"A German-Japanese family story the likes of which you've never read before. ‘Beautiful to cry’ - Doris Dörrie
"A family gets lost and finds itself again. As comforting as a favourite childhood meal." Isabel Bogdan
"We become who we are from small experiences, from encounters, from snippets of sentences that our family gives us, from moments that we share with other people. This is what this novel is about: gentle, closely observed, tender and delicate, full of love." Lena Gorelik
When Aki learns that her grandmother has died, she books two flights.
She wants to take her mother to her family in Japan one last time, even though she knows how risky it is to tear a person with dementia away from their familiar surroundings. And she has never really experienced Keiko as lost as she did that first night in the hotel. But then they sit down to dinner in her parents’ old house and suddenly she, who has become so quiet, speaks cheerfully and clearly for herself.
It is only on this journey that Aki recognises in her mother the courageous and life-hungry woman that she once was, before this great weariness, so threatening for Aki, settled over her in Germany.
With gentle clarity, Yuko Kuhn tells the fascinating story of a German-Japanese family that gets lost between cultures and finds itself anew.