Lake and Other Stories

In these beautiful, sensuous stories about Japanese-Canadian life and family history, Gerry Shikatani explores, with a fine, enamoured eye, a man in the middle of life, looking both forward and backward. “Lake” finds a father and two of his adult children at the cottage, tenderly, tentatively comparing versions of their lives together. In “Michiko”, an elderly woman returns alone to British Columbia, to the scenes of her childhood before the forced evacuation of Japanese Canadians during World War II. In “B”, history catches up with the narrator in Paris and on the Skeena River, in a gothic tale of obsessive sex and the relentless circles that the past can create.