NEWS & EVENTS
September 20, 2023 | Eugene, OR | Book Reading
Cascade Manor
My wife and I moved into Cascade Manor, a Continuing Care Retirement Community here in Eugene in April of 2021. By tonight’s date we’ve been here a little over two years. Last month in mid-August, my dear friend and co-author Nina Wolpe and I had our novel about our lives during World War II published and tonight was the first hopefully of a number of book readings for Two Faces. Because of the COVID pandemic which continues to be a concern, and because my book reading was set to be televised on the in-house network, only about thirty members came out in person.
I began with a brief summary of my friendship with Nina that was behind our joint writing effort and gave a short history of my parents’ two family’s immigration to America from Hiroshima, Japan in the early 1900s.
I began my reading with the book’s Dedication to our two mothers, and to the college classmate and friend of Nina’s mother, a Nisei second generation Japanese who testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in 1980.
I then read the first three chapters that began the descriptions of the three main story arcs of Two Faces, touching on my lifelong friendship with Nina that was the primary basis for our story, the evacuation and internment of my family following Pearl Harbor and how we stayed in touch with the separation, and about family as the touchstone that kept everything together during these hard times. There followed a question-and-answer session.
Most of my audience were old enough that they were alive at the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, some old enough they remembered it happening.