Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the MurasakiShikibu Prize

Introducing Hiromi Ito, an award-winning Japanese author who has been compared to Haruki Murakami and Yoko Tawada.

The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about what it means to live and die in a globalized society.

Ito has been described as a ' shaman of poetry' because of her skill in allowing the voices of others to flow through her. Here she enriches her semi-autobiographical novel by channeling myriad voices drawn from Japanese folklore, poetry, literature, and pop culture. The result is a generic chimera - part poetry, part prose, part epic - a unique, transnational, polyvocal mode of storytelling. One throughline is a series of memories associated with the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the ' thorns' of human suffering.

' Overflowing and contradictory, worn down with fatigue, yet brimming with energy, The Thorn Puller combines a confessional story of a woman dealing with family commitments in two countries with vibrant excursions into Japanese folklore and history.' - Richard Medhurst, Nippon.com

' With ruthless honesty and wicked humor, Ito exposes the frustration and inconvenience of being a caregiver, juxtaposing it with the sorrow of watching a loved one deteriorate.' - Foreword Reviews, starred review

' Poet Ito makes her English-language fiction debut with a lyrical account of a woman caught between two cultures and her family' s demands…Fans of Japanese literature will enjoy this impressionistic project.' - Publishers Weekly

' Ito' s chameleonic prose confronts mortality, cultural conflicts, religious comforts, and waning relationships, embellished with all manner of welcoming, unfiltered, surprisingly humorous honesty about the universally quotidian, from pimple-popping to good sex.' - Terry Hong, Booklist