Fish of the Seto inland sea. Este artículo no está disponible.Fish of the Seto inland sea

An extraordinary portrait of one family across the years of Japan’s greatest changes; a loving, honest, moving biography of the author’s mother.

Ruri Pilgrim tells the story of her family from the 1870s to the 1950s. She begins with the formality and security of the arrangements of life for a Japanese middle-class family, living in a walled compound with their servants, following exactly the tradition inherited from their parents, with marriages arranged for the children, which continued up till World War II.

By then her mother was married to an engineer and living in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. That period, with her mother’s often funny, painful experiences of learning about the Chinese and Russians with whom she now lived with her growing family, and the war seen from her point of view, is fascinating. At the end of the war, the Japanese – women, children, everyone – had to escape, walking hundreds of miles to the coast.

The family returned to a Tokyo where the society, the culture, the economy was entirely overturned. The Americans were everywhere, the Japanese were unemployed, and the ways of society that they had all known had vanished. And yet somehow Ruri’s indomitable mother survived.

Ruri Kumoi Pilgrim grew up in Japan and Manchuria. Winning a Fulbright Scholarship to Columbia University, New York, she subsequently studied anthropology at Cambridge University. Married to international aid consultant, John Pilgrim, she lived all over the world, with their three children and her mother, who joined her from Japan for the last years of her life.