Synopses & Reviews
The Fishmonger's Daughter is a story that will take the reader from pre-World War II rural Japan to a wartime bride's life in the United States and New York City's garment district in the 1950s and 60s. Katsuko was born in Yatsushiro, a rural village on the island of Kyushu in southern Japan. The town, on the same island as Nagasaki, is sort of the Kentucky of Japan, and its distinctive culture and language is a part of a Japan rarely depicted in English-language books about the island. Katsuko was the daughter of a fishmonger, a charismatic local power broker and black marketeer who ran fish-a major commodity in Japan-for the local geisha houses and the rural Yakuza, or mafia. He had four wives, and his daughter, almost from the time she could walk, was his right-hand man. The book will detail this colorful man, and the harsh but fascinating life he lived as seen through the eyes of his daughter. But this is also the story of a young woman's coming of age in a very hard time. The story will eventually culminate in New York City where she will trace her journey through the garment district of New York to her current position as a successful realtor with the Corcoran Group at age 82.