The laws of evening - Mary Yukari Waters

In the wake of World War Two, a generation of Japanese women found itself frozen, as if in amber - the last representatives of an exquisite, ancient culture slowly being crushed between the realisation of its own brutality and the coming American Century. Mary Yukari Waters' astonishingly assured and elegant portraits show these women, with their husbands and fathers gone and their children at risk from appalling hunger and illness, still drawing sustenance from the dying tradition in which they were raised. Upheaval is balanced with renewal, estrangement with reconciliation: a mother tries to leaven her son's appetite for baseball and American food with the memory of his father; a woman asks few questions of an old, lost friend so that he might save face.
With her completely authentic and alive stories, Yukari Waters gives her readers a passport into an otherwise alien culture, taking us beyond the usual images of Japan and into the human heart behind the ritual.