The Favorites: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Waters is a graceful, subtle writer, gifted at limning the intricate connections between women bound together by blood or marriage. This is a novel of extraordinary beauty."-- Booklist, starred review

Product Description

When Mary Yukari Waters's short-story collection, The Laws of Evening, was published, Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio's Fresh Air said that "Waters's empathic imagination is so vivid she makes her reader feel like a silent witness to the small acts of cruelty and surrender that the history books can't record." In her exquisite first novel, Waters explores the complex relationships among three generations of women bound by a painful family history and a culture in which custom dictates behavior.

Fourteen-year-old Sarah Rexford, half-Japanese and half-American, feels like an outsider when she visits her family in Japan. She quickly learns that in traditional Kyoto, personal boundaries are firmly drawn and actions are not always what they appear. Sarah learns of a family secret -- an interfamily adoption arranged in the throes of World War II. Her grandmother gave up one of her daughters to the matriarch of the family, and the two families have coexisted quietly, living on the same lane. While this arrangement is never discussed, it looms over the two households. In this carefully articulated world, where every gesture and look has meaning, Sarah must learn the rules by which her mother, aunts, and grandmother live.

Delicately balancing drama and restraint, Waters captures these women -- their deep passions and tumultuous histories -- in this tender and moving novel about the power and beauty of mother-daughter relationships.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (June 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416561072
• ISBN-13: 978-1416561071
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #352,167 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Soul of an Author, July 1, 2009

By	The US Review of Books (New York City, NY) - See all my reviews

A touring novelist is often asked: Did that really happen to you? The answer is invariably no and, if the author is feeling particularly risky, yes. An important task undertaken by a writer is to make connections that are vital but missing from both the personal and the common consciousness. To accomplish this, an author of fiction must mine everything that he or she knows and shoot it through a prism of experience. It is hard to separate the writer from the story, and asking him or her to quantify a specific aspect would be akin to asking you if you just drank the perfect glass of water. What does it matter if it is genuinely authentic and essential?

This is one of the aspects that elevates award-winning author Mary Yukari Water's beautiful and poignant first novel, The Favorites. It is the tale of a group of Japanese women who are working through intergenerational relationships and the decisions that position them inside their personal stories. Fourteen-year-old Sarah Rexford is a half-Japanese and half-American visitor to her mother's Japanese homeland for the summer. Waters understands this experience, and she reveals the cultural and family dynamic as both an insider and a visitor to this exotic locale. She accomplishes this in a way that the well-researched writer or the well-traveled journalist cannot. There are inner circles and outer circles within the family that can only be penetrated by tacit agreement, and there are inside faces and outside faces--wrought by historical, social, and person decisions--that may never be unveiled during the course of lifetime. "Uchi versus Soto: inner circle versus outer circle. ... Uchi meant the few allies in whom a woman could place absolute trust. Soto was everyone else..." Understanding these circles is vital to daily interaction. Treading through them like an American means disaster.

The curiosity of a child compels this foreign understanding, but Sarah suffers a psychological deficit for being half-Japanese and raised abroad in America, and she will continually battle the inevitable barriers from her family and even her own mother. Within this conundrum, the Japanese American contraposition is used, occasionally with humor, as a mirror to Sarah's dilemma. At one point, Sarah and her cousins play a game of "American Emotions," wrought through their skewed perception of American pop culture. "Sarah, wanting to seem as Japanese as possible, had been parodying American movies. 'I love you, son,' she said in a deep voice. 'You are very special to me.'" The idea of the western outward expression of feelings versus the eastern reluctance becomes a haunting theme as the story unfolds.

At the core of the secret family life--which ceremonially and rhythmically turns in beehive fashion with great energy, duty, and honor--is the revelation that due to overwhelming post WWII circumstances Sarah's grandmother was pressured into giving up her newborn child to her nearby childless sister-in-law. Like American Indians, shifting children within the tribe is not unusual, but in Sarah's family, the effects ripple through the generations. For the adopted child, who has let her true identity go unrecognized and unspoken for a lifetime, the result is an impenetrable outside face toward Sarah (her niece), Sarah's mother (her sister), Sarah's grandmother (her true mother), and likely the entire world. Sarah comes of age through this understanding, and only after tragedy strikes the heart of the family is a rare and unexpected connection achieved. So how different are we all in the end?

The Favorites is a novel that requires patience in the early going. We are slowly sipping foreign water here, mixed with drama that we will immediately recognize as our own. For Sarah, the family secrets arrive in pieces and riddles, but the unraveling is so deftly written it leaves the impression that the author was indeed part of the story. The sensory details--the taste, smell, and sight of Ueno, Japan--operate at a master's level. The emotional resonance--the love, compassion, and dignified handling of the characters--forces the reader to take pause in the small moments that so importantly define this family if not Japanese existence in general.

Like any novel that impresses and lingers both during and after the reading, the author's soul resides somewhere within these pages. The writer and story live in harmony and lift the book beyond the ordinary, or just like Sarah observes about Japanese emotions, first as a joke early on in the story and then more poignantly toward the end: "We let them ferment, her mother had said, till you can't tell them apart."

This is essential to understanding the story of how life goes forward, and it does not matter from which spring it was drawn. The Favorites is real, full of the stuff of life that we can all savor.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Family and Tragedy in Kyoto, September 21, 2009

By	Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In her debut novel, The Favorites, gifted short story writer Mary Yukari Waters tells the story of a Japanese family once torn apart by war and now living with the sacrifices of the past. The Kobayashi and Asaki households live side by side, seemingly related only by marriage; however, a deeper, unspoken secret unites them.

Divided into four parts, The Favorites begins when fifteen year old Sarah Rexford and her mother Yoko arrive in their native Kyoto for the summer. Sarah is a "half" -- half-Japanese and half-American -- and thus does not belong fully to either culture. However, as she navigates the complex family relationships, sees her mother for the first time as popular, becomes reacquainted with her young cousins, and gets settled into the Japanese household, Sarah begins to understand some deep truths about her extended family and where she belongs in its hierarchy. In later sections, the point-of-view switches to those of the Japanese women and their methods of coping to a family tragedy that ignites the wounds of their past.

At first, the cultural details are somewhat heavy-handed, and they seem designed to instruct rather than provide richness to the story itself. When combined with Sarah's unsophisticated point-of-view, these facts give the first part the feel of a young adult, or possibly middle school, novel. Fortunately, Ms. Waters leaves Sarah's point-of-view for a subtle but much deeper look into the family dynamics through the eyes of the Japanese women. The way the Japanese women cope with their unspoken emotions gives this novel the heart it lacks in the beginning.

Ms. Waters is an excellent writer, and her accessible prose and characterizations carry this story forward with ease, even though it reads at times like an extended short story. As the novel moves from teenage blunt force to delicate beauty, it offers the rewards of a well-written tale.

-- Debbie Lee Wesselmann

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great story in a beautiful setting, June 16, 2009

By	M. Penn (VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This remarkable story develops through the visits of a Japanese/American girl to her mother's home in Kyoto. The complexity of relationships and cultures is entertaining on many levels and full of insight. You'll have to make an effort to keep the names of the characters straight, but it's a touching story well told.