Kirjahaku

In the sparse, lyrical style of a classic pillow book, Miss Gone-overseas chronicles a wartime life that doesn't focus on guns, bombs or military depredations, but on the pedestrian life of a lower-class Japanese woman as she reflects on the turmoil around her. Meiko, a mountain village girl in an unfortunate marriage, is sold to brokers who resell her to a big city brothel. One commercial brothel then sells her to another and she finds herself on an island in one of Japan's distant colonies. Not an untypical fate of a Karayuki-san, or a Miss Gone-overseas, a victim of that culture's legal sex-trafficking. In this small book, she has been given a voice to tell about her life on a tropical Pacific island during the later part of World War II, a book that begins and ends with separations that are also beginnings.

Overseas does double-duty as a stand-alone novel told in the form of linked stories, and as a sequel to the author's first book, Miss Gone-overseas, which was set during WWII on the same Western Pacific island. The author picks up the first book's storyline a couple of decades later with a compelling character-driven narrative centered on three generations of women. Three of the stories showcase American expats learning to find the sweet spots of island life. The last story, focusing on the granddaughter, brings the family's tale full circle. The narrative's cast of characters interacts, as if in a series of pas de deux, in selected vignettes of their daily lives as members of a small community on an exotic, tropical island.