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J-Sei’s Virtual Book Club: Clark and Division by Naomi Hirahara
Clark and Division
by Naomi Hirahara
J-Sei’s Book Club selection for Fall is CLARK AND DIVISION, the latest thrilling mystery by award-winning author Naomi Hirahara, who very graciously made an in-person visit to J-Sei for a hybrid book signing and reading event in August.
Synopsis: Twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, where they have been detained by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life in California the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled two thousand miles away in Chicago, where Aki’s older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier and moved to the new Japanese American neighborhood near Clark and Division streets. But on the eve of the Ito family’s reunion, Rose is killed by a subway train.
Join the Club, Buy the Book
Sign up for J-Sei’s Book Club and be added to the Book Club mailing list (put “Book Club” in your email’s subject line). Please encourage anyone interested to join! Our book discussion will be even further enriched by a diverse range of perspectives, for instance of different ages, races, and gender identities.
Copies of the hardcover edition are available for purchase from Eastwind Books, which Eastwind is very generously offering to Book Club members at a discounted price. Order the book online through Eastwind and type JSEI in the coupon field at cart checkout to get your 10% discount. Also, you can choose to pick up your copy at the store or arrange for shipping, or you can designate J-Sei for delivery/pick-up by typing your request into the Note to Seller comment box at cart checkout. We can also facilitate a Share-a-Book program that will allow members to share their copy of the book after they’ve finished reading it.
Book Club Format: Read the book at your own pace. As you’re reading, you can comment online about whatever strikes you and share with fellow Book Club members on the secure J-Sei Book Club webpage. Periodically I will check in with members by email to prompt online discussion about certain themes and aspects of the book. Then sometime around October or early November we’ll schedule a live Zoom meeting so members can get together to discuss the book.
Hope you can join us!
— Kathy Hashimoto, moderator
About the Author
Naomi Hirahara is the Edgar Award–winning author of the Mas Arai mystery series, including Summer of the Big Bachi, which was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and one of Chicago Tribune’s Ten Best Mysteries and Thrillers; Gasa Gasa Girl; Snakeskin Shamisen; and Hiroshima Boy. She is also the author of the LA-based Ellie Rush mysteries. A former editor of The Rafu Shimpo newspaper, she has co-written non-fiction books like Life after Manzanar and the award-winning Terminal Island: Lost Communities of Los Angeles Harbor.
J-Sei’s Virtual Book Club: Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
Minor Feelings is anything but minor. In these provocative and passionate essays, Cathy Park Hong gives us an incendiary account of what it means to be and to feel Asian American today. Minor Feelings is absolutely necessary.
— Viet Thanh Nguyen,
Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
by Cathy Park Hong
As Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month comes to a close, J-Sei’s Book Club summer selection is MINOR FEELINGS: AN ASIAN AMERICAN RECKONING by poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong. After its debut in Spring 2020, this collection of seven essays became an instant classic, presenting a blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and history to examine racialized consciousness and truth in America today. Unifying these essays is Hong’s evocation of “minor feelings,” that disturbing yet familiar experience of having one’s own perception of reality discredited or marginalized by others. In this time of social change and racial justice, Hong’s timely, candid, and subversive book challenges all of us to reconsider notions and assumptions that we grew up with as well as thinking about what we can do, as individuals and as a community, moving forward.
Join the Club, Buy the Book
Sign up for J-Sei’s Book Club and be added to the Book Club mailing list. Please encourage anyone interested to join! Our book discussion will be even further enriched by a diverse range of perspectives, for instance of different ages, races, and gender identities.
Copies of the newly issued paperback edition are available for purchase from Eastwind Books, which Eastwind is very generously offering to Book Club members at a discounted price. Order the book online through Eastwind and type JSEI in the coupon field at cart checkout to get your 10% discount. Also, you can choose to pick up your copy at the store or arrange for shipping, or you can designate J-Sei for delivery/pick-up by typing your request into the Note to Seller comment box at cart checkout.
Book Club Format: Read the book at your own pace. As you’re reading, you can comment online about whatever strikes you and share with fellow Book Club members on the secure J-Sei Book Club webpage. In addition, once a week for seven weeks, I’ll update the Book Club webpage to focus on one of Hong’s essays. At the end of July we’ll schedule a live Zoom meeting so members can get together to discuss the book.
— Kathy Hashimoto, moderator
About the Author
Cathy Park Hong was raised in Los Angeles. She graduated from Oberlin College and has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of three acclaimed poetry collections, Engine Empire (2012), Dance Dance Revolution (2007), and Translating Mo’um (2002). Hong is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and is a full professor at Rutgers University.
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Protected: Book Club – The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World
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J-Sei’s Virtual Book Club: The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World
“A tender tribute to grief and what it teaches us. Healing is not linear, and the ones we lose never truly leave us…. The phone booth is a magical place that not only connects the living to the dead but also the living to the living.”
— BookPage
Join the Club, Buy the Book
For its Spring reading selection, J-Sei Virtual Book Club observes the tenth year following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeast Japan. We’ll be reading a newly released novel about the Tohoku disaster and its aftermath, offering a meditation on survival, loss, and hope. The US edition is scheduled for release on March 9, and copies are available for purchase from Eastwind Books at the discounted price of $22.50. Order the book online through Eastwind and either pick up your copy at the store, arrange for shipping, or designate J-Sei for delivery/pick-up in the comments.
Book Club Format: Read the book at your own pace. As you’re reading, you can comment online about whatever strikes you and share with fellow Book Club members on the secure J-Sei Book Club webpage. Questions and cues will also be provided in the webspace to initiate possible discussion threads. After several weeks, we’ll schedule a live Zoom meeting so members can meet to discuss the book. Sign up for the Book Club and be added to the Book Club mailing list.
J-Sei Book Club Pick: The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina, translated by Lucy Rand
On March 11, 2011, a massively powerful earthquake occurred off the northeast coast of the island of Honshu, Japan. It triggered a tsunami that caused unspeakable death and destruction, killing more than 15,000 people, with an additional estimated 2,500 missing and 228,000 displaced. Years later, survivors and families continue to deal with trauma and loss. In THE PHONE BOOTH AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, Yui and Takeshi meet at a phone box located in a garden at the top of a hill in Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, where the grieving can talk on a disconnected rotary phone and send messages to their lost loved ones. The novel follows Yui and Takeshi as they navigate their grief and lives after tragedy.
Inspired by the actual kaze no denwa (“phone of the wind”), the novel explores death, grief, survival—and hope for the future. Join J-Sei Book Club and connect with fellow book lovers as we read this gentle Japanese story together.
About the Author and Translator
Laura Imai Messina was born and raised in Rome, Italy. In 2006 she moved to Tokyo and earned master’s and doctorate degrees from Tokyo University. A novelist and blogger in Italian, Messina has made her English-language publishing debut with The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World. She lives in Kamakura with her Japanese husband and children.
Lucy Rand is a British writer and translator who lived for a time in Japan translating pharmaceutical texts. One of her first literary projects was translating Quel che affidiamo al vento from Italian into The Phone Box at the Edge of the World, the UK edition that was published in 2020 and was then adapted for US publication in 2021.