In 1941 California, seventeen-year-old Nobu and his sister Sachiko witness an assault on their father by a group of teens that includes Nobu's friend Terrence, and soon Terrence is jailed for his crime, while Nobu and Sachiko are sent to an Arkansas internment camp.

Frank May's practice leans heavily to estate planning. Murder cases are way out of his line. But when his client, Stanford law professor Peter Prosser, is murdered, Frank becomes deeply entangled in yet another violent death. Prosser had been writing a detective novel; Frank has the only copy of the manuscript, minus the crucial last chapter. Far from a literary masterpiece, the novel features the (thinly disguised) members of the Soames family, the family of Prosser's ex-wife — and even a character based on Frank himself. Can this badly-written novel tell us why Prosser died and who killed him? Mysteriously, real-life events start paralleling events in the novel, including a second murder: a woman in the Soames household, dressed in a red kimono, is strangled in her room. As Frank follows the trail, it leads to a number of unlikely places, including the cultural studies department of Stanford University and a wedding chapel in Las Vegas. Maybe if he can endure reading the dead professor's novel, he can solve the evolving mystery. Part of the series The Frank May Chronicles by QP Books.

Rika is excited about going to buy a red kimono to wear for Children's Day. But when they get to the shop, there are no red kimonos left. Then Mom gives Rika the red kimono that she wore when she was Rika's age. Connect to the nonfiction text pair, Special Celebrations Around the World.

Examines Japan's war generation--Japanese men and women who survived World War Two and rebuilt their lives, into the 21st century, from memories of that conflict Since John Hersey's Hiroshima--the classic account, published in 1946, of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of that city--very few books have examined the meaning and impact of World War II through the eyes of Japanese men and women who survived that conflict. Tattered Kimonos in Japan does just that: It is an intimate journey into contemporary Japan from the perspective of the generation of Japanese soldiers and civilians who survived World War II, by a writer whose American father and Japanese father-in-law fought on opposite sides of the conflict. The author, a former NPR senior editor, is Jewish, and he approaches the subject with the sensibilities of having grown up in a community of Holocaust survivors. Mindful of the power of victimhood, memory, and shared suffering, he travels across Japan, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, meeting a compelling group of men and women whose lives, even now, are defined by the trauma of war, and by lingering questions of responsibility and repentance for Japan's wartime aggression. The image of a tattered kimono from Hiroshima is the thread that drives the narrative arc of this emotional story about a writer's encounter with history, inside the Japan of his father's generation, on the other side of his father's war. This is a book about history with elements of family memoir. It offers a fresh and truly unique perspective for readers interested in World War II, Japan, or Judaica; readers seeking cross-cultural journeys; and readers intrigued by Japanese culture, particularly the kimono.

Publisher description

Oceans and decades apart, two women are inextricably bound by the secrets between them. Japan, 1957. Seventeen-year-old Naoko Nakamura’s prearranged marriage to the son of her father’s business associate would secure her family’s status in their traditional Japanese community, but Naoko has fallen for another man—an American sailor, a gaijin—and to marry him would bring great shame upon her entire family. When it’s learned Naoko carries the sailor’s child, she’s cast out in disgrace and forced to make unimaginable choices with consequences that will ripple across generations. America, present day. Tori Kovac, caring for her dying father, finds a letter containing a shocking revelation—one that calls into question everything she understood about him, her family and herself. Setting out to learn the truth behind the letter, Tori’s journey leads her halfway around the world to a remote seaside village in Japan, where she must confront the demons of the past to pave a way for redemption. In breathtaking prose and inspired by true stories from a devastating and little-known era in Japanese and American history, The Woman in the White Kimono illuminates a searing portrait of one woman torn between her culture and her heart, and another woman on a journey to discover the true meaning of home.