MEMOIR: Waiting for Daisy, By Peggy Orenstein Bloomsbury, 224pp. £12.99The Japanese word for a miscarried foetus is mizuko, meaning "water child", a being who "flows between life and death, but belongs to neither".
ALL OVER Japan there are shrines where grieving parents leave toys and offerings at the feet of the Jizo statues so that he - the Buddhist God for aborted babies and miscarriages - may guide their water child down a different pathway for another try at life.
The water children are mourned and remembered with all the ceremony and respect due to anyone who has lived and died on this earth. As far as I am aware, no such ritual or recognition is available in the western world, where lost babies are mourned in silence and sometimes even in shame.
Peggy Orenstein has certainly had her fair share of mourning. For six years she endured miscarriages, countless disappointments and endless physical degradation in her quest to become a mother. In the highly personal and extremely informative Waiting for Daisy: The True Story of One Couple's Quest to Have a Baby, she takes us through her struggle.
Orenstein, an award-winning journalist and author of Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gapand of Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-changed World, is not only a lover of the lengthy title but also a self-confessed "can-do American", who likes to lay it on the line.
She is clearly used to being in control of her life, and indeed, she was, until the moment she decided to try for a baby. At 35 and with only one ovary, the odds were already stacked against her.
Infertility has increased rapidly rate in recent years and there are many theories as to why. For whatever reason, millions of women worldwide now seek fertility treatment every year, while it seems in the UK alone more than 2.5 million men are affected by male infertility. It has become a boom industry.
WAITING FOR DAISY, less a memoir than a guidebook, is essential reading for any woman who is considering this often harrowing and not always successful route.
Orenstein will tell you exactly what you are letting yourself in for: from the ins and outs of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) to the pros and cons of egg donation.
Nothing, but nothing will be held back. You will be allowed microscopic access to Orenstein's body, which she offers to readers like a sacrifice.
Her "gorgeous mucus", (vaginal, that is), the ingredients of the serum with which she injects herself daily (the postmenopausal purified urine of Italian nuns, if you're asking). Nothing is too private to share. You will be prepared for the daily humiliations, the endless disappointments and the cruelest tormenter of all - the monthly recurrence of unrequited hope.
On the other hand, any woman hoping to persuade her partner to accompany her along this route might be well advised to keep the book out of sight. Orenstein's husband certainly had a rough time. On his first visit to the clinic a nurse, directing him to a cubicle, shoved a paper cup at him and bellowed, "Masturbate, and don't touch the inside of the cup".
Outside, he could hear the nurse yelling and people walking by. There was a towel, a chair, copies of magazines; Penthouse, Playboyand for some bewildering reason, Golf Digest. Golf Digest- perhaps to help him with his grip. A few years later, as one scheme led to another, he was worn down and fed up with being "treated like a sperm bank on legs". The need to conceive had overwhelmed all other aspects of their lives. There was no sex without motive and the motive was always, always a child.
But Orenstein would not be stopped. She continued her quest, trying everything from private clinics to acupuncture. Meanwhile, thousands and thousands of dollars had gone down the drain.
It should be said that Waiting for Daisyis not all about matters gynaecological. There are plenty of digressions, not all of which are relevant to the main body of the story. A visit to an ex-boyfriend, an orthodox Jew and father of 15 children hardly warrants 20 pages and soon begins to read like padding.
The digression to Hiroshima is far more successful. Orenstein's husband is of Japanese descent, which may have contributed to her acute insight into Japan and its culture.
We learn about modern Japan; its women and their heavy drinking, (how good it is to hear about guzzlers worse than ourselves!) the phenomenon of "single parasites" - single, unmarried women living at home, showing no interest in marriage or babies and spending money like water.
Then there is Orenstein's account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb. This is a riveting section, particularly the story of the famous "Hiroshima maidens", 25 young women, mutilated in the atomic attack, who in 1955 were adopted by the US and brought to New York for reconstructive surgery.
They became darlings of the US media. However, when they returned to Japan, patched-up and dressed like westerners, they were often treated with suspicion and resentment. Poor little deformed American dolls. It's a story worthy of a book in itself and Orenstein tells it wonderfully.
Recently chosen as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week, Waiting for Daisyis certainly causing a stir and manages to reach way beyond its target audience with its accessible style and honest, if at times a little too upfront, manner.
As the title suggests, Peggy and her husband eventually succeed. Shortly after they have started the complicated business of adopting a child, out of the blue she finds herself pregnant. Nine months later the adoption has fallen through, (for reasons not altogether made clear) and Daisy is born. It is a happy ending. Would that all such stories could be.
Christine Dwyer Hickey is a short-story writer and a novelist