Dear Ken-chan

Download or read book Dear Ken-chan written by Kazuko Winter and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-07-17 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.