In 1990 author Kyoko Mori returned to her native Japan to visit the "landscape of my childhood." There - looking for the house in which her mother killed herself, running on land that was once water, and retracing childhood train trips to her grandparents' farm - she relived the memories and uncovered the secrets that unlocked her past. In The Dream of Water, a series of chapters that are themselves "small perfections," she leads us to the "larger happiness" of an autobiography that is also a work of art.