Prose Excerpts

Written: 2019
Full Word Count: 40,000

Philo on the Mountain (Winner of 2019 Storymakers First Chapter Contest)

All roads led to the Mountain. All paths, all trails. But the Mountain was forbidden. No one had been on its slopes in all of Philo’s memory. And he was twelve years old.

Yet there he was, standing on the road. A rumbling in his chest brought him there. Then he thought, The rumble comes from the Mountain, like a voice.

Behind him, the one-room huts of his village squatted low to the ground as if they were afraid the Mountain might notice them. 

The huts were grouped in circles throughout the village, dozens of them. In the center of each circle, was a shallow pit, filled with pieces of wood that waited patiently to be lit. The fires were the only light in the village at night. They were a place to gather and cook meals. A place to talk, though the villagers rarely spoke of anything but how to stay away from the Mountain.

Philo lingered on the road while the other boys his age ran from pit to pit, igniting the wood. They raced between huts, and tromped through garden rows, crushing the plants under their bare feet. As they passed by, he heard words like “strange,” and “no friends.” The words burned on his cheeks. 

A hand gripped his arm and spun him around. A man with a pinched face—as if someone had crumpled it like unwanted parchment—scowled at him.

“What are you doing here?” The angry man pressed closer, while the off-limits road pushed at his back.

Written August 2022
Word Count: 900 

Autobiographical Cannon

Charlotte’s Web. I am young. I can read a chapter book. I think I am all grown up. Words matter. They must be woven with care. And put in a web. Girls matter. Geese matter. Even rats matter. But especially pigs. Goodbyes happen and there is sadness in the world. My own life has sadness. I must say goodbye to grandparents, to aunts, to cousins. They leave like Charlotte, but they also leave something behind. Some goodbyes stay inside my heart and I can still hear them when I’m listening. Spiders have more wisdom than anyone else. 

Bridge to Terabithia. I am older. I read everything that the librarian and my mother put in my hands. I know about sadness (Thank you, Charlotte), but I don’t know about tragedy. Leslie teaches me about that. She knows that bridges can lead to new places. To new friendships. To joy. She knows about everything. Except for ropes. Ropes should be stronger. There are ropes that used to hold my family together. But ropes break, and Leslie doesn’t come back. Neither does my dad. But he could have come back. He just didn’t want to. This is tragedy.

The Chronicles of Narnia. Words have meanings that I have to dig out of the deep places. They are symbols. They are allegories. I soak in all the meanings, and try to find ones that no one knows about. Deep magic. Now I know that colors have taste. That lions make sacrifices, that lanterns sprout like a vine, and that boys hide beneath dragon’s skin. Dear C.S. Lewis, I create stories too. I’m not good at it, but maybe someday. By the way, I love Reepicheep. And Puddleglum. 

A Tale of Two Cities. How does history tell a story? There is anger in the world. There is hatred. There are guillotines. There are wars where both sides are wrong. Tragedy can fill a whole country. It can ruin a whole people. Did you know? Wine flows in the streets like blood—or blood flows through streets like wine—and it consumes the killers and the killed. Why? Why did the people deserve this? Why did they not deserve this? What about the children? What about being human? How many more will it take? I must never stop asking questions.

Les Miserable. I am a real grown up now. I am not afraid of long books. I read and read and read. The sewers of Paris almost make me stop, but I keep going. I finish and I cry, because a book that covers a whole life, also shows me my own. I want to be redeemed by candlesticks. I want to lift a wagon to save someone else, even if it means I am condemned. I don’t want to be buried alive. I want to trudge through the mire and come out the other side holding the key to everything. And now that I’ve read it, I also know that it is alright for a girl to be smart. I can understand what many others cannot. I can be proud of the 1,432 pages. But the sewers of Paris. Ew.

Little Women. I am a woman. Sometimes I am Amy. Sometimes I am Meg, or Beth, or Marmee. Many times I am Jo and mistakes live in my bones. And now I know that books mold to me. I am in those pages too. I was told that “Women are only . . .” but it’s not true. Women are travelers, they are scribblers. They can ruin jam and they can pickle limes. They can fix what is broken by war. They are stronger than love and death. Complexities. I am not only a wife and a mother. And hair is not my one beauty.

Japanese Fairy Tales. I am half-Japanese. People say, “Not Japanese enough,” or, “Too Japanese.” I am American. They don’t allow me to be anything else. They say, “Unity is what matters.” They don’t believe me when I talk about Incarceration. They ignore me when I say stop calling it internment. I am missing so many of my pieces. So I read the tales of my culture, stories about rice, about dragon princesses, and bamboo, and tongue-cut sparrows. Some of my pieces are hidden in the pages. They are not hard to find. Now I must learn the language. I find more and more pieces.　ありがとうございます。 I am not just half-Japanese. I am whole. Grandma Kanno would be proud. 

When Women Were Dragons. I am now in my forties. For many years I want to be something more. I suspect that something was taken from me. I remember that I am a writer. I go back to school. I feel a joy that can’t be contained by my skin. Then Kelly Barnhill tells me that women are dragons. It’s true. I have dragoned. My anger, my joy, my beauty, my thick thighs. None of that can be kept in such a small body. I must step out of my skin. I devour everything that has kept me back. The world will have to make room for me. I want to incinerate. I want to claw and shred and bite. And then after, I will bake a loaf of bread. But only if I feel like it.

I am the books. The books are me. I keep reading in order to meet myself there.

Creative Nonfiction

Written: April 2025
Full Word Count: 2900

As Obaachan Guides

I don’t remember my grandmother’s funeral. I was 34 years old when she died, but somehow most of that day has drained into the same abyss that holds the memories of my first steps and my first words. But sometimes she wafts into my dreams. During those visits, she is almost always in her kitchen. Sometimes she visits me in her car, sitting atop two phone books that boost her up high enough to see over the dashboard. On rare occasions, she visits me on the couch in her living room, the old slouchy sitting area covered in crocheted blankets. On those days, we sit together as she holds my babies, exclaiming over their light hair and blue eyes. 

Today she visits me sitting next to her basement fireplace. The crochet hook in her hand flies across a blanket, turning, twisting, looping, knotting together every color of yarn. The heaviness of my curly black ponytail tugs on my neck and shoulders. I know I’m a kid in this moment because my hair is only curly when it’s permed. As in, only chemicals will make my coarse, straight Japanese hair form a curl. And I only permed my hair in the 80s. Like everyone else.

“Grandma, will you teach me how to speak Japanese?” 

Japanese. Her first language. She had been born in Utah, but her parents spoke very little English. Dad told me he had often heard her speaking a mixture of English and Japanese—mostly Japanese—when she was with her mother. Grandma could teach me all the words that my great grandparents had spoken. And my great-great grandparents. And my great-great-great grandparents. 

“No, Amanda. You don’t want to learn Japanese. We’re American.”

But I do, Grandma. I want to learn Japanese. I want to know about honorifics, I want to know about -masu, and -mashita, and -masen. I want to exclaim that your food is oishii desu yo! I want to talk about Buddhism and why Uncle Ted says baka inu, and why people on television mock your accent, and why the kids at school pull their eyes at me. 

I don’t want to have to learn Japanese as an adult. Not without you, Grandma. I don’t want those words embedded deep in my soul by someone besides you. I want you to pull them out of my DNA and hand them to me, tumbling through my fingers like too many cherries. 

But I have to let someone else teach me. To let someone else show me how to write my name and read the kanji of our family that means pipe and flute and field and wilderness. But it didn’t come from you, Grandma. And so it remains nothing more than the ghost of my Japaneseness, rising up from your grave to haunt me, always to be my shadow. You could have taught me.  We were robbed, Grandma. Was it Pearl Harbor that stole our words? Was it Topaz, and Tule Lake, and Manzanar, and the Model Minority? If it wasn’t for them, could we have stood in your kitchen as you stir-fried veggies and I learned how to count? Ichi, ni, san, yon, go. Ichi, ni, san, yon, go. Ichi ni…