Growing up in a cage

This book came to me literally as a found item. While Walking San Francisco, I happened upon the San Francisco Public Library mobile tech classroom. Somebody had set outside a carton of books the library was "de-accessioning" -- getting rid of -- for free. I couldn't go by without looking and picked up this title: Gaijin: American Prisoner of War.

What a find! Graphic novelist Matt Faulkner has adopted experiences from his own family history to draw the story of the coming of age of a mixed Japanese-American San Francisco teenage boy, Koji Miyamoto, after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. His father was traveling in Japan at the time; U.S. authorities find that suspicious. His schoolmates call him "Jap" and beat him up; when internment is ordered, his white mother chooses to go with him to the holding camp set up on Alameda island. There, a gang of "pure" Japanese boys taunt him as a "gaijin" -- outside person. They claim his white mother is making nice with the white solider jailers. This insult leaves him furious and confused. He dreams that his father is a Japanese aviator bombing American enemies. He becomes more and more lost in violent fantasies and tries to join up with the camp's bullies who have been abusing him.

Fortunately an older male internee who had employed his father, Mr. Yoshi Asai, befriends the increasingly disturbed boy-child. Luck and dignified compassion enable Mr. Yoshi to keep Koji from being caught stealing food and from being treated as a criminal. Eventually all 8000 northern Californian internees from Alameda are driven off to Camp Agua Dulce in the mountains above Santa Clarita.

The novel jumps to the war's aftermath and then to a mature Koji's reunion in postwar Japan with his father who survived the war though the father is portrayed as using a crutch to walk.

Faulkner's drawings are extraordinary, warm and full of deft movement. Their warmth contrasts with the considerable violence of the action in the story.

I had to wonder, why was the library getting rid of this? The copy I picked up is undamaged. Perhaps it falls between many stools -- not really a book for "young adults" as it is labeled, uncomplimentary to just about all the races and adults represented, yet not strictly moralistic either. Just what I appreciated.

If anyone in San Francisco wants this book, I'll deliver it to your front door in this season of social distancing. Just ask in comments.