How to Be an American Housewife

June 21, 2010
In this enchanting first novel, Dilloway mines her own family's history to produce the story of Japanese war bride Shoko, her American daughter, Sue, and their challenging relationship. Following the end of WWII, Japanese shop girl Shoko realizes that her best chance for a future is with an American husband, a decision that causes a decades-long rift with her only brother, Taro. While Shoko blossoms in America with her Mormon husband, GI Charlie Morgan, and their two children, she's constantly reminded that she's an outsider—reinforced by passages from the fictional handbook How to Be an American Housewife. Shoko's attempts to become the perfect American wife hide a secret regarding her son, Mike, and lead her to impossible expectations for Sue. The strained mother-daughter bond begins to shift, however, when a now-grown Sue and her teenage daughter agree to go to Japan in place of Shoko, recently fallen ill, to reunite with Taro. Dilloway splits her narrative gracefully between mother and daughter (giving Shoko the first half, Sue the second), making a beautifully realized whole.

June 1, 2010

A Japanese war bride and her American daughter lay bare family secrets and heal old wounds in Dilloway's poignant debut.

At the end of the war, 18-year-old Shoko had to go to work so her younger brother Taro could finish school, even though she was the better student. As a girl, her mission was to find a husband, and her father hoped she would marry one of the American occupiers, though her brother hated them. But Shoko fell in love with Ronin, a member of the "untouchable" caste still despised in modern Japan, and only married kindly American Charlie after Ronin was killed. We learn all this from the elderly Shoko, settled in San Diego since Charlie retired from the Navy and now facing surgery for a heart condition, probably a legacy of radiation from the bomb blast at Nagasaki, 50 miles from her childhood home. Though Taro has refused to communicate with his sister since she married an American, Shoko has unfinished business in her homeland, and when her doctor forbids her to make the trip, she persuades daughter Sue to go in her stead. Sue, a divorcée with a preteen daughter and a paper-pushing job that bores her, has always felt that she disappointed her mother—and in fact, Shoko's narration of Part One reveals a cranky, difficult woman, unable to show love except by criticizing and still carrying around a load of resentments from her childhood. Part Two, Sue's account of her visit to Japan, is considerably softer-edged; she meets two welcoming cousins and manages to crack Taro's grumpy façade, collecting the white funeral kimono Shoko has requested of him and eliciting fond memories of his sister as a baseball-playing tomboy in prewar Japan. The transition is a little abrupt, and the closing sections are more reassuring than Shoko's narration led us to expect. Readers looking for a strong story that turns out well for sympathetically rendered characters will not complain.

Warm-hearted and well-written, if a trifle pat.

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July 1, 2010
Loosely based on the life of Dilloway's mother, this debut novel is a beautifully told story of love that melds family, cultures, and survival. During the American occupation of Japan, Shoko, the beautiful eldest child of a lawyer-turned-Konko priest, obediently allowed her father to select a U.S. serviceman for her to marry. Now residing in San Diego with her husband, Charlie, Shoko is ailing from a heart condition, likely resulting from radiation exposure during the bombing of Nagasaki. She wants to return to Japan to reunite with her estranged brother, Taro, but the reunion is instead realized by her daughter Suiko/Sue, who narrates her search for her long-lost family in Japan with her own daughter in tow. VERDICTDilloway's writing is fluid, and she clearly knows how to draw the reader into her story. The only minor drawback is the rather rushed ending, which ties things together a little too quickly and neatly. Nevertheless, readers who enjoyed stories set in similar times, such as Jamie Ford's "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet"and Janice Y.K. Lee's "The Piano Teacher" along with works by Lisa See, should also like this one.—Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA

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