Color of the Sea
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Growing up in a time between wars, Sam Hamada finds that the culture of his native Japan is never far from his heart. Sam is rapidly learning the code of the samurai in the late 1930s on the lush Hawaiian Islands, where he is slowly coming into his own as a son and a man.
But after Sam strikes out for California, where he meets Keiko, the beautiful young woman destined to be the love of his life, he faces crushing disappointment---Keiko's parents take her back to Japan, forcing Keiko to endure their attempts to arrange her marriage. It is a trial complicated by how the Japanese perceive her---as too Americanized to be a proper Japanese wife and mother---and its pain is compounded by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which ignites the war that instantly taints Sam, Keiko, and their friends and family as enemies of the state.
Sam himself is most caught between cultures when, impressed by his knowledge of Japanese, the U.S. Army drafts and then promotes Sam, sending him on a secret mission into a wartime world of madness where he faces the very real risk of encountering his own brother in combat.
From the tragedies of the camps through to the bombing of Hiroshima, where Sam's mother and siblings live, Sam's very identity both puts his life at risk and provides the only reserve from which he can pull to survive. In this beautifully written historical epic about a boy in search of manhood, a girl in search of truth, and two peoples divided by war, Sam must draw upon his training, his past, and everything he has learned if he's ever to span his two cultures and see Keiko, or his family, again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hamamura's broad debut follows a Japanese language teacher raised in Hawaii as he finds love and as the U.S. and Japan drift into war. Isamu "Sam" Hamada, born in Hawaii to Japanese parents and raised in Japan until age nine, leaves Japan in 1930 to be reared by a Japanese-American family in Hawaii, before moving to California. A constant for the intense but likable Sam is his dedication to the martial arts, a passion shared by Yanagi Keiko, the American-born young woman he meets in California. Their love is haunted by an earlier liaison of Sam's, but Keiko and Sam press on until she leaves for Japan in the spring of 1940 to finish high school and, it is planned, marry a man chosen by her grandparents. As the war begins, Keiko's family is deported from Japan to the U.S., while Sam is recruited by the U.S. military intelligence, and a slim second chance comes into view. The romantic material is solid if idealized; various martial arts chapters have a clumsily formal quality; Sam's final military adventure at Okinawa strains credibility; an extended passage on the bombing of Hiroshima is motivated only by placing Sam's parents and siblings there. But Hamamura has a real command of the relevant history and packs a great deal of it into several dense but lucid and accessible story lines.
Customer Reviews
Color of the sea
Historic, romantic, spiritually deep, contemplative and unforgettable. A must read