AlliterAsian by Allan Cho Page A

There’s no way to write the novel that you want to write, that you think you’re going to write. There’s no way to raise the perfect child. There’s no way to do all of these things that you most want to do in life, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to do them. In a way, the more impossible thevow is, the more beautiful it is. It’s about the willingness of the spirit.”
    That effort certainly seems to have paid off. In the autumn of 2013, Ozeki would be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious awards a novelist could hope for. And yet on the day that I spoke to her, just days after the announcement of the longlist, it’s that song in a little bookstore in Bath that really captured the author’s imagination. To Ozeki, this kind of evidence of her work’s reverberation in the hearts of her readers is the greatest award. “It felt like such a precious gift that I was getting,” she remembers. “It’s a beautiful process.”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  A UTHOR C OMMENTARY
    I became enamoured with Ruth Ozeki and her book A Tale for the Time Being just after I had returned from a visit to the Tohoku region of Japan, where I travelled to places that had been destroyed, and I collected stories with an eye to writing a book. I was searching for meaning in the unthinkable, and here was a novel that explored all the themes that had been on my mind—disaster, grief, and profound human connection over time and distance. It was as if Nao, the fictional Ruth, the real Ruth, and I were all part of this grand conversation about what it meant to be human in a time when the world seemed both smaller and larger than it ever had before. — Erika Thorkelson, 2015
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  A BOUT THE A UTHOR
    Erika Thorkelson was born in Winnipeg, grew to adulthood in Edmonton, answered phones in Dublin, Ireland, and taught English in a little town called Shiroishi, in northern Japan. She now lives in Vancouver, where she writes nonfiction, tells stories, and teaches writing.

Light at a Window
    Ricepaper 15, no. 1 (2010)
    Terry Watada
    Tomeo Shoyoma was a good-looking teenager living in the east end of Vancouver, 1941. He was at the top of his class at Britannia High School and looking forward to UBC and a wonderful career like his big brother’s. True, Tommy, a UBC graduate in commerce and economics, couldn’t become a chartered accountant because of the times, but it was a temporary thing for both him and his brother, Tomeo reasoned. After he graduated, he knew the world would be different, and he’d be all right in the long run.
    He lived with his brother in a rented room in a house south of Powell Street Grounds, the park that formed the centre of the Japanese community back then. Their parents still lived in Kamloops, BC, not wishing to be anywhere near the big city. They consented to their boys moving to Vancouver to attend school.
    Like so many others his age, Tomeo had a nickname based on some prominent characteristic. There was “Hammerhead” Nishihata for the shape of his head, “Fuzzy” Seko because of her Japanese name, Fusae, and “Windy” Gotanda who had the nasty habit of passing wind in public, hence his moniker.
    Tomeo’s label was appropriate enough: “Romeo.” Besides the obvious rhyme, he was very popular with the girls. On a Saturday night, when most went in groups to a movie at the Palace or an old vaudeville show at the Pantages, Romeo always had a date. He looked real sharp with his slicked-back hair, wide-lapelled suit, and two-toned patent leather oxfords bought with money he earned at a part-timejob at Soga’s Department Store on Powell Street. The girls, too, were real dolls—Hedy Shimizu, Addie Kodama, and Helen Yoneyama, to name three. They always wore the latest styles, dresses from back east and high-heeled shoes from the women’s department