Had a lovely chat Saturday night with an author at yet another author’s book-launch party. To celebrate her fun but also incredibly informative new book Crazy fror Kanji: A Student’s Guide to the Wonderful World of Japanese Characters, Eve Kushner hosted a Kanji Festival at a Japanese restaurant in Albany, California, complete with music, games, a raffle, tea-tastings, Japanese beer, and yummy sushi.
While there, Dibs! met Wendy Tokunaga, author of the 2007 novel Midori by Moonlight, whose heroine is a young Japanese woman newly arrived in the USA, where the russet-haired Californian she came here to marry cheats on her with his ex-girlfriend and calls off the wedding. Sad story — but funny, the way Tokunaga tells it, and sweet … in more ways than one, as Midori stays in the States and tries her hand at professional baking. A musician as well as a writer, Tokunaga grew up in San Francisco and first went to Japan after winning a Japanese songwriting contest.