The River of Time, A Collection of Short Stories

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.

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.