Instaread on The Japanese Lover: Isabel Allende’s Novel

By IRB Media

Inside this Instaread Summary & Analysis of The Japanese Lover:

• Summary of book

• Introduction to the Important People in the book

• Analysis of the Themes and Author’s Style

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Dec 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781944195571

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Summary

The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende is a novel that chronicles a forbidden but passionate romance that grows between two people over time, and how this relationship touches the lives of others over the course of several decades. Much of the book is set in San Francisco during and after World War II, when tensions were high between the United States and Japan and between Nazi Germany and European Jews; both conflicts impact the formation of the relationship at the heart of the novel.

Irina Bazili is a young girl with no family and a dark past who comes to work at Lark House, a senior residence and home for convalescents. One of her patients is the vivacious screen printer Alma Belasco. Alma takes Irina under her wing as her assistant, and over time Irina comes to learn more about Alma and the reasoning behind some of her mysterious habits, such as disappearing for days at a time unannounced or receiving yellow envelopes and gardenias from anonymous senders.

Alma slowly tells Irina her life story: In the 1940s, Alma was sent away from her Jewish family in Poland to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousins, the Belascos, in the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco. Meanwhile her older brother Samuel was sent to England and later joined the war effort. Alma’s