Dear Ken-Chan : : A Letter from Japan / / Kazuko Winter.

• VerfasserIn: Winter, Kazuko,
• Place / Publishing House: Folkestone, England : : Global Books Ltd,, [1996]; ©1996
• Year of Publication: 1996
• Edition: First edition.
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (viii, 156 pages)

This candid memoir is a gripping personal tale of cultural schizophrenia. Kazuko Winter was the daughter of a high-ranking Japanese diplomat, raised and educated outside her native Japan in India, South Africa, Australia, and Oxford, England, in the 1950s and 1960s. She also spent time with her parents in Nigeria and Paraguay. Never fully at home anywhere, she suffered from an increasing sense of isolation that once led her to the brink of suicide, and at another stage to seriously consider entering a Catholic order of nuns. Written in the form of a letter to an old Japanese friend, the book relates the author's turbulent love affair with a young Japanese diplomat, her turbulent decision to break off the affair because she did not believe she belonged within Japanese society, and her subsequent happy marriage to a German scholar. At once disturbing and uplifting, this is an intensely felt story of the path to healing and her gradual reacceptance of herself, her mother and her Japanese heritage.

Table of Contents

Preface; 1 Beginnings; 2 India; 3 South Africa; 4 Sojourn in Shibuya; 5 Australia; 6 Nigeria and Return to Sydney; 7 Things Japanese; 8 Oxford; 9 South America; 10 Back to Oxford; 11 Return to Asuncion; 12 Germany; 13 Kilimanjaro; 14 Back to Europe; 15 Rediscovering Japan; Postscript.