Maureen Ann Crane was bornJanuary 25, 1940, in Ashiya, Japan, a beautiful community on the Inland Sea, to Albert Edwin Crane,businessman, and Josephine Wagen Crane, a teacher from Geneva, Switzerland. Though not with great clarity, Maureen remembers the soundWorld War II bombs raining on nearby Kobe and Osaka; she was not evacuated to a war-free countryside, andthese sensory memories have fueled the strong antiwar stance that permeates all her work. Because of the war's disruption and devastation, she was taught at home by her keenly intellectual Uncle Harry; she could recite Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at five and had read literary classics in English and French by ten. She was, in fact, so advanced that, after formal elementary schooling at a convent school, she skipped seventh grade and completed her junior and senior high schooling at the Canadian Academy in Ashiya by seventeen. During the school...