Longlisted for the 2025 PEN Open Book Award * A Martin Cruz Smith Award for Emerging Diverse Voices Finalist in the CALIBA 2024 Golden Poppy Book Awards * “This debut novel breaks all the rules…capturing loss in all its belligerent rage and raw humor.” —Oprah Daily * “Full of heart.” —PureWow *
A tender, wry, and shamelessly honest novel following a Japanese widow raising her son between worlds with the help of her Jewish mother-in-law as she wrestles with grief, loss, and—strangest of all—joy.
Shortly after her husband Levi’s untimely death, Kyoko decides to raise their young son, Alex, in San Francisco, rather than return to Japan. Her nosy yet loving Jewish mother-in-law, Bubbe, encourages her to find new love and abandon frugality but her own mother wants Kyoko to celebrate her now husbandless life. Always beside her is Alex, who lives confidently, no matter the circumstance.
Four sections of vignettes reflect Kyoko’s fluctuating emotional states—sometimes ugly, other times funny, but always uniquely hers. While freshly mourning Levi, Kyoko and Alex confront another death—that of Alex’s pet fish. Kyoko and Bubbe take a road trip to a psychic and discover that Kyoko carries bad karma. On visits back to Japan, Kyoko and her mother clash over how best to connect Alex with his Japanese heritage, and as Alex enters his teenage years and brings his first girlfriend home, Kyoko lets her imagination run wild as she worries about teen pregnancy.
In this openhearted and surprising novel about the choices and relationships that sustain us, there are times where Kyoko is lonely but never alone and others in which she is alone but never lonely. Through these moments, she learns how much more there is to herself in the wake of total and unexpected upheaval. “A penetrating look at the complexities of grief, love, and joy” (Booklist) See: Loss. See Also: Love. is also a testament to the spiraling awareness of the vast range of human emotion we experience every day.
