THE POND BEYOND THE FOREST

Ito offers a soul-searching memoir about the lasting effects of childhood emotional neglect.

In 2013, the author experienced intensifying conflicts with Peter, her pathologist husband, and David, her teenage son, compelling her to question whether she had put her troubled upbringing behind her. Born in 1961 in Sagamihara, Japan, Ito was the youngest of three children in a family described by friends as “barabara,” a Japanese word meaning “separate, scattered, broken up, torn, or ripped apart.” Her father, a workaholic surgeon who had founded a hospital, and her mother, who was involved with social organizations and devoted to shopping and partying, were rarely home and had a fraught relationship. (Ito was primarily brought up by surrogate caregivers.) A summer spent abroad in Napa, California, in 1977 was revelatory; the Schmidt family, who hosted her, was close and loving—everything hers was not. In 1979, the author was committed to the psychiatric unit at the Yokohama Harbor Medical Center, diagnosed with “stress-induced psychosomatic disorder” due to emotional neglect. While working on her doctorate in education at Stanford in 1993, she met Peter, whom she married in 1995—David was born in 1997. In the 2010s, pressures exacerbated by their laissez-faire parenting style, David’s teenage mood swings and complicated romantic entanglements, Ito’s menopause, and an imbalance in the spouses’ sex drives nearly caused the family to implode before psychological and emotional counseling helped the author to repair her relationships with her husband, son, and herself. Ito moves from adulthood to childhood and back again in nonchronological chapters that insightfully juxtapose her lives in Japan and the United States. Her descriptions of her lonely family life in Japan and of her mother’s obsessive shopping and hoarding illustrate that no culture is exempt from dysfunctional families. Her self-appraisals can be funny, as when she is berated by a stranger (as an adult) for talking on the train in Japan: “It made me wonder if my blabbermouth provoked males to explode in anger.”

A compelling, honest, and ultimately victorious memoir.