Why She Left Us - Hardcover

Rizzuto, Rahna Reiko; Reiko Rizzuto, Rahna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060193700 ISBN 13: 9780060193706

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1999

Synopsis

After giving birth to a child out of wedlock on the eve of World War II, Emi Okada flees to the U.S. where she endures internment in the Colorado desert and then embarks on a lifetime of unraveling the family secrets that have shaped her troubled existence. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto was born and raised in Hawaii and has a degree in astrophysics from Columbia College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

A Conversation with Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, author of Why She Left Us

We generally expect a debut novel to be autobiographical. What inspired you to use the internment of the Japanese during World War II as the jumping off point for your first book?

My mother and her family were interned at the Amache camp during the war. In 1992, I went there with my mother and my grandmother for the 50th anniversary reunion of the opening of the camp. It was fascinating, and heartbreaking. There were about 200 people there--telling stories in the middle of a prairie, surrounded by a cemetery, a monument, and a few cracking foundations. My mother and I climbed on one of the foundations and paced off the tiny rooms that entire families lived in.

Was there a factual inspiration for the events in Why She Left Us, then, or did it spring wholly from your imagination?

The story came mostly from my imagination. Before I started writing, I spent about a year and a half interviewing people about their experiences in the camps. Those interviews had a huge impact on both the structure and the plot of the book. I found that there were all of these secrets--and some of them were amazing. For example, one young woman told me that, when her grandmother got her redress papers, she pulled her aside and told her that the man she had always believed was her grandfather was actually not. Her real grandfather was an American soldier who had six brothers in the Japanese army. He was captured in Japan, and when he was taken prisoner, all six of his brothers committed suicide because they felt he had brought shame on his family. Then he committed suicide as well. It was secrets like that that inspired much of the novel.

So you didn't draw on your mother's memories when writing about life in Little Tokyo before the war, or the demeaning experience of the internment camps?

She was too young, only five when the war ended. And her parents never talked about it when she was growing up. In fact, my interest in the past has stimulated hers, and she's discovering things as I discover them, too.

Do you think the secrets--both the real ones you heard and the fictional ones you imagined--were a unique by-product of the war and the internment?

I think there is an element of shame, and the time was unquestionably painful. But, everyone has secrets. The internment just made it possible for people to bury things, to bury them very effectively.

From the Inside Flap

A haunting novel of uncommon emotional power, Why She Left Us weaves in and out of the personal tragedies and political persecution of three generations of a Japanese American family and exposes the complex, often destructive bonds of love and honor that tie a family together.

At the center of the story is Emi Okada, a young girl who finds herself pregnant and alone on the eve of World War II. She gives up her firstborn, Eric, for adoption, but her mother finds the boy and brings him home, intent on raising him as part of the Okada family. This crucial event becomes a turning point in the story as it dramatically alters the lives of Emi's parents, siblings, and, later, her children. Betrayals and secrets tear a family apart a family that is already struggling with assimilation, intergenerational conflict, and war.

Narrated in turn by Emi's two children, Eric and Mariko, her mother, Kaori, and her brother Jack, Why She Left Us crisscrosses the century--from Japanese picture brides and migrant farm workers to the internment of Japanese Americans in the Colorado desert to contemporary Los Angeles and Hawaii, where Emi's two children have settled as adults. Sparely and exquisitely written, Why She Left Us is a superbly accomplished first novel that illuminated the universal relationships between mothers and their children, while evoking the power of history to affect individual lives.

Reviews

Rizzuto's characters are wonderfully well-drawn - jagged, honest and unpredictable. A shelf of novels and memoirs has explored the Japanese internment, and countless more have examined the clashes between immigrants and their offspring, marching inexorably away from old values. What sets Rizzuto's novel apart is her narrow focus on a handful of flawed, striving, uncertain people, bound by blood and obligation but never quite managing to read each others' souls.

A well-crafted first novel strains to affect as it tells of three generations of Japanese-Americans whose lives have been distorted by family and history. Four narrators, Eric and his sister Mariko, grandmother Kaori and her son Jack, chronicle the story of the Okada clan from their arrival in California in the early 1900s. Events move from that point to the recent present and from California to Hawaii, where Mariko now tries to learn about something of the past from her mother Emi. Shortly before WWII, Emi left the family as a teenager, became pregnant with Eric, gave him up for adoption, and then, as the Okadas were about to be sent to an internment camp in Colorado, returned home pregnant again. Emis mother, Kaori, retrieved Eric from his adoptive parents, while her brother Will, brutally treated by his own father and later to die as a war hero, beat up Emi and accused her of being a whore. Meantime, her uncle Jack, his loyalties divided, stood by helplessly. Nothing especially good will happen to the Okadas, whose sorry plight never quite evokes sympathy, either because they overreact or, seemingly for plot purposes, remain bent on behaving stupidly. When Mariko, now in her 50s, learns that Eric is her brother, she better understands why she feels alienated from husband Roger; fearful of abandonment; and guilty about a secret abortion. Eric, reared by Kaori, became a convicted criminal in adolescence and has felt rejected ever since Emi chose Mariko over him when she finally married. Jack. Jack also fought in WWII, and, torn between his marriage and his family, chose the latter, while his mother Kaori regretted not keeping the promise shed made to Emi to stay with her no matter what. Eventually, the two siblings are reunited, and Mariko confesses her past to Roger, but the mood is somber rather than celebratory. The story makes heroic efforts to come alive and engage but, despite the fine prose, just doesnt. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In a nonlinear narrative spanning the 1920s to the 1990s, Rizzuto's moving first novel explores four members of the Okada family, alternately telling their stories. In the process the author reveals their attempts to understand the past. Emi, the central character, does not tell her own story. She is seen through the eyes of her two illegitimate children, her brother, and her mother. Yet it is Emi's choices to abandon her son yet keep her daughter that set in motion other decisions that would leave the Okada family scarred and divided. Rizzuto shows how the normal push and pull of family relationships is greatly exacerbated by issues of assimilation and culture clash, as first-and second-generation Japanese Americans grow up torn between rebelling against and honoring the rituals and values of their Japanese-born parents and grandparents. At the same time, Rizzuto leaves us with the comforting thought that although the past can never be erased, through love and forgiveness it can lose its painful hold on the present. Nancy Pearl

A very young unmarried Emi Okada gives birth twice during World War II. Her son, whom she gives away, is retrieved by Kaori, Emi's mother. Emi's daughter, Mariko (who is raised by Emi and, when Emi marries, George Hamada), barely remembers her brother, who is left behind yet again when Emi and George depart to make a life of their own. In the midst of this genealogical horror, this fractured family, which includes Kaori's brutal husband, Mistuo, her most obedient son, Jack, and her raging son, Will, is swept up in one of the most disgraceful chapters in American history when they are relocated to the Santa Anita (CA) racetrack, which has been converted into an internment camp for Japanese American citizens. The conspiracies of silence choking this family wreak havoc nearly beyond measure. Elements of tragedyAan abortion, a prison term, a war casualtyAgrab the reader. One keeps hoping that this powerful indictment of intentioned deceit, dictated by tradition and twisted loyalties, will somehow reveal just a glimmer of redemption at the end. A remarkable first novel; highly recommended.ABeth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060193700
• ISBN 13: 9780060193706
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 295