Description:

**Winner of the Toyo Shuppan Literary Award** Within the peaceful walls of an old French church, Mayu, a young Japanese artist, finds inspiration. She befriends the local priest and gets involved with community outreach, discovering a rough world of drugs, prostitution, and marginalized youth. Through this work, she learns the value of human life. Even young Pierre, who gets arrested for attacking his mother with a knife, deserves compassion. This delinquent has a seven-year-old sister named Anna and, as Mayu gets to know the family, she uncovers a disturbing history of abuse. Her wild attempt to save the girl from her twisted mother calls upon a brutal courage she didn’t know she had. Stunned by her own audacity, Mayu turns away from the church, finds herself a seemingly perfect husband, and returns to Japan. But she hears cries of suffering even in her beautiful new home. Is her husband cheating on her, or is there some darker tale in her husband’s family history crying out to be discovered? ** ### About the Author Shiho Kishimoto is an award-winning author, whose accolades include the Tenth Shinpusha Foucault Masterpiece Award for the best short story anthology for *Lottery *and the Aichi Publishing Critic’s Award for *I See a Stranger. I Hear Them Cry*, published in Japanese in 2003, earned the Toyo Shuppan Literary Award and marked Kishimoto’s debut as a novelist. Kishimoto graduated from Japan’s Women’s College of Fine Arts. She lives in Tokyo. Raj Mahtani has been a Japanese-to-English translator since the early nineties, and currently works closely with TranNet, a Japanese literary translation agency in Tokyo. Among Mahtani’s recent translations are Reiko Saegusa’s *Tale Winds, *Akiko Hoshino’s *Painted Cookies, * Fumitada Naoe’s *Live with Meaning. Die with Passion, *and Randy Taguchi’s *Fujisan*. Mahtani holds a BA in international affairs from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He lives in Yokohama, Japan.