A girl is born in Nagasaki, Japan one year after the atomic bomb explosion that ended The Second World War. Her father is an American GI, her mother the unmarried daughter of an affluent Japanese businessman, who shunts her to a loveless foster family. In this poignant memoir, she describes her childhood in post-war, occupied Japan, while revealing little-known historical and cultural realities of the time. Because of the traditional Japanese bias against foreigners, she grows up in a climate of continual harassment about her Caucasian features. This persecution leaves scars on her developing personality that she must overcome later in life.
In an “out-of-the-frying-pan” development, an evangelical missionary couple takes her to Canada and adopts her. The “into-the-fire” element is that her adoptive father is a serial abuser of young, biracial girls and molests her repeatedly in the name of “love.” He sends her to a fundamentalist Christian Bible school, where she eventually recognizes both its outlandish teachings and her sanctimonious father’s perversion as the malignancies they are. She rejects them both and embarks upon a quest to find out what “love” really is.
A current of mystery runs through her life as she tries to find her birth mother. Was she the woman who stared at her so intently at the Peace Park in Nagasaki? Was it the woman who telephoned her from Japan with a warning? And who was the “brother” who emerged in her later life and then disappeared? A transoceanic conspiracy haunts her from Japan to Canada to the U.S.
In an “out-of-the-frying-pan” development, an evangelical missionary couple takes her to Canada and adopts her. The “into-the-fire” element is that her adoptive father is a serial abuser of young, biracial girls and molests her repeatedly in the name of “love.” He sends her to a fundamentalist Christian Bible school, where she eventually recognizes both its outlandish teachings and her sanctimonious father’s perversion as the malignancies they are. She rejects them both and embarks upon a quest to find out what “love” really is.
A current of mystery runs through her life as she tries to find her birth mother. Was she the woman who stared at her so intently at the Peace Park in Nagasaki? Was it the woman who telephoned her from Japan with a warning? And who was the “brother” who emerged in her later life and then disappeared? A transoceanic conspiracy haunts her from Japan to Canada to the U.S.
