters, Burk expertly weaves Misako’s story with that of Kensho, a gangly mixed blood Buddhist priest interested in clairvoyance, and the mystery of the bones."