When suffering seems unbearable, a poet turns to poems and tales. And chants and prays. They are poems. Sometimes a demanding one. But many times a consolation. A few words doesn’t hurt; sometimes they save souls too. Hiromi Ito’s The Thorn Puller translated by Jeffrey Angles clings on the arrangements and chains of those words: prose, tales, chants, poems, iterations. She borrows and molds other voices, blending them into her slices of quotidian life, of taking care of her elderly parents, attending to her daughters, dealing with husband and dog, navigating her own aging and illness. To live is to suffer, to care for the living, even more. The endless cycle.

The Thorn Puller goes back and forth between doing and wishing. Cleaning your mother’s bottom after helping her shit in the toilet is annoying, “they had the same foul smell as the ones I make” and “my hand started to smell […] the smell never completely went away.” She stuck her hand into the jet of water shooting (bless be bidet), and prayed: “May this stink is taken from me.” And that’s just a matter of fact of what a daughter does as she finds herself “in a real pinch.” Ito questioned why she was in such a place where her world seems crumbling but simultaneously hold up as she relentlessly takes care of her family members. “So what’s really happening? Is Jizo not answering my prayers and pulling out my thorns?”

Ito, the character, who often “finds herself in a real pinch” is undetachable from Ito the writer who creates a scene of season’s whispers. They’re bound by the murmuring of time.

I pricked up my ears. Santa-san. They were calling him Santa Claus. December 24 wasn’t just a special day for Jizo. It was a special day for Santa too. Look, it’s Santa-san! Whisper, whisper. Santa-san! Whisper, whisper. Santa-san! Look, it’s Santa-san! Murmur, murmur. Santa-­san, Santa-san. Look, it’s Santa-san! Mutter, mutter. Santa-san, Santa-san. Rustle, rustle. Look, it’s Santa-san, Santa-san! Whisper, whisper. Santa-san, Santa-san. Murmur, murmur. Look, Santa-san, Santa-san, Santa-san, Santa-san. Whisper, whisper. Whisper, whisper. Santa-san, Santa-san, Santa-san. Murmur, murmur. Whisper, whisper. The whispers rushed through the crowd.

This paragraph unsettles. Everyday life is full of such murmurs. Repeated. Until one finds how banal is to be disoriented. Jizo. Santa. Jizo. Santa. The deities who care for children. And their presences and present come to realities through they who whisper.

Ito’s question in this novel or, more accurately, her wondering is about dying and death, a scattering life and after-breath, a stirring in the wind, that one cannot fathom without borrowing words, making conversations, and expressing some ugly groans, in which turning right feels heavy. Is her loneliness coddled or neglected? The novel does not answer. It prompts. The minutiae of taking care for others and the impossibility of escape from it are arrangements of body, saying words and chanting myths. But this is an attempt to endure. Not to be eased. Not getting easier. But to be let go of, to be let go from. Because suffering bears and sustains. And yet, a mother can wish for her children’s lives to be spared from the unbearable.