Patricia Belyea and Japanese Textiles

Patricia Belyea is a well known textile artist who imports Japanese textiles and leads trips to Japan for people to both learn more about the Japanese textile philosophy and to use more of them in textile art. Her origin story in quilting is that she made a baby quilt for a coworker, and has been a quilter ever since. I myself started with making a pinwheel quilt with fabric that my grandmother had used in the 1930's, 40's, and 50's, which I tied and used on my bed in college, and I too have been quilting ever since. It is a seductive craft, especially if you love fabric, and Japanese fabric is especially luscious. She is living these days in Wauconda WA with the ground squirrels, deer, and bears--it meets the definition of frontier living, which is an area with less than 2 people per square mile. She did a Zoom lecture to our guild from her studio there. Her relationshio with the textile process in Japan extends to growing indigo herself. It’s a big story — germinating seeds the size of a dot to growing plants with bright green leaves to extracting magical blue dye. It was the second time that Patricia Belyea attempted to farm and harvest Japanese indigo at her highland home. And it worked — with a yield of 5 pounds of indigo dye!

The Little Sparrow Murders by Seishi Yokomizo

Sometimes I am good when it comes to picking out books and sometimes I am just plain lucky, and in this case it is the later rather than the former. I have been using a web site with murder mysteries pictured that are published each month in order to keep abreast of authors that I read routinely, but also to read authors that I do not know or have not read, but who have published more than one one book. The sad truth is that while I am getting older, so are the authors that I have been reading, along with my spouse, for the entirety of our relationship, and so I need to find new things to read. I really like the website, because it turns out I really need the pictures as well as the title to pay attention--I am constantly discovering that I am very visual and without it I have trouble paying attention, and it seems to be worse not better as I get older. So I am grateful it exists and that I found it, but the downside is that there is no information about the books beyond author, title and the cover--with a reference to the detective and which number in the series this is. So the good news is that I really liked this, and it is one of a series of books by the same author. He is long gone now, having published his first murder mystery in 1921, and this one is from the early 1950's. He was the first to write in this genre in Japan, and he has over 70 published novels, only 6 of them translated into English. The complexity of the mystery as well as the characters is right up my alley and I will read the rest of them, but I am most grateful to have discovered this author, and to know a little bit more about writing from Japan.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

This is a great book on many levels. The first of which is that it is a Japanese novel set in Japan written by a Japanese novelist that seems both Asian and Western at the same time. Brilliant. Unusual. This author is the Asian Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The man who can make the mystical qualities of his culture, a culture he clearly adores, understandable to those not in the know. Not Japanese. Not able to rift on the cultural norms that the book recapitulates. The second is that the story is wonderfully told. The protagonist, Toru Okada, is complicated. At first he seems kind of mild mannered and straight-forward, except that he has quit his job without a prospect for a new one. His wife seems devoted to him and unconcerned by his unemployment. First their cat disappears. Then his wife follows. The back story to all that is just as interesting as the story that is happening, and the story that is in Toru's dream life is yet another dimension to the tale. The helpers that step forward to aid him in the search for his cat are also a mixed bag--they give him information, helpful information, details that he didn't know--but not necessarily associated with the cat. But Toru never looks a gift horse in the mouth. One of the (for me) subtle part of the book is that the culture of shame is very much alive and well in Murakami's Japan, but it is more complicated. His characters are fully engaged in western culture, yet not quite dissociated from their Asian heritage. The story meanders between the main theme and the various side themes. It is difficult at times to tell what is really happening, what is a dream, what is part of the Tokyo underworld, and what falls in the realm of the mystical. But the book is always well written, always riveting, always entertaining.