The most recommended books on Japanese Americans

I heard of this book from a neighbor, and now I’m telling everyone to read it.

This is a historical fiction set in California, where I live, and it has wonderful, diverse, complex characters. A family saga infused with the landscape of the Eastern Sierras and its water wars, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the WWII internment of Japanese Americans, and gourmet French cuisine.

The book had amazing prose that took my breath away on every page. This novel prompted me to travel to the museum at Manzanar, the former Japanese internment camp, which is well worth visiting. 

The story of how this book came to completion is amazing, too: the author had a major stroke when it was almost finished, leaving her daughter to painstakingly help her find her voice again, a process that took six years. Worth every moment I spent immersed in its 500+ pages.

Like so many of the books I love, this book isn’t afraid to show a queer couple in distress.

I love this book for its brutality, its interracial couple and the dynamics that entails, for its detour to Japan, for its scrumptious descriptions of food, and its emphasis on food as a means of connection.

It’s beautiful, honest, raw, and contemporary in all the best ways.

Kyo Maclear is one of my favorite authors—someone who can gracefully transition from biography to graphic novel to memoir without losing her signature style, which is lyrical without being heavy-handed and playful without being cute. Like another book on my list, this one is brilliantly illustrated by the incredible Julie Morstad, who similarly manages to perfectly capture the unique spirit of each subject while remaining singularly herself. 

This story of Gyo Fujikawa, the artist who created the first book featuring babies of all races tumbling and playing happily together, weaves together myriad themes—the women’s suffrage movement, the internment of Japanese citizens during WWII, the sexism in academia, and the racism that first plagued young Gyo at school, and later made it so difficult for the adult Gyo to get her first book published. It manages all this while being effortlessly readable and entertaining. Brava, Kyo!

Sujata Massey is Indian and German. She has written a whole series of books set in Japan or featuring Japanese characters. This is her seventh featuring investigator Rei Shimura, and is set in Washington DC's restaurant world. Shimura's task: find a Japanese war bride who disappeared 30 years earlier. I love Rei Shimura’s wry humor and intelligence. My husband founded, and we owned, The Safe House, an espionage-theme restaurant in Milwaukee, so this book resonated with my experience.

Kitasei combines a science fiction thriller with a searing exploration of women’s friendships across time, race, ethnicity, and politics.

With Earth increasingly uninhabitable, a group of 80 women of childbearing age are sent into space with vials of semen to recreate human life on a distant planet.

Kitasei reveals the growing conflicts among the women, which intensify when one of them dies while trying to repair the ship. Asuka, the beautifully drawn central character, feels insecure about her place among the women and worries that, as their anxieties intensify, she might be targeted as the traitor in their midst.

As I set about the task of writing political thrillers, I read many gifted novelists in this genre. I found that the plots often revolved around shoot-‘em-ups and egregiously evil militant groups. Barry Eisler is an exception. He is a superb writer who casts a talented and likeable character into a career as an assassin. John Rain chooses this life because his actions deter greater acts of violence. And isn’t that the choice many of us face in the modern world? Isn’t going to war about saving lives by killing the bad guys? In my books, I try to be sensitive to the issue that peace does not come easy in a violent world, and sometimes the trade-offs to secure peace are not at all pleasant.

Kiku Hughes’s graphic novel is about a girl in San Francisco who travels back in time to witness her grandmother’s interment. My kid said, “Displacement brings up important issues and talks about historical events while having an interesting story. I feel like that’s hard to do. It’s also a graphic novel with really nice art.”

My kid thought it was a really thought-provoking read, and she kept talking about it for months afterward.

You will never look at (or wear) a kimono the same way after reading Amy Sueyoshi’s ingenious investigation into the making of an American leisure culture awash in stereotypes of Japanese and Chinese sexuality. With a focus on San Francisco, Sueyoshi’s book reveals how Anglo-European Americans appropriated “Oriental” dress and design aesthetics, even as the white press and legal system displayed overt hostility toward people of Asian descent. This book is one of my very favorites among a growing body of work that centers on the making of racial identities within histories of sexuality. Sueyoshi is a superb writer, and in this book, she excels at honoring the humanity of Asian-descended people within a white leisure culture that insisted on their inferiority.

This book takes young Shinji Takahashi from the comfort of his contemporary life and throws him into the world of ancient Mesoamerican culture, an evil corporation, and the illustrious Society of Explorers and Adventurers. I liked that Shinji is of Japanese heritage (and his ancestors’ role as guardians of a temple in Hokkaido were what drew him into this adventure) but it wasn’t the basis for his heroism in this fun-filled adventure.

I loved this story about a Japanese-American boy who accidentally becomes pen pals with a French Jewish girl. Alex isn’t thrilled to find out Charlie is a girl, but as time passes, their friendship becomes an unshakeable bond—and then Charlie’s letters stop coming, and Alex’s family is forced into an internment camp by the US government. Alex siezes an opportunity to volunteer for a Japanese-American infantry regiment (the highly decorated 442nd), hoping all the while that he can somehow, miraculously, find Charlie.

This book is bittersweet and infuriating, cleverly juxtaposing the prejudice and mistreatment faced by Alex’s family with the ever increasing restrictions and cruelties faced by Charlie in German-occupied Paris, and it contains some of the best depictions of combat I’ve read in a YA novel.