The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Father of the Four Passages by Lois-Ann YamanakaJoseph Dewey
Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Father of the Four Passages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 233 pp. $23.00.
Sonia Kurisu understands that art, or at least worthwhile art, is a way through darkened corridors, a difficult often graceless movement toward self-forgiveness. Sonia Kurisu is many things—a troubled woman-child assessing the damage of a judgmental mother and a wandering father; a twenty-ish lost soul addled on drugs and ekeing out a life as a lounge singer in Vegas while living with a junkie boyfriend; and a single mother who, haunted (literally) by three abortions, now struggles to understand her way toward authentic motherhood while attending to her son, a toddler whose odd behavior and persistent crying may indicate that he is autistic. But supremely, Sonia Kurisu is an artist who uses the unrelenting candor of language to piece together not only a riveting, often imagistic narrative but to fashion as well forgiveness of sorts, atonement for a life she realizes has left her at the threshold of maturity more dead than alive. This is not an easy read. Sonia does not easily charm a reader into sympathy. But her honesty, the vulnerability she exposes beneath her streetwise flippancy, is compelling. She sorts through her memories, including poignant correspondences with each of her aborted offspring and a koanlike relationship with her delinquent father, in pitch-perfect prose that is earthy and convincing. Yamanaka gives voice to a troubled character who, without sentimentality needs forgiveness—from her family, her dead children, her needful son, but supremely from herself. And, like all worthwhile art, the breathtaking closing, which takes place on the magnificent sweep of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, affirms pain even as it permits redemption. [Joseph Dewey]