This novel about a young man of Korean ethnicity growing up in Japan was written in 2000 but its message could not be more prescient or apt to our own current political and social situation. It is a novel about love and identity and the tremendous individual and social cost of labeling others with arbitrary distinctions.

When Sugihara was fourteen, his parents decided to go to Hawaii on vacation. Unfortunately, although they lived in Japan, his parents were registerred as North Korean citizens or “Zainichi Chyosenjin, ” a term that is both descriptive of their legal and derogatory and insulting.  Since they would never be able to travel with a North Korean passport, his father applied for South Korean citizenship which would then allow him to travel. This simple decision had huge ramifications for the family, because this was when Sugihara decided that instead of going to Hawaii, he wanted to use that money go to a Japanese school instead of the Korean school he had been attending.

On his first day, the principal of his new school asked him to change his Korean name to a Japanese name, so he would blend in with the other students and is when he became Sugihara. This did not, however, prevent his classmates from finding out he was Korean and torment him accordingly, although Sugihara gave and good as he got.  After some time at his new school he was invited to a party thrown by one of his friends. There he meets a girl from another school named Sakurai who is beautiful, smart and Japanese.  They have many of the same interests in music, movies and books and they begin spending a lot of time together, sharing what they have read and listening to music. Yet even as he enjoys being with her and even meeting her parents, Sugihara knows that at some point he will need to tell her is background, but he keeps putting it off afraid of her rejection.

Then one night after suffering a personal tragedy, he tells her that he is not Japanese as his name might suggest but rather ethnically Korean, and “Zainichi Chyosenjin.”  In the silence that follows this revelation, Sugihara realizes that he must discover for himself who he is and what he is rather than accepting the discriminatory definitions of others over which he has no control. What he doesn’t know is if Sakurai will be willing to follow him on this journey and confront her own biases and prejudice. Is their connection and the love they share strong enough to confront the history, prejudice and discrimination so ingrained in the society they live in?

Kaneshiro won the Naoki prize for Go, one of the most sought after awards for literature in Japan. His frank and hard hitting discussion about the ingrained prejudice and discrimination of Koreans in Japan is quite shocking for a country where uncomfortable truths are rarely raised. But Kaneshiro, in a relatively short novel (165 pages,) is not simply indicting Japan’s discriminatory legacy but instead urges all of us to see the absurdity in prejudice and discrimination, and understand its effects on all of us.

Brenda’s Rating: *****(5 Out of 5 Stars)

Recommend this book to: Ken, Keith, Sharon, Marian and Lauren

Book Study Worthy? Yes!

Read in ebook format.