Kadohata, Cynthia 1956-

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Kadohata, Cynthia 1956-

Personal

Born 1956, in Chicago, IL; married (divorced, 2000); children: Sammy (adopted). Education: Attended Los Angeles City College; University of Southern California, B.A. (journalism); graduate study at University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University.

Addresses

Home—Long Beach, CA. Agent—Andrew Wylie, Wylie, Aitken & Stone, Inc., 250 W. 57th St., Ste 2106, New York, NY 10107. E-mail—[email protected].

Career

Writer. Worked variously as a department-store clerk and waitress.

Awards, Honors

Whiting Writer's Award, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation; Chesterfield Writer's Film Project screenwriting fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts grant; Newbery Medal, 2005, and APALA Award for Young-Adult Literature, 2006, both for Kira-Kira.

Writings

The Floating World, Viking (New York, NY), 1989.

In the Heart of the Valley of Love, Viking (New York, NY), 1992.

Kira-Kira, Atheneum (New York, NY), 2004.

Weedflower, Atheneum (New York, NY), 2006.

Cracker!: The Best Dog in Vietnam, Atheneum (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including New Yorker, Grand Street, Ploughshares, and Pennsylvania Review.

Adaptations

Author's novels have been adapted as audiobooks.

Sidelights

Cynthia Kadohata is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer. Her short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Grand Street, and the Pennsylvania Review, and her novels, including The Floating World and In the Heart of the Valley of Love, have been generally well received. In 2005 Kadohata received the prestigious Newbery Medal for her young-adult title Kira-Kira, a semi-autobiographical tale about a Japanese-American girl growing up in a small town in rural Georgia.

Like writers such as Amy Tan, Kadohata is frequently cited as a literary spokesperson for Asian Americans. However, this is a position about which she is

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ambivalent. As she told Publishers Weekly interviewer Lisa See, "there's so much variety among Asian-American writers that you can't say what an Asian-American writer is." Kadohata's novels contain many clearly autobiographical features and have frequently been lauded for their striking imagery and their hauntingly lyrical narrative. Her writing has been compared to that of Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Mark Twain, and J.D. Salinger.

Although Kadohata was born in Chicago, Illinois, she and her family lived in Michigan, Georgia, Arkansas, and California while searching for work. A voracious reader but an indifferent student, she dropped out of high school during her senior year, opting instead to go to work in a department store and a restaurant before enrolling in Los Angeles City College. From there, Kadohata transferred to the University of Southern California, where she earned a degree in journalism in 1977. After an automobile jumped the curb and severely injured her arm, Kadohata moved to Boston where she concentrated on her writing career. "I started looking at short stories," the author told See. "I had always thought that nonfiction represented the ‘truth.’ Fiction seemed like something that people had done a long time ago, and wasn't very profound. But in these short stories I saw that people were writing now, and that the work was very alive. I realized that you could say things with fiction that you couldn't say any other way."

Kadohata set herself the goal of writing one story each month, using money from temp jobs and her insurance settlement to support herself. After receiving numerous rejections, she sold a story to the New Yorker in 1986; that tale, along with two others also published by that prestigious magazine, would later become part of her debut novel, The Floating World. After briefly attending graduate-level writing courses at the University of Pittsburgh, Kadohata transferred to Columbia University's writing program. However, after finding a publisher for The Floating World, she abandoned her program at Columbia.

The Floating World is narrated by twelve-year-old Olivia and follows the journey of a Japanese-American family searching for economic and emotional security in post-World War II America. Kadohata uses Olivia's character to portray the family dynamics and interactions that occur as they travel, eat, and even sleep in the same room together. In a passage that reveals the significance of the book's title, Olivia explains this itinerant life: "We were traveling then in what she [Obasan, Olivia's grandmother] called ukiyo, the floating world. The floating world was the gas station attendants, restaurants, and jobs we depended on, the motel towns floating in the middle of fields and mountains. In old Japan, ukiyo meant the districts full of brothels, tea houses and public baths, but it also referred to change and the pleasures and loneliness change brings. For a long time, I never exactly thought of us as part of any of that, though. We were stable, traveling through an unstable world while my father looked for jobs."

In addition to the physical journey, Kadohata illustrates Olivia's internal journey in The Floating World. Due to the close quarters of her family's living arrangements, Olivia is exposed to adult issues at an early age. She witnesses the tension that exists between her parents, their quiet arguments, and even their love making. In addition, she is constantly subjected to her eccentric grandmother's frequently abusive behavior. Finally the family finds a stable home in Arkansas where Olivia matures from a young teen to a young adult. It is during this time that she learns to understand the ways of her parents and grandmother and to develop her own values. Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Grace Edwards-Yearwood commended this portrayal, pointing out that "Kadohata writes compellingly of Olivia's coming of age, her determination to grow beyond her parents' dreams."

Reviewing The Floating World, Diana O'Hehir wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Kadohata's "aim and the book's seem to be one: to present the world affectionately and without embroidery. To notice what's there. To see it as clearly as you can." Caroline Ong, a Times Literary Supplement contributor, described Olivia's narrative as "haunting because of its very simplicity and starkness, its sketchy descriptions fleshing out raw emotions and painful truths." Susanna Moore, writing in the Washington Post Book World, judged that The Floating World would be more effective had it been written in the style of a memoir. However, the critic also conceded that "Kadohata has written a book that is a child's view of the floating world, a view that is perceptive, unsentimental and intelligent." New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani praised the first-time novelist's ability to handle painful moments with humor and sensitivity, concluding that such "moments not only help to capture the emotional reality of these people's lives in a delicate net of images and words, but they also attest to Ms. Kadohata's authority as a writer." Kakutani concluded the review by noting that The Floating World marks the debut of a luminous new voice in fiction."

In the Heart of the Valley of Love concerns survival and quality of life in Los Angeles in the year 2052. In her fictional future world Kadohata pits the haves and have-nots against one another. Both are gun-toting communities without morals, law, or order. Amid this chaos, the main character, a nineteen-year-old orphan of Asian and African descent named Francie, relates her story of endurance.

Some critics found Kahodota's sophomore effort to be relatively disappointing. Barbara Quick, writing in the New York Times Book Review, criticized In the Heart of the Valley of Love for its lack of conviction and imagination, and further noted that main character Francie, with only a few alterations, is identical to Kadohata's earlier protagonist. In a similar vein, Kakutani argued that "Kadohata's vision of the future is not sufficiently original or compelling," resulting in "an uncomfortable hybrid: a pallid piece of futuristic writing, and an unconvincing tale of coming of age." The reviewer noted, however, that "the writing in this volume is lucid and finely honed, often lyrical and occasionally magical." Praising In the Heart of the Valley of Love, Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Susan Heeger lauded Kadohata as "masterful in her evocation of physical, spiritual and cultural displacement," adding that "the message of this marvelous though often painful book is that our capacity to feel deep emotion … just might bind us together, and save us from ourselves."

The Newbery Medal-winning Kira-Kira, Kadohata's first book for a young-adult audience, "tells the tender story of a Japanese-American family that moves from Iowa to rural Georgia in the 1950s," according to School Library Journal contributor Susan Faust. The work concerns the complex relationship between Katie Takeshima and her older sister, Lynn, who often cares for Katie while their parents work long hours at the town's poultry plants. Katie worships her older sister, who taught Katie the Japanese word "kira-kira," which means "glittering" and which Katie uses to describe everything she loves. When Lynn falls ill and is diagnosed with lymphoma, the sisters' roles are reversed; Katie becomes Lynn's caretaker, an exhausting and heart-wrenching ordeal that ends with her sister's death. Through Katie's narration, Kira-Kira "stays true to the child's viewpoint," the "plain, beautiful prose … barely contain[ing] the [narrator's] passionate feelings," noted Booklist critic Hazel Rochman. "The family's devotion to one another, and Lynn's ability to teach Katie to appreciate the ‘kira-kira,’ or glittering, in everyday life makes this novel shine," added a Publishers Weekly critic.

Also for a young-adult readership, Weedflower is set in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor and chronicles the growing friendship between Sumiko Yamaguchi, a Japanese-American girl living in an internment camp, and a Native-American boy who lives on nearby reservation lands. Noting that the work is loosely based on the childhood experiences of her father, Kadohata explained on her home page: "My father and his family were interned in the Poston camp on the Colorado River Indian Reservation in the Sonoran desert. One source claims the thermometer in 1942 hit more than 140 degrees in the Poston area." In the novel, Sumiko's uncle and grandfather are sent to North Dakota after the United States declares war on Japan, while the rest of her family is transported to a camp in the Arizona desert. Despite the harsh living conditions and her frustrations at being imprisoned, "Sumiko finds hope and a form of salvation" by creating a garden, observed a contributor for Publishers Weekly. A reviewer in Kliatt praised Weedflower, calling it "a haunting story of dramatic loss and subtle triumphs."

A high school dropout turned award-winning novelist, Kadohata believes that, as it did for her, literature has

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the power to nurture and transform an individual. After she left school, the author explained in her Newbery acceptance speech (as published in Horn Book), "I sought out the library near my home. Seeking it out was more of an instinct, really, not a conscious thought. I didn't think to myself, I need to start reading again. I felt it. I rediscovered reading—the way I'd read as a child, when there was constantly a book I was just finishing or just beginning or in the middle of. I rediscovered myself." She continued, "I look back on 1973, the year I dropped out of school, with the belief that libraries can not just change your life but save it. Not the same way a Coast Guardsman or a police officer might save a life, not all at once. It happens more slowly, but just as surely."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Kadohata, Cynthia, The Floating World, Viking (New York, NY), 1989.

Notable Asian Americans, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.

PERIODICALS

Amerasia Journal, winter, 1997, Lynn M. Itagaki, review of In the Heart of the Valley of Love, p. 229.

America, November 18, 1989, Eve Shelnutt, review of The Floating World, p. 361.

Antioch Review, winter, 1990, review of The Floating World, p. 125.

Belles Lettres, spring, 1993, review of In the Heart of the Valley of Love, p. 46.

Booklist, June 15, 1992, Gilbert Taylor, review of In the Heart of the Valley of Love, p. 1807; January 1, 2004, Hazel Rochman, review of Kira-Kira, p. 858.

Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), August 5, 1989.

Horn Book, March-April, 2004, Jennifer M. Brabander, review of Kira-Kira, pp. 183-184; July-August, 2005, Cynthia Kadohata, "Newbery Medal Acceptance," pp. 409-417, and Caitlyn M. Dlouhy, "Cynthia Kadohata," pp. 419-427.

Kliatt, March, 2006, Janis Flint-Ferguson, review of Weedflower, pp. 12-13.

Library Journal, June 15, 1992, Cherry W. Li, review of In the Heart of the Valley of Love, p. 102.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 16, 1989, p. 12; August 23, 1992, pp. 1, 8; May 2, 1993, review of The Floating World, p. 10.

New York Times, June 30, 1989, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Floating World, p. B4; July 28, 1992, Michiko Kakutani, review of In the Heart of the Valley of Love, p. C15.

New York Times Book Review, July 23, 1989, Diana O'Hehir, review of The Floating World, p. 16; August 30, 1992, Barbara Quick, review of In the Heart of the Valley of Love, p. 14.

Publishers Weekly, May 12, 1989, review of The Floating World, p. 279; June 1, 1992, review of In the Heart of the Valley of Love, p. 51; August 3, 1992, Lisa See, "Cynthia Kadohata," pp. 48-49; February 9, 2004, review of Kira-Kira, pp. 81-82; February 27, 2006, review of Weedflower, p. 62.

School Library Journal, January, 1990, Anne Paget, review of The Floating World, p. 127; March, 2004, Ashley Larsen, review of Kira-Kira, pp. 214-215; May, 2005, Susan Faust, "The Comeback Kid," pp. 38-40.

Time, June 19, 1989, review of The Floating World, p. 65.

Times Literary Supplement, December 29, 1989, Caroline Ong, review of The Floating World, p. 1447.

U.S. News & World Report, December 26, 1988, Miriam Horn and Nancy Linnon, "New Cultural Worlds," p. 101.

Washington Post Book World, June 25, 1989, pp. 5, 7; August 16, 1992, p. 5.