2005: KIRA-KIRA by Cynthia Kadohata
My sister, Lynn, taught me my first word: kira-kira. I pronounced it ka-a-ahhh, but she knew what I meant.
Well, it's time to have the big discussion about "should children's novels be an unrelenting parade of borderline-absurd misery?", a question to which I'm inclined to answer "probably not". But Cynthia Kadohata, author of 2005 medalist Kira-Kira, apparently takes a different view of children's literature than I do. Hey, she has a medal and I don't, so clearly she's doing something right, but Kira-Kira is perhaps the single most oppressive reading experience I have had since starting this newsletter.
So, to be clear, I’m not at all against the idea of “bad things happening to characters in a novel”. That’s a good way to build a conflict, and conflict is what’s going to push your story forward. Nor am I really against “bummer lit” as a genre - that is, the genre where the main thing that happens is that somebody dies or suffers some traumatic experience and our protagonist learns from the tragedy. Plenty of Newbery winners fall into this genre, or at least showcase a few elements of it. Summer Of The Swans tried to do it with "intellectually disabled brother gets lost in the woods and almost dies", but couldn't pull it off because there were too many weird tonal shifts. Shiloh had a bunch of Appalachian poverty and animal abuse, but the protagonist also Learned Something and Came Of Age and Saved The Dog At The End, so it all ends up being worth it. Bridge To Terabithia might be the most creatively successful entry in this genre. Even though the tragedy in Terabithia is utterly bonkers on paper - the infamous faulty rope swing accident - the work done earlier in the novel to establish the relationship between the two protagonists, and to establish why that relationship is important, is enough to still make this bonkers event a gut punch that, again, still enables the Coming Of Age and Gaining Deeper Insight About The World. Jess mourns his friend, but resolves to live the better life that she awakened in him, and even passes on the kingdom of Terabithia to his sister. His new life grows out of the tragic accident, as opposed to having the tragic accident be just one of many brutal defeats in a gray life slowly being crushed by the heavy slab of despair. Anyways, on to Kira-Kira!
Kira-Kira is narrated by Katie Takeshima, a young Japanese-American girl in 1950s Georgia. Her parents moved down there from Iowa after their business went under, and now they both work in poultry processing plants; Katie's dad sexes the baby chicks (he kills male chicks at the hatchery as they come by on a conveyor belt), and her mom slaughters the adult chickens. Not only is it gruesome work, but the working conditions are appalling1. Katie's mother works long shifts wearing a pad because she can't leave the line to use the bathroom. She ends every shift covered in filth and gore. With no good childcare options, she has to bring her kids and leave them in the car in the sweltering heat for hours while she continues the butchery inside the plant. Katie's dad works so hard at the hatchery that he just starts sleeping there to skip commutes during his seven-day work week. Sometimes they just have to leave their young kids home unattended. The family rents a cramped house with barely enough room for them, and Katie often finds herself sleeping on the floor. Are you excited to read this one to your daughter yet?
The one bright spot in Katie's life - and really in the life of the entire Takeshima family - is eldest sister Lynn, the brilliant and witty and positive teenager who helps encourage the family and hold everything together. Would you like to guess what happens to Lynn? Here's some foreshadowing from the novel, right after Lynn gets hit in the chest with a ball at recess:
"She swayed a bit but said, “I’m fine.” “What happened?” “I don’t know. It seemed swirly for a second.” “What seemed swirly?” “Everything.”"
Perhaps you feel the same way you felt when Kate Winslet started coughing in an early scene in Finding Neverland and said out loud to yourself "oh, I get it, she's definitely going to die." And you'd be right! Lynn has lymphoma! Throughout the novel she keeps getting worse, further straining the already miserable family relationships, until she dies! She dies alone, too, because everyone else is at work! And then they all have to work harder because they're still working through all of the medical debt!
And I haven't even gotten to the goddamn five-year-old in a bear trap!
"Sam shouted over and over, “Waaaaaaaa! Waaaaaaaa!” in a voice that I didn’t recognize at first as his. But even before I recognized it, it was pulling me toward it. I wished I didn’t run faster than Lynn, so I wouldn’t have to arrive first. But since she’d become a teenager, her legs had grown long and gawky. I passed her and ran toward the screaming. Someone had set a trap in the field, the metal kind that bites an animal until the animal is forced to chew off its own leg. The teeth dug through Sam’s skin, making a circle of red on his thin ankle. For some reason his face was red, as if someone were squeezing his neck. He looked at me pleadingly. “Help me,” he said. For a second I thought his foot was cut off."
Did you think I was making up the "my five year old brother unexpectedly gets caught in a bear trap with no warning" plot point? While this gives the reader some much-needed relief if they had been saying to themselves "I just don't feel like the sister dying of lymphoma and the horrifying oppressive conditions of 1950s Georgia poultry plants are miserable enough", it was not to my personal taste.
The main question weighing on me as I read Kadohata's novel was what enjoyment could any child possibly derive from reading this? There is almost no redemption, no relief from any of this anywhere in the novel. Things start bad, and they get worse. The sister dies. The brother has a limp for the rest of his life. The parents work themselves nearly to death, and the dad gets himself fired and starts working at a hatchery that's further away from home. Everything is gray suffocating misery, forever…the end.
Kira-Kira obviously has representational value; it's not like there are a lot of other Newbery medalists about Japanese-American families, or Asian-American families overall. So what would a young Japanese-American reader find in this book, learning about characters who look just like them? It's so hard for me to imagine a reader being excited to see people like them suffer to absurd lengths, and when I say absurd lengths, again, I'm referring to the scene where a five-year-old boy unexpectedly steps into a surprise bear trap. Maybe that reader will learn that she's not alone. But not alone in what? In being miserable? Because that's apparently what Katie learns:
"I wondered if anyone else in history had ever been as sad as I was at that moment. As soon as I wondered that, I knew the answer was yes. The answer was that millions of people had been that sad. For instance, what about the people of the great Incan city of Cuzco, which was ransacked by foreigners in the sixteenth century? I wrote a paper about that for school. And then there were all the millions of people in all the many wars throughout history and throughout the world, and all the millions of people with loved ones killed by millions of other people. A lot of people had been as sad as I was. Maybe a billion of them had been this sad. As soon as I realized this, I felt like I was no longer a little girl but had become a big girl. What being a big girl meant exactly, I wasn’t sure."
I don't know. I don't want to tell my daughters a story like this. Life is very hard, that's certainly true, and sometimes bad things do happen for no reason. But I'd want my daughters to hear a story about how, even when life gets very miserable, there are still ways to change it, still ways to fight against that misery. I'd want to tell them the story that Kadohata almost told before veering into a bear trap.
There's another story in the background of Kira-Kira: something is going on at the plant:
"I saw the man walking around the building again. She saw me studying him and said, “That’s the thug.” “What’s a thug?” She looked at him. He was watching us now, but then he kept walking. She leaned toward the car. “Didn’t your mother tell you? The workers are trying to unionize. The thug works for Mr. Lyndon. He discourages union activity. He doesn’t let any of the employees gather in the parking lot, even if they’re not talking about the union.”"
The workers at the plant are talking union. Now, Katie's mother doesn't want anything to do with this; in her words, “A union is when all the workers get together and fight the very people who have provided them with a job and the very people who pay the employees money to give them the means to buy a house someday.” But it's a union organizer who takes Katie's brother to the hospital after he steps in that bear trap, and it's the union-leaning employees that show up to the funeral of Katie's sister. And in the end, when the vote to unionize comes, Katie's mother does ends up voting for it, once she learns that the union wants to fight for bereavement leave. As Katie puts it, "it was a little late for my mother, but if she voted yes, she knew it would not be too late for the next family suffering grief."
This isn't a novel about unions. It's about Katie's relationship with her family, and especially her sister. But should it have been a novel about unions? Obviously, I would have really liked that, given my personal politics and my family history. But there's a reason I like unions beyond just the practical, material things that unions can do for workers. Unions are good narratively. I honestly think this is an underrated reason why people come into labor politics.
When I say unions are good narratively, what I mean is, when you talk about unionizing with your coworkers, you are talking and acting in a framework of "there's a whole bunch of good little guys and they're finally standing up to the big bad guy." That's a story we've all seen and heard before in books and movies and tv shows and Sum 41 songs. It is an attractive story, a fun one to tell and a fun one to hear, one that is simple and easy to understand, one that we have been hearing some version of since we were children. Doing something like organizing a workplace or participating in a strike puts you in that story that you like to hear, one that makes sense and that puts you in the right role. That can be very powerful, and very inspiring. Labor politics involve material arguments and policy arguments, of course, but I think the narrative arguments are very underrated in terms of how they can win people over to a cause like unionizing and fighting the boss for your fair share of what you produce.
For me, Kira-Kira is a missed opportunity. There's a story Kadohata could have built out more, and I think she could have done it without sacrificing her writing on the family's relationships or Katie's narrative voice. A fight between poultry workers and their rich oppressive boss, seen through the eyes of a child trying to adjust to a new state and an unfamiliar culture and set of hardships, checks all the boxes for what makes a great Newbery medalist, and a story with an inspirational narrative value that you want to share with your child. But instead of that, we spend Kira-Kira wading deeper into misery and suffering, or rather stumbling around in the suffering until we step on the wrong thing and almost get our foot ripped off.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1928 medalist, Gay-Neck: The Story Of A Pigeon by Dhan Gopal Mukerji.
As opposed to the working conditions today, which I'll just assume are much better, without looking it up.