With the success of last year’s popular NHK drama, “Massan” — a dramatization of the life of Scotswoman Rita Cowan in early 20th-century Japan — it was inevitable that interest in foreign wives in this country would surge.
264 pages
Stone Bridge Press, Nonfiction.
Several memoirs by foreign wives debut this summer, “Here Comes the Sun: A Journey to Adoption in 8 Chakras” offers a multicultural perspective in its lively retelling of one woman’s travails in life — how did a “skinny Jewish girl” growing up at Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley, California, during the 1970s, wind up owning a yoga studio in Tokyo, Japan?
Author Leza Lowitz uses the philosophy of yoga to outline her journey toward self-realization. The book documents an unpretentiousness, guileless life.
Her memoir documents the snags and hurdles of a life lived overseas through her search for place — a place to belong, a place to be herself. And all with a grounded equilibrium and heartfelt authenticity — this is a celebration of resilience and creativity.
Lowitz takes readers from a seaside village in California to a spiritual retreat in India and back to the clamorous streets of Tokyo, using prose filled with wry, witty asides on life’s incongruences.
Near the end of the book, she recounts the time when American poet Maya Angelou visited her school in 1970, who spoke of “how the power of her words had frightened her — she’d believed they had the power to take life.”
As Lowitz concludes: “Well, they did. But they also had the power to give life.”
Reading “Here comes the Sun” is like a breath of fresh beach air: clean, invigorating and hopeful as the horizon.
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