The River of Time, A Collection of Short Stories - Softcover

Kono, Robert H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0971305013 ISBN 13: 9780971305014

Publisher: Abe Publishing, 2003

Synopsis

This collection of 17 short stories deals with the Japanese American experience in the internment camps, the veterans who volunteered to fight in Europe and the Pacific and the possibilities of life beyond the camps and the aftermath of WWII.

The characters--veterans, ex-internees, students, professors, expats--provide the reader with insights into a unique response to human relationships in everyday circumstances. (Drifting down a river on a last fishing trip with a dying friend proves to be an understated human and philosophical capstone to a long life.) Japanese Americans who find themselves in today's fragmented world as a people swept up in current events and compelled to find their own voice is very much a part of the content of the stories.

About this title

About the Author

The author, Robert H. Kono, who also wrote The Last Fox, A Novel of the 100th/442nd RCT, was born in LA during the Great Depression, spent the war years in the concentration camps and followed his father as a 13-year old repatriate to postwar Japan. Though he was in the land of his ancestors, he found himself to be a displaced American youth among a look-alike people, and he was seen by them as a gaijin -- a foreigner, an outsider.

Upon returning to America after being isolated in a foreign land for 13 years, he discovered the land of his birth at a time -- the Sixties -- when the fabric of society was being torn apart by the civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests and counterculture revolution. It was an America that was a far cry from the country he knew as a boy before WWII.

His stories reflect his experiences in the camps and his cosmopolitan background in the Far East at a time when history was in the making -- the advent of Communist China, the Korean War, the heating up of the Cold War and the rebuilding of war-torn Japan. It was as if he were at a time and place when the world came to him to make him a part of the unfolding events. His stories are infused by his insights. Though the circumstances are often bleak, his hope for the future of mankind remains undying, a hope replete with the conviction that the good in life is self-regenerative.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpted from The River of Time, A Collection of Short Stories by Robert H. Kono The stretch of Big Fall Creek he had discovered a one-and-a-half hour drive southeast of Eugene was one of the best kept secrets of his life, even more secret than the movements of his regiment. He was a soldier fighting not to prove his loyalty but to be free...free to indulge later in his likes or dislikes, whatever he pleased. His passion turned out to be fly-fishing.... His last trip...it was fraught with loneliness. Sam Seiffert, his fishing buddy with whom he had spent many happy hours, was dead. Sam was the only one he had shared his secret with; both were dedicated fly fishermen and limited themselves to only one fish per day. Of all the damnedest things in the world, Sam had to die when a piece of shrapnel caught in the Battle of the Bulge worked its way toward an artery in his leg. When he flopped down on the bed one night, the piece of metal severed the vein, and he was dead by morning. Tats couldn't believe it. His friend's body had been booby-trapped long after the war was over. To add to his loneliness, he lived alone, doing the laundry, cooking, cleaning, whatever a widower does when his wife is gone. Emy was dead for over a year. Tats still had to get used to being alone. And he caught himself talking aloud. At first he had been embarrassed to say aloud what had been a silent thought, but now the sound of his voice was something of a comfort. "Emy, I miss you so much," he would say out loud in the emptiness of the house. He would keep up the chatter as he went about his chores, even though his voice echoed hollowly off the walls.

--Excerpted from THE LAST TRIP

Edition details

• Publisher: Abe Publishing
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0971305013
• ISBN 13: 9780971305014
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 257