Kyoko

Maya Ishida is no stranger to sorrow. Torn from her artist father in her native Japan, raised by her cold, ambitious mother in Minneapolis, she has finally put together a life with few disruptions: a safe marriage and a quiet life 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. After her father dies, Maya is pulled back into...

In 1990 author Kyoko Mori returned to her native Japan to visit the "landscape of my childhood." There--looking for the house in which her mother killed herself, running on land that was once water, and retracing childhood train trips to her grandparents' farm--she relived the memories and uncovered the secrets that unlocked her past. In The Dream of Water, a series of chapters that are themselves "small perfections," she leads us to the "larger happiness"...

Tragedy strikes when Emili is shockingly murdered by a mysterious stranger. The other four girls present at the scene of the crime - Sae, Maki, Akiko and Yuka - are unable to remember the killer's face and the crime goes unsolved. Fifteen years later, a now adult Sae is paid a surprise visit on her wedding day.

When Yuka was a child, her mother always favored Yuka's sickly older sister Mayu. Now the successful proprietor of a flower shop, Yuka is still consumed by jealousy. When Mayu marries a kindly policeman named Keita, Yuka's latent childhood traumas emerge and she concocts a plan to seduce him.

Maki is now a teacher at a strict elementary school and trains in self-defense techniques to combat her feelings of helplessness. When an attacker arrives at her school, Maki jumps into action to confront him, triggering a chain of unforeseen repercussions.