Kyoko Mori was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1957 and immigrated to the United States in 1977, at the age of twenty. She got her bachelor's degree in English from Rockford College in Illinois, her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee and she now works as an Associate Professor of English and creative writing at St.

Norbert's College in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Mori is a naturalized American citizen, and is disdainful of the social restrictions against women in Japan. She considers herself "more American than Japanese," and she shuns the Japanese cultural mores that she believes bind women in a constant struggle for self-satisfaction.

Mori had a hard life growing up in Japan.

At the age of twelve, her mother committed suicide and left her to work through her grief alone, getting no love or sympathy from her father or from his new...