For fans of Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know, a memoir of a middle-aged Japanese immigrant mother’s struggle to raise her teenage son and save her marriage when she finds herself triggered by memories of her own childhood trauma as he enters adolescence.

At age twenty-two, Shigeko Ito immigrated to America to escape Japan’s rigid society and a neglectful childhood home that landed her in a mental hospital at seventeen. She thrived in her new, healthier environment and thought her traumatic past was all behind her. 

Until it wasn’t.

Motherhood, she realized, was far more challenging than she could have ever imagined. But it was her son’s high school years that proved to be particularly daunting, and that was when her past reemerged—in the form of intense flashbacks to her childhood trauma and tumultuous teenage years. With the stream of daily stresses compounded by menopausal irritability, Shigeko often found herself regressing into a bunker-like mentality with childish coping mechanisms, a pattern that threatened to undo her most prized achievement: her happy family.

In The Pond Beyond the Forest, Shigeko faces her past head-on, taking the reader along on her quest to uncover the root causes of her lifelong struggles—a journey that leads to deeper self-awareness, understanding, and acceptance, and ultimately saves her family and marriage.

Shigeko Ito grew up in Japan and immigrated to the US in her early twenties to pursue higher education. She holds an MEd and a Montessori teaching certificate from the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, CA, and a PhD in Education from Stanford University, where she wrote her dissertation on Japanese preschool education. Ito is an avid animal lover, especially of dogs, and enjoys birding, gardening, and raising mason bees. For many years she has worked at a Montessori preschool in Seattle, WA, where she lives with her husband of thirty years.