FICTION

SHIZUKO’S DAUGHTER by Kyoko Mori (Henry Holt: $15.95; 218 pp.) A rule of traditional haiku is that a few of those tightly rationed 17 syllables have to be expended on setting the actions or emotions in the poem in time and space, whether directly--by mentioning, say, a “summer moon”--or by implication, through seasonal details such as plum blossoms or red maple leaves. In this first novel, Japanese-born Kyoko Mori follows poetic tradition even while writing English prose. Her story of a girl’s struggle to overcome the shock of her mother’s suicide is framed by the passing of the seasons, the rituals of weddings and funerals, the succession of the generations.

In the opening chapter, Shizuko, a Kobe housewife whose husband has been cold and unfaithful, talks to 12-year-old Yuki on the phone, writes her a loving note, goes into the kitchen and turns on the gas. Her wish is that Yuki “grow up to be a strong woman.” This is not easy, despite Yuki’s prowess at sports and academics. She has to live with her father and stepmother because they fear that “people would talk” if she lived anywhere else. Yuki resents them; they give her the silent treatment. In the next half-dozen years, she finds solace in running and art but feels that love must lead to tragedy. Even her grandparents’ long marriage brings sadness, she observes, when her grandfather dies.

Mori, who teaches at a college in Wisconsin, intends to show the process by which Yuki regains her faith in life. This happens too quietly and steadily to allow the novel much drama. Mori’s dialogue has a stiff, “translated” quality, as if she has been unable to find English equivalents for colloquial Japanese speech. Yet the individual chapters, told from various points of view, crystallize much as haiku do around the images that locate them: yellow mittens, a golden carp, irises, a winter sky like “a pit (Yuki) could fall into backward,” a bowl shattered in wordless rebellion.