Maureen Ann Crane was born on January 25, 1940, in Ashiya, Japan, a beautiful community on the Inland Sea, to Albert Edwin Crane, a businessman, and Josephine Wagen Crane, a teacher from Geneva, Switzerland.

Although not with great clarity, Maureen remembers the sound of World War II bombs raining on nearby Kobe and Osaka; she was not evacuated to a war-free countryside, and these 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 age 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...