Japanese American Internment

Akiko "Jane" Thompson, a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian woman in her mid-30s, is attempting to forge a quietly happy life in the Bay Area with her fiance, Shiro. But after a bizarre car accident, things begin to unravel. An intruder ransacks their apartment but takes nothing, leaving behind only cryptic traces of his or her presence. Shiro, obsessed with government surveillance, risks their security in a plot to expose the misdeeds of his employer, the TSA. Jane's mother has seemingly disappeared, her existence only apparent online.

Japan faces Korea in the World Baseball Classic at Dodger Stadium, and curmudgeonly gardener Mas Arai finds himself embroiled in a murder. A Japanese tabloid writer drops dead on the field, and Mas gave the victim his last drink. It turns out there's more at stake than a baseball championship - international diplomacy depends upon uncovering secrets buried decades ago.

Louis Thorn and Haruto "Harry" Yamada - Eagle and Crane - are the star attractions of Earl Shaw's Flying Circus, a daredevil (and not exactly legal) flying act that traverses Depression-era California. The young men have a complicated relationship, thanks to the Thorn family's belief that the Yamadas - Japanese immigrants - stole land that should have stayed in the Thorn family.

From the editor of the award-winning Children of Manzanar, Heather C. Lindquist, and Edgar Award winner Naomi Hirahara comes a nuanced account of the “Resettlement”: the relatively unexamined period when ordinary people of Japanese ancestry, having been unjustly imprisoned during World War II, were finally released from custody. Given $25 and a one-way bus ticket to make a new life, some ventured east to Denver and Chicago to start over, while others returned to Southern California only to face discrimination and an alarming scarcity of housing and jobs.

Fred Korematsu liked listening to music on the radio, playing tennis, and hanging around with his friends - just like lots of other Americans. But everything changed when the United States went to war with Japan in 1941 and the government forced all people of Japanese ancestry to leave their homes on the West Coast and move to distant prison camps. This included Fred, whose parents had immigrated to the United States from Japan many years before. But Fred refused to go.