Cynthia Kadohata:
Life After the Newbury

Cynthia Kadohata's luminous novels of the Japanese American experience were rescued from obscurity by the Newbury Award for young adult readers.

by Hillel Italie
AP National Writer

Cynthia Kadohata
Photo: AP Photo/Reed Saxon
Life After the Newbury

arly one January morning, author Cynthia Kadohata received a phone call informing her that she had won the Newbery Medal for the best children's book of 2004. Upon hearing the news, her world appeared both unchanged and transformed.

      ``It's weird,'' she says. ``When they first called to tell me, everything looked exactly the same: The furniture is the same and you still have to clean the house and change the diapers. But it also feels like the whole world is different. It's hard to describe. There's a sense of confidence I hadn't had in a long time, a sense of security and satisfaction.''

      Kadohata, who won the Newbery for her novel, ``Kira-Kira,'' was, until recently, just another name on that long list of once-promising, now-forgotten authors. Those who did recall her knew that years ago she had published a very strong first novel, ``The Floating World.''

      What happened after her first book was far less known.

      ``The Floating World,'' published in 1989, is the story of a transient Japanese-American family in the 1950s, an immigrant's tale of assimilation and an American myth of perpetual movement. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani praised Kadohata's ``beautiful, clean yet lyrical prose'' and declared her a ``luminous new voice in fiction.''

      For a time, the news only got better. In 1991, Kadohata received a Whiting Writers Award, a $30,000 grant given annually to emerging authors of exceptional talent. She had a major publisher, Viking, and a powerful agent, Andrew Wylie. A long, accomplished career seemed assured.

      ``I think if things go pretty well with your first novel, you kind of think, `Oh, this is what happens when you publish a novel.' You don't have another personal experience to weigh it against,'' Kadohata says.

      But she soon struck a bump on the road to literary greatness: The Second Novel. ``In the Heart of the Valley of Love,'' a dire story of chaos and repression set in the 21st century, came out in 1992 and fatally damaged her reputation. Kakutani called the book a ``pallid piece of futuristic writing, and an unconvincing tale of coming of age.'' The public seemed to agree and ignored it.

      The author soon left Viking and parted from her agent. Through a small publisher, White Wolf, she published ``The Glass Mountains,'' a science fiction novel inspired by Philip K. Dick that ``was in print for about three seconds,'' she recalls. By the mid-1990s, she was working as a secretary at a food processing company and attempting a career as a screenplay writer.

      ``My feelings ... were that nobody in the world is going to buy a book from me, so I didn't know what to do next,'' she says.

      Kadohata no longer had a readership, but she did have a well-placed friend, Caitlyn Dlouhy, a classmate at the University of Pittsburgh and now a senior editor at Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster's Children's Publishing. Dlouhy, noting that Kadohata's books all were narrated by young people, thought the author a natural to write for that age group.

      ``I kept thinking she writes about teens so beautifully. She can get into their heads and write about their concerns,'' Dlouhy says.

      ``Every year, I would ask her if she would consider writing a book for me and every year she would say no. My little polite requests hadn't achieved anything, so I sent her a big box of favorite YA (Young Adult) novels, and I said, `Read this.' And she called me and said, `I can do this.' And I said, `Of course, you can do this!'''

      Kadohata used her own background to tell the story of a Japanese family living in the South in the 1950s. ``Kira-Kira'' _ the title refers to the Japanese word for ``shining'' _ is narrated by young Katie Takeshima, who recalls her family's struggle to earn money and relate to the world outside the Japanese community.

      Praised by the American Library Association, which awards the Newbery, as a ``tenderly nuanced novel (that) glitters with plain and poignant words,'' Kadohata's book now has more than 100,000 copies in print, bringing money and stability to an author who has often lacked both.

      ``Winning the Newbery renewed my sense of the mysterious or magical quality of life,'' she says. ``It feels VERY different from the publication of my first novel. It's the opposite of feeling, `Oh, this is what happens when you publish a novel.' It's more like, HOLY COW, something amazing and miraculous can happen in this world out of nowhere.''

      She has lived all over the country and all over Los Angeles, but she is as settled as she's ever been, with her adopted son, Sammy, and her boyfriend, George, in a gray-shingled, one-story house on a long side street in Long Beach.

      ``I walk by the school nearby and I think, `OK, that's where Sammy's going to school,'' she says of her son, now 19 months old. ``My brother lives here. Mom lives here. I don't think I feel as strongly as most people, `Here I am. I'm home.' But it's terrible, because I want Sammy to feel like he's home.''

      Sammy is out with the baby sitter on this cloudy afternoon, but his presence _ stronger than any Newbery _ carries on in conversation and in the house's decor, from the scattered toys in the living room to the green and white plastic stool that serves as a table for drinks.

      Writing time is precious for Kadohata these days _ so is rest _ but the 48-year-old author does not live up to her own billing as a ``sleep deprived'' mother. She looks and sounds far younger, with her long, dark hair, strong cheekbones and a bright, self-conscious laugh that proves a natural cure for any wrinkles.

      Kadohata found writing the book an easy adjustment from her previous work, with only minor editing necessary. Like her other books, ``Kira-Kira'' is a story of ethnicity and gender and class, and, most of all, of displacement. ``Home,'' whether in the physical world or as a state of mind, has been an end longed for, but mistrusted.

      The author is a Japanese-American whose father was interned in an American prison camp during World War II, an experience that contributed to Kadohata's own wary, ``transient'' heart, as if compulsive motion were an antidote to enforced confinement.

      She was born in Chicago, but soon lived in Arkansas and Georgia as her father searched for work. By age 9, her parents divorced and she returned to Chicago with her mother, sister and brother. Her teenage years were spent in Los Angeles.

      Books were steady companions throughout her youth, and the local public library was a surrogate home. Her first dream was journalism, the kind of nonfiction literature she discovered in James Agee's ``Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.'' But Kadohata decided, perhaps too hastily, that she could only be a reporter if she learned how to drive.

      So she turned to fiction, studying creative writing at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh. She continued her education after school, when she moved to Boston in the early 1980s and began reading anthologies of ``The Best American Short Stories.''

      ``It was like a bomb going off in my mind. I know this sounds ignorant, but I didn't have a real awareness of people writing about today,'' she says, citing in particular the work of Ann Beattie. ``When I was in school, you basically read Nathaniel Hawthorne and other older writers.''

      Kadohata began submitting stories to The New Yorker and other magazines. Dozens were turned down, but she persisted and was eventually published by The New Yorker, Grand Street and The Pennsylvania Review.

      ``I think the name of her novel (`The Floating World') was, retroactively, fitting for her stories,'' says Daniel Menaker, Kadohata's editor at The New Yorker and now executive editor-in-chief of the Random House Publishing Group.

      ``There was an odd, floating quality about her work. Her characters were floating in America, unmoored and ungrounded. And there was this sense of removed observation, even though the story lines and the family drama was very intense.''

      Kadohata has no plans to write any more ``grown-up'' books, but has completed a second young adult story, ``Weedflower, in which she writes of her father's time in the internment camp, and plans two more books for kids, including one about Vietnam.

      She believes that her work has changed greatly since ``The Floating World.'' Experience has quieted the ``yearning'' of her early fiction. Writing screenplays in the 1990s gave her a greater appreciation of plot, and growing older has made her more willing to confront emotions. Inspiration itself has been domesticated.

      ``For many years ... I would hop on a bus or train when I wanted to conjure up the writing spirits,'' she explains. ``Today I'm a mother. How can a mother hit the road to conjure up spirits? Today I feel I need to seek ideas out, digging under dirt, pushing through bushes, the same way my son seeks out the world.''
“I think if things go pretty well with your first novel, you kind of think, `Oh, this is what happens when you publish a novel.' You don't have another personal experience to weigh it against.”