“If you've lived in Japan, this collection will awaken memories; if you haven't, you'll find yourself wanting to. Lowitz's prose evokes the country itself, a white porcelain cup of green tea, an orderly surface that holds a rich and complex world. Her Japan is never cliched; her Westerners are always trying to go deeper, to penetrate the silences. Like her sculptor in "The School of Things," Lowitz teaches us the names of things, "so that the things that had once seemed great mysteries . . . were no longer distant and unobtainable.” Rhiannon Paine, Too Late for the Festival: An American Salarywoman in Japan

Eastern traditions clash with much more than Western culture in these twelve short stories and a novella set in modern-day Japan. A Zen koan holds the key to the death of a dolphin; a sculptor relives his father's death while shaping his art. A British woman and her Japanese boyfriend fall in love with an old-fashioned scale shop. An edgy English teacher sets her sights on a rising Japanese boxer. Two feuding American women take a strange trip to the Spice Islands. A housewife arranges one last meeting with her imprisoned Leftist lover. A yakuza character actor named Genji finally comes to accept his face.

The stories in this debut collection from award-winning poet Leza Lowitz are not about samurai or geisha, but people we might actually meet on a given day in the nameless streets of Tokyo; the strange, the ordinary, the scarred, and the real.

Leza Lowitz was born in San Francisco and grew up in Berkeley, California. She has a B.A. in English Literature from U.C. Berkeley, and an M.A. in Creative Writing/Japanese Literature from San Francisco State. She made her way to Tokyo in the early 1990s, where she worked as a freelance writer and taught at Tokyo University.

Her work has appeared in Harper's, MS., ZYZZYVA, Yellow Silk, Prairie Schooner, Awaiting a Lover, and in numerous magazine and anthologies internationally, including The Broken Bridge, An Inn Near Tokyo, Prairie Schooner, The Atlanta Review and Expat. Her writing has been broadcast on National Public Radio's "The Sound of Writing," and on NHK Radio. Her honors include a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, a translation fellowship from the NEA, a California Arts Council Individual Fellowship in Poetry, an Independent Scholar Fellowship from the NEH, two Pushcart Prize nominations in Poetry, and with Shogo Oketani, the 2003 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Award for the translation of Japanese literature from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University.

She currently writes book reviews for KQED Radio's "Pacific Time" and The Japan Times. She is also Reviews Editor for Manoa Journal, for whom she guest-edited two features on Japanese literature, most recently "Silence to Light: Japan and the Shadows of War." She also directs a yoga studio in Tokyo, Sun and Moon Yoga. She can be reached at www.lezalowitz.com

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