Inheritance From Mother

Praise

“A must-read novel about the tangled bonds of motherhood…gorgeous and intimate.”
—Washington Post
 
“Mizumura craftily mixes the old with the new, creating a highly readable throwback to popular dime novels that replaces gilt with guilt and romance with real talk.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Mizumura’s realism embraces family dynamics and bodily decline, both of which are anatomized without a hint of sentimentality…[She] depicts the ordeals of middle age with intelligence and empathy…[Readers] will find in Mizumura a fascinating example of how a writer can be at the same time imaginatively cosmopolitan and linguistically rooted.”
—New York Review of Books

 “There is admirable ambition in the way Mitsuki’s story expands into a much larger portrait of middle-class anomie in a Japan still reckoning with its past and the paradoxes—and fraught compromises—of its identity.”
—New York Times Book Review
 
“[A] compelling exploration of family history and its impact on relationships and traditions.”
—Publishers Weekly
 
“A novel of female endurance and obligation…A long, minute, subtle consideration of aging, loyalty, and the bonds of love grounded in the material details of Japanese culture but resonating far beyond.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Mizumura’s startlingly unsentimental portrait of a woman who begins to examine her own life after her mother’s death electrified readers when it was…serialized in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper in 2010 and 2011…Chapter by chapter, Mizumura gives her heroine courage to believe in the right to independence and happiness—an inheritance not of wealth, but of self-knowledge.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“A story whose distinct layers, like lacquer, are laid over one another to form a lustrous whole. In Inheritance from Mother, the lines between past and present blur; the East is transposed like a palimpsest over West; and life shades into literature.”
—The New Republic
 
“Mizumura endows her characters with complexity in a stunningly graceful manner…Mizumura’s depiction of the relationship between eastern and western ideals is one of the most gripping aspects of the novel…her work is steeped in self-awareness, brazenly critiquing the traditional structures so integral to her history. Mizumura does not avoid diving head first into those things that leave the deepest scars: death, infidelity, and the surrendering of dreams are where she starts.”
—The Rumpus
 
“A thoughtful examination of the emotional complexities and contradictions that surround the aging and death of a parent. Through deft, engrossing storytelling, Mizumura addresses the reality of this all too commonplace experience. It’s a timely, substantial novel and a pleasure to read.”
—Structo
 
“A fascinating example of the overlap of Japanese and foreign influences, nicely brought to the fore by Mizumura.”
—Complete Review
 
“A deeply moving exploration of the complex and often fraught relationships between mothers and daughters. Mizumura uses her astute powers of observation to reveal, layer by layer, the turmoil and anger roiling beneath the surface of her characters. A beautifully crafted novel with universal appeal.”
—Cari Luna, author of The Revolution of Every Day

“Mizumura’s previous novel in English was transcendently romantic; in Inheritance from Mother, romance manifests mainly as liability and false lure, while the years devolve from poetry to prose. The ingenious plot, however, produces vitality and beauty mercifully different from the conventional love story’s, surprising us with gleeful relish and bursts of sheerest gratification.” 
—Anna Shapiro, author of Living on Air
 
“In this coming-of-a-certain-age novel, the longings and desires of a middle-aged daughter are as bountiful as those of Emma Bovary. If Douglas Sirk and Agatha Christie went on a writing junket to Japan, they might return with this quietly seductive novel, in which Minae Mizumura’s heroine uses her mother’s inheritance to compose a new life story for herself.”
—Judith Pascoe, Professor of English, University of Iowa
 
“Mizumura has taken all the classic themes of the grand newspaper novel—sibling rivalries, unhappy marriages, family inheritances—and woven them into a moving tale for our own day.” 
—Michael K. Bourdaghs, Professor of Modern Japanese Literature, University of Chicago