Why She Left Us

Rating:
Summary: why she left us
Review: Ms. Rizzuto uses four narrators and their very different perspectives to tell the story of three generations of a family. This device offers the reader varying, even conflicting, impressions of events and their impact on the characters. It also provides the reader with insight into just how enormous a "generation" gap can be. A women who appears cold in the eyes of her grandson (and at least this reader), gains the readers sympathy when she tells her own story.

By not giving us a simple answer to the question in the title, Rizzuto forces the reader to consider the many reasons a mother would accept one child yet reject another. What little we learn of the circumstances surrounding her two pregnancies provides the reader a long list of Emi's possible, yet ultimately unknown motivations. By leaving us wondering, this beautifully written book, its complex characters, its question and the internment, stays with you long after the last page has been re-read.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling family tragedy
Review: Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's well-written story of an Asian-American family tragedy is both compelling and fulfilling. The title is a puzzle within a puzzle for readers not familiar with Japanese-American culture following the events of the internment and its profound effect on Japanese-Americans to this day. Who knows why Miss Liberty abandoned her vow "with liberty and justice for all" and left 120,000 of her children without status, identity, or fundamental rights? As Rizzuto's story shows, it is a question first buried by Asian-Americans as they dealt with the immediate problems of the internment, then kept hidden for generations and only now voiced loudly by descendents still profoundly affected by the events and their aftermath. It is a question that cries out for an answer, even though it has none. Ironically, there are parallels in the tale of a young unmarried Japanese mother who, faced with the shame of illegitimacy and the uncertainty of life in an internment camp, leaves her son with the hope he will be adopted by a family not forced into internment. That act, which serves as a counterpoint and propels the story, however, provides the readers with its own rationale. If the book had been titled "An Asian-American Tragedy," Rizzuto would have left readers without the need to continually face the puzzle of the past as Japanese Americans do until this day. A reader in Hawaii.

Rating:
Summary: A dramatic book, full of poignant and powerful scenes.
Review: Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, an exciting, young Hawaiian author, here uses the sordid story of the U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor as the framework of a family saga. The internment of the Okada family, locked up in horse stalls at the Santa Anita race track, an internment camp, permanently scarred every member of the family. Being torn from the fabric of society and isolated in pens was an experience so thoroughly degrading that the real people who lived through it have rarely opened themselves to discuss it (and who can blame them?), and the author's telling of the story is especially dramatic because the subject is so rare in fiction.

Both masterful and uncompromising, Rizzuto paints scenes of horror and cruelty within this family, all the result of frustration, a distorted sense of honor, a lack of communication, or a feeling of utter helplessness. And while few of these scenes actually take place in the internment camp itself, nearly all are the result of the internment experience and illustrate its long-term effects. There are powerful and affecting scenes of a grandmother's flaying, a young girl's abortion, a mother's heartbreaking abandonment of her three-year-old child, a brother's brutal kicking of his sister, a young soldier's death, and, most affectingly to me, a family's wresting of a child from a woman who has adopted and raised him, and would probably have given him a better chance for a successful life.

While these individual scenes will stay with me for a very long time, the book itself really did not come together as a whole for me, however. The alternating points of view among various members of the family are effective in allowing the reader to see why some characters behave as they do, but the impetus to all of the action and the key to the book as a whole lies in the character of Emi, the daughter of Kaori and mother of Eric and Mari, and she is the one person whose point of view we never see. She is an enigma, and we never really get to know her. As a result, I'm still not sure "Why She Left Us." Most frustratingly, I'm also not sure whether the "She" of the title is Emi or the U.S. government. But then again, perhaps that's what the author intended.