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.

TRIGGER WARNING: Childhood emotional neglect

SHIGEKO ITO is an educator, mental health advocate, and author of THE POND BEYOND THE FOREST: Reflections on Childhood Trauma & Motherhood. She grew up in Japan and immigrated to America in her twenties to pursue higher education, earning a PhD in Education from Stanford University. Drawing on cross-cultural experiences and academic expertise, she explores themes of trauma, resilience, and healing, with a particular focus on childhood emotional neglect. For many years, she worked at a Montessori preschool in Seattle, Washington, where she lives with her husband of thirty years. Her articles have appeared on the CPTSD Foundation’s blog and on the ADAA (Anxiety and Depression Association of America) website.