Gr 9 Up—During a year in Tokyo, Japanese American Nao reconnects with the country she left as a child, wrestles
with remastering her mother tongue, and bonds with her roommates, fellow exchange students on journeys of their
own. Becker's graceful, expressive illustrations convey the frustration of language and cultural barriers—and the joy
of surmounting them.

This was given to me as a gift by a friend, whom I have shared many years with and who said this was perhaps her favorite graphic novel ever. It was amazing and struck so many cords with me. Bring the tissues if you’re going to read it. If you’ve ever tried to reconnect to your roots, if you’ve ever moved away from your family, or struggled on the pathway from teen to adult, I hope this book will strike cords with you, too. It was so good. ( )

A beautiful and thoughtful graphic novel from Harmony Becker, the artist behind George Takei's "They Called Us Enemy". The story focuses on three young women from different parts of Asia who end up staying at the same sharehouse in Japan as they study, struggle, laugh, and come to a deeper understanding of who they are and what they want from life.

Becker does a fantastic job of showcasing each girls journey individually all while tying them together into the bigger narrative. While they each are grappling with different feelings (like Nao feeling like she isn't fully Japanese or American, or Hyejung coming to terms with her break from familial expectations) they learn from each others rich backstories and cultural experience, weaving a multicultural story that is highly immersive and informative.

I also enjoyed the fact that not every single little thing was wrapped up tidily with a bow or gave the expected "happy" ending. That's not to say the ending is not sad, necessarily, it's just super realistic. Sometimes family struggles go on a while, or people have to leave places they love, or not everyone has a big, grand plan for what they want to do in life and are instead just taking life day by day. At times I forgot this was fiction because each character felt so deeply realized and full of emotion that I thought this must be autobiographical - but no, it's just a very honest and heartwarming read that I think many readers will enjoy. ( )

This is a poignant, thoughtful, funny and tender multi-cultural story about language, friendship and finding one’s feet. It follows three young women living in a sharehouse in Tokyo. Nao, who was born in Japan but grew up in America, has come to improve her mother tongue. Tina, from Singapore, and Hyejung, from Korea, are both studying for the university entrance exams. The three of them mainly communicate in English with each other, but they also have Japanese housemates, two brothers who don’t speak much English.

I loved this so much! It has a vibrant sense of place, and moreover of a place to be explored, and captures living in Japan through the seasons. I loved the characters and the illustrations, and the lively way the illustrations portray the characters. Their mannerisms, their quirks. Their hopes and dreams and frustrations. Their friendships.

When the characters are speaking Japanese (or Korean, etc), the speech bubbles are in Japanese characters, with the English translation written underneath. But if the POV character doesn’t understand what has been said, then the English translation might be incomplete or missing altogether. I thought this was a really effective way of capturing the experience of not knowing a language fluently (or not knowing it at all)!

Becker has also phonetically written her characters’ accents and at the end, there’s an author’s note “On the use of accents in this book”:

Western media has a long history of portraying Asian people in offensive, one-dimensional ways. So often characters are written with thick foreign accents for comic or exotic effect [...] I grew up listening to accented English in my home and community, and I have lived in several countries where I struggled with my own broken Japanese, Korean and Spanish. My intent with Himawari House was to allow characters who spoke with accents, who occasionally stumbled over their grammar, to be fully actualized, three-dimensional people. I love accents. I think they add depth and character to one’s speech -- a sense of place.

I think it helps that accented English isn’t the only thing Hyejung and Tina speak, and so they’re not defined solely by their imperfect English -- standard, fluent English is used to translate the other languages they speak and to translate their thoughts. And because this is a graphic novel, it’s their visual depiction which makes the strongest impression.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to quote pictures.

I am strongly considering buying myself a copy of this.

I wonder how different I would have been if I had stayed here.
To be a part of everything… and not just a bystander.
I feel like I’m mourning a twin I lost in childhood.
A twin who never got to grow up… but who always… waited for me to come back.

( )

My favorite quotes from the book:

I've been thinking about the difference between English and Japanese lately. English is a man sitting on the rain with his legs spread wide. English is a basket full of apples, rolling lazily onto the grass. A for apples! English is unafraid, English is the barefoot leap into cold water. Japan rations words like sugar in a war... sprinkling the tiny crystals lightly onto their intentions and folding them up small and quiet. You mean what you say. The weight in the space between words deepening, darkening. -page 308


Sometimes I feel like my Japanese self is just a costume. I want it to be me, but it isn't, not really. [...] The people here move through the perfumed air so lightly...they don't even hear the calling of crows in the morning. They couldn't imagine that I built my life clinging to these things, building a dream house out of things I wasn't sure I had a right to.
-Nao, pages 216-217 ( )