Author Emily Itami touches on themes of family loss, mixed race heritage, and the enduring bond of siblings in her affecting second novel, Kakigori Summer.
Three sisters, Rei, Kiki and Ai, narrate their family’s story through alternating first-person accounts. The three young women lead busy, separate lives. Rei works in finance and lives in London. Kiki and her young son, Hikaru, are in Tokyo, where Ai also lives.
As the story opens, Ai is in crisis. A rising pop singer and celebrity, Ai has become embroiled in a major sex scandal; she’s been caught having an affair with a married man, and the story is front page fodder for the Japanese tabloids. Her career rapidly implodes and she goes into hiding and a deep funk.
Ai isn’t the only one who is suffering. Her two older sisters are unhappy with their jobs and love lives, and all three siblings share unresolved feelings about their mother, who died a few years earlier.
The older sisters rally to Ai’s side. They decide to return to the small town where they grew up in a coastal area of Japan, there to protect and cosset Ai for a few weeks. They stay in the house where they grew up, next door to their crabby great grandmother (Obaachan in Japanese) and in this more relaxed setting they are able to decompress and reconnect as a family.
There, their hometown reveals its simple and traditional charms. They enjoy hikes in the countryside, traditional festivals and summer foods such as kakigori (shaved ice). Not everything is perfect; they fall into an uneasy rhythm with Obaachan, who is hypercritical and judgmental of nearly everything the sisters do or say or how they appear.
But Itami is assiduous about avoiding sentimentality or easy resolutions. The genuine nostalgia the sisters feel for their hometown is tinged by darker memories. They have been scarred by the death of their mother, who apparently committed suicide by drowning in the sea—her body was never found—and by their status as outsiders in Japan.
They are “haafus,” the Japanese term for mixed race, typically half white, half Japanese, their Caucasian British father having left long ago. Rei in particular bears a grudge against the racial and cultural homogeneity of Japan. Their haafu nature complicates the question of where they consider home.
The clash and cacophony of cultures and perspectives mirror the sisters’ internal dissonance, though their bicultural upbringing gives them unique perspectives and skills. For instance, in conversations with each other, they often switch between Japanese and English depending on the context – English for the edgy snark, Japanese for the niceties and nostalgia. Among each other they speak a “pidgin hybrid of both” languages.
Their reckoning with their mother’s death gives them a deeper understanding of the loss and where that leaves the living. Ai realizes that she can’t hide forever or simply vanish. “If our mother taught us anything, though, it’s that that doesn’t work. You don’t disappear; it’s the exact opposite. You leave a void where you used to be that takes up a hundred times as much space as you ever did alive.”
For Rei, memories of her mother are bittersweet but no less instructive. “I remember [mother] going for a walk one day, when she was well, because she wanted to go see the light in the old station. I don’t understand how you could know life so well that you see how beautiful a ray of sunshine through a high-domed ceiling is, and that standing there looking at it and watching the people through it, on the way to wherever they’re going, makes it worth living, and then decide that you’d rather be nowhere than here watching the light, with us.”
It is writing like this that makes this novel so exceptional and winning—and well worth the read.
David Takami is the author of Divided Destiny: A History of Japanese Americans in Seattle, numerous essays and online content about Asian American history, and dozens of book reviews published mostly in The Seattle Times. He grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, NY and has lived in Honolulu, Tokyo and Seattle. He now lives in Kenmore, Washington.
