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