Why She Left Us

The erosion of a Japanese-American family is the subject of this searing first novel, which follows three generations of the Okada family as they are torn apart by poverty and suffer the indignity of internment during WWII. The title refers to Emi Okada, a young woman who dishonors her family by bearing two children out of wedlock. Using four narrators (Emi's children, Eric and Mariko; her mother, Kaori; and her brother Jack), Rizzuto depicts a family undone by secrecy and violence. Desperately poor migrant workers brought to the edge of starvation by the Depression, Kaori and her husband send Emi to work as a maid for a salary of 25 cents a week when she is only 12. Emi returns, pregnant, in 1940, and discloses that she has relinquished another child, Eric, for adoption. Shamed by this denial of cultural traditions, Kaori sanctions the use of brutal tactics to get the boy back. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Okadas are interned--first at the Santa Anita Racetrack in Southern California, where Mariko is born, then at the Amache Camp in eastern Colorado, where they are forced to live in horse stalls. Like many nisei (children of Japanese immigrants born in the States), Emi's two brothers enlist in the army, but only one survives, to become embittered by the postwar climate of sustained hatred of ethnic Japanese. After the war Emi moves away with Mariko, abandoning Eric to be raised by Kaori. In 1990, Mariko, now married and living in Hawaii, discovers she has a sibling and presses Emi for the truth about her past. Emi rebuffs her with a quote from Kaori: shigata ga nai (""it can't be helped""). Undeterred, Mariko locates her relatives in California and discovers a family torn by resentment and embittered by prejudice. Rizzuto expertly heightens the drama of the Okada family's saga with her tensile, vigorous prose, as unsparing as the story she tells. The harsh conditions of immigrant life, and the scars it leaves on succeeding generations, have been portrayed before, but Rizzuto's uncompromising portrait of the suffering of Japanese-Americans is depicted with rare force and candor. In the end, this tale of clashing cultures and generations also depicts a gaping wound in our history that no amount of token government reparations can heal. Agent, Susan Bergholz. Author tour. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.