The Truth About Death and Dying

“ Yasu was simply crazy. But no crazier than the rest of the war.” Rui Umezawa’s first novel weaves in and out of the lives of three generations of the Hayakawa family, starting during World War II in Japan and ending in present-day Toronto. The story is tragic, hilarious, lyrical and universal, tracing the legacy of war and the past on one family’s fortunes and memories. Film director Atom Egoyan says: “This ambitious debut creates a dense world of overlapping events -- from the smallest details of domestic life to the grandest scale of atrocity and horror. Rui Umezawa presents this unique world of cause and effect with a carefully harnessed sense of despair, yearning and beauty.” Maimed physically and emotionally, Shoji Hayakawa leaves the devastation of post-war Japan and moves to the University of Milwaukee to teach physics. His father, Yasujiro, was the doctor in the village of Kitagawa, and an outspoken pacifist in dangerous times. Shoji and his wife Mitsuyo still recall their wartime childhood: bartering for food, evacuation to the countryside, returning to the burnt remains of the cities. Transplanted into suburban America, Mitsuyo’s mother will watch life through the windows, marvelling at how absurdly people act even when they have everything they need: food, water, clothes, and no bombs. Shoji has two sons, Toshi and Kei. Toshi is a gentle boy but sees the world with an abnormal intensity. Objects seem to speak to him. He has to lock himself in a closet to concentrate on his homework, and lies face down in the school corridor with his forehead pressed against the cool linoleum to calm himself. Exuberant but noisy, he is stopped from taking piano lessons. He is an embarrassment to his mother and to his angry brother Kei, who leaves for Canada to build a career as a rock musician. Mitsuyo, so demanding of Kei, considers Toshi insane and never expects anything of him. Yet Toshi, full of im