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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition

Cynthia Kadohata

by Elizabeth D. Schafer

Other literary forms

Although Cynthia Kadohata (kah-doh-hah-tah) studied journalism intending to become a reporter, she did not seek professional employment in that field. Kadohata began writing short stories as a teenager and then resumed that craft in the late 1970’s because she believed she could reveal truths better through fiction than through nonfiction. In 1986, The New Yorker first accepted one of Kadohata’s stories. Her short stories have also been published in Grand Street, Pennsylvania Review, Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, and The New York Times. Kadohata’s stories have been included in several collections, such as Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (1993), edited by Jessica Hagedorn, and American Eyes: New Asian-American Short Stories for Young Adults (1994), edited by Lori M. Carlson, for which Kadohata wrote the introduction. She has incorporated several of her short stories into her long fiction and has begun preparing screenplays based on her work.

Cynthia Kadohata.

ph_0111226252-Kadohata.jpg

(George Miyamoto)

Achievements

Recognition of the quality of Cynthia Kadohata’s writing has come in the form of financial support from a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Award, and a fellowship from the Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project. The universal appeal of Kadohata’s fiction has resulted in her novels being issued in numerous languages, including Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Spanish, Polish, Serbian, Italian, and Romanian. Her works have also been released in Braille, large-print, and audio editions. Several of Kadohata’s novels have achieved best-seller status, have received starred reviews, and have been named outstanding examples of historical fiction. Because of their profound themes and insights, Kadohata’s books attract readers representing several generations, ranging from elementary school students to senior citizens.

Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love was designated a PEN West Award finalist. In 2005, the American Library Association presented its Newbery Medal to Kadohata’s book Kira-Kira. That novel also received the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature 2004-2005. The Pacific Rim Voices Project designated Kira-Kira a Kiryama Prize Notable Book, and the Bank Street College of Education included the novel on its 2004 list of Best Children’s Books of the Year. In 2007, Kadohata’s novel Weedflower won the 2007 PEN USA Literary Award for Children’s Literature and the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award.

Biography

Cynthia Lynn Kadohata was born on July 2, 1956, in Chicago, Illinois, to Toshiro and June Kadohata, both California natives. Her paternal grandparents had emigrated from Japan to California. When Kadohata was a toddler, she moved with her parents and older sister to Tifton, Georgia, where her father worked for the Chemell Hatchery as a chicken sexer, separating female and male chicks, a job many Japanese Americans performed in the decades after World War II. Her family later relocated to Arkansas towns, including Springdale, where her father secured similar poultry industry work and her younger brother was born.

By age nine, Kadohata had moved north to Michigan and then to Chicago with her mother and siblings when her parents divorced. She maintained contact with her father in Arkansas. Wherever she lived, Kadohata read voraciously, especially animal books and science fiction, and wrote stories. She attended a Chicago alternative high school. Relocating with her family to Los Angeles when she was fifteen, Kadohata dropped out of Hollywood High School in her senior year, in 1973, when that school refused to accept many of her Chicago high school’s credits.

At eighteen, Kadohata started taking journalism courses at Los Angeles City College. She then transferred to the University of Southern California, where by 1977 she earned a bachelor of arts degree in journalism. In college, a creative nonfiction class and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) inspired Kadohata about the possibilities she could pursue as an Asian American author. After receiving severe injuries to her right arm and collarbone when she was struck by a car, she moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where her sister resided. Funded by insurance money and jobs, Kadohata wrote short stories, many based on her family, that she submitted to major U.S. literary periodicals.

Kadohata enrolled in graduate writing courses at the University of Pittsburgh in 1986. She left that program and sold a story to The New Yorker prior to attending creative-writing classes at Columbia University. Agent Andrew Wylie contacted Kadohata in 1988 after reading her work in The New Yorker and suggested she expand her stories into a novel; this work became The Floating World. During 1990, Kadohata returned to the Los Angeles area; she lived and worked in Hollywood and then in Long Beach, writing two novels. She took a screenwriting course because a director asked her to try writing a screenplay.

Kadohata married Mark Douglas Metcalf on August 30, 1992, in Las Vegas, Nevada. They divorced in 2000. In the early years of the twenty-first century, Kadohata, encouraged by an editor friend, has focused on creating books marketed as children’s or young adult literature that present readers with the same kinds of sophisticated imagery, themes, and plots as are found in her novels for adults. Kadohata flew to Kazakhstan in June, 2004, to adopt a toddler, whom she named Sammy. While she stayed in that country for almost two months, waiting for paperwork approval, she wrote portions of her novel Weedflower, gaining a sense of her protagonist’s unease confined in an alien place. She and her son settled in Covina, California.

Analysis

Movement propels the plots of Cynthia Kadohata’s fiction. Characters migrate to search for employment or to take care of other such practical concerns. They also travel to escape from what they perceive as unbearable situations. Some are uprooted by circumstances beyond their control. Survival and sacrifice are significant themes in Kadohata’s writing, which emphasizes character development. Her characters represent diverse ages, from children to elderly people, with most narrators being female Asian teenagers. Their interactions reveal vulnerabilities and strengths as they strive to comprehend each other and themselves. Family in Kadohata’s fiction represents people bonded together by blood or necessity. Community shapes her characters and often serves as a substitute family. Themes of duty and loyalty reinforce friendships and other relationships.

Because of the transitory nature of many of their experiences, Kadohata’s characters usually desire permanence and are looking for a home. They are frequently marginalized due to ethnicity or gender and encounter limited options. Themes of confinement, both physical and emotional, permeate Kadohata’s writing as her characters find themselves controlled by people with political or social power. Her style incorporates symbols, often flowers or animals, to represent resilience, hope, and other traits associated with characters. Memory is important for Kadohata’s characterizations, as people share insights and traditions, guiding others to awareness of their heritage, whether they choose to accept or reject it. Kadahota’s writing mostly appropriates historical settings, where her characters envision preferable futures. Autobiographical elements and inclusion of Japanese terms influence her literary voice. Responding to critics who have attacked her depictions of Asian characters, Kadohata defends the cultural authenticity of her fiction.

The Floating World

Kadohata’s first novel, The Floating World, presents distinctive stylistic use of literary elements, particularly themes, characterizations, and symbolism, that are evident throughout her subsequent fiction. After World War II, Olivia Osaka’s family is representative of many Japanese Americans who sought opportunities and socioeconomic stability denied them during the 1940’s. Olivia, age twelve when the novel begins, serves as narrator during her multigenerational family’s constant movement, traveling through what her grandmother refers to as ukiyo, a floating world that sustains travelers’ needs with services and goods. In addition to being interpreted literally, the floating world symbolizes change as migrants move from one transitory existence to another, alternating between being unconscious and being alert. The dreamlike movement represents maturation as individuals shift from childhood to adulthood and attain new levels of awareness. It also suggests assimilation as characters slip away from their Japanese customs to be accepted as Americans.

Olivia, the daughter of Jack, observes her family members—her grandmother, Obāsan; her mother, Shimeko; her stepfather, Charlie-O; and her three half brothers, Ben, Walker, and Peter—as they find these oases in the remoteness through which they move in pursuit of a better life. She introduces her grandmother as an antagonist who hurts her family physically and emotionally. Obāsan’s death in a floating world hotel after Olivia ignores her request for assistance affects the travelers, who briefly mourn her and then return to their journey. Olivia continues being influenced by Obāsan and Japanese culture, remembering her grandmother’s stories and reading her diary.

Olivia’s parents settle near Gibson, Arkansas, buying their desired home. Teenage Olivia begins separating from her family, working in a chicken hatchery and acquiring a lover. As an adult, Olivia moves to the West Coast, pursuing an autonomous life with a boyfriend, yet she helps her family when asked. Olivia agrees to service Jack’s vending-machine route, continuing movement alone as part of her own floating world. Many critics have praised Kadohata’s first novel, particularly for its evocative language and imagery.

Kira-Kira

Katie Takeshima, narrator of Kira-Kira, is reminiscent of The Floating World’s Olivia. The theme of post-World War II Japanese American migration in Kadohata’s previous fiction continues when Katie’s family moves from Iowa to Chesterfield, Georgia, for employment at a chicken hatchery. Incorporating autobiographical details, Kadohata develops effective characterization with themes of innocence, rejection, acceptance, and loss. Katie adores her older sister Lynn, whom she considers her closest friend, especially when they are outsiders in their new community. Lynn symbolizes comfort and security for Katie, teaching her to perceive wonders in ordinary things. Katie learns her first word, kira, Japanese for “glittering,” from Lynn to describe anything that pleases her. Excerpts from Lynn’s diary supplement Katie’s perspective.

Katie yearns to make friends at school but is frustrated in her efforts when classmates shun her. When Lynn secures a best friend, Amber, Katie fears she will be displaced, but she becomes angry when Amber rejects Lynn. An anomaly, Katie embraces her sister’s suggestions to remain hopeful as she deals with ostracism and ambiguities, such as being unsure where she belongs in the segregated South. Like many of Kadohata’s characters, the Takeshimas desire to own a home. Katie’s mother processes chickens at a local plant to earn money for a house. The workers endure intolerable conditions, of which Katie becomes aware when she accompanies her mother to work and meets Silly (Sylvia) Kilgore, another employee’s daughter, who becomes a reliable friend.

A local ghost story and the injury of the sisters’ younger brother by a metal trap foreshadow the diagnosis of lymphoma that Lynn receives when she is fourteen and Katie is ten. Katie despairs as her sister’s health declines. Their roles reverse as Katie nurtures her sister and naïvely hopes that she will survive. The day Lynn dies, Katie futilely chases the setting sun before it disappears after she has gathered mementoes from Lynn’s last day alive. Travel helps to restore Katie’s family’s unity when they go west to honor Lynn’s unfulfilled wish to see the Pacific Ocean.

Weedflower

Weedflower emphasizes Kadohata’s awareness of the impacts of World War II on several generations of Japanese Americans. In autumn, 1941, Sumiko Yamaguchi, age twelve, dutifully helps her extended family tend their fields of carnations and kusabana (weedflowers), which symbolically survive extreme conditions. Sumiko aspires to become the owner of a flower store. When a white classmate invites her to a birthday party, lonely Sumiko envisions becoming friends with the girl until the girl’s mother refuses to allow Sumiko to stay in their home. This theme of exclusion expands as public distrust and fear of Japanese Americans escalates after Japanese pilots bomb the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor.

Sumiko stoically accompanies her family to a California racetrack, where thousands of displaced Japanese Americans await further dispersion. The humiliating conditions symbolize the powerlessness Sumiko feels. Sumiko’s family is relocated to an internment camp on a Mohave Indian reservation in Poston, Arizona. Kadohata’s settings intensify the characters’ anger and sadness, with dust storms impeding movement and heat stifling activities. Natural threats include rattlesnakes. Animosity between many of the internees and members of the Mohave tribe, who consider the Japanese Americans intruders, results in fights. The theme of identity is constant as the internees insist they are Americans but are hesitant to deny their Japanese ancestry.

Some of the Japanese American farmers irrigate the desert, transforming the arid land to produce large crops of vegetables. Sumiko’s gardening expertise helps her befriend a Mohave boy, Frank, and a Japanese American man, Mr. Moto. Her relocation experiences and disappointments guide her to comprehend the responsibilities of friendship and family. She introduces an agriculturally skilled cousin to Frank’s brother so the Mohave can learn irrigation techniques to sustain agriculture after the war ends. Sumiko shares weedflower seeds she brought from home with Mr. Moto and helps him grow a garden that wins a prize in a camp contest. Those seeds symbolize how Sumiko is a catalyst for ideas and growth, not only in herself but also in others, and empower her with the possibility to reestablish roots wherever she goes when the internment ends.

Outside Beauty

Kadohata examines how reality and fantasy collide in Outside Beauty. Appearances shape thirty-five-year-old Helen Kimura, who instructs her four daughters, each fathered by a different man, to strive for physical perfection. Teenage narrator Shelby depicts her mother’s superficial existence, noting how Helen relies on her looks to attract men who provide material support until she tires of them. Emphasizing Kadohata’s frequent themes of escape and family, this novel begins in summer, 1983, when Helen flees from a suitor, driving with her girls from their Chicago apartment to California, where her daughter Lakey’s father lives. Each sister fulfills a role when traveling, being responsible for reading maps, choosing hotels, and monitoring the gas gauge, becoming reliant on each other to be accountable A subpoena from Mr. Bronson, the father of Helen’s youngest daughter, Maddie, who is seeking custody, forces the family to retreat to Illinois.

An accident the next summer immobilizes their mother; she is hospitalized, and the girls diplomatically reassure her that her beauty is unmarred and avoid mentioning the scars that have altered her face. Because they are minors, the sisters are sent to live with their fathers; they are devastated to be separated. Embarrassed by her father, Jiro, especially his unfashionable clothes, Shelby initially distrusts the solitude of his rural Arkansas home, which contrasts with her urban background. Gradually, she begins to see beauty in nature.

A medical emergency reunites the sisters in Chicago, and they learn their mother might die. Shelby tells her sisters that she believes Mr. Bronson is abusing Maddie. Determined to stay together and protect Maddie, the sisters run away. Their escape symbolizes the girls’ unity while revealing the individuality gained during their separation as they react uniquely to situations confronting them and demonstrate resourcefulness. Empowered by their journeys, the sisters realize truths regarding their mother and that they possess inner strength that is more enduring than external beauty.

Bibliography

1 

Cutter, Martha J. “Finding a ’Home’ in Translation: John Okada’s No-No Boy and Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World.” In Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Examines themes of family and home as they are presented in the two novels and addresses Kadohata’s fictional assimilation of Japanese American experiences and culture.

2 

Dlouhy, Caitlyn M. “Cynthia Kadohata.” Horn Book Magazine 81, no. 4 (July/August, 2005): 419-426. Insights about Kadohata’s writing career are provided by her editor and friend who was enrolled in the same graduate writing program at Pittsburgh as Kadohata. Discusses the editing of Kadohata’s novel Kira-Kira.

3 

Faust, Susan. “The Comeback Kid: Now That Cynthia Kadohata Has Won the Newbery Medal, Her Career Is Finally in Full Bloom.” School Library Journal 51, no. 5 (May, 2005): 38-40. Summarizes how Kadohata’s writing has been affected by literary criticism, including a brief interview with Kadohata.

4 

Kadohata, Cynthia. “Interview with Cynthia Kadohata.” Interview by Hsiu-chuan Lee. MELUS 32, no. 2 (Summer, 2007): 165-186. In an extensive interview Kadohata explores her perception of her identity as an Asian American and how her Japanese ancestry has shaped her writing.

5 

_______. “Newbery Medal Acceptance.” Horn Book Magazine 81, no. 4 (July/August, 2005): 409-417. Kadohata describes her response to this literary achievement and reveals biographical information relevant to her development as a writer unavailable in other resources.

6 

Kafka, Phillipa. “Cynthia Kadohata, The Floating World: ’I Like the Diabolical Quality, the Clarity of Admitting I Want.’” In (Un)doing the Missionary Position: Gender Asymmetry in Contemporary Asian American Women’s Writing. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Focuses on the family dynamics, cultural attitudes, and social roles in Kadohata’s novel The Floating World.

7 

Woo, Celestine. “Bicultural World Creation: Laurence Yep, Cynthia Kadohata, and Asian American Fantasy.” In Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, edited by Rocío G. Davis and Sue-Im Lee. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Analyzes literary techniques that Kadohata uses to depict characters whose travels immerse them in diverse cultures and their responses to being marginalized.

8 

Yu, Su-lin. “Cynthia Kadohata (1956-    ).” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Provides a biographical profile as well as literary criticism and a bibliography. Comments on how Kadohata’s experiences influenced her early fiction.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Schafer, Elizabeth D. "Cynthia Kadohata." Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSLF_13400141000056.
APA 7th
Schafer, E. D. (2010). Cynthia Kadohata. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Schafer, Elizabeth D. "Cynthia Kadohata." Edited by Carl Rollyson. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed September 17, 2025. online.salempress.com.