Terry Watada

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. This wonderful collection is inspired by an old Japanese parlour game of telling ghost stories. In this game, popular during the Edo period (1603-1868), participants gathered at night to sit around 100 lit candles. Each player then told a ghost story in turn. After each story, a candle was snuffed out. The last candle to burn out represented the end of a spiritual evocation, which the participants hoped would summon a supernatural being from another world. THE GAME OF 100 GHOSTS is a lyrical tribute to the poet's friends and relations who recently departed their lives.

The Game of 100 Ghosts

Fiction. At the heart of MYSTERIOUS DREAMS OF THE DEAD is the spiritual search for a father who died in a plane crash north of Lake Superior when his son was fifteen. Mike Shintani decides in his early thirties to address the curious circumstances surrounding his father's death; the senior Shintani's body was never found, and wolves circled the crash site as if guarding the area. The impetus for Mike's search for truth is a diary he found in the basement of his home. It was obviously his father's, but it was written in Japanese. Mike never knew his father could write Japanese. He himself could neither read nor write the language. He was fortunate enough to enlist the help of Naoko Ito, a Japanese grad student at the University of Toronto. It turned out, the book was a dream diary, filled with poetry, descriptions of the surreal, and the story of a love affair with a woman named Chiemi. Chiemi is at the centre of the elder Shintani's dreams, and Naoko, after some time, seemingly disappears into thin air. Both appear as ghosts in dreams. Another great mystery of Mike's life is the behaviour of one of his best friends, Boku Sugiura, who decides one day to rob a bank, in the name of his grandfather and redress for Japanese Canadians. The two strains of the novel come together in Moose Jaw. Mike discovers the truth about his father's life and Boku's uncle (Daniel Sugiura from Terry's previous novel, THE THREE PLEASURES), a protestor in the Moose Jaw stand-off. Through elements of the Japanese ghost story (kwaidan), magic realism, and Buddhist myth, secrets are revealed and explored. MYSTERIOUS DREAMS OF THE DEAD is an imaginative examination of the effects of exile, internment, and dispersal on the third-generation of Japanese Canadians (the Sansei).

Mysterious Dreams of the Dead

"The Canadian internment of Japanese citizens leading up to and during the Second World War. The story follows three main characters as they negotiate this extremely difficult time for Japanese-Canadians."--

The Three Pleasures

A powerful novel about Japanese gangs and picture brides in pre-World War II North America.

Terry Watada

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