After the Bloom

By Leslie Shimotakahara

A daughter’s search for her mother reveals her family’s past in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War.

Lily Takemitsu goes missing from her home in Toronto one luminous summer morning in the mid-1980s. Her daughter, Rita, knows her mother has a history of dissociation and memory problems, which have led her to wander off before. But never has she stayed away so long. Unconvinced the police are taking the case seriously, Rita begins to carry out her own investigation. In the course of searching for her mom, she is forced to confront a labyrinth of secrets surrounding the family’s internment at a camp in the California desert during the Second World War, their postwar immigration to Toronto, and the father she has never known.

Epic in scope, intimate in style, After the Bloom blurs between the present and the ever-present past, beautifully depicting one family’s struggle to face the darker side of its history and find some form of redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Apr 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781459737440

Leslie Shimotakahara

Leslie Shimotakahara holds a Ph.D. in English from Brown University. Her memoir, The Reading List, was winner of the Canada-Japan Literary Prize, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the KM Hunter Artist Award. Leslie lives in Toronto.

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Reviews for After the Bloom

[bayleaf_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rita Takemitsu’s mother, Lily, is missing and this is the worst possible time. Rita is newly divorced and has moved into a new apartment, for that matter, she’s not even unpacked. Her daughter, Kristen, is staying in Vancouver with her father, who appears to have moved on more quickly from the divorce than Rita so Kristen’s phone calls add to her misery. Her brother Tom isn’t taking the disappearance seriously and Lily’s new husband, Gerald, is slowly falling apart as he learns his wife isn’t who he thought she was.That’s the background for Leslie Shimotakahara’s novel, After the Bloom, but it’s not the real story. The real story and what’s far more interesting is what happened to Lily and the Japanese-Americans in 1943 in the Matanzas internment camp. Matanzas is based on a real-life camp, Manzanar, one of ten camps in the United Stated where Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during WWII and the site of the real-life Manzanar Riot (portrayed quite vividly in the novel as the Matanzas Riot).The author uses the present, 1980’s Toronto and Lily’s disappearance, to lead us back into the past and educate us (or at least, me) into the nature of the camps. How a woman who suffers from occasional fugue states is able to travel a great distance to achieve a goal is a bit of mystery and often Rita’s neediness grates, but ultimately After the Bloom is an engrossing read, a sad yet important reminder of a period in American history, and I would recommend the book.