WINNER of the 2017 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize WINNER of the 2016 Canada-Japan Literary Award. An emotionally gripping portrait of postwar Japan, where a newly repatriated girl must help a classmate find her missing sister. After spending the war years in a Canadian internment camp, thirteen-year-old Aya Shimamura and her father are faced with a gut-wrenching choice: move east of the Rocky Mountains or go "back" to Japan. Barred from returning home to the West Coast and bitterly grieving the loss of Aya's mother during internment, Aya's father signs a form that enables the government to deport them. But war-devastated Tokyo is not much better. Aya's father struggles to find work, compromising his morals and toiling long hours. Meanwhile, Aya, born and raised in Vancouver, is something of a pariah at her school, bullied for being foreign and paralyzed when asked to communicate in Japanese. Aya's alienation is eventually mitigated by one of her principal tormenters, a willful girl named Fumi Tanaka, whose older sister has mysteriously disappeared. When a rumor surfaces that General MacArthur, who is overseeing the Occupation, might help citizens in need, Fumi enlists Aya to compose a letter asking him to find her beloved sister. The letter is delivered into the reluctant hands of Corporal Matt Matsumoto, a Japanese American serving with the Occupation forces, whose endless job is translating the thousands of letters MacArthur receives each week. Although Matt feels an affinity with Fumi, he is largely powerless, and the girls decide to take matters into their own hands, venturing into the dark and dangerous underside of Tokyo's Ginza district. Told through rich, interlocking story lines, The Translation of Love mines this turbulent period to show how war irrevocably shapes the lives of people on both sides-and yet the novel also allows for a poignant spark of resilience, friendship, and love that translates across cultures and borders to stunning effect.

Autorentext

LYNNE KUTSUKAKE is a novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, The Translation of Love, won the Canada-Japan Literary Award and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. A third-generation Japanese Canadian, she has a master's degree in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto and studied Japanese literature in Japan on a Monbusho Scholarship. Fluent in Japanese, she has translated a short story collection, Single Sickness and Other Stories, by Mizuko Masuda. She has a degree in library and information science and for many years worked as a Japanese Studies librarian at the University of Toronto.