A startling, erotic novel about balancing care for others with self-care unfolds as the unnamed narrator returns to Carmel, California, to care for her ailing mother. With her husband and children in Hong Kong and her mother steadily declining in an assisted living facility, she becomes fixated on her mother’s garden, particularly a dormant cherry tree. Torn between her obligations to her family and her mother's needs, she feels isolated and unmoored. In her solitude, she embarks on a passionate affair with an arborist who shares her fascination with the garden, and together they work to revive it. As she immerses herself in the garden and awakens to her own desires, she begins to view her mother's illness as part of a natural cycle of life and death. Amidst this, she struggles to teach Lady Murasaki’s eleventh-century novel, The Tale of Genji, which resonates eerily with contemporary society's pandemic struggles. This powerful, beautifully written narrative explores themes of bodily pleasure, nature's intense observations, and a profound reckoning with time's passage, both within ourselves and in the world around us.
