Book Review: "Yarn: Remembering the Way Home" by Kyoko Mori

Yarn is the mystic thread that shapes Kyoko's life; from badly misshapen mittens she knitted in school after her mother's suicide, to complicated flip-flop mittens for her friend Junko when she taught at Harvard. Kyoko's life and relationships are beautifully woven into her yarn and fiber projects that echo her desire for order, love, and peace.

As a young adult, she favored the seamless sweaters that were so easy and fast to knit and comfortable to wear. When her life became grey, dull, and routine, she preferred Fair Isle knitting to "decorate the empty space." The lovely patterns in these sweaters reminded her of those in her mother's tapestries from long ago in Japan, yet she could never duplicate their beauty in her own life.

In her forties, Kyoko's knitting moved from simple freeform to intricate patterns she labored to follow. Her life, too, became more complex as she struggled with relationships with her husband, co-workers, and friends. She could not duplicate the intarsia she loved: "The ideal marriage Chuck and I had in mind was intarsia: two yarns making their parallel journeys through the fabric, allowing each to cover only its own territory."

Yarn is a memoir of a life that is so very normal in that a few events cast long shadows. Kyoko's mother's suicide, her unloving and distant father, her life with a husband who never understands her, and her return to live a solitary life, shape the story as Kyoko struggles to find her own identity. It is only in her knitting and weaving that she understands who she truly is. Knitters know that every project must have at least one mistake in it, and Kyoko discovers that her life also has dropped stitches and skipped patterns, some that she could fix and others she left in the weave.

Kyoko Mori's Yarn is a journey much like knitting; the reader is drawn to the simplicity of the pattern and the beauty of the fiber, yet once the project is underway, the rhythm of the needles becomes comfortable, until that unexpected or complicated turn in the pattern. The story has places that move slowly and the reader begins to think the sweater will never be finished. Sometimes the stitch count is off, but we don't know it until Kyoko has to unravel the story and re-knit it, and the reader finally begins to see how the pattern makes the design.

The beauty of Yarn is not in the reading but in the reflection of how lives are woven into a tapestry. It reads like a reflection or a journal, and has no real climax, conflict, or unexpected resolution in the last few pages. Kyoko Mori stands at one place in her life and contemplates both the past and the present, and weaves a story out of the threads that crossed her path. She is not content with only recounting beauty in her life, but rather she knits a story that is practical and real.

Read more book reviews:
"Gemma" by Meg Tilly
"By Reason of Insanity" by Randy Singer

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