I came to the United States from Japan when I was eight years old. The moment I could read English, I dragged my mother to the library every week and checked out the maximum number of books allowed. I loved books. I wanted to be a writer! But friends and professors said my English, a second language, would never be good enough. So I packed away my dream and went to law school, becoming the first Asian woman admitted to the Colorado bar.
But the dream couldn’t be contained. I started taking night classes in creative writing. One instructor who taught me the basics of fiction told me to keep going. So I did. It took years of workshops, conferences, and steady work. But I finished my first novel, Ayumi's Violin, about a biracial Japanese girl who must build a new life in a new country, with a prejudiced stepmother and a resentful stepsister. It garnered the Paterson Prize Honor Book, the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Gold Award, and was named one of Colorado's Powerful Reads.
I kept writing novels with Japanese protagonists, each built around a theme that I believe is important. Accidental Samurai Spy, set in 1863, is about a young warrior who makes peace with his enemies. Swept Away follows a fifteen-year-old boy who is the only member of his family to survive the 2011 Japanese tsunami. It won the Paterson Prize, plus two other honors. Its theme: forgiveness.
After finishing a novella for reluctant young readers, Kidnapped at the Icefall, and from experience teaching workshops, I published How to Write a Middle Grade Book Kids Will Love. Then came Blossoms on a Poisoned Sea. I'd spent years researching the 1956 Minamata mercury poisoning disaster in Japan, one of history's most devastating industrial coverups. Writing it during the pandemic felt appropriate. The book received the Freeman Book Awards Honorable Mention and another honor.
I’m now working to publish Amache Blues, about a twenty-year-old Japanese American woman in a World War II incarceration camp in Colorado navigating domestic abuse, a forbidden liaison, and handed impossible choices.
I’m glad I kept chasing my dream.