Get 50% off Woman Who Brings the Rain: A Memoir of Hokkaido, Japan, just use ADVENT15 at the checkout. Offer runs for 24 hours only.
As precise and nuanced as Japanese calligraphy, this memoir of the author’s stay on the remote Hokkaido island in the far north of Japan, has at its heart the mountain, Yotei-san, the region’s iconic equivalent to Mount Fuji. As much about learning a language (with connotations of ‘reading’ a wild landscape) as it is about nature, this dignified and nuanced work evokes what is cultured and cultivated, and yet also honours the wild; the untranslatable. With its themes of seasonal transformation, the peripheral, folklore, loneliness and learning to belong, this work takes a personal philosophical stance in relation to the centre and the periphery.
'Eluned Gramich has written the perfect essay - a minutely detailed yet nuanced evocation of place and personalities that is full of ecologically precise imagery and is as attentive to the Japanese language as it is to Hokkaidan landscape.' – Mark Cocker
Featuring original calligraphic art by the late Kuniko Sheldon, both Eluned's writing and Kuniko's kanji prints were featured in a special exhibition at The Coach House, St Dogmaels back in October.
Kuniko's husband Eric and her two daughters.
