Mothers

Umi Kusahara
Glacier Bay Books
264 pages

Mothers is Kusahara Umi’s debut English title, collecting and translating 15 years worth of self-published short stories developed on themes of love, family, and loss.

Offset printed on a luxury cream paper stock, with a sewn binding.
The cover will feature gatefold flaps spot printed with a mix of red and blue inks on uncoated paper, showcasing brand new artwork created by Umi specially for this, their first collected edition.

Mothers contains 12 short stories that encapsulate different facets of the human experience.

A man grapples with his complicated relationship with his mother, who he abandoned after leaving home for college, and whose heart (and body) were too big for the world to be kind to; a young girl finds a small bird, and after nursing it back to health the bird continues to grow alongside the girl, accompanying her through each stage of life in a kaleidoscopic waltz until it carries her “home” for one last journey; the familiar “Red Riding Hood” context is juxtaposed with a young woman who comes into the woods to visit her “wolf” grandmother, the literal fantasy-tinged presentation dissolving into the subtle issue of independence and the difficulty of caring for those in need; a young mother visits her new husband’s estranged-and-now-comatose son at the hospital, looking for answers after he and his girlfriend are recovered from a car crash; these and many other works which Kusahara Umi has carefully crafted over the years will be available in English for the very first time. Umi’s stories here are heartfelt, beautifully drawn, and deal with complicated human relationships in a sensitive and honest way.