Mariko Nagai
Professor, Japanese & Critical Languages
Dust of Eden by
We lived under a sky so blue in Idaho right near the towns of Hunt and Eden but we were not welcomed there. In early 1942, thirteen-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa and her Japanese-American family are sent from their home in Seattle to an internment camp in Idaho. What do you do when your home country treats you like an enemy? This memorable and powerful novel in verse, written by award-winning author Mariko Nagai, explores the nature of fear, the value of acceptance, and the beauty of life. As thought-provoking as it is uplifting, Dust of Eden is told with an honesty that is both heart-wrenching and inspirational.
Georgic by
Fiction. Asian American Studies. Winner of the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction selected by Jonis Agee. "Based on dire events in Japanese history and the key of folktale Mariko Nagai has written stories of a stark and unforgettable human landscape. War, imprisonment, hunger, and betrayals are in these timeless narratives. In the last story, drowning land, a young man who has spent his life sleeping and dreaming hears a voice whispering, It is time to wake up. The past has finally counted and enough change has come from his dreaming life to get him to act. Now, there is the possibility of release and change—of body, soul and mercy uniting with what is essential in order to grace communal life. This is a deeply thoughtful and beautifully written work"—Gioia Timpanelli.
Histories of Bodies by
Sparrows. Migration. Borders. Bodies. Blurring languages and metamorphosizing landscapes. In Histories of Bodies, Mariko Nagai traces the memory of loss, grief, death and family, seeking to define love in its multifaceted manifestations, each definition shifting, taking flight, then landing, only to be exiled out of the origin. From New York to Amsterdam to Boston to Tokyo, each landscape, whether temporal or imaginary, is rendered out of memory, then wrought into unsettling language of sorrow. In these poems, the world is consistently shifting, and what remains, at the end, is temporary migration of a sparrow, suddenly landing, then disappearing into the urban landscape.
Instructions for the Living by
creative non-fiction
Irradiated Cities by
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Art. Hybrid Genre. Asian & Asian American Studies. Winner of the 2015 NOS Book Contest, as selected by guest judge l#65533; thi diem th#65533;y. The before, the after, and the event that divides. In IRRADIATED CITIES, Mariko Nagai seeks the dividing events of nuclear catastrophe in Japan, exploring the aftermath of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Nagai's lyric textual fragments and stark black and white photographs act as a guide through these spaces of loss, silence, echo, devastation, and memory. And haunting each shard and each page an enduring irradiation, the deadly residue of catastrophe that leaks into our DNA. "Early on in IRRADIATED CITIES we encounter this sentence, tucked in a parenthetical: '(it always seems to be clear on catastrophic days).' Catastrophe wipes away certainty and tips us all into a state of 'seems,' of looking at one thing in the changed light of another, of seeing a landscape in relation to what it no longer holds, of recognizing the human face within the seemingly limitless horror of what humans are capable of inflicting on ourselves and our environment. This book, a sifting and circling, a calm and masterful layering of voices and vantage points, a slowly emerging portrait of four different Japanese cities and their inhabitants, resists any effort at arrivals or conclusions. By doing so, it shows us that while we may have an accumulation of facts for what happened on a particular day in a particular place, perhaps even the names and words and pictures of the people to whom catastrophe struck, and would not let go, it is within the dark sedimentation and the feather- light drift of history that we might glean what yet remains, and gives off light, to summon and trouble us still." --l#65533; thi diem th#65533;y "Atomic fallout fills this latest from poet and fiction writer Nagai (Dust of Eden: A Novel), a tenacious composition of personal narratives, researched details, and the author's own photographs of Japan. The story moves chronologically through four cities affected by radiation: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and Fukushima. Nagai's descriptions capture something deeper than history books do. By meshing small moments--'organs float in jars with wooden number tags'--and the overarching history in which they occur, Nagai speaks to both the individual and to the unifying social trauma...The book wobbles brilliantly on the border between the known and unknown."--Publishers Weekly, starred review
Under the Broken Sky by
"Necessary for all of humankind, Under the Broken Sky is a breathtaking work of literature."--Booklist, starred review A beautifully told middle-grade novel-in-verse about a Japanese orphan's experience in occupied rural Manchuria during World War II. Twelve-year-old Natsu and her family live a quiet farm life in Manchuria, near the border of the Soviet Union. But the life they've known begins to unravel when her father is recruited to the Japanese army, and Natsu and her little sister, Cricket, are left orphaned and destitute. In a desperate move to keep her sister alive, Natsu sells Cricket to a Russian family following the 1945 Soviet occupation. The journey to redemption for Natsu's broken family is rife with struggles, but Natsu is tenacious and will stop at nothing to get her little sister back. Literary and historically insightful, this is one of the great untold stories of WWII. Much like the Newbery Honor book Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, Mariko Nagai's Under the Broken Sky is powerful, poignant, and ultimately hopeful. Christy Ottaviano Books
Irradiated Cities by
Hiroshima : tu n'as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien -- Nagasaki : it is a very pleasant way to die -- Tokyo : it is no longer the postwar -- Fukushima : all the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.
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