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    A Study Guide for Gail Tsukiyama's "The Samurai's Garden"
    A Study Guide for Gail Tsukiyama's "The Samurai's Garden"
    A Study Guide for Gail Tsukiyama's "The Samurai's Garden"
    Ebook42 pages31 minutes

    A Study Guide for Gail Tsukiyama's "The Samurai's Garden"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Gail Tsukiyama's "The Samurai's Garden," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535839396
    A Study Guide for Gail Tsukiyama's "The Samurai's Garden"

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      A Study Guide for Gail Tsukiyama's "The Samurai's Garden" - Gale

      13

      The Samurai's Garden

      Gail Tsukiyama

      1995

      Introduction

      The Samurai's Garden (1995), by Gail Tsukiyama, tells the story of Stephen Chan, a Chinese college student recovering from tuberculosis. The novel consists of Stephen's journal entries starting in September of 1937, when he arrives at his family's vacation house in a small seaside town in Japan, and continuing into autumn of the following year, when he leaves, having healed physically and matured emotionally.

      While Stephen is there, he is befriended by Matsu, who has been caretaker of the house and garden since he was a young man. Stephen also has his first brush with romance, all the while worrying about the Japanese soldiers fighting their way through China toward his family in Hong Kong. As Stephen learns to find his place in the world, Tsukiyama explores themes of personal and cultural identity, isolation, and family over the threatening background of the war. The Samurai's Garden also reflects Tsukiyama's own heritage as an Asian American with both Chinese and Japanese cultural influences.

      Author Biography

      Tsukiyama was born in San Francisco on September 13, 1957. Her father was a Japanese American who was raised in Hawaii, and her mother was of Chinese descent, having immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong. Thus Tsukiyama's life was rich with both of her parents' cultural backgrounds, and it clearly had a great influence on her work.

      Tsukiyama began writing as a teenager. She mostly created poetry, but when she started college at San Francisco State University, she first studied film. After deciding that writing allowed her to express herself creatively better than film, she changed her major to creative writing. She earned her bachelor's degree and then continued on at San Francisco State to earn her master's. Her master's thesis was a collection of poetry, but soon after finishing school, Tsukiyama switched to prose. She began to write short stories and soon started work on a novel.

      Her first published book, Women of the Silk (1991), became a best seller. The Samurai's Garden (1994) was her second book; her most recent work is A Hundred Flowers (2012). Many of Tsukiyama's novels take place in the past or in very specific communities. For example, Women of the Silk and its sequel, The Language of Threads (1999), recount the lives of Chinese silk workers in the first half of the twentieth century. The characters in The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (2007) provide glimpses into the Japanese traditions of sumo wrestling and Noh theater. In The Samurai's Garden, which takes place in the late 1930s, readers see the citizens of Yamaguchi, all

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