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.
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.
