Rebecca’s Reflections
Edited Out, Part Two: Dance and the Dalliance in the Yoshiwara
Here's another scene from The Kimono Tattoo draft that ended up on the cutting room floor. Again, we have reference to Hiratsuka Raichō, but also to a controversial feminist painter, an ancient Japanese legend, and the politics of protest in postwar Japan. Why did...
Edited Out, Part One: Hiratsuka Raichō and the Shiobara Incident
When I first sent Melissa Carrigee of Brother Mockingbird...
Home is Where the Views Are
I can’t remember when I decided I would retire to North Carolina. The idea came on gradually. Maybe it was after I spent that month in the Tennessee cabin writing the first draft of The Kimono Tattoo. It was only a month, but I felt such an affinity for the hillsides...
My Tokyo House of Horrors
“Okay. Here’s a listing that might work!” The agent pushed a sheet of paper across the desk to me. “The landlord specifically says he wants to rent to foreigners.” That was refreshing news. My husband, Dennis, and I had been in Tokyo for nearly a week now, trying to...
Nuns Fret Not: My Life in Manhattan
I often feel I could live anywhere. When I was seven my family spent a year in India, and I loved it. For college I relocated to the Sandhills of North Carolina. Only a two-hour drive from my home in Raleigh, still the landscape was different, with long-leaf pines,...
Not a Drive-By: On Falling in Love with a House
Why do you love your house?” the young woman asks me. We are sitting on my front porch while she interviews me about the flood. She is doing a study on the River Des Peres that runs alongside the street perpendicular to mine, meandering through a concrete culvert...