Spotlight on Cynthia Kadohata

Cynthia Kadohata is the author of the Newbery Medal–winning book Kira-Kira, the National Book Award winner The Thing About Luck, the Jane Addams Peace Award and PEN America Award winner Weedflower, Cracker!, Outside Beauty, A Million Shades of Gray, Half a World Away, Checked, A Place to Belong, Saucy, and several critically acclaimed adult novels, including The Floating World. She lives with her dogs and hockey-playing son in California. 

Q: Your upcoming middle grade novel, A Place to Belong, follows a Japanese-American family after they renounce their citizenship and move to Japan following their experiences in a US internment camp during WWII; as we learn about Hanako and her family’s efforts to survive and move forward, we glimpse the political and cultural climate surrounding this period of uncertainty, starvation, and hopeful recovery. Can you talk a bit about your research, and what it was like thinking about the time period from the eyes of an observant twelve-year-old girl?

I was quite lost for a long time—that’s why it took so long to write this novel. I couldn’t figure out who Hanako was until someone introduced me to a woman in her eighties who lives in San Marino now. I wouldn’t say Hanako’s story is this woman’s story, but there are a lot of similarities. She worked in the rice fields outside Hiroshima city like Hanako. She became very close to her grandparents, who adored her and her family. She’s a very go-forward person, but in a humble, quiet way. She also has an extraordinary memory, and by luck her granddaughter had read Kira-Kira. So she let me bombard her with questions for years. I try to see through the eyes of everybody I interview, but she’s really the one where, when I talked to her, I suddenly had direction. It’s always interesting how…it’s hard to explain…there are certain people who are just out there, almost as if by magic, and you kind of pluck them like fruit off a tree. And then you write the story. Even if it’s not a specific person, there’s always this magical process of suddenly discovering the story and plucking it off the tree and making it yours. Like it’s out there in the ether, in the Land of Floating Fruit Trees, and then you take it. Lol, I probably sound quite wacky, but anyway that’s the process, that’s how I go about trying to see from a character’s eyes—I pluck the character off a tree in the ether, and then it’s mine! I honestly feel this way—I don’t feel I “develop” characters or “think them through.” I just suddenly “spot” them on a tree, and I take them.

Q: Hanako’s grandfather says, “‘There is many bad, but there is also many good. So we move forward in life, neh? When we can, we move forward.’” Throughout the book, we see the family’s hope for conditions to improve for the next generation, and how much they seem to value the life that they do have. What do you hope readers take from this book, and Hanako’s experiences?

I was answering some questions from a grad student the other day, and we touched on this. So I’m going to use the answer I gave her, just because it’s still the same answer. I wouldn’t be happy unless my main characters get a sense of the grown-up world and what they will face and what they have to do to rise up. That’s the real world! That’s what you’re up against! Rise up! That’s what I hope readers take from my best books, that they need to rise up and be architects of their own lives.