Book Spotlight: Wat Kept Playing – Emily Inouye Huey

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Wat Kept Playing, by Emily Inouye Huey, tells the story of Wataru Misaka, the first person of color to play in the NBA.

What I liked:

The more I read ‘designed to inspire kids of color’ books by authors of color, the more I wonder how these books are shaping the experiences of today’s kids. I don’t remember all that many books in English, featuring Japanese Americans, from my own childhood, but since I was surrounded by so much media direct from Japan, I don’t know if I ever really registered the lack of representation of people who looked like me in US media. I’m glad that, for today’s nikkei kids, this will probably not be an issue, as there are so many nikkei authors working in the US children’s market right now (and more to come, I’m sure!).
Is there a Japanese edition of this book, or any plans to publish one? I feel like this story might be interesting to kids in Japan – though, as I say this, I wonder if a story about Japanese Americans (or nikkei of other backgrounds) playing MLB would do even better (and I wouldn’t be surprised if books like this already exist in the Japanese market – conversely, I can only imagine the sheer number of books about players like Ohtani). It would be interesting to do some sort of analysis around sports-themed literature in the Japanese children’s market by both nihonjin and nikkei authors, including picture books, manga, graphic novels, and children’s novels. I feel like sports manga is going strong right now and it would be interesting to try to identify the underlying reasons for this trend.

What I learned:

I’m no sports aficionado, but I really enjoyed learning about Misaka’s life and experiences. It never occurred to me to think about who the first person of color to play in the NBA might be and it’s pretty awesome to know they were Japanese.

Questions I had:

I feel like I saw ads for another picture about Misaka, by a non-Japanese author, around the same time as I was seeing publicity for Huey’s book. I suppose it must be a coincidence, but it was nevertheless odd. I also sometimes see YA novels by white authors with eerily similar covers and/or plots to YA novels by authors of color and I assume this is not always totally coincidental, but I also don’t know if this is simply a wider phenomenon of authors writing to trends (or being encouraged to write to trends?) or yet another example of white authors trying to profit off things that authors of color accomplished first. To be clear, I don’t know the race of the author who wrote the other book about Misaka, but I’m fairly certain they are not Japanese.

Follow-up: