Kira-Kira

views updated

Kira-Kira

CYNTHIA KADOHATA
2004

INTRODUCTION
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
PLOT SUMMARY
CHARACTERS
THEMES
STYLE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
CRITICISM
SOURCES
FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

Cynthia Kadohata's Kira-Kira, published in 2004, is the story of a young Japanese American girl growing up in the 1950s. This is Kadohata's first book for young adults, following several adult novels. It highlights the work and life experiences of Japanese Americans in the pre-Civil Rights era, as well as their struggles to achieve the American dream. The novel explores the relationship between individual and community identity. In Kira-Kira, community helps to define the individual. The main character, Katie, develops her sense of self through her experiences and relationships with others—friends and family, neighbors, teachers, and peers.

Katie chronicles her family's life in the United States. In her first-person narration she emphasizes the lessons in honesty, love, disappointment, and hope that her sister, brother, and parents teach her. Although the novel recounts the many hardships the family endures—back-breaking work, poverty, racism, illness, and death—it also focuses on those moments in life that are kira-kira, which means "glittering" in Japanese. These are the moments when the characters of the novel experience the things that make life worth living: beauty, happiness, and hope.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Cynthia Kadohata was born in 1956 in Evanston, Illinois, the daughter of Japanese American parents. She has a journalism degree from the University of Southern California and attended graduate writing programs at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh. Kadohata believes her writing has been shaped by her family's experience as Japanese Americans, which included frequent moves across the United States in search of work. Kadohata drew on her family's experience for Kira-Kira, her novel for young readers which received the 2004 Newbery Medal.

Kadohata was hailed as a new voice in American fiction in 1989, with the publication of her first book, The Floating World. Like Kira-Kira, this book also features a young girl's first-person narration of her family's moves throughout the United States. The Floating World was widely reviewed and praised for its masterful writing. Kadohata also published In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992), set in the futuristic Los Angeles of 2052. She has frequently contributed short stories to periodicals such as The New Yorker, Grand Street, Ploughshares, and the Pennsylvania Review.

Kadohata has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Whiting Writer's Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. In 2006, Kadohata will publish Weedflower, another novel for young readers. Weedflower tells the story of a friendship between a young Japanese American girl living in an internment camp and a young Mojave boy living on the reservation. In Weedflower, as in Kira-Kira, Kadohata draws on her family's experiences. Kadohata's father was interned with his parents, in a camp that was on the Colorado River Indian Reservation in Arizona.

Although she derives material from her Japanese American background, Kadohata does not like to be regarded only as an Asian American writer. She believes this label limits her ability to go beyond preconceived ideas that some readers may have about Asian Americans.

PLOT SUMMARY

Chapters 1-4

The novel is a first-person narration by Katie Takeshima, the middle child of Japanese-American parents. It chronicles her life from the age of five to her teenage years in southern Georgia. An older Katie tells the story, reflecting on her childhood as well as her relationship with her family and others in the community where she lives. The novel begins when Katie is five years old and living in Iowa. This period of her life is idyllic. She plays constantly with her older sister Lynn, whom she adores. The strong bond with her sister is established here in the opening chapters. Lynn takes care of her while her parents work, and teaches Katie her first word, kira-kira—the Japanese word for "glittering"—those beautiful things in the world that are sources of happiness, such as the sky, the stars, and flowers.

The first chapter offers a scene that is essential to understanding the themes in the novel. Katie and Lynn are playing near a cornfield and when Lynn runs off into the field to hide. Katie becomes upset and begins to cry. Lynn quickly comes out of the field to comfort her, but a vicious dog charges at them. After the dog tears Katie's pants and scrapes her leg with his teeth, Lynn manages to distract him and take Katie to safety, but the dog then attacks Lynn. Frightened for her sister, Katie throws a bottle of milk at him, and the dog runs away. Katie believes Lynn saved her life, but in Lynn's diary entry for that day, transcribed in the novel, she writes, "Later, when the dog attacked me, Katie saved my life." The way the sisters' love for each other saves them is a recurring theme throughout the novel.

The Takeshimas' Oriental grocery store fails because there are few Asians living in their Iowa town, and the family moves to Georgia. On the trip from Iowa to Georgia, Katie begins to learn about racism. When the family stops at a motel to spend the night, they are told that they may only stay in the back rooms reserved for Indians. When Katie's father explains they are not Indian, the woman at the front desk replies that the back rooms are for Mexicans, too. Katie protests that they are not Mexicans, either, but her father quietly fills out the registration card, telling the woman that the back room is fine. He does not argue with the woman at the motel because his family needs a place to sleep.

With the help of her Uncle Katsuhisa, Katie's parents get jobs in a chicken hatchery and poultry processing plant. Her father sexes chickens—he divides the male chicks from the female—and her mother is responsible for cutting drumsticks off chicken bodies in the processing plant. Their jobs require that Katie's parents spend many hours away from home and her father sometimes sleeps at the hatchery because the work hours are so long. Her mother often works extra hours and comes home exhausted. Katie, Lynn, and their little brother Sammy must sometimes fend for themselves and take care of each other.

Only thirty-one Japanese Americans live in the Takeshimas' town—Chesterfield, Georgia—and they keep to themselves. The rest of the town's population does not even seem to understand where they are from. When Katie starts school, the other children ask her "Are you Chinese or Japanese?" and "What's your native name?" even though Katie has developed a southern accent and has lived in America her whole life. Aside from their questions, the kids at school ignore her, just as Lynn warned that they might. The children at school do not speak to Lynn, either, and the only friends Katie's and Lynn's parents have are the few Japanese people living in their apartment complex. Lynn tells Katie that the townspeople believe the Japanese are worthless, "like doormats—or ants or something!" and the two sisters vow to live near each other by the sea when they grow up. The Takeshimas' youngest son Samson Ichiro Takeshima—Sammy—is born in this early part of the novel as well.

Chapters 5-8

Katie takes care of Sammy the same way Lynn took care of her, spending all her spare time with him. Lynn practices writing short stories in her diary, mostly about living by the sea. She begins to feel ill and worries that she cannot help Katie with her homework. Lynn is an excellent student who gets As in school, while Katie gets straight Cs. She is bored by schoolwork and does not apply herself.

When Lynn is fourteen, she begins to make friends at school—because she is so pretty, according to Katie. Lynn becomes best friends with Amber, a white American girl, "one of those really girlie girls who paint their fingernails and even their toenails." Katie watches as Lynn transforms into a young woman. As Lynn develops an interest in boys and a longing to fit in with her American peers, Katie feels as though she and her sister are growing apart. She resents the fact that Lynn still sees her as a child. Lynn and Amber convince Uncle Katsuhisa to take the family camping so that they can be near some boys from school who are also camping that weekend. Lynn and Amber leave Katie behind to flirt with the boys, and they return to the campsite giggling and whispering. They tell Katie about their evening, "how Lynn had kissed Gregg, and how Amber had almost kissed the other boy, and how they were the cutest boys in the class." When Katie tells them about her fantasy boyfriend, Joe-John Abondondalarama, they laugh at her.

During the summer months when neither Lynn nor their neighbor Mrs. Kanagawa can take care of Katie and Sammy, they go with their mother to the processing plant and wait in the car until their mother finishes her shift. Katie discusses her mother's work, remarking on the town's prejudice against the people who work in the poultry industry. She learns about union organizing, and discovers that Mr. Lyndon, the owner, has hired a thug to intimidate workers and prevent unionization at his poultry farms. Her mother opposes unions, believing it is "wrong to fight the people who are trying to help you." Katie hates seeing her mother work in poor conditions at the factory and vows to one day have enough money to buy the factory and treat the workers well. While waiting in the car, Katie meet Sylvia Kilgore—Silly—a girl approximately Katie's age who does laundry at the plant and who later becomes Katie's first friend.

Chapters 9-12

Lynn is increasingly weak and nauseous, often sleeping through the day and staying home from school. At first her parents thinks it is only anemia, but the problem appears to be growing more serious and they take Lynn to the hospital. When they return home, her parents tell Katie that "Lynn's anemia was 'acting up' and she just needed more liver." Katie's parents apply for a loan to help them buy a house. They feel a house of their own might help improve Lynn's health. Lynn's health does seem to improve once they move, and everyone is certain their new house has brought them good fortune.

The children plan a picnic to celebrate their new home. They go to the unfenced grounds on Mr. Lyndon's property, where Sammy's foot gets caught in an animal trap. Katie frees Sammy from the trap, then she and Lynn struggle to carry him home on a blanket stretched between them. Worried about her brother's worsening condition and Lynn's exhaustion, Katie runs to some nearby houses to get help. Ultimately Hank Garvin, a handsome stranger, takes them to a hospital. Katie is surprised that a white person can be so helpful; thanks to his assistance, Sammy is not seriously hurt.

Later that year Lynn is hospitalized; because Katie's mother often stays with Lynn, Katie and Sammy sometimes sleep at the poultry farm with their father. They amuse themselves by playing with male chicks that are unimportant to the business because they cannot lay eggs. Katie even steals a few of them and frees them in a nearby field. Katie and Sammy bring coffee and doughnuts to the workers, and rub their backs as they work through twelve-hour shifts. Katie's playful adventure at the farm contrasts with the laborers' lives. She describes the harsh working conditions: how the workers all sleep in the same room, hardly change their clothes, and only get four hours of sleep a night. Katie is worried by how exhausted her father looks.

Lynn comes home from the hospital but is so ill she cannot attend school. Katie often stays home to spend time with her, reading to her from a set of used encyclopedias. One day when Lynn is especially sad, she tells Katie she wishes she had glittery pink nail polish. Wanting to please her sister, Katie steals the nail polish from a five and dime store. It is the first time she has ever stolen anything, and she escapes from the store successfully even though someone sees her do it. The next day after school, she returns home to find the cashier who had seen her steal the nail polish. Her mother pays the woman for the nail polish and promises she will be punished. Katie's father orders her to personally apologize to the owners of the five and dime for having stolen their property. He also finally admits why Lynn is sick. She has lymphoma, a word that Katie learns is a type of cancer when she looks it up in the dictionary. She realizes that Lynn might die.

Chapters 13-16

Because of Lynn's mounting medical bills and their house mortgage, Katie's parents work all the time, leaving the children alone a great deal. Lynn's health worsens; she and Katie get into their first fight, each telling the other "I hate you." Uncle Katsuhisa takes his family, Katie, Sammy, Silly, and Jedda-boy, a land surveyor friend, on a Thanksgiving camping trip to distract them from the sadness caused by Lynn's illness. On the way to the campsite, they get lost and the truck gets stuck near the edge of a cliff. Once they get going again, Katie falls out of the truck through a loose door without anyone noticing and a few minutes pass before the truck stops and turns around to pick her up.

After listening to Jedda-Boy's stories about his land-surveying adventures, Katie asks Auntie Fumi when Uncle Katsuhisa will become a land surveyor. Fumi answers that no one in Georgia would hire a Japanese man as a land surveyor, so his dream will never be realized. However, she says, "It's different for you children. You're younger, the world is changing."

Mrs. Muramoto, a neighbor, holds a big party on New Year's Eve, the biggest holiday of the year for the Japanese. Katie describes the yearly ritual of staying at the party until ten o'clock, returning home to sleep for a few hours, then waking up before dawn to write down her hatsu-yume, "first dream of the New Year." According to the custom, their family then meets other Japanese families in an empty lot to watch the sunrise, "the traditional way to celebrate New Year's in Japan." But this New Year's Eve, Katie stays with Lynn, and Lynn makes her promise that she will get better grades, go to college, and take care of their parents and Sammy. Katie goes out to the empty lot alone to watch the sunrise, and cries.

I cried and cried. For a while as I cried I hated my parents, as if it were their fault that Lynn was sick. Then I cried because I loved my parents so much…. I wondered if anyone else in history had ever been as sad as I was at that moment.

Lynn dies that morning and her family grieves for her. When Katie learns that Lynn died alone, she regrets leaving to watch the sunrise. She thinks, "I had no idea whether it mattered or not to her that she had been alone at the exact moment she died. But I thought maybe it did." Katie and her mother scour the house for things that belonged to Lynn in order to keep them: stray hairs, a chewed-on pencil, newspapers from when she was alive. Katie cuts a lock of her own hair and ties it around Lynn's neck.

That same day, angry and frustrated that he could not help Lynn, Katie's father commands Katie to show him the animal trap that hurt Sammy's leg (the boy still limps from the accident). After finding the trap, he and Katie drive to Mr. Lyndon's house where, overcome by emotion, he smashes the windshield of Mr. Lyndon's car with a two-by-four. They drive away from the scene and don't stop until they reach the next town, where a sheriff questions them about what they are doing. He is looking for the person who damaged Mr. Lyndon's car. Katie tells him that her sister has just died and that they were on their way to get tacos. The sheriff lets them go.

Katie writes a eulogy recounting a special memory of Lynn, which she delivers at Lynn's funeral. Katie's father cries at the graveside, the first time Katie has ever seen him do so. With Uncle Katsuhisa's help, she creates an altar in Lynn's honor. She places treasured objects that belonged to her sister in a special wooden box, makes a bowl of rice for her, and places both on the altar. Believing that Lynn's spirit is watching her, Katie tries to do better in school to honor the promise she made to her sister, and she gets an A on her math test. Katie's father takes her with him to apologize to Mr. Lyndon for damaging his car and is immediately fired from his job. Luckily he gets another job at another hatchery, one not owned by Mr. Lyndon. According to Katie, her father's apology to Mr. Lyndon was a defining moment, because he realized that they had a choice about whether to "be an unhappy family forever, or not." They could determine their own futures. Katie learns that "even when you're very, very wrong, if you apologize, you can still hold yourself with dignity."

Katie's mother, resistant to unionizing efforts throughout the novel, joins the union of hatchery workers and they win by one vote. She decides to support the union when she learns that it will give workers paid leave when a family member dies. "It was a little late for my mother," Katie recounts, "but if she voted yes, she knew it would not be too late for the next family suffering grief." When the holiday season arrives, Katie's father decides that the family needs a vacation. Katie suggests they travel to the California coast because it had been Lynn's lifelong dream to live by the ocean. After a trip to Lynn's grave, Katie's father tells her that Lynn wanted Katie to have her diary. As Katie reads it she learns more about Lynn. Katie discovers that she was the "only person mentioned every single day, even if she just wrote something like, Katie got another C today." Katie decides she will go to college to honor Lynn's memory.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Kira-Kira was released in an unabridged version on audio CD by Listening Library in 2005. It is narrated by Elaina Erika Davis.

The Takeshimas drive to California and arrive on December 31, near the first anniversary of Lynn's death. The family walks to the beach on New Year's Day and Katie wishes "Lynn could have lived to see the sea with us!… I don't think anyone understood as well as I did how badly Lynn had longed to walk along the water the way my family and I did that New Year's Day." Although she is sad that Lynn is no longer with them, Katie believes she hears her sister's voice in the waves, saying kira-kira.

CHARACTERS

Joe-John Abondondalarama

Joe-John Abondondalarama is a figment of Katie's imagination. He is her idea of a perfect boyfriend; she often daydreams about how they will meet and the kind of life they will have with their seven children. Amber and Lynn laugh when she tells them about Joe-John, so she pretends that she is just kidding.

Amber

Amber is Lynn's best friend. She introduces Lynn to an American lifestyle, as well as to her ideas about how girls should behave and how they should interact with boys. Lynn spent all of her time with Katie when she was younger; Amber represents a new phase in Lynn's life as she is finally accepted by her American peers. Katie does not like Amber and sees her as competition for her sister's attention. She also thinks that Amber is frivolous and only cares about boys and looking grown-up. Eventually, Amber drops Lynn as a friend when Lynn becomes sick.

Auntie Fumi

Auntie Fumi is Uncle Katsuhisa's wife and Katie's aunt. She is described as a round and loving woman who comforts Katie when she is troubled. She often defends Katie when Uncle Katsuhisa treats her with harsh impatience. Auntie Fumi and Uncle Katsuhisa come over and play board games with Katie and Sammy when their parents are tending to Lynn in the hospital.

Hank Garvin

Hank Garvin takes Sammy Takeshima to the hospital when his foot gets caught in an animal trap on Mr. Lyndon's property. This is Katie's first encounter with a white man who shows a genuine desire to help her or her family. She is also infatuated with him, despite their age difference. Katie's parents are grateful that he was able to help Sammy, Katie, and Lynn; they give him a watch to thank him for his kindness. He attends Lynn's funeral with his wife.

Jedda-Boy

Jedda-Boy is Uncle Katsuhisa's friend, a land surveyor who goes camping with the family. He represents what Uncle Katsuhisa wants professionally, but is barred from having because of his race.

Uncle Katsuhisa

Uncle Katsuhisa is Mr. Takeshima's brother, and uncle to Katie, Lynn, and Sammy. He is boisterous and very active, whereas Katie's father is a quiet thinker. Katsu is the Japanese word for "triumph," a word that describes Uncle Katsuhisa well. It is Uncle Katsuhisa who secures employment for his brother and sister-in-law at the hatchery in Georgia when the Takeshimas' Asian grocery store fails in Iowa. He drives his dilapidated truck to Iowa to help them move, entertaining Lynn and Katie on the drive with silly songs about their names. Although he is happy and economically stable, he has always wanted to survey land instead of working at a hatchery. He feels no one will hire him as a surveyor because he is Japanese. Although he appears rough he is very caring and loving toward all the Takeshima children; he is a source of fun for them because he always takes them and his own family camping. After Lynn dies, he helps Katie confront her grief and build an altar to honor her sister.

Mrs. Kanagawa

Mrs. Kanagawa is the neighbor who watches the neighborhood children while their parents work. She lives in the same apartment complex as the Takeshimas in Chesterfield, Georgia.

Silly Kilgore

Sylvia Kilgore, who goes by Silly, is Katie's only friend. They meet in the parking lot of the processing plant where Katie's mother works. Silly works at the plant doing the morning laundry. Silly approaches Katie while she sits in the car; their first conversation takes place through the rolled-down window. Silly's mother supports the unionization of the processing plant workers, and Katie's mother tells her to stay away from Silly. Eventually they become good friends and Silly goes camping with the family. It is at Silly's mother's union meeting that Katie's mother decides to join the union.

Sylvia Kilgore

See Silly Kilgore

Mr. Lyndon

Mr. Lyndon is the wealthy owner of the chicken hatchery and poultry business where Katie's parents work. He is one of the richest men in Georgia and lives in a former plantation mansion. He hires anti-union thugs to intimidate his employees and prevent unionization. He does not care about anything or anyone but his own wealth, and his neighbors despise him. He places animal traps on his property when there is no reason to do so, needlessly endangering people. Sammy catches his leg in one of these traps and must be taken to the hospital. On the day of Lynn's death, Katie's father—full of rage that is seeking a target—drives to Mr. Lyndon's house and smashes his windshield. When he apologizes for having damaged Mr. Lyndon's car, Mr. Lyndon replies that he is sorry about Lynn's death but does not accept this as an excuse. He fires Mr. Takeshima from his job and orders him to pay for the damages to the car.

Katie Takeshima

Katie is the first-person narrator of the novel and its main character. She is the middle daughter of Japanese American parents who move from Iowa to Georgia when Katie is five years old. Katie is very close to her older sister Lynn and protective of her younger brother Sammy. She is a young girl trying to determine her identity and where she belongs. She explores these issues by recounting her experiences with members of her family and people in the community around her. Through Katie's eyes, the reader learns about responsibility, the importance of love for self and others, and what it means to have a home. Katie tends to Lynn when she is ill and watches over Sammy while their parents are working long shifts. Although she is only a young girl, Katie pulls the family together when Lynn dies of lymphoma. She makes healthy meals, cleans the house, and generally keeps things in order because her parents are too distraught to do so. She also proposes a family trip to California, because her sister had always wanted to go there and see the ocean.

Lynn Takeshima

Lynn Takeshima is Katie's older sister and a principal focus in the novel. Katie's narration recounts many experiences she has with her sister while growing up. Lynn is intelligent and caring, a straight-A student who watches out for Katie as she grows up. She teaches Katie about racism, friendship, and love, but most importantly, about kira-kira, the things that make life worth living, like "the beautiful blue sky, puppies, kittens, butterflies". Lynn dreams of living with Katie in a high-rise apartment building while they go to college, and then living by the ocean in California. To Katie, Lynn seems almost perfect, someone who can do no wrong. The family is constantly trying to please Lynn in an effort to improve her health, and when they move to their new house they consider it "Lynn's house." Lynn becomes ill with what the family thinks is anemia. However she also has lymphoma, a form of cancer, and she dies on New Year's Day. Katie spends much of New Year's Eve with Lynn, but she leaves to watch the sunrise and is not with her sister when she dies.

Mr. Takeshima

Mr. Takeshima is Katie's father. He is a hardworking, first-generation Japanese American whose main concern is his wife and children. He generally struggles through life without complaining, but sometimes he lashes out at the people he believes are hurting his family. For example, he searches for the animal trap that hurt Sammy and subsequently smashes Mr. Lyndon's windshield. Nevertheless, he teaches Katie about the importance of being honest, facing responsibilities, and putting family before oneself. Katie has complete faith in her father's ability to take care of the family. She describes him as a thoughtful and contemplative man, given to reading and thinking rather than talking loudly or sharing opinions like Uncle Katsuhisa. Katie feels that her father is always proud of her, no matter what she does.

Mrs. Takeshima

Mrs. Takeshima is Katie's mother. She is hardworking and strict, but also sensitive: "She was so delicate that if you bumped into her accidentally, you could bruise her." She cherishes peace and quiet, and often tells her children to keep quiet. She is often dismayed at the way her daughters depart from her ideal of Japanese womanhood, and she considers sending them to Japan to become more feminine. Her only concern seems to be her family; she works in demeaning conditions at the poultry processing plant to earn money for a house. At first she opposes unionization at the plant, but she supports the union after Lynn's death. Her decision to join the union makes Katie proud, though she leaves her feelings unspoken.

Sammy Takeshima

Sammy Takeshima is Katie's younger brother, whom she treats like a son. His full name is Samson Ichiro Takeshima. Ichiro means "first son" in Japanese. Katie pays as much attention to him as Lynn did to her growing up, and Katie is his "special favorite." When Sammy's leg gets caught in an animal trap on Mr. Lyndon's property, Katie rushes to get help taking him to a hospital.

THEMES

Racism

Set mostly in pre—Civil Rights era Georgia, the novel accurately portrays the treatment of Japanese Americans in the United States in the 1950s. Though they are U.S. citizens, the Japanese American characters in Kira-Kira are continuously treated as outsiders and excluded from mainstream society. In several instances, the Takeshimas encounter people who do not even recognize them as Japanese; at the motel, the front-desk woman assumes they are Indian or Mexican, and when Katie starts school the other students ask if she is Chinese or Japanese. They cannot compete with whites for the same jobs, they are relegated to special sections for "colored people," and are generally regarded with suspicion. The characters experience others' racism as alienating and isolating. Interestingly, even though much of the novel is set in the South, there is no mention of African Americans or any other ethnic groups who might share similar life experiences with the Japanese Americans. Although the novel does not express any direct opinions about whites as a group, the characters who are not Japanese are viewed with suspicion and often portrayed as less caring or thoughtful than the Japanese characters.

Identity

The novel is concerned with the question of identity on many levels. Katie and her family are Japanese Americans living in the American South of the 1950s. Although she was born and raised in the United States, Katie often struggles to reconcile her Japanese upbringing with the customs and traditions of her native country. The question of identity is also explored in regard to gender roles—in Katie's case, the question of what it means to be a woman. Katie's mother often berates her and her sister for not being feminine enough because they are growing up in the United States. She tells them that she will send them to Japan to become properly feminine, and she curls Katie's hair in pin curls and dresses her in a party dress on the first day of school. Katie, who is changing from a young girl to an adolescent, wonders about what it means to be feminine. She is annoyed by Amber and Lynn's preening and gossiping about boys, but she also wants to be a part of it.

Identity is also explored in terms of the role that a person occupies within a family. Even though Katie is a middle child whom others sometimes see as irresponsible or childish, she lifts the family out of the depression caused by Lynn's death. It is she who takes over housekeeping and cooking chores while her parents are working overtime to pay the mortgage and Lynn's medical bills, and she takes care of Sammy just as well as Lynn took care of her. Various definitions of identity evolve throughout the novel; its meaning changes according to the life experiences of the characters.

Love and Kinship

Despite the many hardships the Takeshimas endure in the novel, their love for one another maintains a strong spirit and a willingness to continue living. Love is primarily expressed in the relations between the family members, communicated in the ways they make sacrifices and care for one another, the lessons they teach each other, and even in the legacies they leave behind. The Takeshimas also show love in their ability to see beauty and good in the world, even when the dark and unpleasant side of life seems most prominent. Mr. Takeshima works tirelessly at two jobs to support the family, but he never questions whether the sacrifice is worth it. The children save the nickels their father gives them for snacks, planning to help pay for the house and eventually saving one hundred dollars. Uncle Katsuhisa shares his secret grief over a lost infant son to help Katie gain perspective on the loss of her sister. The characters also perceive love as a saving force. At the beginning of the novel when Katie is chased by a dog, Lynn protects her and is attacked by the dog. Katie comes to her rescue by throwing a bottle of milk at the dog. In the sisters' different accounts of the story, each speaks of the other girl's bravery. The love each has for the other saves them both.

The American Dream

The American dream is the idea—some might say myth—that hard work and determination result in economic prosperity and social mobility. As immigrants and members of a minority, Katie's family struggles to achieve the elusive American dream. Even though Katie's parents work long hours to buy a house, an act that they believe might save Katie's sister Lynn, they are plagued by medical bills and mortgage payments. The novel shows the Takeshima family achieving limited success; the success they do achieve sometimes requires that they sacrifice long-held beliefs. For example, Katie's mother realizes that her antiunion view is hurting not only her own family, but other plant workers' families as well. At the same time, the novel's focus on economic inequality and racism demonstrates how these forces could make it impossible to satisfy an immigrant family's basic material needs and desires in 1950s America. Katie's description of Mr. Lyndon's house, which "seemed as big as a castle," illustrates the economic disparities between workers and management. His sense of entitlement and ruthless treatment of his workers further confirms this unfairness. However, Mr. Takeshima's apology to Mr. Lyndon illustrates people can maintain their dignity and integrity even though the material prosperity of the American dream may remain beyond their reach. Ultimately, the novel's focus on discriminatory social practices presents a critique of the idea that hard work brings economic prosperity. The family's emphasis on kira-kira shows that perhaps not everyone's goal should be to achieve wealth. However, the tragedies and hardships that the family endures demonstrate the importance of access to fair wages and equal opportunities.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Research the U.S. labor movement in the twentieth century. What segments of the population joined unions? Did some ethnic groups participate in the unions more than others? What were women's roles in the unions? Write a five-paragraph paper detailing the pros and cons of joining a union. Tell the reader whether you would join one, and include the reasons for your decision.
Keep a diary for a week, and write down your activities, thoughts, impressions of other people, opinions about ideas and news that you heard during the week, and things you would like to do in the future. Write a three-paragraph paper describing anything you learned about yourself from keeping a diary.
Interview family members, friends, and people in your community about their thoughts on identity. Ask your interviewees how they define the term "identity." Does it refer to family heritage, to nationality, to the language(s) they speak, to gender, or to something else? Write a three-page report detailing your findings and include your own definition of identity in your report. Consider the age, gender, and religious background of the people you interview.
Research an ethnic group in the United States other than your own. What country did they emigrate from, where have they settled geographically, what kind of general experiences have they had in the United States, what are their traditions and customs, and what languages do they speak? Write a two-page essay detailing your findings.
Write a two-page short story in which the narrator is a young girl or boy whose parents were not born in the United States. Write the story using a first-person narrator. Imagine his or her thoughts, feelings, relationships, and activities regarding American culture. Explore differences and similarities between American culture and the culture of your narrator's parents. How does your narrator cope with these differences?

Hope

Kira-Kira is undeniably a story about hope and the power of dreams. Hope is the mechanism that drives the Takeshima family, both as a group and as individuals. No matter how desperate or difficult the situation, the Takeshimas see an opportunity for hope and a chance for something better, something kira-kira. The promise of a better livelihood leads the Takeshimas from Iowa to a small town in Georgia. Mr. and Mrs. Takeshima work around the clock at exhausting jobs, persisting because it offers the hope of owning a home. After Lynn dies, Katie and Sammy become their parents' source of hope and their reason to continue their hard work: "[Mr. Takeshima] needed to think about his children who were still alive, because he was honor-bound to think of the living before the dead." Lynn's hopes for she and Katie as college students and her dream of them living by the sea come to shape Katie's aspirations. The Takeshimas trip to the coast at the end of the novel fills Katie with hope, as "the water started to make [her] feel happy again."

STYLE

Foreign Language

Beginning with the title of the novel, Japanese words and their English translations appear throughout the narration. The use of foreign words has a critical function; Japanese terms and the cultural meanings they connote are woven into the very fabric of Katie's American life. They show the two halves of her existence: her cultural Japanese roots and her American lifestyle. Whenever a Japanese word is used, its English definition is also provided, allowing readers who are not Japanese to participate fully in the story. Words such as kira-kira (glittering), katsu (triumph), ochazuke (green tea mixed with rice), shizukami (hush), and hatsu-yume (first dream of the New Year), name and translate the Japanese and American characteristics of Katie's life, for both Katie and the reader.

Point of View

The novel is entirely composed of a first-person narration by the main character, Katie Takeshima. The reader thus learns about events, relationships, feelings, and ideas only through Katie's eyes. Additionally, Katie is telling this story from a distance, some years after the events have occurred. Because she is somewhat removed from the story, she can use hindsight to understand and communicate some events more clearly. The first-person narrative style expresses one of the main goals of the novel: to show life events filtered through the eyes of a young girl just beginning to discover the world around her.

Realism

Realism is a method of depicting events accurately and realistically in art and literature, without idealizing or romanticizing what is happening. Realism allows readers to relate to events and emotions and to connect with characters. Description is one of the ways to accomplish a realistic portrayal of a time and place. Much of this novel is dedicated to describing events and environments as they really are, such as people's physical characteristics, nature, and the minute details of a house's interior space. Lynn's death, for example, is not peaceful and lovely with everyone relieved that she is out of pain; instead, it is a messy, life-shattering event in the Takeshima family. Before her death, Lynn's "breath [was] catching heartbreakingly, as if breathing had become a hardship for her body. Her hair had grown stringy." Though it would have been poetic to have had Lynn die surrounded by her family and uttering final farewells, Cynthia Kadohata instead approaches her death realistically, as it could possibly have happened in a busy family on a holiday night: Lynn died when no one was in the room. "'Who was with her?' [Katie] asked. [Her] father's voice broke as he said, 'Nobody.'"

Symbol

A symbol suggests or stands for something else without losing its original identity. In literature, symbols combine their literal meaning with the suggestion of an abstract concept. In this novel, the house serves as a symbol of realizing the American dream. A house means stability and a reward for sacrifices. Katie's parents work grueling hours doing demeaning work to save enough money to buy a house. Even the children save their allowances, to give the money back to their parents as a contribution toward this goal. When Lynn becomes ill, the house is considered a source of happiness and even seems to contain the possibility of a cure. They believe Lynn will recover when they buy the house because she will be so happy.

Another symbol in the novel is the road, which represents the family's quest for a better life as well as each character's search for his or her own identity. The road is thus a symbol of the space that must be traveled—through life experiences and relationships with others—to get to the desired destination. The Takeshima family travels by car from Iowa to Georgia, and on vacation from Georgia to California. Katie's mother and father must spend over an hour driving to work each day. When Katie and Sammy have to go with their mother to the processing plant early in the morning, Katie says, "The road was empty, like so many roads we had driven on inmylife." AfterMr. Takeshima loses his job at the hatchery, he knows that there are more opportunities down the road: "I've heard there's an opening at a hatchery in Missouri. If it's time to move on, it's time to move on." The road, as a physical space, is where Lynn and Katie often lie in their pajamas as young children in order to look at the stars. It symbolizes the space of imagination and aspiration.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Post-World War II American and Japanese Society

The United States entered World War II after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1941. In 1942, the U.S. government decreed that all Japanese people residing in the United States, including second- and third-generation American citizens, should be placed in internment camps, because it was thought that they might engage in treasonous activities against the United States. Japanese Americans were held prisoner, forced to leave their jobs, property, and possessions until the end of the war in 1945. Millions of dollars in property were lost. Some years later, the Japanese who were interned were compensated at ten cents for every dollar lost. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed into law by President George H. Bush, apologized for the internment and offered reparations to thousands of Japanese Americans who were denied their civil and constitutional rights by the U.S. government during World War II. Though neither Katie nor her parents were held in internment camps, they were still subject to the lingering social distrust toward Japanese Americans after the war. Additionally, in many areas of the South, if a person was not Caucasian he or she was considered to be "colored" regardless of ethnicity and therefore subject to discriminatory Jim Crow laws.

Asian-American Literature

Amy Ling notes in "Teaching Asian American Literature" that Asian American literature often has several broad aims:

to remember the past, give voice to a hitherto silent people with an ignored and therefore unknown history, to correct stereotypes of an exotic or foreign experience and thus, as [writer Maxine] Hong Kingston says, to claim America for the thousands of Americans whose Asian faces too frequently deny them a legitimate place in the country of their birth.

Asian-American literature cannot be fully appreciated without some background information on the historical and cultural contexts of Asians in the United States. Nor can the term "Asian American" be understood as a single entity, for it contains myriad nationalities and languages, dozens of religions, and a multitude of races as originating sources.

Asian-American literature is considered one of the subdivisions of multicultural or multiethnic literature. According to Gonzalo Ramirez and Jan Lee, there are two kinds of multicultural literature: multiethnic children's literature and melting pot literature. Multiethnic children's literature usually addresses the following themes: heritage, the battle against racism and discrimination, everyday experiences, urban civilization, friendship, and family relationships. Cultural problems arise as the protagonist is caught between two cultures and must learn to survive. Melting pot books do not address racial issues but emphasize that Asian Americans have the same lifestyle as any other American.

Asian-American literature first emerged in the 1940s, but at that time it was generally non-Asians who wrote books about Asia or Asian Americans. After the end of World War II, there were many Japanese Americans who wrote autobiographies about their experiences in the internment camps in the United States. The first Chinese author to achieve financial success in the United States, C. Y. Lee, was a mentor to many other Asian writers. He wrote The Flower Drum Song in 1955. In the 1970s, criticism began to emerge about the way that Asians were depicted in literature. Critics argued that the literature lacked diverse illustrations and characterization, and that most illustrations of Asians were drawn in exactly the same way, without regard for cultural or physical distinctions. These illustrations rarely portrayed Asians living in the contemporary United States, wearing modern clothing and living in modern housing. Instead, they offered a stereotyped and unrealistic picture of Asian-American life. There was a call for Asians to write about their experiences and for illustrators to create more accurate representations of Asian Americans. Since that time, many Asian-American authors have met with mainstream success, and authors and illustrators have created a more accurate picture of the Asian-American experience.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Although Kira-Kira is Cynthia Kadohata's first novel for young readers, the issues she raises and her narrative style bear many similarities to her previously published works of adult fiction, especially The Floating World. Critics often read her works in the context of Asian American literature published in the United States since the 1990s, especially in reference to gender, nationality, and identity. Kadohata's first novel, The Floating World (1989), is a kind of road drama featuring a Japanese American family's attempt to find a place of their own. Like Kira-Kira, The Floating World is set in the 1950s and narrated by a Japanese American girl, who recounts her family's experiences while traveling through the United States in search of good jobs and a home. While they are always included within the Asian American canon, other critics have read Kadohata's works as postmodern texts because of their emphasis on how gender affects society. Critics note that Kadohata utilizes mother-daughter relationships to emphasize changing views on womanhood in the Asian American community, like other Asian American writers such as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and R. A. Sasaki.

Critics often cite Kadohata's approachable writing style and characterization as an important reason for the uniform critical and popular success of Kira-Kira A review in The Christian Century called Kadohata's writing "extraordinary." In School Library Journal, Ashley Larsen notes, "All of the characters are believable and well developed, especially Katie…. Girls will relate to and empathize with the appealing protagonist." Hazel Rochman of Booklist includes Kira-Kira among her top ten historical novels for children and young adults, citing its "plain, beautiful prose." Winner of the 2005 John Newbery Medal for outstanding writing, Kira-Kira was praised by Award Committee Chair Susan Faust in Kadohata, Henkes win Newbery, Caldecott Medals" as "a narrative that radiates hope from the inside out."

CRITICISM

Peter Menard

Menard teaches comparative literature. In this essay, Menard considers Kadohata's book in relation to current debates within American and multi cultural literature.

Although it is a novel intended for young readers, Kadohata's Kira-Kira can be read within the author's entire body of work, which consists primarily of novels for an adult audience. Kira-Kira explores many of the same themes and issues that are present in all of Kadohata's novels. It is also representative of the debates occurring within American and multicultural literature.

In the 1960s, American literature began to move toward inclusion of ethnic, religious, and racial groups that had been left out of a traditionally "white" canon. As a result of the experiences of World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement, Americans looked for ways to redefine themselves. African Americans, Jewish Americans, and other groups whose experiences had largely been absent from the literary scene began to appear as both authors and characters to tell their stories. Many of these stories focused on the exclusion minorities had endured and their integration into the wider American community. According to Gilbert H. Muller in New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction, the Immigration Act of 1965 was part of a body of legislation and other social forces that helped to rewrite "the epic of America" in ways that emphasized the "polyglot, multicultural, and transnational" (quoted in Klinkowitz). This new epic was an idealized vision of an integrated nation—America as a melting pot of languages, traditions, customs, and ideologies.

By the 1970s and 1980s, however, some critics began to question this melting-pot model. These critics saw the multicultural vision as problematic not only because it supposed that the melting pot experience was possible, but because it also made the very notions of identity and difference hard to sustain. If integration relies on the idea of an all-encompassing American identity, what happens to the differences that excluded groups have used to define themselves? That is, what happens to the distinctive features—such as languages, traditions, customs, and religious practices—that made those groups' differences visible, unique, and valuable? The ambiguities that emerge in the effort to rewrite American literature and make it more inclusive require us to think again and more carefully about what it means to be an American.

The issues surrounding American ethnic literature are also tied to broader debates in postcolonial studies, a school of criticism that analyzes clashes between cultures and examines mechanisms of oppression and resistance. This school of thought argues that people do not necessarily identify themselves in terms of the places in which they live. For example, in Kira-Kira, Mrs. Muramoto holds a New Year's Eve party that features traditional Japanese customs and rituals. Katie says, "New Year's is the biggest holiday of the year for the Japanese." Though Mrs. Muramoto and the Takeshimas live in America and adopt many "American" ways of life, they identify themselves culturally as Japanese and maintain important Japanese traditions in their American lives.

Kira-Kira illustrates many of the ambiguities present in the debates mentioned above. The narrator is a young girl born in Iowa, but her frame of reference—the way in which she views the world—is colored by the language, traditions, and customs of Japan. This is largely because her parents are kibei, which means that they were born in the United States but educated in Japan. The characters of Japanese descent in the novel are defined primarily in cultural terms, that is, they are described in the context of their customs, traditions, myths, and folklore. However, the American characters are defined exclusively in racial terms as white. There are no other non-white ethnicities in Kira-Kira. Because race is the only feature used to describe the other American characters, the novel lacks the cultural components that would define what it means to be anything but a Japanese American. There is never any mention in the novel of "white" traditions, customs, or history; there are only descriptions of how, with few exceptions, whites exclude or look down upon those who are not white. Lynn, the narrator's sister, presents the conflict concisely as "us versus them":

"Haven't you noticed that Mom and Dad's only friends are Japanese?… That's because the rest of the people are ignoring them. They think we're like doormats—or ants or something!" Now she was really angry…. She suddenly reached out and hugged [Katie] to her. "You tell me if anybody treats you like that, and I'll take care of it!"

Lynn's statement illustrates the way that the Japanese characters in Kira-Kira view white people as a homogenous force threatening their existence as Japanese Americans. According to Katie's sister, Japanese people do not exist for white people, or if they do, they occupy a low position in the social hierarchy. This dynamic makes it difficult to group Kira-Kira within so-called multicultural texts, given that it is only the Japanese who are given a central and valued place in the cultural context of the novel, and the rest of the characters are viewed largely as a menace.

When whites are portrayed in a positive manner in the novel, there is often mention of what makes them different from and less admirable than the Japanese characters. The reader can see this as Katie recounts her friendship with Silly, a girl she meets when she accompanies her mother to the processing plant. Silly works part-time at the poultry plant because her uncle makes her earn her own money for school clothes. Katie thinks this is strange and reflects that even though her own parents are poor, they buy her all the school clothes she needs. In pointing out this difference, the narrative implies a judgment about families that fail to help their children in this way. By comparison, Katie's family stands out as exemplary.

Silly's case also points to the question of class differences in the novel. The discussion of class is based on extremes and stereotypes: the rich characters are evil, while the poor characters are morally upright and worthy of esteem. This characterization of class differences is further complicated by the fact that the rich characters are mostly white. The only white character who cannot be explained in these simplistic terms is Hank Garvin, the man who helps Katie take Sammy to the hospital after he catches his foot in an animal trap. The treatment of class in the novel suffers as a result of this idea that poverty is synonymous with moral virtue. This presupposition threatens the very premise of the novel: a family's quest for the American dream, which presupposes social and economic advancement.

Criticism that favors a multicultural perspective is also concerned with the treatment of gender in literature. Gender-based criticism focuses on how males and females are represented, the places they occupy in the community, and their views on sexuality. Before multicultural perspectives became more common, Asian women were often portrayed as exotic objects without voices of their own, and the male point of view predominated. Kira-Kira dismantles this idea. The novel shows how different life experiences lead all the women in the novel to acquire voices of their own and become independent individuals who do not depend on men to determine their destinies. Mrs. Takeshima, the mother, exemplifies this point. At the beginning of the novel she is described in stereotypical terms as a "delicate, rare, and beautiful flower," a fragile person who wishes only for quiet. As the novel progresses, her life-changing experiences—being forced to work under humiliating conditions to support her family, living through the illness and death of her eldest child, and adapting to life in Georgia—teach Mrs. Takeshima to speak for herself. This change has a significant impact on her family and community. Mrs. Takeshima's transformation is spurred by the prospect of unionization at the poultry processing plant where she works. Initially, she vehemently opposes unionization and sides with the owners because she is afraid of losing her job. However, Mrs. Takeshima attends a union meeting at the end of the novel after Katie tells her:

"The union wants to give the factory workers three days off with pay for grief leave, like if a family member dies." [Mrs. Takeshima] pursed her lips and looked at me severely. "It's a little late for that," she said. My mother didn't say anything more. But when the union vote was held the next week, the union won by one vote. That was a surprise, because everyone had expected it to lose by one vote. My mother seemed pleased that the union had won, so I knew how she'd voted.

Mrs. Takeshima's new-found voice mirrors the changed status that Katie, the narrator, acquires after her sister's death. At the beginning of the novel, Katie happily lives in Lynn's shadow and is willing to follow her sister anywhere. Katie is devastated when Lynn dies, but handles her grief by assuming a new role as the oldest daughter and sister in the family:

I was worried that her spirit was watching me every time I cried. I was worried that if she saw me crying, she would be very unhappy and maybe she wouldn't be able to leave the earth the way she was supposed to. So even though I wanted her to keep watching me, I wished she would forget about me and never see me crying and never worry about me anymore, even if that meant I was now alone.

Katie assumes the role of family caretaker in the wake of Lynn's death. After her parents give her Lynn's diary, she discovers that they waited to give it to her because they though it would be too upsetting. Katie says, "It was odd to hear them say that, because I'd thought it was I who'd taken care of them after Lynn died. But they seemed to think that they had taken care of me."

The whole family is grief-stricken and each blames him or herself for not being able to save Lynn; it is Katie who assumes responsibility for realizing Lynn's dream to visit the California coast. In fulfilling her sister's wish she is able to both mourn and celebrate her, giving her and her family the willpower to go on living. The transformation that she undergoes presents a clear challenge to stereotypical views of Asian women.

In spite of its broad generalizations, challenges to stereotypical American identity are the beating heart of Kira-Kira. As the debate over America's literary canon continues, it is clear that contributions like Kira-Kira are helping to rewrite the "epic of America."

Source: Peter Menard, Critical Essay on Kira-Kira, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Sarah A. Wood

In the following essay, Wood reviews Kira-Kira, and asserts that Kadohata's fiction style is similar to that of a memoir.

Kira-Kira is a Japanese word that describes things that glitter. It is Katie Takeshima's first word taught to her by her older sister Lynn as they lie in the empty road outside their house looking at the stars. Lynn teaches Katie everything worth knowing. When their family moves from their Japanese community in Iowa to Georgia, Lynn is the one who must explain why some of the other children won't talk to them at school.

The setting is 1950s Georgia. Katie's parents are American-born Japanese, but that doesn't change attitudes toward the family. Her mom and dad work in a poultry processing plant, in conditions typical of factories in the mid-1950s. Factory workers wear thick pads beneath their uniforms because they aren't allowed to take breaks to use the bathroom. Workers suffer permanent injury from long hours of performing the same tasks. They aren't given time off for sickness or family emergencies. Attempts to organize a union lead to beatings and other repercussions.

When Katie asks her mother about unions, her mother responds, "A union is when all the workers get together and fight the very people who have provided them with a job … It's wrong to fight the people who are trying to help you." Katie's mother is afraid of losing one of the few jobs available to Japanese-Americans.

Through the family's struggle to raise money for a home, it is Lynn who is always providing the link between the old and the new and helping the family to understand the process of assimilation. But when she gets sick, the family begins to fall apart. It is up to Katie to take on the role of big sister and eldest daughter.

Cynthia Kadohata is clearly a gifted writer. Her prose sparkles with a specificity that makes Kira-Kira read more like a memoir than fiction. There are many things in the book that are true. The conditions in post-war factories are true; in some places they still exist. The struggles of an American-born Japanese family are true, and the limitations placed on the family are still experienced by many immigrant families in this country. And the relationships in this book are true, especially the bond between Katie and her sister Lynn.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Sherry Garland's Shadow of the Dragon (1993) is the story of Danny Vo, a high school sophomore trying to resolve the conflict between his Vietnamese refugee family's values and his new American way of life.
Kadohata's first novel, The Floating World (1989), is a young girl's story of her family's travels across the United States in search of work. The experiences of Japanese Americans in the 1950s are the principal focus of this book.
Finding My Voice (1992), by Marie G. Lee, focuses on Ellen, a young woman who is growing up in a small Minnesota town. Her Korean parents pressure her to go to Harvard, while her classmates and some teachers create pressure with their racism, both subtle and overt. Ellen must learn to cope with these challenges.
Lois Lowry's A Summer to Die (1984) also deals with the death of an older sister and a younger sibling's struggle to cope with the situation.
Allen Say's Grandfather's Journey (1993) won the 1994 Caldecott Award. In this novel, a Japanese American man recounts his grandfather's journey to America and explores the feeling of being torn between two countries.
Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989) is the story of eight Chinese women. Four are mothers, each forced to leave China for a different reason; the other four are their daughters, each of whom faces a different set of problems in her everyday life. Each chapter is presented from a different woman's point of view. The most important character is Jing Mei "June" Woo, the daughter of the woman who started the Joy Luck Club. She is asked to join the club and play mah jong with her adoptive aunts after her mother dies.
Child of the Owl (1977), by Laurence Yep, is the story of a young girl named Casey, who has lived on the road with her gambling father. She is eventually forced to move in with her grandmother in Chinatown. Although she is Chinese American, she knows nothing about her Chinese heritage, and her grandmother begins to teach her about the Chinese culture and way of life. Casey learns about Chinese culture, her dead mother's life, and her own personal history.

Early in the book Lynn tells her sister, "The blue of the sky is one of the most special colors in the world, because the color is deep but see-through both at the same time." She adds that water and people's eyes have the same quality. Good fiction can also have this quality of depth and transparency; Kira-Kira certainly does.

Source: Sarah A Wood, "Review: Kira-Kira," in KidsReeds.com, Feburary 2004, p. 1.

Susan Faust

In this excerpt, Faust talks to Kadohata about how her experience as a Japanese-American growing up in the South influenced her writing and her Newbery Award-winning novel, Kira-Kira.

It was four in the morning on the West Coast, and Cynthia Kadohata's phone was ringing. This had better not be bad news or a crank caller. Kadohata's boyfriend grabbed the receiver, listened to the excited librarian on the line from Boston, and passed the phone to her. The next moment, Kadohata was leaping up and down: her first children's book, Kira-Kira (S & S, 2004), had just won the Newbery Medal, the nation's most prestigious award for young people's literature.

Since Kadohata began writing fiction in 1981, her career has had more ups and downs than the Grand Tetons. Her short stories appeared in The New Yorker. The New York Times praised the "beautiful, clean yet lyrical prose" of her first novel, The Floating World (Viking, 1989). And two years later, she won a Whiting Writers' Award, a $30,000 grant given to a writer of exceptional promise.

Then, suddenly, her career hit the skids. Kadohata's second novel, In the Heart of the Valley of Love (Viking, 1992), met with mixed reviews. Her third, The Glass Mountains (White Wolf, 1995), was virtually snubbed. By the late-'90s, the one-time wunderkind was all but forgotten, working as a secretary at a food-processing plant and struggling to write screenplays. An old friend suggested she write for kids. Kadohata resisted, but her friend—Caitlyn Dlouhy, now an editor at Simon & Schuster's Atheneum Books for Young Readers—persisted. Giving in to Dlouhy's suggestion turned out to be the best career move Kadohata ever made.

Kira-Kira ("glittering" in Japanese) tells the tender story of a Japanese-American family that moves from Iowa to rural Georgia in the 1950s. The quiet novel radiates hope as its narrator, young Katie Takeshima, recounts her parents' struggles to earn a living and her older sister's battle with lymphoma. Like Katie, Kadohata was born in the Midwest to Japanese-American parents. She grew up in small-town Arkansas and Georgia, where her father, like Katie's, worked long hours in a chicken-processing plant. Kadohata spent her teen years in Los Angeles and studied journalism at the University of Southern California and creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. Now 48, she and her 20-month-old son, Sammy (whom she adopted from Kazakhstan), live in Long Beach, CA, where we caught up with her.

What was your reaction when you found out that Kira-Kira had won?

It was just complete, pure, uncomplicated joy. I kept screaming. I'm in my pajamas and robe, and I'm jumping up and down. Sammy didn't know what was going on. Caitlyn called shortly after I hung up, and then we both screamed.

I heard she convinced you to write for kids by sending you a box of children's books. Why were you so resistant?

I didn't really think that I could do it. It seemed like a whole other world. And then when I read the books, I realized that it's exactly the same process whether you're writing for kids or grown-ups. I thought, "Hey, I should try this."

How did the idea for Kira-Kira originate?

Maybe with my father, because he worked really hard and many, many long hours. Then came the voice of the girl, Katie. When I'm writing a first-person novel, that "I"—that word alone—feels like it does something in my brain; it makes it seem like it's really me.

What events in the story are based on your own life?

The feeling of intensity in the family was very real. There are also a few details that are true. Everybody in the hospital did come to see my brother when he was born, because they had never seen a Japanese baby before. And I had a very heavy Southern accent when I was a little girl. I used to be a really huge taco eater. There's one point in the story when the sister dies, and Katie eats five tacos. That was definitely something I would have done as a child.

Do you have an older sister?

I do, and she is still alive. She took care of us a lot, even though she is only a year and a half older than me. She had a maternal quality about her even then. So I always looked up to her. When I told her what the book was about, she got mad at me. I guess she thought that I was "secretly hostile toward her." Then, after she read it, she was happy.

What was it like to be Japanese American in the South during the 1950s and '60s?

We fit in by not fitting into it, by being part of a very small community. When we went to a party, it was almost always with a group of other Japanese or Japanese Americans who worked as chicken sexers, separating male and female chicks in the hatchery. I remember a little girl asking me something like, "Are you black or white?" I really stumbled for an answer. I said, "I don't know."

Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?

When I was 17, I wrote the most idiotic story in the world. It was about all these ducks that had only one leg. They lived on another planet and were a metaphor for humans. I actually sent that story to The Atlantic Monthly and, of course, immediately got a rejection. I don't think I wrote anything again until I was in college, when I wrote for the school newspaper.

When did you get serious about writing fiction?

In 1981 or 1982, I started sending short stories to both The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. I wrote 20 to 40 stories, and I got rejections for all of them. But I got letters back that were encouraging, so I kept writing. I remember in 1986, right before I sold my first story to The New Yorker, I told a friend that I didn't think I was ever going to sell a story; I wondered if I should stop writing. About three weeks later, I got a phone call from an editor at The New Yorker.

How did you come up with the title Kira-Kira?

Actually, the first title was "I Wish." Then I played around with another Japanese word, pika-pika. It basically means "glittering," as well, but a slightly different kind of glittering. It sounds sharper, and so at some point, I thought it just wasn't the right word. I didn't know the word kira-kira. Someone who was born in Japan ran a bunch of words by me, and that was one of them. Some people said that either pika-pika or kira-kira would do fine. Then I heard about a commercial in Japan about a toilet-bowl cleaner that goes pika-pika. The toilet gets so clean that it's shining. That was the beginning of the end for pika-pika.

What do you think of when you hear the word kira-kira?

Stars. Fireflies. I think the title itself stands for hope in the end. It's definitely the right word.

Source: Susan Faust, "The Comeback Kid," in School Library Journal, May 1, 2005, p. 38.

SOURCES

"Kadohata, Henkes win Newbery, Caldecott Medals," in American Library Association, www.ala.org (January 17, 2005).

Chiu, Monica, "(Un)Doing the Missionary Position: Gender Asymmetry in Contemporary Asian American Women's Writing ," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2, 1998, pp. 407-10.

"Review of Kira-Kira," in The Christian Century, Vol. 121, No. 25, December 14, 2004, p. 24.

Chuh, Kandace, "Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity and the Body ," in Journal of Asian American Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1999, pp. 337-39.

Harris, Violet and Others, "Multi Cultural Literature," in Language Arts, Vol 70, No. 3, March 1993, pp. 215-24.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, "Fiction: The 1960s to the Present," in Symploke, Vol. 12, No. 1-2, 2004, pp. 174-87.

Larsen, Ashley, "Review of Kira-Kira," in School Library Journal, Vol. 50, No. 3, March 2004, pp. 214-15.

Ling, Amy, "Teaching Asian American Literature," Georgetown University's Electronic Archives for Teaching the American Literatures, www.georgetown.edu/tamlit (July 7, 2005).

Muller, Gilbert H., New Strangers in Paradise. The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction, University Press of Kentucky, 1999.

Rochman, Hazel, "Top 10 Historical Fiction for Youth," in Booklist, Vol. 100, No. 18, May 15, 2004, p. 1630.