A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

was something familiar about the fabrics from which the pieces of appliqué had
been cut (14-5).
The writer now proceeds to spread out the pieces, the ‘dirty laundry’ of the villagers,
inviting the reader to step closer and see the beauty of the resulting fabric. The stories’
central idea is the double need to cling and to let go, accept changes and not let them
defeat you. In “The Bishop’s Wife,” Aki has lost a lover to the sea, feeling that “the world
he’d loved had narrowed around her, drawing closer and closer until it covered her over,
like the sea” (100-1). Now she wants her daughter to leave for Honolulu, go to college,
and thus get rid of this place of her memories. Looking at her daughter in the mirror,
she could see the repeating shapes of time frozen in the reflection there. Her wide
brow and stubborn mouth in Missy’s dreaming face; her own face so much like
her mother’s photograph on the Buddhist altar next to the window. And outside
the window, the slow life of the village – the hills and sea holding all the visible
world like a single, perfectly contained thought (97).
There is beauty as well as danger in such a condensed outlook. Luckily, Missy is and at
the same time is not like her mother. Shattering the mirror, she announces that she will
stay, explaining “You can want a place with your whole skin, the way you can want a
person. It can fill your thoughts, without your even knowing” (103). Missy takes charge
of her life, leaving Aki to clean up her own mess: “The fragments, clinking against the
metal dustpan, reflected back the walls of the room, trapped sky from the window, a
dozen tiny images of herself” (ibid.).
To some of Watanabe’s characters, however, the past is the place they return to
for strength and relief. “Cousin Min,” the mainland-returned former revue tap dancer is
clearly out of place as well as out of time in the no-nonsense village. When she has hurt
herself badly after trying to put on a tap show, the doctor “said she would probably never
dance again” (91). Her nieces however, who pass by her house one evening, are witness
to Min’s dance on the roof and beyond:
Then, right before our eyes, Min lifts her arms – a gesture from dreams of flight –
and steps out onto the air. I wait for the plummet, the terrible thud, but it doesn’t
happen. The air holds her. She dances out above a huge plumeria tree, its white
224