The Red Kimono
A Novel
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
In 1941, racial tensions are rising in the California community where nineyear-old Sachiko Kimura and her seventeen-year-old brother, Nobu, live. Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor, people are angry, and one night, Sachiko and Nobu witness three teenage boys taunting and beating their father in the park. Sachiko especially remembers Terrence Harris, the boy with dark skin and hazel eyes, and Nobu cannot believe the boys capable of such violence toward his father are actually his friends. What Sachiko and Nobu do not know is that Terrence’s family had received a telegram that morning with news that Terrence’s father was killed at Pearl Harbor. Desperate to escape his pain, Terrence rushes from his home and runs into two high-school friends who convince him to find a Japanese man and get revenge. They do not know the man they attacked is Sachiko and Nobu’s father. In the months that follow, Terrence is convicted of his crime and Sachiko and Nobu are sent to an internment camp in Arkansas, a fictionalized version of the two camps that actually existed in Arkansas during the war. While behind bars and barbed wire, each of the three young people will go through dramatic changes. One will learn acceptance. One will remain imprisoned by resentment, and one will seek a path to forgiveness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Japan has just attacked Pearl Harbor and two Californian families endure the rippling effects in this debut novel. Terrence, an African American teenager living in Berkeley, learns that his father has been killed in action. He's persuaded by peers to avenge his father's death by beating a Japanese man, Michio Kimura, leaving the man severely injured and Terrence in jail. Kimura is transported from the hospital to a Justice Department camp, and his family, after being informed that he has died en route, is relocated to Santa Anita Assembly Center in a mysterious effort by the U.S. Government to investigate and concentrate all Japanese inhabitants, whether citizens or not. Plot and historical intrigue drive this novel as Morrill's attempts to use punctuation as a vehicle for what language should do falls flat. Characters' thoughts are often more compelling than the language that surrounds them, as we see when Terrence recalls memories of racial discrimination: "He might have played on the same baseball and basketball teams as them, but how often did one of his white friends ask him over to one of their houses?" It reads like a story better suited for a visual medium, where prolific ideas are not as easily outweighed by poor language.
