Cat's Cradle By Cheiko Okazaki Bookcraft, 1993. Trade paperback: 215 pages. ISBN: 1-57008-670-2 Suggested retail price: $12.95 (US) 1993 AML Award: Sermon
Reviewed by: Sandy Straubhaar

Hello AML-List,

I am way overdue on this review so I had better send it off today. It is on Chieko Okazaki's book, Cat's Cradle (Bookcraft, 1993), 215 pages, $12.95.

Several years ago in our Relief Society in Lansing, Michigan (Williamston Ward) our Relief Society president came in with a job chart that she showed us and said, "This is to help my children learn to be kigatsuku." It was an idea from Sister Chieko Okazaki's book, Cat's Cradle, she said, and it meant "willing to help without being asked." A great idea, I thought -- though it wasn't lost on me that the notion of instilling this attitude in one's children via job charts might not fit the original concept exactly!

And that was all I heard of this book until I got my copy not so many months ago. My loss -- I should have bought every Okazaki book the minute it came out. I have come to find her nothing less than astounding, and I consider it a wonderful sign that her books sell as well as they do.

To save you from further gushing on my part (and I'm not really a gusher by nature: just ask my S.O.), I have decided after deliberation that maybe the best way to present Sister Okazaki to this list is via quotations, in the mode of "Gems from the Thought Of . . ."

One more excursus before I start -- I think the reason she "gets away with" saying some of the things she does has to do with her impeccable manners, her refreshingly non-Wasatch-Front perspectives, and the fact that she is, as she says herself, "not a weak person." (And, she adds, "Ed [her husband, now deceased] was not afraid of my strengths" [11].)

Here are just a few things:

Like many others, I'm a cancer survivor. . . . What's the recipe when life hands you a death sentence? Spunk, sunshine, and survival. . . . So here we are, alive, and facing death. But we're the lucky ones. We're the survivors. . . . The unlucky ones are the people out there who believe nothing will happen to them.(133-4)

Many women feel that there is a Relief Society 'mold' that they have to fit into to be acceptable. I love the experience of Karen Lynn Davidson, a stake Relief Society President in California [teacher at a Catholic girls' school; single until 38; no children of her own] . . . She says -- and I love this! "But paradoxically, I serve an important purpose by not fitting the traditional image . . . I'm a daily reminder to our stake." (97-8)

We were married in 1949. . . . It was also a time when women left the jobs they had taken to help win the war and went home to split-level ranch houses in the suburbs and drove station wagons full of children to ballet lessons and Little League games. It was a time of togetherness and material prosperity that worked very well for some marriages but which made specialists out of most couples: the husband specialized in earning the living and the wife specialized in rearing the children. . . . (part about having two children, moving to Utah, husband working on a masters in social work while Chieko was offered a job as exchange teacher [from Hawaii] at an elementary school) We knew that this decision meant we couldn't follow the specialization model that many of our neighbors were using. . . . Even when I had not been working, Ed had participated fully in parenting. The boys were his number one job, just as they were for me, and now that I was working they were the number one job for both of us. The number two job was everything else -- our work, our Church assignments, and our housekeeping chores. That year worked so well it became reasonable to ask, 'Why not continue?' So we did. (5-6)

[Someplace, I can't find the page, she says] "The dish does not care who washes it." [I've heard this one before, but it's a wise and surprisingly revolutionary remark, even today.]

[from section praising Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Pulitzer Prize winner -- quoting Ulrich] 'It took me five years to complete a one year M.A., nine to do a Ph.D., eight years to write Martha Ballard's book [the prize-winning book]. Meanwhile Gael and I together raised our children. (124)

Pp. 91-92 tells an anecdote about a YW program in southern California for entering Beehives where the theme and motif was taken from "The Wizard of Oz." Stake President Carlfred Broderick noticed that "The officers had really knocked themselves out to create the Land of Oz right there in the cultural hall. 'There were no weeds on that road; there were no munchkins; there were no misplaced tiles; there was no wicked witch of the west. That was one antiseptic yellow brick road, and it was very, very clear that once they got to Oz, they had it made. It was all sewed up.' This bothered President Broderick a little. . . [and in his remarks at the end of the program, he made clear to the girls that] 'The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not insurance against pain. It is resource in event of pain. . .'"

Time to go teach and I'm hardly started, but these ought to give people an idea. I can't end without explaining, though, that the central metaphor of the book has to do with patterns of working together to accomplish a task: Sister Okazaki considers the pattern of the cat's cradle (horizontal, interconnected) a better one than the pattern of the ladder (vertical, hierarchical). In the cat's cradle model the workers are more likely to be internally motivated to get the job done. Is this a revolutionary idea in our culture? (Not only Mormon culture, but North American.) I think it is.

Sandy Straubhaar
Germanic & Slavic Languages
Brigham Young University
sandra_straubhaar@byu.edu