BOOK REVIEW / MEMOIRS : Confronting a Heritage and Its Painful Past : THE DREAM OF WATER: A Memoir <i> by Kyoko Mori</i> , Henry Holt, $22.50, 275 pages

Ayear ago, Kyoko Mori published a novel for older children and adolescents entitled “Shizuko’s Daughter.” It told of a Japanese girl whose mother kills herself, whose coldly self-centered father takes a boorish second wife, and who finds her own salvation through art and memory.

Now, in “The Dream of Water,” Mori has taken the same material, stripped away the fiction, and recast it as her own adult memoir of pain and discovery.

After graduating from high school in Kobe, Japan, Mori won a grant to attend college in the United States--this, despite a letter from her father arguing that she was spoiled and selfish and didn’t deserve it. (Her high-school principal burned the letter.) Mori went on to graduate studies, won tenure as a professor of creative writing in Wisconsin, married and became an American citizen.

In 1990 her sabbatical leave came up, and it was time to confront a past that had denied her twice. Her gentle mother’s suicide, and her father’s brutally contemptuous treatment both seemed to proclaim: You have no business existing. Mori returned to Japan for two months. Her intention was to see her relatives on both her mother’s and father’s sides, to visit childhood friends and--if she could bear it--to meet her father.

“The Dream of Water” is, by turns chilly and fragile, and honest--almost to a point of seeming perverse. At times, it is astonishingly beautiful: The chaste black strokes of a calligraphy that, by withholding, suggests more colors than color can achieve. Its lovely whorls describe the time Mori spends with her aunts, uncles, cousins and grandmother; the harsh down strokes are the meetings with her father. She is on a prosecutor’s mission.

He had treated her mother with harsh indifference and cold tyranny. Did this cause her death by kitchen gas--or was her own artistic, but depressive, nature partly responsible? When he discovered his wife’s body, he sent Mori--then 13--to make the police report. In their house, he quickly installed the woman who had been his mistress and would become Mori’s stepmother. She was critical, snobbish and jealous. When she felt that Mori was disrespectful, she would pack her bags and threaten to leave. The father’s unfailing response was to beat his daughter; once, he threatened to come to her room at night and kill her.

Worse, he forbade all contact with her mother’s large and loving family. The most beautiful passages in the book tell of Mori’s visits to the aunts and uncles, and of a long trip to see her grandmother in a remote country village. The encounters restore a sense of the cultivated heritage that Mori’s mother’s death and her father’s cruelty had deprived her of. Yet no one will condemn her father in the outspoken terms that she--already Americanized--requires.

Eventually, she realizes that their judgment is both gentler and more damning. Out of family piety, all they will say is that the father is “a strange man.” But quietly, they make clear that it is family piety that he has so shockingly transgressed by cutting his children off from their relatives. The book’s and Mori’s triumph is her depiction of the gradual reweaving of her family ties, and her gradual discovery of their elusive richness.

Her father remains unwilling to reconcile. Mori’s visits to him are awful, comical and oddly double-edged. He tries to be polite but after an effortful half-hour, he has to lie down. He and the stepmother offer a formal hospitality--both press money on her--laced with anger. And she nourishes her own anger. In a scene of black hilarity, they share a restaurant meal where even the food seems poisonous. Mori realizes that she is acting as coldly and unpleasantly as her father; she cannot help it.

We expect some kind of reconciliation, if not with the father, then with herself. We do not get it, and eventually we see that this is the book’s difficult point. Mori’s eye is cold but clear. Through the clarity filters the beauty of a large heritage that Mori is by now too American to share, but still Japanese enough to appreciate its redeeming value and to be in some measure restored by it.