The Truth About Death and Dying

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

This strong and unusual novel, the author’s first, slips easily
between three generations of the Hayakawa family, with flashbacks to
memories of life in Japan toward the end of World War II. Family banter
is amusing and heartwarming as the story traces the family’s fortunes
as well as their shared hardships and difficulties. Yasujiro, the
father, is a doctor. His son, Shoji, aged nine at the novel’s start,
is a regular target for a gang of bullies. As an adult, Shoji teaches
physics at the University of Milwaukee, is married to Mitsuyo, and has
two sons, Toshi and Kei. Toshi is gentle and very focused; Kei pursues a
career as a rock musician. As the family recalls the wartime devastation
of Japan, through talk and action, tears and laughter, they reflect on
the unfairness of life.

In Umezawa’s writing, small scenes become memorable, often poignant.
Place, time, and relationships are vividly realized. Atom Egoyan’s
front-cover blurb is apt. He describes Umezawa’s style as having “a
carefully harnessed sense of despair, yearning and beauty.” This is an
accurate but partial truth, as the novel is often comic, and despair is
frequently counterbalanced by hope.

Irony, thick enough to cut with a knife, provides another
counterbalance to despair. In Shoji’s wartime memories, “people were
constantly leaving to die. And there was never enough to eat. People
nonetheless mustered enough enthusiasm to send teenagers off on suicide
missions. They gathered at the train stations, waving banners ... as if
they might be sending the local softball team off to a local
tournament.” Much later, Toshi reflects that if things went wrong,
“people cut their stomachs open,” and “exquisitely demented ideas
were forever unquestioned.”

The Truth About Death and Dying is a moving and memorable novel.
Judging by this first work, we have in Rui Umezawa a powerful new voice
in fiction.