![]() ![]() Ono has talked about her parents as being emotionally distant. Still, he is an enthusiastic writer, sympathetic to his subject (not so much to Lennon), and alive to the attractions of an unusual person and an unusual life. He dates the great Tokyo air raid to 1944, for example, and he gives the impression that Ono spent the night in the bunker with her family. The result feels somewhat under-researched. ![]() He didn’t talk to Ono, and there’s not much in the way of new reporting in his book. The most recent Ono biography is “ Yoko Ono: An Artful Life,” by Donald Brackett, a Canadian art and music critic. No matter what you think of the strength of the art, you can admire the strength of the person who made it. Yet the much smaller group of people who know about her as an artist, a musician, and an activist appreciate her integrity. The public perception of her as a woman devoted to the memory of her dead husband has made her an icon among the kind of people who once regarded her as a Beatles-busting succubus. Ono may have leveraged her celebrity-but so what? She never compromised her art. She began managing the family finances after she and her husband John Lennon moved to New York, in 1971, and she is said to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars today. Her art is exhibited around the world: last year at the Serpentine, in London (“ Yoko Ono: I Love You Earth”) this year at the Vancouver Art Gallery (“ Growing Freedom”) and the Kunsthaus in Zurich (“ Yoko Ono: This Room Moves at the Same Speed as the Clouds”). Whether she sought them or not, though, she has both. Like any artist, Ono wanted recognition, but she was never driven by a desire for wealth and fame. She later called it “maybe my first piece of art.” She would ask him what kind of dinner he wanted, and then tell him to imagine it in his mind. Ono later said that she and Keisuke would lie on their backs looking at the sky through an opening in the roof of the house where they lived. The children traded their possessions to get something to eat, and sometimes they went hungry. In the countryside, the family found itself in a situation faced by many Japanese: they were desperate for food. But Ono’s mother, worried that there would be more attacks (there were), decided to evacuate to a farming village well outside the city. They had some thirty servants, and they lived in the Azabu district, near the Imperial Palace, away from the bombing. She had just turned twelve and had led a protected and privileged life. She could see the city burning from her window. While her mother and her little brother, Keisuke, spent the night in a bomb shelter under the garden of their house, she stayed in her room. That night, Yoko Ono was in bed with a fever.
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