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Ghosts for Breakfast, written by Stanley Todd Terasaki and illustrated by Shelly Shinjo, is the story of a boy who accompanies his father to investigate “ghosts” in a nearby farmer’s field.

What I liked:

• Daikon! It never occurred to me the ghosts might be daikon. I’m glad everyone gets to eat daikon pickles at the end. I wonder how many nikkei farmers – specifically, the men – did their own pickling.
• I’m assuming Terasaki chose the names Ono, Omi, and Omaye for their onomatopoeic similarity to certain English words. It’s amusing, but also a bit strange for these secondary characters to have names, whereas the main character and his parents are never introduced. I can see why this happened, since Terasaki is retelling a family anecdote and already knows who everyone is, but it does give the Troublesome Triplets a somewhat more substantial presence than the supposed main characters. At the same time, the use of the first-person narrative and the nameless narrator might make it easier for young readers to imagine themselves into the story, which I think is a goal of many children’s books.
• Shelly Shinjo’s illustrations are so much fun! Her characters are rendered with empathy and humor, and her use of curved lines and rounded forms lends her images a homely, familiar quality. That said, I initially thought the food depicted on the cover was some kind of dumpling, and wondered why a story purportedly about nikkei history would so prominently feature what appeared to be Chinese cuisine. The daikon pickles depicted in the last few pages of the book are easier to identify!

What I learned:

• Are the Troublesome Triplets a group of bachelor farmers making a living together? According to the notes at the beginning of the book (I read the paperback edition), the story is set in the late 1800s and based on an incident from Terasaki’s family history. What were the demographics of California-based nikkei communities at this time? Were farmers with families more likely to become community leaders?

Questions I had:

• What was the market for daikon at this time? Was there any demand for it outside of nikkei and other Asian communities? My uncle grows daikon behind his house, so I know it can be cultivated in small quantities. I wonder if various nikkei farmers took turns growing Japanese vegetables for circulation within the community, so that everyone could enjoy familiar dishes without worrying about cutting into their cash crops.
• Who is Terasaki’s intended audience for this book? What was his purpose in writing this book?
• From whom did Terasaki first hear this story? I’m assuming it was passed down orally through the generations. Specifically, I’m curious about the use of “pon” as the sound for knocking – if the story was written in Japanese, I would expect とんとん or どんどん to be the sound, depending on the strength of the knock. It could be that ぽん was commonly used in this manner at this time, or it could also be a feature of a certain dialect.

Follow-up:

• I wish there were more nikkei-authored picture books chronicling aspects of nikkei history outside of the camps. Books like Ghosts can serve as an entry point to nikkei history in Japanese school, and help students draw connections between what they see on the page and their own family experiences.
• I really need to read a memoir or family history chronicle about the lives of the earliest Japanese immigrants to the US – my grandmother’s parents would have been part of this pre-camp generation and no one in the family seems to know much about their experiences.