The Rogue Wave (A Novel)

This stunning debut is a primal story of before and after: the magic of a Japanese family's life on the windswept coast of central California in the early 1940s and the rupture of their removal from it during the under-acknowledged tragedy of the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor.

The unnamed narrator of The Rogue Wave, the youngest daughter among seven children, grows up on Point Lobos, where her father is caretaker of the land along a stretch of rugged coastline sought out by artists and tourists. While she has an American childhood outside the home, the family's private rituals are Japanese—their style of bathing and cooking, her father's practice of sumi-e painting and instruction to his brood in how the creative eye sees, how to respect nature's gifts. In the shaping event of her coming of age, her wayward brother Isao is accused of the murder of a white woman, igniting the daughter's first consciousness of race. And then comes the towering wave that will sweep away everything she knows—the "removal" of Japanese Americans stripped of their rights and transported to interment camps in the spring of 1942. 

In taut, evocative prose, the story is narrated from the distant, snowy city of Cleveland, where the daughter awaits an education promised by a Quaker organization after the camps have turned their prisoners out to face an uncertain aftermath. From a chilly Midwestern boarding house, she revisits the dramatic landscape of her childhood, the mystery of Isao's fate, and the secrets of her now scattered family.

In this unforgettable American journey, tinged equally with beauty and rage, Melia di Kodani paints an unforgettable portrait of a bygone era whose injustices mirror those of our own.