SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
The Night of a Thousand Blossoms

“Tsukiyama has long been known for her emotional and detailed stories. This time, she has gone even deeper to explore what happens to ordinary people during frightening and tragic times.”
-- Lisa See, author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love
 
“Gail Tsukiyama is a writer of astonishing grace, delicacy, and feeling. Her lyric precision serves not only to leave the reader breathless but to illuminate human suffering and redemption with clarity and power.”
-- Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
 
“Covering the years of the war and after, on the home front of Japan, Tsukiyama tells a powerful story of family, of loss, and of endurance with her usual insight, her perfect imagery, and her unforgettable characters. . . . I loved every word.”
-- Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club
 
“Gail Tsukiyama takes us into the world of sumo, allowing us to experience what exists beyond the rituals and the wrestling: the fascinating culture of contact and the intimacies of family love and devotion. This is an impressive achievement.”
-- Elizabeth George, author of What Came Before He Shot Her and Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life
 
“A master storyteller . . . Gail Tsukiyama expertly and beautifully weaves together the lives of a sumo wrestler and his family, and a Noh mask-maker through World War II and into the 1960s.”
-- Jane Hamilton, author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Dreaming Water

"Gail Tuskiyama is a writer of astonishing grace, delicacy, and feeling.  Her lyric precision serves not only to leave the reader breathless, but to illuminate human suffering and redemption with clarity and power."
-- Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Tsukiyama creates a bond between Cate and Hana that mothers and daughters will know as almost a physical need, so deeply entwined are they in each other's lives.  They anticipate each other's pain; one will unexpectedly laugh or suddenly cry, and the other one responds in kind.  The reader, too, laughs and aches under the spell of such graceful writing."
-- USA Today

"Although Dreaming Water takes place over the span of just two days, in clear, poetic prose Tsukiyama creates a family and their life that necessarily must be lived in their own mysterious and poignant orbit."
-- Jane Hamilton, author of A Map of the World and Disobedience: A Novel

"Beautifully written, effused with both sadness and hope, Tsukiyama's novel cannot fail to move readers."
-- Booklist (starred review)

 "...Tsukiyama blossoms with an intimate portrait of a mother and her dying daughter."
-- Kirkus Reviews

"Tsukiyama writes beautifully about courage and love, showing us the importance of daily kindnesses and highlighting the beauty found in the relationships among mothers, daughters, and friends."
-- Library Journal

From Publisher's Weekly
"Tsukiyama (The Language of Threads) has a style at once evocative and formal, well suited to historical romances; now she takes on contemporary drama. At 38, Hana Murayama is dying of Werner's syndrome, a genetic defect that causes premature aging. Hana is almost totally dependent on her mother, Cate, who at 62 is still recovering from the sudden death of her husband, Max. As a child during WWII, Max had been interned with other Japanese-Americans in a camp in Wyoming and subsequently went on to teach history at a small northern California college. That background, her mother's love of gardening and her own usually feisty outlook are what Hana brings to her effort to live and die with dignity. Over the course of two days, Hana and Cate retrace in memory their lives and Max's. Their scattered and sometimes conflicting expectations are brought into sharp focus when Hana's best friend, Laura, now a successful East Coast lawyer, arrives with her two daughters, Hana's godchildren, allowing Hana and Cate to find a measure of the reconciliation that has eluded them. Tsukiyama has a wonderful ability to elicit delicate atmospherics; in particular, she uses the sense of touch to stunning effect. But the pacing is stilted, and neither Cate nor Hana allows herself a moment of private rage, although, in her thoughts, Cate strays briefly from the stoic. Her implicit frustration adds a note of vulnerability to the moving, subtle narrative."
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The San Francisco Chronicle, Patricia Abe
...a quietly powerful and understated story...

From Booklist, February 15, 1998
In a story where the omniscient narrator moves the point of view among the family participants, and where time may shift years between chapters or linger over moments slow and sweet as honey, we view the world of Emma Lew of Hong Kong and, later, San Francisco; her older sister Joan; and their family from 1940 to 1965. The changing mores of Hong Kong society are the backdrop for the tender relationships among Emma, who longs for a wider world than her mother's ladies' lunches; Joan, who finds her place in the movies that have fed her dreams since childhood; Auntie Go, who pulls deeply against tradition by running her own business; and silent servant Foon, whose cooking forges a near-mystical familial bond. Particularly fine at evoking how scent and aroma can jog the memory and clutch at the heart, the tale grows in richness as it proceeds, a paean to the sustaining pleasures of family.
Copyright© 1998, American Library Association. All rights reserved

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
The Samurai's Garden

From Booklist, March 1, 1995
Praised for her lovely first novel, Women of the Silk (1991), Tsukiyama has extended herself even further and written an extraordinarily graceful and moving novel about goodness and beauty. The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Tsukiyama uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for her unusual story about a 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen who is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight. Matsu is a samurai of the soul, a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world, and Stephen is a noble student, learning to appreciate Matsu's generous and nurturing way of life and to love Matsu's soul mate, gentle Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy. Tsukiyama is a wise and spellbinding storyteller. Donna Seaman. Copyright © 1995, American Library Association. All rights reserved.