The Thorn Puller Review
by Linda A. Gould
by Linda A. Gould
Sitting down with The Thorn Puller is like hanging out with your best friend and having one of those conversations that wend and wind and digress before coming full circle. You don’t have an agenda or talking points, you just know that your friend will say something outrageous about your most intimate and serious problems and that you’ll both end up laughing at whatever shit life throws at you. After hours together, you’ll have talked about magic and sunrises, lions eating gazelles, brain dysfunction, politics, gardening, family, your sex life, foreign countries, a childhood memory, spiders, your aging body, and whether hell exists—in that crazy, disconnected, but natural order. You may not remember all that you talked about, but you’ll feel rejuvenated and happier for just having been in your friend’s company.
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Sitting down with The Thorn Puller is like reading someone’s innermost dialogue, complete with rambling reasoning, neuroses, digressions, regrets, fears, ideas, obsessions, curiosities, distractions, loves, desires, guilty pleasures, and mean-spirited thoughts, all of which paint a portrait of an endearing, irascible, loving, caring, irreverent, troubled middle-aged woman under inordinate amounts of stress.
And you love her, because The Thorn Puller is one of the most honest books you will ever read, even though it is described by Publishers Weekly as autofictional, which means you don’t know what parts of the story to believe.
You don’t believe her account of watching a poet friend transform from a bent and crooked old man who needs a walking stick for support into a living, robust Jizo (an enlightened being known for protecting lost souls, travelers, and children). Yet, Ito unloads her burdened soul to him, he listens with such care, then offers such profound advice, that it’s irrelevant whether he is an old friend or god-like figure. It’s real. It’s believable.
You certainly do believe much of her story: the multiple trips—emergency and planned—between the US and Kumamoto to care for sick and infirm parents, her back and forth between love and resentment towards her husband, and her newfound interest in Jizo. Ito’s storytelling is about things any middle-aged woman is experiencing, but her wit and honesty, her life experiences, and her curiosity are uniquely hers, so when her mother suffers a stroke and Ito writes, “When I was little, she’d scolded me countless times for not eating my food properly—cut it out and eat right, she’d say. Now, she was the one eating strangely. No one had said a thing, but I could hear her words echoing in my ears, and a mean-spirited part of me wished I could say, now who’s eating funny?” you know it’s wrong, but you can’t help but laugh at her irreverence and sympathize with her sentiment.
The Thorn Puller is a benchmark book. Some reviews compare Hiromi Ito to Haruki Murakami and Yoko Tawada, but make no mistake, Ito is her own person, with her own style, and she sets her own standard for storytelling that will be a measure for aspiring authors.
The interplay between poetry and prose is seamless, setting a pace and tone that resembles stream-of-consciousness writing without the confusion that often arises with that technique.
The interchange among literature, folktales, haiku, legends, and Ito’s life experiences is a lesson in the importance of art in our lives and how written art is not just entertainment, but holds lessons and examples, references to better understand our world, ourselves, our experiences, and emotions.
But those things are secondary to the strength and impact of this book. Read The Thorn Puller to learn for yourself the significance of the title. Read The Thorn Puller because this story is about dealing with stress (and who isn’t?). Read The Thorn Puller because it is ultimately about dealing with death—of loved ones, pets, your own—but is not morbid (except when it is) or depressing (well, sometimes it is) or hopeless (which it never is). It is a dialectic journey into the human spiral towards death as seen through the joys and travails of life. And that journey is fun, wild, funny, educational, sad, thought-provoking, personal, and relatable.
Note: White Enso received an advance copy of this book for review. The review is unpaid and Linda A. Gould’s personal opinion.
And you love her, because The Thorn Puller is one of the most honest books you will ever read, even though it is described by Publishers Weekly as autofictional, which means you don’t know what parts of the story to believe.
You don’t believe her account of watching a poet friend transform from a bent and crooked old man who needs a walking stick for support into a living, robust Jizo (an enlightened being known for protecting lost souls, travelers, and children). Yet, Ito unloads her burdened soul to him, he listens with such care, then offers such profound advice, that it’s irrelevant whether he is an old friend or god-like figure. It’s real. It’s believable.
You certainly do believe much of her story: the multiple trips—emergency and planned—between the US and Kumamoto to care for sick and infirm parents, her back and forth between love and resentment towards her husband, and her newfound interest in Jizo. Ito’s storytelling is about things any middle-aged woman is experiencing, but her wit and honesty, her life experiences, and her curiosity are uniquely hers, so when her mother suffers a stroke and Ito writes, “When I was little, she’d scolded me countless times for not eating my food properly—cut it out and eat right, she’d say. Now, she was the one eating strangely. No one had said a thing, but I could hear her words echoing in my ears, and a mean-spirited part of me wished I could say, now who’s eating funny?” you know it’s wrong, but you can’t help but laugh at her irreverence and sympathize with her sentiment.
The Thorn Puller is a benchmark book. Some reviews compare Hiromi Ito to Haruki Murakami and Yoko Tawada, but make no mistake, Ito is her own person, with her own style, and she sets her own standard for storytelling that will be a measure for aspiring authors.
The interplay between poetry and prose is seamless, setting a pace and tone that resembles stream-of-consciousness writing without the confusion that often arises with that technique.
The interchange among literature, folktales, haiku, legends, and Ito’s life experiences is a lesson in the importance of art in our lives and how written art is not just entertainment, but holds lessons and examples, references to better understand our world, ourselves, our experiences, and emotions.
But those things are secondary to the strength and impact of this book. Read The Thorn Puller to learn for yourself the significance of the title. Read The Thorn Puller because this story is about dealing with stress (and who isn’t?). Read The Thorn Puller because it is ultimately about dealing with death—of loved ones, pets, your own—but is not morbid (except when it is) or depressing (well, sometimes it is) or hopeless (which it never is). It is a dialectic journey into the human spiral towards death as seen through the joys and travails of life. And that journey is fun, wild, funny, educational, sad, thought-provoking, personal, and relatable.
Note: White Enso received an advance copy of this book for review. The review is unpaid and Linda A. Gould’s personal opinion.
Linda Gould is an American and long-time resident of Japan. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in media outlets around the world. Gould is the editor of White Enso, an online journal of creative work inspired by Japan, and host of “Kaidankai,” a podcast of supernatural stories.