Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes.

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor in the Department of Modern
Languages and Literatures at Laurentian University.

Terry Watada’s first novel, based on a true story, foregrounds the not very well known history of Vancouver’s Japanese Canadian community prior to World War II in this imagined narrative of personal and communal love, loss, danger, and intrigue. Hayashi Yoshiko dreams of escaping the traditions and conventions of 1917 Japan by going to America. She ends up in Vancouver as the “picture bride” of Miyamoto Jinsaburo, whom she and her family are led to believe is a successful and wealthy boarding house owner. Yoshiko’s naive, romantic fantasies are crushed upon her arrival, and her life with Jinsaburo is a story of disillusionment, abuse, neglect, poverty, and desperation. Tragic circumstances and an unspeakable crime not only give Morii Etsuji, an Issei underworld gang leader, dangerous power over first Jinsaburo and then Yoshiko, but also lead to a brutal and shocking end.

In historical terms, Kuroshio (the “Black Current” that was believed to bring Japanese immigrants safely to North America) reveals details and facts about the Issei and Nissei of the Japanese Canadian communities on the west coast of Canada, vividly narrating the public and private lives of Japanese immigrants in the first half of the 20th century. Yoshiko and Etsuji, the principal characters, are both victim and survivor to a point of their particular immigrant experiences and the politics and intrigue of the Japanese Canadian community that shape their individual fates and inextricably draw them together.

Through their stories Watada makes the historical personal, and, as contradictory as it may seem, the historical narrative becomes more imaginatively real in this way. However, he recounts the story through a series of flashbacks, which, at times, this reader found rather confusing, as the focus shifted from one character to another, often at parallel points in their lives but at different times in the novel.

This technique could have been more deftly managed.

Nevertheless, the novel explores a part of our past that is too little known, and adds voices that have been too long silenced. Read it to find out more about who we were.