I consider myself extremely lucky to be one of those with an early look at Juliet S. Kono's new novel, Anshū, from Bamboo Ridge Press. The book will be out in the second half of September, so you have all summer to savor the often overlooked delights of anticipation.

Anshū tells the story of Himiko Aoki, a teenage girl in Hilo who is sent to live with an uncle and aunt and cousins in Tokyo in the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Himiko becomes an eyewitness to suffering and survival in the war years as the story moves from Tokyo to Kyoto to Hiroshima.

Juliet Kono has chosen this Japanese-American girl as her first-person narrator, thus drawing us into Himiko's life and emotions in a more personal way than any historical non-fiction could hope to achieve.

I plan to write more about Anshū when it is published, but for now I want to make a couple of points. The novel is so moving because it is a deeply human story, written by a fine storyteller who has researched her subject for years, and because it is written by a poet. I suspect that poets have an edge over other writers of prose fiction because they have lived closely with words and loved them and know how to make them sing.

To follow Himiko as she lives and endures through the most challenging of times is at once crushing and uplifting. Knowing from the chapter titles on the contents page what terrible events awaited the young girl, I felt on every page like a spectator at a Greek tragedy who knows what's coming. I thought I would cry, but instead I felt myself shaken and changed, as if I had gone through the fires with Himiko.

I want to share what other early readers have written about Anshū. Here are a couple, and I'll include more in a few days.

Casting a spotlight on one family’s destruction and survival in wartime Japan from 1941 through 1949, Anshū illuminates the larger canvas of the Asia-Pacific War as only a deeply imagined literary narrative of war can. The story is told through the eyes of an unmarried teenaged girl from Hawai‘i who is shipped off to live with relatives in Japan after she becomes pregnant. Hi-chan’s new family members present a mix of unconditional support and unrelenting abuse, and she must navigate this complicated home environment as both a new mother and a foreigner with limited fluency in Japanese language and cultural norms. Her daily foraging for life’s necessities in wartime Japan as food grows increasingly scarce and unaffordable, and as the Japanese military grows increasingly desperate for new recruits, allows us to see the Tokyo firebombing and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima not as surreal iconic events but as they might have been experienced by ordinary people living at ground zero.

Anshū, a Japanese word written with the characters for “darkness” and “grief,” is a powerfully moving and vividly rendered story of destruction by fire and the flames of memory.

—Gayle K. Sato, Meiji University

By the time she published her first book, Hilo Rains, in 1988, Juliet S. Kono was already living with her protagonist of Anshū, Himiko Aoki. Kono’s second book, Tsunami Years, and her experiences in between affirmed her growing understanding of human tragedy, suffering, and transience. To write Anshū the author had to live with the novel’s fictional narrator for years of her life, in order to learn and to tell the unspeakable about a subject few if any Americans before Kono have been able to speak about without guilt and revulsion. Anshū, the very word defined by this novel, means an understanding, an apprehension deeper than guilt, deeper than fear, than hate, than love and pity and sympathy, deeper than resignation, deeper than acceptance.

—Stephen H. Sumida, University of Washington

Tags: Anshū, Bamboo Ridge Press, Hilo, Japan, Juliet Kono, World War II

This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2010 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Hawaii fiction, Literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.