East Falls the Sun
This wartime coming-of-age story starts in a Wyoming prison camp, where nine-year-old Alan Kurobe is locked up with his disabled mother and two younger sisters. They join thousands more Japanese Americans uprooted and incarcerated after Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Encircled with barbed wire and gun towers, detainees strive to cope with physical discomfort, poor diet, armed patrols and interminable boredom. When his mother is hospitalized, Alan and his sisters are shipped to a camp in Texas to join their Japanese-born father, a suspected enemy alien.
Family dysfunction, institutional racism and a perpetual identity crisis plague Alan for four years in the camps before the family is forcibly “repatriated” to Japan at the insistence of their father. Their daily struggle continues for 13 more years in a devastated, disease-ridden foreign country, but Alan disciplines himself, studies hard and masters Japanese – until his unique talents come to the notice of the US Occupation Authorities.
A story of determination, resilience and ultimate personal triumph, based on the author’s real-life experiences.
Robert H. Kono
Robert Hiroshi Kono was born in Los Angeles in 1932. Detained at age nine with his Japanese American parents after Pearl Harbor, he spent the war years in various internment camps. In 1946, he was forced to leave the US when his father moved the family to Japan, where he became fluent in Japanese. His later academic success at an English-language college in Yokohama led to his recruitment by the CIA as a translator for a clandestine operation in Tokyo. There he met Carol Louise Lippold, whom he married in Seattle 1959 when they returned home. After graduating from the University of Washington with honors, he moved his family to Eugene and taught at the University of Oregon. He was a prolific writer, self-publishing several works in his last 25 years. East Falls the Sun, a fictionalized account of his early years, was finished a few weeks before his death in 2023.
Growing up in a
U.S. Prison Camp
in World War II
After a career in teaching and admin at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and briefly at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Robert Hiroshi Kono retired early to write – a dream that had followed him from boyhood. Within two decades he had self-published five novels and a short story collection covering many of the themes inspired by his remarkable early life – including The Last Fox: A Novel of the 100th/442nd RCT, Westward Lies the Sun, Eye of the Star and Starburst Over China.
But, as he approached his 90th year, he was still determined to finish a trilogy of novels inspired by his experience as a Japanese American during and after World War II. He only managed to finish the first volume, East Falls the Sun, shortly before he died in 2023.
The novel is a finely wrought fictionalized account of his real-life wartime experience, starting at age nine, when he was interned in a series of prison camps.
Here’s the first page:
1. Heart Mountain
Heart Mountain sat on the horizon like a broken thumb hitchhiking out of the sprawling prairie, where a concentration camp was built to house 12,000 Japanese and Japanese American internees. That November the snow blew as high as six feet up against the tarpaper barracks. The wind chill factor brought the air to minus sixty degrees, cold enough to freeze one’s breath. The snow layered the prairie like an undulant cloak of ermine, guarded by a copse of trees by the Shoshone River, and stretched to Heart Mountain’s crooked thumb pointing north.
Transferring from the camp at Gila River, Arizona, the Kurobe family – Elinor and her three children, Alan, Jane and Helen – arrived at Heart Mountain, each lugging a suitcase, and settled in their room in Block 15. Elinor’s husband, Hajime, had been arrested by the FBI the night of the Pearl Harbor attack and sent to a series of separate detention centers. The family had to make do without a head of household to manage what promised to be an extended stay. Not that Hajime would have relished the task; he was basically indolent and irresponsible. It would be up to Elinor to find ways to supplement the $3.50 monthly allowance each detainee received, which was not enough to buy warm clothes or improve their diet.
Latest Amazon reviews
A very engaging and unusual WWII story
5.0 out of 5 stars
You might think a historical novel that starts with four years in a U.S. World War II internment camp would be rather mind numbing. But wait till you meet nine-year-old Alan Kurobe. Even at that age, he’s stoical, pragmatic, methodical, with a peculiar mix of self-awareness and inner discipline. Stuck with dysfunctional parents and two kid sisters, he slowly builds his future life despite the confinement, regimentation and monotony. On reaching his teenage years, he’s shipped to postwar Japan and struggles through 13 more years of bi-cultural confusion, studying hard and holding the family together despite total parental collapse. But his brilliance pays off in the end in a beautifully ironic twist.
A compelling view of WWII from the eyes of a Japanese American child
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant work. For all of the different perspectives offered over the years regarding WWII, this novel captures the unique perspective of a second-generation Japanese American child uprooted from his Americana life as he’s moved from internment camp to internment camp – a coming of age tale grappling not only with the protagonist’s individual identity and struggle, but also coming to terms with an ancestry nearly as foreign to him as it was to the Roosevelt Administration.
Gripping from start to finish.
| Title | East Falls the Sun |
|---|---|
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-7331007-7-9 |
| Size | Trade paperback, 6 x 9 in (15.24 x 22.86 cm) |
| List Prices | US: $19.95; UK £17.95; EU €18.95 |
| Published | June 1, 2024 |
| Pages | 210 |
| Features | Black & White |
| BISAC | FICTION / Asian American & Pacific Islander FICTION / World Literature / Japan FICTION / Historical / 20th Century / World War II & Holocaust |