The Hidden Flower

Josui was a lovely Japanese girl of good family. she had been born in America and lived here until she was fifteen, when, after Pearl Harbor, her father took his family back to japan rather than have them go behind barbed-wire. In Kyoto, spared by the war, she met Lieutenant Allen Kennedy, who had aristocratic Virgina blood in him. Theirs was no cheap or casual romance. They were married in all dignity by solemn Buddhist rites in a temple in Kyoto. Then Allen brought his bride Josui back to America, and here the child Lennie was born. "When was the mortal life of the child begun? They did not know at whcih moment in the day's brightness or in the shadow of the night his spirit stepped from the eternity before birth into the world of life. Whether it was in the first screened room now across the sea, or in the high room looking toward the west, whether it was in the mountain cabin where they spent a handful of days, reluctant to leave the snow-crowned peaks, whether it was in the upper room in a little hotel in a mall town on the endless plain, or in the rolling hills of the Midwest, the did not know. Somewhere i the glorious months, at some place of love in the chain of days and nights of love, the world child was living, but still they did not know.They were not thinking of him but of themselves." Beauty infuses the story - beauty of the Japanese landscape, gardens, home life, and later beauty of the American scene, beauty of the human spirit in Josui, in Cynthia, the American girl, in the Jewish woman doctor who brings the child to birth, and throughout, beauty of style and vision.