To learn more about Book Spotlight, read this first.

Cherry Blossoms in Twilight recounts the life of Yaeko Sugama Weldon, first as a child growing up in wartime Japan, and then as a wife and mother in the United States.

What I liked:

• The mini illustrations accompanying the chapters, hand-drawn by Yaeko-san,* are lovely. They enhance the book’s intimate, familial feeling without distracting from the narrative. Also, I’m always fascinated by writers who illustrate their own work, since I think the act of doing so is quite different from having someone else illustrate your work.
• The writing is accessible but not juvenile. Naturally, not everything is shared with the reader, but it felt to me that the things left unsaid were selected for personal reasons rather than to sugarcoat the story. I would have enjoyed reading this as a kid and I definitely enjoyed it as an adult. Readers who appreciate the writing style (though perhaps not the problematic subject matter) in the Little House series will find a similar voice in Cherry Blossoms in Twilight.
• The extensive descriptions of everyday life in wartime Japan are essential reading for those of us (including me) whose classroom education about Japanese involvement in World War II focused almost exclusively on atomic bombs and camps. Yaeko-san’s story also complements narratives such as those presented in Miyazaki’s 風立ちぬ and Takahata’s 火垂るの墓. (I would actually love to see Miyazaki tackle a film addressing the relationships between Nihonjin and Nikkeijin, but I kind of doubt he would ever do this.)
• In what to me feels like true Japanese/Nikkei spirit, Yaeko-san presents her many experiences, her accomplishments and struggles, without moralizing or attempting to coerce the reader into feeling a certain way about her. This particular way in which Nihonjin/Nikkeijin express ourselves to the world is something I have always loved and admired.

What I learned:

• I knew there were Japanese women who married US servicemen (of all races) and immigrated to the US, but I think this is the first book I’ve read that centers on these experiences. I’m not sure if these women self-identified as Shin-Issei, but I’m interested in how they might have interacted with Nikkeijin who had already been living in the US for a generation or two.

Questions I had:

• Did Yaeko-san ever consider creating a bilingual version of her memoir? It might just be my own bilingual Nikkei perspective, but I’m always interested to see how bilingual Japanese/Nikkeijin express themselves differently in English versus Japanese.**
• How have other Japanese/Nikkei readers responded to Cherry Blossoms in Twilight?

Follow-up:

• Read more Japanese/Nikkei memoirs!
• Read more Japanese/Nikkei authors writing on wartime Japan in both fiction and nonfiction. (There are a ton on my TBR, I just need to get to them!)
• See if I can find a comparative work on the experiences of Shin-Issei who came to the US at different times after the war. This would ideally be an anthology of writings by Shin-Issei themselves, as opposed to a topical piece by one person, but so far I haven’t come across such a work.

*I have never met Yaeko-san, but the impression I have of her after reading the book is very similar to how I feel around some of my older female relatives and family friends, whom my mother (and, learning from her, my sister and I) often refer to as [first name]-san, so I hope it’s all right if I call her Yaeko-san here.

**Or Japanese versus another language, especially for Nikkeijin who are not based in the US. The articles on Discover Nikkei about the evolution of the Japanese language among Brazilian Nikkeijin are particularly interesting in this regard.