Talk with Susan Ito and Suzanne Kamata

Writers in Kyoto Event, July 27, 2024

This event, taking place in a blessedly cool classroom of Ryukoku University Omiya Campus, showcased Susan Ito, author of I Would Meet You Anywhere, a memoir of her youth as a bicultural Japanese-American who was adopted by Japanese-American parents and grew up in New Jersey. (See below for more information on the book, which recently was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award.)

Susan Ito, a teacher of writing and now at Mills College/Northeastern University, this year taught a summer program (“Food in Japan”) through the university at various locations in Japan, including Tokyo, Fukui, and Kyoto. Her students (international) read from their writings completed during the course, many of which were restaurant reviews. Suzanne Kamata, a noted writer of fiction (her most recent published novel is Cinnamon Beach, soon to be reviewed by WiK) and other genres, and member of Writers in Kyoto, collaborated with her in the online journal Literary Mama, and after the student readings, they talked together about Susan Ito’s book and life. Susan also read some sections from her book. The event closed with a question-and-answer session.

Thanks are due to Paul Carty and Ryukoku University for making the venue available, and to all who attended from Ryukoku and from Writers in Kyoto.

I Would Meet You Anywhere by Susan Ito (Ohio State University Press, 2023)
Finalist for National Book Critic Circle Award

Susan described her book, which spans several decades and takes in the realities of adoption and the Japanese concentration camps in America during WWII, as “a search for truth.” It is reviewed by Suzanne Kamata in Goodreads in part as follows: “The memoir reads like the most gripping of novels, and would be of interest to anyone interested in adoption, motherhood, Japanese culture, and what it’s like to be biracial.” It’s definitely all of that, and also would appeal to “anyone who has felt rootless, questioned their place within their family, or longed for deeper self-understanding” (cover blurb by Nicole Chung).

That’s a pretty broad spectrum of appeal. It would certainly extend to those who have struggled to be part of a Japanese family by marriage, or to anyone who felt rootless when living long-term in another country, or to those who know who their parents were but don’t know anything about previous generations, for example never having met their grandparents on one side or the other. Everyone has experienced past loss, and everyone has holes in the fabric of their family, whether “actual”, adopted, or in-laws by marriage. Thus this book tells an extreme version of a story that many of us, especially in this time of the world, can relate to.

Susan’s story, one of being mixed race by birth (Japanese and American) and also adopted by parents who themselves had their own questions of identity (Japanese-Americans), is a heroic search for self, exhaustively researched and written over many years. Particularly referencing her search for, and finally meeting with, her birth mother, and also dealing with her complicated emotions surrounding her adoptive parents, and with Japanese culture that is both foreground and background, it is also a complex story, full of emotional twist and turns and many heartrending anecdotes.

In the preface to the book, she describes it as “a story which holds a secret at its core” and also says “The risk of telling the story comes at a great cost, but the cost of not telling it is equally painful.” She is also careful to point out that this is not an autobiography per se, but deals with only one facet of her many-faceted life.

Written by a person who has done a lot of work in order to come to grips with her own story, this book is an inspiration to everyone, but particularly (I would suggest) writers.