In postwar Tokyo, a deported Canadian Japanese teenager and her classmate. The result is a memorable story of hope and loneliness with a cathartic ending. The Translation of Love, by Lynne Kutsukake. Kutsukake’s story is consistently engaging, though a smattering of unlikely plot points can be distracting. The characters further intersect when Fumi asks Matt for help getting the letter to MacArthur. With Aya’s strong command of English, Fumi writes to MacArthur to ask him for help with locating Sumiko and bringing her home. Fumi is desperate to find her older sister, Sumiko, who left the family to work as a bar girl in order to provide food and medicine for them.
Aya’s mother had committed suicide by drowning, and Aya keeps the stones that had been found weighing down her pockets.
Twelve-year-old Fumi, one of Kondo’s students, finds herself befriending the shunned Aya Shimamura, who was sent to live in Japan after internment with her father in a Canadian camp. Matt, a Japanese-American military man, and Kondo, a middle-school teacher with considerable language skills, both ply their trade by translating letters: Matt for General MacArthur, who has invited the Japanese people to mail him their thoughts, and Kondo on the black market, where he works weekends writing letters for lovelorn women to their G.I. Kutsukake’s moving debut novel focuses on the intertwining stories of several protagonists in post–World War II Tokyo.
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