Lily Soto Quinn is starting to have an affair. At the first sexual encounter, she ponders the significance of her lover's body: "Part of him so clearly missing. A gap between his kneecap and the ground, filled with nothing but air." To Lily, her lover's missing leg, lost in a motorcycle accident, represents what she finds missing in her life.
Julie Shigekuni's "Invisible Gardens" follows the self-discovery of a Japanese-American woman whose life should be happy on all scores. Her American husband, Joseph, a public health pathologist, is a success. The couple have a splendid home in New Mexico, two fine children, and Lily has respectable work teaching history at a college.
Yet so much is missing: the romance, the freedom and the spontaneity that she enjoyed with Joseph when they were in New York -- before gentrification, separate careers and family.