the translation of love by lynne kutsukake

Corporal Matt Matsumoto is a Japanese-American soldier in MacArthur’s translation unit and his co-worker, Nancy Nogami, is a Japanese-American typist impatiently waiting to return to the U.S.

Kondo Sensei is their brilliant schoolteacher and a moonlighting translator in Love Letter Alley, where Japanese women go to get notes from G.I. In the process, they encounter a cast of characters struggling to reconcile themselves to great loss. The girls write their own letter and it triggers a series of events that take them to the darkest and most dangerous corners of the city. They discover what seems like a lifeline: during this bleak period, Japanese citizens have taken to penning hundreds of thousands of letters to the American leader in charge of the occupation, General MacArthur, making passionate pleas for assistance. The pair form an unlikely friendship and launch a search for Fumi’s sister. Aya has arrived after being interned at a camp in the Rocky Mountains, shipped out in the fall of 1946 and repatriated to a country she’d never known. The narrative follows two preteens: Fumi, a spirited Japanese who’s desperate to find her missing sister, a bar girl in Ginza, and Aya, a timid Japanese-Canadian from Vancouver. The novel is set in postwar Tokyo, as a nation comes to terms with its occupation. Retired University of Toronto librarian Lynne Kutsukake’s debut novel The Translation of Love explores these questions with an epic tale of defeat, despair and redemption. What happens in the days and months and years after the guns fall silent and the tanks retreat? How do people cope? How do they grieve their losses, heal their pain and return to the land of the living?

What we don’t always consider is the aftermath.

When we think of war, we often think about the horror of armed conflict.

The translation of love by lynne kutsukake