|
|
| photo: Edmond Lee | |
Lynne Kutsukake is a third generation Japanese Canadian. She earned a master's degree in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto and has lived and studied in Japan. For many years, she worked as a librarian at the University of Toronto, specializing in Japanese materials. Her short fiction has appeared in Grain, Prairie Fire, the Dalhousie Review, the Windsor Review and Ricepaper. In 2010, she was a finalist for the Journey Prize, awarded for best Canadian short story by an emerging writer. Her debut novel, The Translation of Love, is published by Doubleday (April 5, 2016).
On your nightstand now:
My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. I am a devoted fan, and when I learned that Strout had a new novel, I rushed out to buy it. Janice Nimura's nonfiction work, Daughters of the Samurai, promises to be fascinating reading and covers a topic I am deeply interested in. It's about five young Japanese girls who were sent by the Japanese government in 1871 to study in America. Other books in the queue are A Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin, City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg and There's Something I Want You to Do by Charles Baxter.
Favorite book when you were a child:
C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I really wanted a hidden door at the back of my own closet that would lead to a secret world.
Your top five authors:
For the beauty and precision of their sentences and for their remarkable ability to penetrate the human heart: Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, Virginia Woolf, Tanizaki Junichiro.
Book you've faked reading:
Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. There was a time in my life when it seemed that everyone around me had read it and loved it and couldn't stop talking about Jo and all the March sisters. But I just couldn't get into it. 
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Laws of Evening by Mary Yukari Waters. The stories in this lovely collection are all set in Japan. Each one is a gem, filled with tenderness and quiet insight.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I love all the covers on the Haruki Murakami novels. They capture the quirky, off-kilter weirdness of the fictional worlds Murakami is so great at creating.
Book you hid from your parents:
Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls. How embarrassing.
Book that changed your life:
Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. It made me realize that this was the literary world I had been seeking, one in which the people looked like me.
Favorite line from a book:
The final sentence in "The Dead" from James Joyce's Dubliners: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." It's a perfect story, filled with perfect sentences. Whenever I read that last sentence, the whole world goes still.
Five books you'll never part with:
Only five? Impossible to choose, I want to keep them all! Anyway, here's a start: A Gesture Life by Chang-Rae Lee, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. From its magical opening sentence, this work cast a hypnotic spell over me. I would like to be held in its thrall once again, just like the first time.