Gaijin Mama

I recently visited Naoshima, an island in the Inland Sea, for the first time. Formerly an industrial waste dumpsite, the island has been converted into an art lover’s mecca. I had a chance to visit a couple of art museums, as well as the delightfully kitschy 007 Museum, near the harbor.   Here is the entrance. Although I had to change out of my shoes and into slippers to view the Monet at the Chichu Art Museum (which has only three exhibits total, two of them inaccessible...

I contributed a story called “Peace on Earth,” about a biracial boy with divided loyalties who goes on a trip to Okinawa with his family, to the forthcoming anthology Tomo, edited by Holly Thompson. Proceeds from this book will benefit teen survivors of the tsunami that hit north-eastern Japan on March 3 of last year. You can read an interview with me about the story here.

Nothing quite says Japan like Mt. Fuji. In fact, one of my earliest and most enduring images of the country was a photo in the World Book encyclopedia of the Shinkansen  speeding past the iconic peak. Mt. Fuji, with its distinctive gentle, asymmetrical slopes and its cone-shaped top, has inspired poetry and prose, art, a religion, and at least one pop song (?Funk Fujiyama' as sung by the popular mid-1990s group Kome Kome Club). The renowned woodblock artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)...

The Art of Hearing Heart Beats begins, as many such books do, with a missing person, a box of keepsakes and a mysterious letter. In this case, it’s a father who goes missing – a Burmese-born entertainment lawyer, married for 30 plus years to an American with whom he has two adult children. One day, he tells his wife and daughter, Julia, that he is going to Boston. He never comes back. Later, they discover that he actually went to Thailand, and they haven’t heard anything...

I’ve often talked and written about The Screaming Divas, a novel set in underground 1980s Columbia, South Carolina. The novel was inspired by the all-girl groups of the early 1990s, such as Bikini Kill, and also by my nights hanging out at a club called The Beat. I have a certain fondness for this novel and all that it evokes. It was once represented by a big-time agent, who, alas, couldn’t sell it. The timing was off, I guess, and I’m not sure that it’s publishable...

I’m happy to report that an excerpt from my unpublished novel, The Screaming Divas, is now published in Hunger Mountain. You can read it here. If you like this part, you can read another chapter, published as “How Harumi Became a Punk Rocker” in Woman’s Work: Stories. Also, if you’ve got an e-reader, or if you’re giving one for Christmas, consider downloading Anthology: Realistic Fiction from Cicada, which includes my novella...

A couple of months ago, my son brought home a memo from school calling for families to host a group of students who would be visiting from Australia. They'd been planning on visiting the Tokyo area, but due to the March 11th earthquake and worries about radiation, they'd had a change in itinerary. At first, I hesitated to volunteer. After all, the students were probably eager to experience Japanese culture, and our family is hardly typical. I'm an American and my husband is Japanese. Our...

I’ve recently become a big fan of Kristin Bair O’Keeffe’s blog Writerhead, which is directed at expatriate writers, but offers inspiration for anyone. Once a week, there’s an interview with a writer. (Click here, for Kristin’s spotlight on me) and every Saturday, there’s a writing prompt. I wrote the following in response to the prompt “The first time I…” I had sushi for the first time in Columbia, South Carolina with a guy named...

So I'm here at my computer, drinking coffee and checking Facebook updates, thinking about how I should be hanging out the laundry, or how I should be out on a power walk, or working on a novel. And then this message pops up: ?Sue, are you there'?  It's one of my Facebook friends, one of my real life friends. She wants to know if I've seen the post on her wall. If I've heard about you.   And before she writes any more, I know what she's going to say. I remember that email you sent a couple...

This past weekend, I made an off-island excursion to Osaka to take part in the Mixed Roots Japan Academic Forum, which was part of a two-day series of events devoted to raising awareness of and promoting studies of individuals with mixed roots in Japan. I made it to Osaka in time for a live music event featuring, among others,  accordionist/rakugo performer Katsura Sunshine and GeneZ, a hiphop trio with Ghanian, Okinawan, American Filipina, Irish, and Japanese roots. On Sunday...