Three Generations of a Japanese Family.

Fish of the Seto Inland Sea is an extraordinary, moving portrait of one family across the years of the greatest changes in Japan, and a loving biography of the author's mother and family.

Ruri Pilgrim tells the story of her family from the 1870s through to the aftermath of the Second World War. Her mother lived in the walled compound of the family home in the countryside, along with the rest of her family and the servants. Her father was a local doctor and their house was very much the centre of the community. The lifestyle was formal and secure; days and seasons followed regular patterns; there were accepted rules governing social behaviour; marriages were arranged. The whole atmosphere was one of timeless continuity.
But then Japan entered the second World War, and Ruri's mother, by now living in Japanese occupied Manchuria with her husband and children, faced the Russians, Chinese and the unbelievable fact of Japan losing the war. The family returned to Tokyo, where the society, the culture and the economy was entirely overturned. The Americans were everywhere, the Japanese were unemployed, and the ways of society that they had all known and lived by had vanished.