Talking to the Dead and Other Stories

In an O. Henry Award-winning story, set in a village on Hawaii's Lahaina coast, Aunty Talking to the Dead patiently teaches her young apprentice how best to still the soul of a passing spirit. Minerva, tap dancer extraordinaire--"the Orient's answer to Fred Astaire"--looks for long-lost stardust among the ghosts in a renovated rooming house called the Bachelor Palms. Sachi and Meg, two little girls with dress-up clothes and fancy airs, shyly taste the anticipated glamour of adulthood on a country-club dance floor. Little Grandma stitches the secrets of family and neighbors into quilts of resplendent glory, while Aunt Pearlie and the Buddhist Mission Ladies Auxiliary keep vigilant watch for the phantom Laundry Burglar. And a cherished only son considers the options of Canada, Vietnam, and Lulu, a wild young woman with a penchant for wanderlust, while his father struggles with recollections of his own wartime terrors and his mother slips excerpts from the Diamond Sutra written on tiny strips of rice paper into the evening meal.
These are but a few of the inventive characters we meet in this honest and moving collection of interrelated stories. Their tales are spoken in a true host of voices, savvy guides to a world at once ancient and modern, through the mine-fields of adolescence, betrayal, madness, racism, and found and failed beliefs, where the marvelous and the real hold hands.
Brilliant and evocatively rendered, the stories in Talking to the Dead are beautifully layered, poignant, and affectionately humorous. Continuing in the rich tradition of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Sylvia Watanabe creates with power and sympathy a wholecloth sense of time and place that is remarkably unforgettable.