Audio-Book Review: The Japanese Lover

Title: The Japanese Lover
Author: Isabel Allende; read by Joanna Gleason. Translated by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson
Publisher: Audio: Simon and Schuster Audio, 2015. Hardback 2015, Atria Books. Originally published in 2015 in Spain by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S.A.U.
Source: Library digital sesrvices

Publisher's Blurb:
In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis, young Alma Belasco’s parents send her away to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco. There, as the rest of the world goes to war, she encounters Ichimei Fukuda, the quiet and gentle son of the family’s Japanese gardener. Unnoticed by those around them, a tender love affair begins to blossom. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the two are cruelly pulled apart as Ichimei and his family—like thousands of other Japanese Americans—are declared enemies and forcibly relocated to internment camps run by the United States government. Throughout their lifetimes, Alma and Ichimei reunite again and again, but theirs is a love that they are forever forced to hide from the world.

Decades later, Alma is nearing the end of her long and eventful life. Irina Bazili, a care worker struggling to come to terms with her own troubled past, meets the elderly woman and her grandson, Seth, at San Francisco’s charmingly eccentric Lark House nursing home. As Irina and Seth forge a friendship, they become intrigued by a series of mysterious gifts and letters sent to Alma, eventually learning about Ichimei and this extraordinary secret passion that has endured for nearly seventy years.

Sweeping through time and spanning generations and continents, The Japanese Lover explores questions of identity, abandonment, redemption, and the unknowable impact of fate on our lives. Written with the same attention to historical detail and keen understanding of her characters that Isabel Allende has been known for since her landmark first novel The House of the Spirits, The Japanese Lover is a profoundly moving tribute to the constancy of the human heart in a world of unceasing change. 

My Review:
Isabel Allende's reputation as a writer is deserved, and this book definitely wormed its way into my mind and stayed there while I was listening to it. It covers familiar ground in so many ways--I regularly bike through the Sea Cliff area of San Francisco where the Belasco mansion is set, and I have long known about the Japanese internment in WWII. Part of what attracted me to the book was the familiar geography it covers. What kept me reading was my desire to know and understand the characters.


I felt like I was getting to know the characters as one does in life--a little at a time, with constant revisions of my understanding. The initial view of most of them sets up assumptions about the kinds of people they were, assumptions that are gradually eroded, developed, and sometimes overturned. A big part of the reading experience ended up being me trying to decide if Alma is a good person or not. That sounds harsh, and I'm not sure if that was Allende's intention, but she is certainly complex and that led to my ambivalence about her.

My biggest complaint about the book is that it takes on too much, and tries to make too many characters central. We see the internment camp through Ichimei's eyes, but that is the only part of the book where he is central, and feels a little gratuitous. We are given more and more glimpses of Irina's life and issues, until I concluded that this is really her story, disguised as Alma's. Maybe it is, but if so, the balance feels off, and in the end she gets short shrift.

On reflection, the one thing that maybe runs as a theme through all the stories is love. What it is, how you find it, and what it means. In that way, the book works--but I'd still rather know more about Irina and what she is like inside, rather than Alma, who in the end I find a bit too self-centered and self-absorbed. Maybe that's part of the understanding we are meant to achieve.

My Recommendation:
This is (no surprise) a book well worth reading. It deals not only with the nature of love, but also of age, illness, racism, and suffering. I'm not convinced it's a great book, but there is a lot in there to think about for a long time after you finish, and that may be the definition of a good book.


FTC Disclosure: I checked The Japanese Lover out of my (digital) library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising." 

Review: Heart Mountain

Title: Heart Mountain
Author: Gretel Ehrlich
Publisher: ebook: Open Road Media, 2017, 382 pages. Original hardback Viking, 1988.
Source: Free review copy from the publisher

Publisher's Blurb:
This is the story of Kai, a graduate student reunited with his old-fashioned parents in the most painful way possible; Mariko, a gifted artist; Mariko’s husband, a political dissident; and her aging grandfather, a Noh mask carver from Kyoto. It is also the story of McKay, who runs his family farm outside the nearby town; Pinkey, an alcoholic cowboy; and Madeleine, whose soldier husband is missing in the Pacific. Most of all, Heart Mountain is about what happens when these two groups collide. Politics, loyalty, history, love—soon the bedrocks of society will seem as transient and fleeting as life itself.

Set at the real-life Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, this powerful novel paints “a sweeping, yet finely shaded portrait of a real West unfolding in historical time” (The Christian Science Monitor).

 My Review: 
I was offered this chance to review the re-issue (as an ebook) of what I believe was Gretel Ehrlich's first novel because I have reviewed many of the works of Ivan Doig, and I accepted it because of that connection, the historical and physical setting of the book, and the fact that I am aware of Gretel Ehrlich as a respected writer. I certainly wasn't sorry.

The story tackles a lot, wrangling the parallel stories of at least 6 people into something that works pretty well as a portrait of a community (or more accurately communities) in a time of struggle. Objectively, I think it probably would be a stronger book if it had tracked at least one less person, but all the threads do contribute to a strong whole.

It is impossible for me not to draw some comparisons with Ivan Doig, who wrote about a similar area. Ehrlich shares his ability to draw an evocative picture of a time and place, and her characters are well drawn, with a depth and complexity that makes them worth the writing. I did feel while reading that the book lacked something that I expect when I read Doig's works, and I think that I will call it warmth. This is a grim story in so many ways, and rightly so--it was a grim time, and the deportation of Japanese Americans to concentration camps in the interior was ugly. Even so, I think I would have enjoyed the book more had there been that warmth, that touch of humor, that allows a story to tell of grim events without weighing the reader down.

But several days after finishing the book, I am still contemplating some aspects of it, and seeing value in aspects of it that on first reading I thought gratuitous. Some parts that at first feel like they are intrusions by minor characters help to add depth and complexity to our understanding of the nation's treatment of the Japanese Americans (not justification, because some things cannot be justified, but we can at least understand the causes. Perhaps that understanding can help prevent similar mistakes from being made in the future). And that is proof to me that this is a good novel, and one that deserves reading, and possibly re-reading.

My Recommendation:
Read it. If you have any interest in American history, WWII, or how racism informs our actions, read it. And if you want to know what a Wyoming winter feels like, or a summer...read it. It's not a light book, but it does cast a good light.


FTC Disclosure: I was given a free ebook for review, and received nothing further from the writer or publisher for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising." 

Middle Grade Fiction: Weedflower, by Cynthia Kadohata

 

Title: Weedflower

Author:  Cynthia Kadohata

Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2006

Source: Library

Publisher's Summary:

Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts: before Pearl Harbor and after it. The good part and the bad part. Raised on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Even when the other kids tease her, she always has had her flowers and family to go home to.

That all changes after the horrific events of Pearl Harbor. Other Americans start to suspect that all Japanese people are spies for the emperor, even if, like Sumiko, they were born in the United States! As suspicions grow, Sumiko and her family find themselves being shipped to an internment camp in one of the hottest deserts in the United States. The vivid color of her previous life is gone forever, and now dust storms regularly choke the sky and seep into every crack of the military barrack that is her new "home."

Sumiko soon discovers that the camp is on an Indian reservation and that the Japanese are as unwanted there as they'd been at home. But then she meets a young Mohave boy who might just become her first real friend...if he can ever stop being angry about the fact that the internment camp is on his tribe's land.

My Review:

This is a well-written piece of historical fiction. Any reader will feel the injustice of the Japanese internment in WWII, as well as the hurt of any child who is rejected for reasons she can't even fully understand. In that, it's a powerful work, and well worth the reading. The book gives the reader a good introduction to what that decision on the part of the US government did to individuals, families, and an entire culture. The author only touches on something that was a major problem, the destruction of the family unit as children banded together and ate apart from their parents or even other siblings, and as families were torn apart by the question of signing the loyalty oath.

The book did feel flawed to me, however, in a couple of ways. One isn't so much a flaw as just how it is put together: the two parts of Sumiko's life almost end up feeling like two separate books, though I think the first part is necessary. The reader needs to see Sumiko doing daily things--not exactly what the reader does, but things that feel human and ordinary and include kid things like sometimes resenting chores--in order to feel fully the shock of the uprooting.

The other issue I had is worse, though I'm not sure how I'd fix it. That is quite simply that the conflict in the story is so huge, and so far beyond Sumiko, that there is no sense really of the development of a story, and certainly no sense of resolution. I don't know; maybe that is just as well if you want to keep the focus on the real injustice. Certainly the characters are well-drawn, so that we care about Sumiko and her life. And I appreciated the way that she, as children do, becomes at home in the camp--at home enough to not want to leave and start yet again. And maybe the fact that she's given no choice about that, either (by the adults in her own family, this time) is no accident: kids are blown by parental winds, in a smaller and more benign echo of what was done to an entire population.

Recommendation:

Weedflower is a good book for introducing children to this aspect of WWII. It is suitable for any kids old enough to cope with the frustration at the injustice (maybe 8 and up, depending on the child). I can also recommend books by Yoshiko Uchida, both fiction and her personal narrative (suitable for older children; some libraries put it in adult biographies, some in kids'), and for adults, Looking Like the Enemy, by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald (in the interests of full disclosure, her brother was my Sunday School teacher long, long ago) which tells of one family's experience being deported from the Pacific Northwest to camps in Idaho and Montana.

FTC Disclosure: I checked Weedflower out of my library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher in exchange for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."  

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