At thirty-five, Mika Suzuki's life is a mess. Her last relationship ended in flames. Her roommate-slash-best friend might be a hoarder. She's a perpetual disappointment to her traditional Japanese parents. And, most recently, she's been fired from her latest dead-end job. Mika is at her lowest point when she receives a phone call from Penny--the daughter she placed for adoption sixteen years ago. Penny is determined to forge a relationship with her...

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on...

"The book follows young Ruth from her arrival at the Kapi'olani Home for Girls in Honolulu, to her adoption by a Japanese couple who raise her on a strawberry and grape farm in California, her marriage and unjust internment at Manzanar Relocation Camp during World War II—and then, after the war, to the life-altering day when she receives a letter from a woman who says she is Ruth’s birth mother, Rachel. Daughter of Moloka'i expands upon Ruth and...

"Cheerfully irreverent, bitingly funny, and filled with romantic charm, Cara Tanamachi's The Second You're Single is all about navigating the most romantic month of the year, and how love always seems to arrive when you least expect it. Freelance writer Sora Reid believes in inertia. She's the odd one out in a close-knit family of go-getters, including her Japanese-American mom, who hints about her need to lose weight, and her soon-to-be married,...

Christine Kitano's second poetry collection elicits a sense of hunger, an intense longing for home and an ache for human connection. Channeling both real and imagined immigration experiences of her own family, her grandmothers, who fled Korea and Japan; and her father, a Japanese American who was incarcerated during WWII, Kitano's ambitious poetry speaks for those who have been historically silenced and displaced. Christine Kitano's first collection...

When John Rain, the Japanese/American "contract killer with a conscience" (Entertainment Weekly), learns that his former lover, Midori, has been raising their child in New York, he senses a chance for reconciliation, perhaps even for redemption. But Midori is being watched by Rain's enemies, and his sudden appearance puts mother and child in terrible danger. To save them, Rain is forced to use the same deadly talents he had been hoping to leave behind....

The story of Shoko, a Japanese woman who married an American GI, and her grown daughter, Sue, a divorced mother whose life as an American housewife hasn't been what she'd expected. When illness prevents Shoko from traveling to Japan, she asks Sue to go in her place. The trip reveals family secrets that change their lives in dramatic and unforeseen ways.

Rei Shimura, a California girl living in Tokyo, has an antiques business that's only slightly more successful than her love life. When her aunt enrolls her in the Kayama School of Ikebana to learn how to arrange flowers, disaster strikes. A mean teacher is found with scissors in her neck, and Takeo Kayama, the sexy billionaire heir to the school, considers Rei's aunt the main suspect. Rei strives to prove her aunt's innocence but becomes enmeshed...

Otsuka's commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any previously written--a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times.