Odori.

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor in the Department of Modern
Languages and Literatures at Laurentian University.

Odori is the traditional dance performed in the long-ago Ryukyuan Kingdom in the East China Sea, where the islands of Okinawa now lie and where myth and legend trace the beginnings of the Okinawan people to the goddess Amamikyo. Most of the novel takes place on Hamahiga Island, starting in the 1930s, but the narrative begins and ends and begins again in the Rainmaker Hills of Alberta in the spring and summer of 1999. Eddie Lanier and his wife, Mai Yoshimoto-Lanier, are in a car accident. Eddie is killed and Mai falls into a coma, a dream world where the spirit of her great-grandmother, Chiru, as a storyteller in the ancient tradition, recounts to Mai the history of the Ryukyuan Kingdom and the moving story of three generations of her own family.

Mai’s grandfather left Okinawa to seek a better life in Canada, but sends Emiko and her twin, Miyako, to live with his parents because of difficult personal circumstances. On Hamahiga the girls seem to possess mythical gifts of dance and healing and are wise beyond their years. They grow peacefully in wonder and accomplishments until the bloody battles of World War II overwhelm Okinawa. Miyako is feared dead, the island and its people brutally ravaged by Japanese and American troops, and only when the war ends does Emiko return to Alberta with her grandparents. There, she eventually marries a man who loves her and all her ghosts, and Mai and her little brother Yukio are born and grow up.

The narrative gracefully loops back, then forward in time, as it can in a dream world, revealing the mysterious joys and sorrows of Mai’s family history. Tamayose’s writing is exquisite. Mai, an artist, tells Chiru that “a word is art,” and Tamayose draws and paints with words in Odori. The characters are vivid and individual, the world they see and experience is literally pictured on each page, and the story unfolds with the elegance and dignity of the odori itself. “To understand odori is to understand life,” Chiru says, and we, along with Mai, come to understand both.