GemmaMedia Books (2013)A young girl leaves Tokyo with her mother in 1979, carrying her pink suitcase to a new home, a new father and sister, on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Thirty-three years later, her mother’s belongings are found packed into boxes, her furniture draped in white sheets. Without so much as a note, a mother leaves these two grown sisters to figure out where she has gone.
Picador USA/Metropolitan Books (2001)Maya Ishida is no stranger to sorrow. Torn from her artist father and native Japan as a child, raised by her cold, ambitious mother in Minneapolis, she has finally put together a life with few disruptions: a safe marriage to a man who never asks any questions, a quiet job weaving clothes in a country studio. The past is no more than a story she vaguely remembers; the present is a gray landscape of solitary pleasures and modest expectations. But when her father dies, Maya is pulled back into the memory of their parting.