Cynthia Kadohata has lived in Chicago, Georgia, Arkansas, Michigan, Los Angeles, Boston, Pittsburgh, and New York City. She has worked as a waitress, sales clerk, typist, publicist, and secretary. She's back to Los Angeles now, probably permanently, and lives with George, her boyfriend of fifteen years; Sammy, her much-loved son; and two very funny and probably insane dogs. Her novels include The Floating World (1989) and In the Heat of the Valley of Love (1992), and her writing has appeared in Grand Street, the Mississippi Review, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares. Her first children's novel, Kira-Kira (2004), won the Newbery Medal in 2005. She has also published the children's books Weedflower (2006), winner of the Pen-USA; Cracker! (2007), winner of six state awards as voted on by kids; Outside Beauty (2008); A Million Shades of Gray (2010); The Thing About Luck (2013), winner of the 2013 National Book Award; and Half a World Away (2014).
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The Floating WorldA Novel
My grandmother owned a valise in which she carried all her possessions, but the stories she told were also possessions. The stories were fantastic, yet I believed them. She said that when she was young fireflies had invaded her town, so the whole town was lighted even during the nighttime. She said she had been told that the summer she was born, strange clouds passed through the sky. Every night for seven nights, a different cloud. The clouds all had a strange glow, as if someone had taken the moon and stretched it into a cloud shape. Those seven moon-clouds, she said, had been a lucky omen. As she spoke, she always gestured a great deal, so the background to her stories would be the soft tinkling of the bell we had bought her.
The Floating World:A Novel -
The Floating WorldA Novel
I grew up with cards. Solitaire and gin were perfect for the monotony of driving. Despite my small hands, when I was six I could make cards disappear behind the ears of my parents, or make the ace of spades always materialize at the top of the deck. When my brothers were old enough to play, each of us owned several decks, not including those with missing cards. My family had Bicycle decks, decks with tigers on the back, decks with wildflowers, and one deck my father got in the army that had naked ladies. He was very embarrassed when I found that deck one day while cleaning. “I never bought anything else like that in my life,” he said, “but a man’s got to be a man.”
The Floating World:A Novel -
The Floating WorldA Novel
The night we packed, Tan came by after I’d gone to sleep. He called at my window, and we took a blanket into the trees. It would have been romantic, but a tick jumped into his ear and later we got rained out. Then, as I was climbing back through the window after saying good-bye for the last time, I slipped on the wet sill and fell into the mud with a wonderful suctiony sound. It was okay with me. The thing about our sex life was it made us feel close, not because it was romantic or beautiful or sweet or anything like that (although at times it was all of those), but mainly because it was a prodigious adventure we were going through together.
The Floating World:A Novel
“Writing in beautiful, clean yet lyrical prose, Ms. Kadohata creates an emotionally precise picture . . . In telling Olivia's story, Ms. Kadohata does not shirk from examining all the sad, painful details of her family's thwarted lives, but she does so with tenderness, compassion and wit . . . The Floating World marks the debut of a luminous new voice in fiction.” —Michiku Kakutani, The New York Times
“With masterful characterizations and quiet strength, Cynthia Kadohata goes straight to the heart of twelve-year-old Summer, her troubled brother, and her Japanese-American grandparents during one grueling season of a contemporary Midwest wheat harvest. Here, Kadohata has carefully crafted a vivid and realistic portrayal of one family’s migrant experience. But even more, she’s created a compassionate, gentle, and humorous book, exploring generational and cultural differences, the fragility of life, and the weighty yet cherished ties of family.” —National Book Award citation for The Thing About Luck
“Half a World Away moves with the speed of a skidding car, in a fine mix of danger and hilarity . . . If literary genius is composed, at least in part, by an uncanny ability to enter other worlds, then Half a World Away proves Cynthia Kadohata’s genius—not that there was any doubt.” —The Boston Globe
Selected Works
