The English Patient is a 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje. The book follows four dissimilar people brought together at an Italian villa during the Italian Campaign of the Second World War. The four main characters consist of: an unrecognizably burned man — the eponymous patient who is presumed to be English; his Canadian Army nurse; a Sikh British Army sapper; and a Canadian self described as a thief. The story is set during the North African Campaign and centers on the incremental revelations of the patient's actions prior to his injuries, and the emotional effects of these revelations on the other characters. The story is told through the characters' perspectives and "authors" of books the characters are reading.
Issei are Japanese immigrants to countries in North America and South America. The term is used mostly by ethnic Japanese. Issei are born in Japan; their children born in the new country are nisei ; and their grandchildren are sansei.
Sansei is a Japanese and North American English term used in parts of the world to refer to the children of children born to ethnically Japanese emigrants (Issei) in a new country of residence, outside of Japan. The nisei are considered the second generation, while grandchildren of the Japanese-born emigrants are called Sansei. The fourth generation is referred to as yonsei. The children of at least one nisei parent are called Sansei; they are usually the first generation of whom a high percentage are mixed-race, given that their parents were (usually), themselves, born and raised in America.
Joy Nozomi Kogawa is a Canadian poet and novelist of Japanese descent.
From 1942 to 1949, Canada forcibly relocated and incarcerated over 22,000 Japanese Canadians—comprising over 90% of the total Japanese Canadian population—from British Columbia in the name of "national security". The majority were Canadian citizens by birth and were targeted based on their ancestry. This decision followed the events of the Japanese Empire's war in the Pacific against the Western Allies, such as the invasion of Hong Kong, the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and the Fall of Singapore which led to the Canadian declaration of war on Japan during World War II. Similar to the actions taken against Japanese Americans in neighbouring United States, this forced relocation subjected many Japanese Canadians to government-enforced curfews and interrogations, job and property losses, and forced repatriation to Japan.
John Kozo Okada was a Japanese American novelist known for his critically acclaimed novel No-No Boy.
Birdsong is a 1993 war novel and family saga by the English author Sebastian Faulks. It is Faulks's fourth novel. The plot follows two main characters living at different times: the first is Stephen Wraysford, a British soldier on the front line in Amiens during the First World War, and the second is his granddaughter, Elizabeth Benson, whose 1970s plotline follows her attempts to recover an understanding of Stephen's experience of the war.
Emily of New Moon is the first in a series of novels by Lucy Maud Montgomery about a Canadian orphan girl growing up in Prince Edward Island. Montgomery is also the author of Anne of Green Gables series. It was first published in 1923.
Mitsuye Yamada is a Japanese American poet, essayist, and feminist and human rights activist. She is one of the first and most vocal Asian American women writers to write about the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.
A war novel or military fiction is a novel about war. It is a novel in which the primary action takes place on a battlefield, or in a civilian setting, where the characters are preoccupied with the preparations for, suffering the effects of, or recovering from war. Many war novels are historical novels.
An Artist of the Floating World (1986) is a novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It is set in post-World War II Japan and is narrated by Masuji Ono, an ageing painter, who looks back on his life and how he has lived it. He notices how his once-great reputation has faltered since the war and how attitudes towards him and his paintings have changed. The chief conflict deals with Ono's need to accept responsibility for his past actions, rendered politically suspect in the context of post-War Japan. The novel ends with the narrator expressing good will for the young white-collar workers on the streets at lunchbreak. The novel also deals with the role of people in a rapidly changing political environment and with the assumption and denial of guilt.
The Book Thief is a historical fiction novel by the Australian author Markus Zusak, set in Nazi Germany during World War II. Published in 2005, The Book Thief became an international bestseller and was translated into 63 languages and sold 17 million copies. It was adapted into the 2013 feature film, The Book Thief.
Japanese Canadians are Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry. Japanese Canadians are mostly concentrated in Western Canada, especially in the province of British Columbia, which hosts the largest Japanese community in the country with the majority of them living in and around Vancouver. In 2016, there were 121,485 Japanese Canadians throughout Canada.
Hisaye Yamamoto was an American author known for the short story collection Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, first published in 1988. Her work confronts issues of the Japanese immigrant experience in America, the disconnect between first and second-generation immigrants, as well as the difficult role of women in society.
Monica Sone, born Kazuko Itoi, was a Japanese American writer, best known for her 1953 autobiographical memoir Nisei Daughter, which tells of the Japanese American experience in Seattle during the 1920s and 1930s and in the World War II internment camps, and is an important text in Asian American and Women's Studies courses.
Nisei is a Japanese-language term used in countries in North America and South America to specify the ethnically Japanese children born in the new country to Japanese-born immigrants. The Nisei are considered the second generation and the grandchildren of the Japanese-born immigrants are called Sansei, or third generation. Though nisei means "second-generation immigrant", it often refers to the children of the initial diaspora, occurring in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and overlapping with the G.I. and silent generations.
Yonsei is a Japanese diasporic term used in countries, particularly in North America and in Latin America, to specify the great-grandchildren of Japanese immigrants (Issei). The children of Issei are Nisei. Sansei are the third generation, and their offspring are Yonsei. For the majority of Yonsei in the Western hemisphere, their Issei ancestors emigrated from Japan between the 1880s and 1924.
99 Years of Love 〜Japanese Americans〜 is a five-episode Japanese-language TV miniseries produced by TBS for its 60th anniversary announced in 3–7 November 2010, starring Tsuyoshi Kusanagi and Yukie Nakama, and sponsored by Toyota and Panasonic.
Weedflower is a 2006 American children's historical novel by Cynthia Kadohata, the author of the award-winning Kira-Kira. The cover photography of the first edition is by Kamil Vojnar. The story is set in the United States during World War II and told from the perspective of 12-year-old Japanese-American Sumiko. A 6.5-hour-long audiobook version of Weedflower, read by Kimberly Farr, has been published.
East of the Rockies is a Canadian mobile augmented reality video game application, produced by the National Film Board of Canada and released in 2019. Written by novelist Joy Kogawa based partially on her novels Obasan and Itsuka, the project tells the story of Yuki, a young Japanese Canadian girl in the 1940s who is caught up with her family in the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II.
