Julie Shigekuni

A thriller that delves into the scenarios of marriage and friendship and explores the fine line between love and betrayal.

In Plain View

In this long-awaited follow-up to her acclaimed debut novel, A Bridge Between Us, Julie Shigekuni offers a beautiful and disturbing look at the intimacy and isolation, desire and despair that haunt a young woman's life. Invisible Gardens is the story of Lily Soto, a thirty-five-year-old Japanese-American woman, who, despite two young children, a stable marriage, and a teaching career based on a book she has finally completed, feels her life is falling apart. An extended stay by her aging father brings back painful memories of her dead mother—and amplifies how a family legacy has infiltrated Lily's perfectly constructed, but painfully flawed, life. As Lily struggles to meet the daily needs of her children, her husband, her father, and her career, and in an attempt to avert her attention from what is troubling her, she begins an affair with a male colleague. It's this illicit relationship that challenges Lily either to abandon her most intimate relationships or to approach her life with renewed insight. In lyrical and precise prose, the novel examines the forces that women in their thirties face—forces that for Lily may mean not only the end of her own happiness but, more important, the dissolution of her marriage and her family.

A Novel

Invisible Gardens

Four generations of Japanese American women make their home in a large house in San Francisco, united by the obligations of family and tradition and, perhaps, by love. In alternating chapters, the four women--Reiko, Rio, Tomoe, and Nomi Hito--speak with unflinching honesty about their lives, the secrets that have separated mother and daughter, and the fierce ties of intimacy that form an inextricable bridge between them.With the touch and power of a master storyteller, Julie Shigekuni gracefully interweaves four distinctive voices to shape a moving story of love and the courage it requires. In baring the heart of one family, she illuminates the truths about families, real and imagined, we all create.

A Bridge Between Us

Daniel Mueller

In stories, poems, and essays, Blue Mesa Review Issue 16 explores the relationship between art and the viewer. As Editor Julie Shigekuni notes in her foreword, "While a work of art begins with the intimate bond between artist and subject matter, once the creation is formed--published, sold-- different kind of relationship ensues. Once it becomes the object of speculation for audiences, literature exists both within the world as we know it, and within the world of the story." Issue 16 features fiction by Alison Kinney, Antoine Wilson, and Thomas O'Malley; creative non-fiction by Daniel Chacon, Blas Falconer, and Geoffrey Becker; and poetry by Ellen Wehle, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Gaylord Brewer, Robert Clark, and James Doyle. Hector A. Torres' interview with novelist and poet Demetria Martinez figures as the centerpiece of a volume that, piece by piece, reminds the reader, as central character Celeste in Alison Kinney's mesmerizing story "Sistina" cannot forget, "there will be an end to looking."

Blue Mesa Review

From the acclaimed author of A Bridge Between Us: “The beauty of her writing turns the heat and hard times of California into a dreamscape.” —Ann Patchett, New York Times–bestselling author Unending Nora is a love story, though not in the ordinary sense. Having retreated to the streets of the east San Fernando Valley amidst an intense heat wave, Nora Yano, who has lived the first twenty-nine years of her life as a devout Christian and an outcast, strikes up a relationship with a stranger and experiences sexual intimacy for the first time. When Nora mysteriously disappears, her best and only friends Caroline and Melissa, each with their own lives to consider, must decide what they’re willing to risk to find her. The complications that ensue, along with an unexpected arrival home, set this novel in motion. Beneath the stories of four compelling women, Shigekuni creates in Unending Nora a web of ideas concerning the after-effects of wartime internment. Fresh out of the camps, a displaced and emotionally scarred generation clustered together to form a community; they even took on a religion in order to adapt to the society that oppressed them. Now their offspring, four young women coming of age in their thirties, must carve their own path. Unending Nora is a story about finding love through adversity. In an ambitious examination of faith, shame, and desire, Julie Shigekuni takes up where John Okada left off over fifty years ago with his masterpiece No-No Boy—to tell the story of a community ready to mark its place in the larger world. “[A] graceful and compassionate novel.” —Gayle Brandeis, author of The Book of Dead Birds

Julie Shigekuni

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