Moon Of Many Petals

Ancient Arts

That day my father,
Takumi, painted deer and plum design
with ink on kimono silk.
His hand steady, he was determined
to practice the Yuzen
dyeing method in America
while my mother, Mio,
embroidered in gold.
Moon of Many Petals is a full-color novel in verse.

There’s a tapestry on the book cover, made of abstract patterns of blue—also embedding a bird and a dark figurine. This last must be female by the contour of her hairdo, by the shape of the dress she wears under a cape. She bends slightly, in a pose we might decode as pensive. She has things in her mind, therefore things to say.

She comes back on the title page. She begins the five chapters composing Cindy Rinne’s new novel in verse. Each appearance is different, and a different patchwork surrounds the shadow-girl. Once, her body is all made of butterflies. Then she grows golden wings parsed with turquoise stones. Later, enrobed in tender lilac, she looks the other way. Sometimes she haunts the foreground, sometimes she disappears in the distance. Her shape always overlaps a list of names, like those found on memorial walls. These are printed on a screen inside the Manzanar Visitor Center. As they part the chapters—forming the backdrop of Natsumi’s metamorphoses—they shift in size. They come close, wishing to be individually spelled, learned, recalled. They recede exposing their vertiginous quantity, their frightening infinity.

Manzanar? If you just flip the pages, jewel tones, soft textures, dancing shapes of the images constellating the text—the author’s own fiber art—suggests whimsicality, maybe a children story. True, as this narrative of evacuation, exile, confinement, prison, is re-told by the lightest of testimonies—an embryo, then fetus. An un-born baby. The tale is related ab utero, a womb its vantage point.

When Mio is forced on a bus together with her husband, Takumi, she is a few weeks pregnant. We have already met the presence tugged inside her. “She” has told us about her parents’ home in Morro Bay, surrounded by the liveliness of the sea. She has spoken of many other things, travelling back in time and as far as Japan, visiting the grandmother whose namesake she’ll be, once borne—another Natsumi, still in Sendai, yet so close to the cluster of cells busy making themselves, they are one. Just as this bundle of tireless growth is one with Mio. The un-born girl experiences her mother’s distress, fear, disorientation, and loneliness.

Ash, wind, dust, make life in the Manzanar barracks harsh, even more for a pregnant body. Only a thin curtain splits the miniature room where two families coexist. Intimacy is erased and so is the language. The internees are prohibited of speaking Japanese. But the fetus witnesses Mother’s revolt, as Mio can’t resist lullabying the fruit of her womb with traditional songs, or reciting an ancient play Grandma loved.

Paper shades at the window can’t hide the barbed wire surrounding the flats—the wide, barren plain containing the camp. The sight loads Mio with anguish, with a sense of suffocation Natsumi can feel, though she is still entirely free. Actually she is freedom itself, as the microcosm of the womb coincides with the macrocosm. She is swallow, butterfly, flower, sakura petal. She is simultaneously past, present, future, whispering in her ancestors’ ears, carrying messages back and forth, sewing what has been with what will be, annihilating distances. Body/souls in the making have such awesome flexibility.

The complete review by Toti O'Brien appears in the April issue of Gravel Magazine. You can read the rest of this thoughtful review at https://www.gravelmag.com/toti-obrien.html