Book Launch and Reading
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
7:00 p.m. reception
7:30 p.m. reading by Juliet S. Kono
UHM Campus Center Ballroom
FREE and open to the public
(Campus parking fees may apply)

Based on real life events, Anshu: Dark Sorrow is a tale of passion and human triumph in the face of extraordinary adversity, spanning the cane fields of Hawai‘i and the devastation in Hiroshima. A pregnant and unmarried Himiko Aoki finds her Hawai‘i-Japanese American identity clashing with Japan’s cultural norms when she is sent to live with relatives in Tokyo in 1941 and becomes trapped there at the outbreak of war. When America drops the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Himiko finds herself adapting in unexpected ways just to survive.

"Simply put, Juliet S. Kono fleshes out the heroism that defines the miracle of survival during World War II Japan and after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Kono, through graceful yet in unstinting prose, gives us a memorable story of atonement and transcendence.
—Joe Tsujimoto, author of Morningside Heights: New York Stories

Anshu is a courageous and necessary book, steeped in the wisdom of Buddhist cosmology, taking on the large issues of the human condition. Through its rich detailing of the “dark sorrow” of a single human journey, Himiko’s story illuminates the relation of each of us to the other, of the very small to the incomprehensible.
—Sylvia Watanabe, author of Talking to the Dead

Anshu, a Japanese word written with the characters for “darkness” and “grief,” is a powerfully moving and vividly rendered story of destruction by fire and the flames of memory which illuminates the larger canvas of the Asia-Pacific War as only a deeply imagined literary narrative of war can.
—Gayle K. Sato, Meiji University"