| Summary: | Places is an English translation of Setouchi Jakuchō's 2001 memoir titled Basho ("Places") in Japanese. Born in 1922, Setouchi wrote this memoir when she was seventy-seven years old. In it she traces her journey back to the geographical locations that anchor memories and reminiscences of her childhood and scandalous earlier life as a novelist, seen through the filter of her later years as a Buddhist nun. The book is accordingly structured by place. Although the narrative proceeds roughly chronologically, it leaps about-the way thoughts and memories often do-connecting things across time and space. As a consciously constructed narrative, it calls to mind and has much in common with Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory-which he calls 'an autobiography revisited.
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