The Color of the Sea
John Hamamura, 2006
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307386076
Summary
Growing up in a time between wars, Sam Hamada finds that the culture of his native Japan is never far from his heart. Sam is rapidly learning the code of the samurai in the late 1930s on the lush Hawaiian Islands, where he is slowly coming into his own as a son and a man.
But after Sam strikes out for California where he meets Keiko, the beautiful young woman destined to be the love of his life, he faces crushing disappointment—Keiko's parents take her back to Japan, forcing Keiko to endure their attempts to arrange her marriage. It is a trial complicated by how the Japanese perceive her—as too Americanized to be a proper Japanese wife and mother—and its pain is compounded by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which ignites the war that instantly taints Sam, Keiko, and their friends and family as enemies of the state."
Sam himself is most caught between cultures when, impressed by his knowledge of Japanese, the U.S. Army drafts and then promotes him, sending him on a secret mission into a wartime world of madness where he faces the very real risk of encountering his own brother in combat.
From the tragedies of the camps through to the bombing of Hiroshima, where Sam's mother and siblings live, Sam's very identity both puts his life at risk and provides the only reserve from which he can pull to survive. In this beautifully written historical epic about a boy in search of manhood, a girl in search of truth, and two peoples divided by war, Sam must draw upon his training, his past, and everything he has learned if he's ever to span his two cultures and see Keiko, or his family, again. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1945
• Where—U.S. Army hospital, Minnesota, USA
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Alex Award, American Library Assn.; Honor Book,
Asian/Pacific American Librarians Assn.;
• Currently—lives in Oakland, California, USA
I was born in the final year of World War II. Mom's parents and sister were interned at Rohwer in southern Arkansas. Dad was a GI training Japanese-American translators. Hiroshima was Dad's hometown. His mother and sister survived the atomic bomb.
My childhood was a puzzle—starting with kindergarten in Grant Heights, just north of Tokyo. An all-American town, complete with miniature white picket fences, where the supermarket was called PX and the surrounding landscape of green and golden rice fields was dotted with low small bowl-perfect hills, each hiding a domed cave in which farmers stored tools and rice. Mom scolded me for playing there, said the hills were old bomb shelters, but never explained what that meant. I spent summer vacations at Grandma’s house in Hiroshima, 2.5 miles from ground zero. Sometimes in dreams I am still that boy standing at the wire fence that separated Grant Heights from Grandma and Aunt Chizuko and all the others who looked like me, but were called Japanese Nationals, while I was a Japanese-American.
I waited years until I was old enough to ask the right questions and to hear the stories the adults would never share with children. I did not choose these stories, I was born into them. And they shaped me, just as my novel, The Color of the Sea, developed out of the puzzle pieces of my family history. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
True and truly felt. Hamamura has produced a valuable corrective to an often one-sided view of Japan and Japanese Americans during the war years.
San Francisco Chronicle
Through beautifully written prose, artful imagery and achingly real characters, John Hamamura sweeps his reader away to a time in history that shook the world and a love story that will resonate long after the final page.
Asian American Press
Hamamura's broad debut follows a Japanese language teacher raised in Hawaii as he finds love and as the U.S. and Japan drift into war. Isamu "Sam" Hamada, born in Hawaii to Japanese parents and raised in Japan until age nine, leaves Japan in 1930 to be reared by a Japanese-American family in Hawaii, before moving to California. A constant for the intense but likable Sam is his dedication to the martial arts, a passion shared by Yanagi Keiko, the American-born young woman he meets in California. Their love is haunted by an earlier liaison of Sam's, but Keiko and Sam press on until she leaves for Japan in the spring of 1940 to finish high school and, it is planned, marry a man chosen by her grandparents. As the war begins, Keiko's family is deported from Japan to the U.S., while Sam is recruited by the U.S. military intelligence, and a slim second chance comes into view. The romantic material is solid if idealized; various martial arts chapters have a clumsily formal quality; Sam's final military adventure at Okinawa strains credibility; an extended passage on the bombing of Hiroshima is motivated only by placing Sam's parents and siblings there. But Hamamura has a real command of the relevant history and packs a great deal of it into several dense but lucid and accessible story lines.
Publishers Weekly
Presented through a series of short chapters and divided into five major sections, this multilayered first novel spans 1930-47 and recounts the Japanese American experience through the life of Isamu "Sam" Hamada, the Hawaiian-born eldest son and descendant of a samurai family. As a nine-year-old, he leaves his mother and siblings in Japan to work on a Hawaiian plantation with his alcoholic father. Upon the older man's return to Japan, he suddenly dies, leaving Sam to fulfill his destiny as the family's "winning lottery ticket." He moves to California to attend college, and a blooming romance is interrupted by the bombing of Pearl Harbor. After proudly serving his country, Sam contemplates suicide through the ancient samurai ritual of seppuku (disembowelment) when he learns the fate of his family back in Hiroshima. Overall, these plot highlights hardly delineate Hamamura's fine characterization. His writing honestly portrays the individual struggles of the immigrant experience as well as defines the equally difficult struggles of their American-born offspring. Hamamura shines as a storyteller and is definitely a name to watch. Highly recommended for Asian American fiction collections and for most public and academic libraries. —Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
Library Journal
To be a Japanese American in mid-twentieth-century America was to be perceived as neither Japanese nor American, and it is this conflict that informs Hamamura's ambitious coming-of-age novel, in which the fate of two people amid the devastation of war reveals how the promises of honor and the security of love can rescue souls and restore faith. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
This is truly a multicultural story of a young man born in Japan, raised in Hawaii and Japan and forced to confront his nationality as he moves between the Japanese and American culture as he comes of age right before Pearl Harbor. At the age of 13, Isamu, or Sam in America, begins his training as a samurai by learning to see the many colors in everything. His intelligence and calm spirit help him when he moves to Hawaii to be with his father and has to deal with the lower status of the Japanese there. Sam is tricked into a relationship with a young woman who is the mistress of her employer, but his true love is Keiko, a girl he has grown up with. When he receives a letter saying the first girl has had his son, his sense of honor forces him to give up his love for Keiko, and he is torn by his conflicting loves. He is also torn between his loyalty to the US, in spite of the maltreatment of the Japanese Americans, including his family and friends, and his love for Japan. The book is beautifully written, drawing the readers into the character of Sam and creating an unusual picture of that difficult time in Japan's and America's history. —Nola Theiss
KLIATT
Before and during WWII, Japanese-Americans find both countries inhospitable in this heartfelt debut. The protagonists are Isamu-later Americanized to Sam-and Keiko, both beautiful, bright and brave, and both tormented by racism. Sam, whose formative years are spent in Hawaii and California, experiences the unvarnished, in-your-face U.S. brand of hate. Keiko, a California girl, suffers the somewhat subtler Japanese variation when she's taken there by her parents in June 1940. In this tale of two countries, it's up for grabs as to which form of the disease Hamamura considers more virulent. On the day Pearl Harbor is bombed, Sam, 20, is arrested as an enemy alien, and, together with stunned friends and neighbors, unceremoniously hauled off to prison. In response to their cry of, "Why are you treating us like this, we're Americans," the FBI retorts, "No, you're not, you're Japs." Transplanted Keiko encounters the kind of arrogance that is the concomitant of nationalistic fervor. Which are you, a teacher demands-American or Japanese? Both, replies a confused, torn 18-year-old, enraging her teacher. For Keiko, challenges to defend boorish America are frequent, and intensifying, of course, when war breaks out. The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor; the U.S. employs the atom bomb; and Sam and Keiko, star-crossed lovers, lead complicated and troubled lives against a turbulent background, searching for identity and ways they can be together. A poignant, fresh story told with feeling and sincerity.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How do the characters and plot express the archetypal symbol of the yin-yang? Which scenes play on the opposition or merging of cultures, East and West? Consider the yin and yang of Keiko, raised to be demur and yielding, traveling with her parents to Japan in search of an arranged marriage... how was her femininity and womanhood redefined by practicing with a warrior’s weapon, the naginata? Consider the yin and yang of Sam, raised to be a samurai, trained in the martial arts...and yet what did his final “tests” demand?
2. Discuss the theme of the collision between fantasy and reality, for example in the samurai jitterbug or the wedding night chapters. How do fantasy and reality color the different kinds of love experienced by the characters? How do the characters react when their dreams and expectations regarding romance bump into the limitations and awkwardness of real life? What do they learn, and how does it change them?
3. Discuss some of the deeper conflicts between philosophical ideals, like those expressed in the characters’ easily uttered words, and their subsequent hard-to-live reality. How are the characters shaped and driven by the theme of promises, kept and broken? By the adherence to the samurai code of honor vs. the demands of true love or the horrors of actual warfare? What aspects of Sam’s martial arts training prove most useful at the ravine and the cave or his visit to the temple? What is the cost of Al and Dewey’s loyalty and patriotism in their quest to rescue the Lost Battalion? What is the quality and nature of Sam’s loyalty, patriotism, and sense of honor and duty, juxtaposed against the atomic bombing of his mother and sister?
4. Consider the yin and yang of East and West. Explore the cultural differences and similarities in their definitions of love, home, enemy, loyalty and sacrifice. In what ways does being a good Japanese clash or harmonize with a character’s need to be a good American and vice versa?
5. Use ideas and scenes from the novel to illuminate how differing cultural demands have shaped your own life. Name your own ancestral origins. Then comparing yourself to the characters in the novel, identify some points where your ancestral cultural values conflict or mesh with the definitions and demands of where you now reside. If your ancestors’ nation, religious beliefs or cultural values were so at odds with (the USA or the country where you live) that you and your family were deemed undesirable aliens or a threat to national security, how would you feel? If the two countries you loved most were at war, and you were ordered to pack no more than two suitcases for yourself and each family member, to leave everything else behind, your car, your pets, your homes and businesses, to be sent to an undisclosed location to live for an unspecified length of time, how would you feel, and more importantly, what would you do?
6. If your friends or neighbors were the ones being targeted and sent away, how would feel, what would you do? Would your feelings and reactions depend on the nature and degree of the threat to the nation? At what point would you close your door and turn your back on your friends or neighbors? If you were drafted into the military during a war against the country where your mother and siblings lived, how would you feel? After the war, how might you feel about journeying home to face the surviving members of your family?
7. How do perseverance, acceptance and forgiveness shape the characters? Discuss the scenes in which compassion and forgiveness toward others or self open the gates to spiritual enlightenment.
(Questions from author's website.)
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