House of the Red Fish

Graham Salisbury's HOUSE OF THE RED FISH provides a companion novel to UNDER THE BLOOD-RED SUN, so familiarity with the prior story will lend uniformity and smooth transition to this ongoing tale of Tomi Nakaji. Here it's a year after his father and grandfather were arrested after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and everyone's waiting for another attack. Japanese American Tomi and his family discover new enemies among old friends as they face new challenges.

THE HOUSE OF THE RED FISH pulses with energy, enthralling images, captivating narrative and most of all, empathy for the downtrodden. THE HOUSE OF THE RED FISH is the house of Tomi, his little sister, Grand'pa Joji, his mom and dad. A flying red paper Fish on top of the house is a Japanese emblem for a happy family in times of peace. They live on the property of the Davis family, home also to Keen who is a bully. Keen also hates Tomi and his family because they are Japanese. The narrative takes place in Hawaii just before and after Pearl Harbour, when Japanese-Americans were perceived as the enemy. After his dad and grand'pa Joji were incarcerated as prisoners of war, Tomi has one goal and that is to retrieve his fisherman father's sampan that was sunk because it was Japanese. A great deal of imagination and creativity must be used in order to bring it back to the surface. Without doubt, Keen will find ways to stop him from reaching his goal. Surprisingly, grand-pa Joji returns, as he was saved by Mrs. Davis and he secretly guides his grandson on how to save the sampan for Keen's dad, whom he hopes will soon be out of the concentration camps that were built for Japanese-Americans. Tomi, his little sister and all his friends show a sense of camaraderie that one can really feel in Hawaii. In fact, Graham Salisbury's family has lived in Hawaii since the 1800 which makes him well versed in the lingo and the sense of friendship that exists among them. THE HOUSE OF THE RED FISH conveys a message of understanding the perceived enemy in times of war. He also conveys a sense of pride in one's heritage. The author's style is entertaining and endearing. We get to root for the good guys and boo for the bullies. Dialogue is fast and witty. Characters are so true to life that you will find yourself cheering for the winners. Graham Salisbury's foray into a delicate subject is highly recommended. Lily Azerad-Goldman, Artist and Bookreviewer for Bookpleasures

Here it is, HOUSE OF THE RED FISH, the eagerly awaited sequel to Graham Salisbury's UNDER THE BLOOD-RED SUN. Readers already acquainted with Tomi and Billy (and their neighbor but "enemy" Keet Wilson) will delight in renewing friendships and going on more adventures in Salisbury's newest novel. HOUSE OF THE RED FISH opens with a brief flashback to September 1941, but the next chapter takes us to March 1943. Tomi Nakaji and Billy Davis, still best friends, are now ninth graders at Roosevelt High. Salisbury makes readers very aware of the ravages of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the way life in Hawaii has changed in the interim for everyone, but especially for Japanese Americans like narrator Tomi and his family. The setting details subtly include many aspects of life in Hawaii during World War II: the boys get stopped, asked for their ID's, and warned that they should also have their gas masks with them; barbed wire fences stretch across the beaches; cardboard must cover the windows of their home each night; curfew is imposed on all residents. The World War II years in Hawaii were rife with prejudice against Japanese Americans--often suspected to be "enemy aliens" (43). However, Salisbury shows how Billy's haole family accept his friendship with Tomi and how Billy himself, paradoxically wise beyond his years yet still charmingly naïve, explains to Tomi why Keet is no longer his friend. Tomi tells us: "It took me a week to force it out of him [Billy]. Keet Wilson turned on me because I was Japanese, and he had been told by his friends at school that white guys weren't supposed to like Japanese guys" (17). Early in the novel, the boys amble down to the nearby Ala Wai Canal where Papa's sampan, sunk by the U.S. Army one day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, is still visible just below the surface of the muddy water. The boat quickly becomes a symbol of the way life was before the attack ("in the before time"), when Tomi, Papa and Grampa Joji were together before the Army took Papa and Grampa away to U.S. Army prison camps. It also represents Tomi's personal war, which Salisbury adeptly counterpoints with the Big war of the real world. The novel follows Tomi engaging in his battles against the backdrop of the bigger war; we see the young dragon in the making carrying on the traditions of his ancestors; even at the end of the novel, Salisbury leaves Tomi still at war: "How many more battles stood between me and the day Papa would finally come home?" (287) As Tomi and Billy battle to raise the Taiyo Maru from its muddy prison, their conflict with Keet Wilson and his blatant prejudice against the Japanese crescendos. Salisbury incorporates many details of Japanese culture and values. (Note: Salisbury includes a helpful glossary of Hawaiian and Japanese phrases and words at the end of the book.) The mantra Tomi remembers from his father, "Don't shame the family. Be helpful, be generous, be accepting," shows the importance of this and other values bei

Sequels are tricky beasties and any author that attempts one is going to have to wrangle with a variety of problems. On the one hand, they have to satisfy their core fan base. The people who adored the earlier book and presumably clamored for a sequel in the first place. Then you have the new crop of readers. This is especially true with children's fiction. Kids grow up and often abandon the authors they loved when they were young (at least through adolescence). In 1994 Graham Salisbury wrote the award winning "Under the Blood-Red Sun". Now, twelve years later, he has come out with a long-awaited sequel, "House of the Red Fish". Fortunately, Salisbury's earlier title is so well-known that the requisite fan-base is already in place and ready. However, there's yet another problem with writing sequels. They have to be able to stand on their own. If you absolutely have to have read the previous book, then your sequel, nice as it is, is going to collapse under its own weight. And weighty books of this nature don't win awards. I, personally, had never read "Under the Blood-Red Sun", so I felt that I was in a pretty good position to determine how well "House of the Red Fish" stood on its own two feet. The advantage to having never read a work by an author like Graham Salisbury is that his talents have a tendency whop you upside the head and leave you wanting more. "House of the Red Fish" is everything an author would want out of a title. Consider this puppy a contender. Tomi is still dealing with the fact that his father and grampa are interned far from home merely because they are of Japanese ancestry. It's 1943 and America is at war with Japan, many of its white citizens terrified of their Asian neighbors. Living on Honolulu, Tomi and his best friend Billy go to school and try to avoid the nasty bully Keet, who (by awful coincidence) just happens to be the son of his mother's employers. Then Tomi comes up with a crazy plan. It happens while he and Billy are staring at his father's underwater sampan fishing boat, sunk not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor. If Tomi can raise this boat and fix it up, he may have a chance at having it in working condition when his father is finally released from his internment. The only problem is that Keet knows of the plan and will do everything in his power to stop Tomi and his friends. Worse still, raising the boat might mean putting his family's home and livelihood in danger. But when Grampa Joji is released from his imprisonment, Tomi finds an unlikely ally in helping him achieve his goal. The characters in this book are remarkable. And the best of these, without a doubt, is Grampa. He's a cranky crochety old man with a single-minded tenacity that the reader grows to adore. I personally am going to adopt his standard phrase of "Confonnit" into my own vocabulary. Grampa has a great sense of pride, worth, and history. Salisbury complicates things nicely, however, when he has Grampa

Salisbury's newest book, House of the Red Fish, is a masterful exploration of the nuances of prejudice, touching on many of the issues (honor, courage, friendship, and the bond between fathers and sons) that Salisbury has probed in his earlier work. The attack on Pearl Harbor didn't only steal Tomi's father and grandfather from his life (they were arrested after the attack). It stole his dream of fishing with his father on his father's boat, the Taiyo Maru, which is sitting now underwater, sunk by the Navy under suspicion that it and its owner might aid invading Japanese forces. Tomi wants to bring the boat back to the surface and dry it out so that it's ready to sail out to sea when his father returns home from prison. Tomi also wants to make his absent father proud... to carry on the Japanese tradition of sons honoring their fathers. To succeed, Tomi must persevere in the face of trouble just like the koi-the fish that symbolizes masculinity and strength because it can swim upstream against strong currents. But it's not easy for Tomi to remain loyal to his family's Japanese heritage or his father's admonitions not to fight, not to shame the family, especially when the red paper koi that his mother raises on a bamboo pole above the roof to celebrate Tango-no-Sekku (Boy's Festival) is destroyed. Tomi's relationships with his friends, a mix of haole (white), Portugese, Hawaiian, and Japanese boys, ring true to life as they fend off attacks by a white-only gang, and work together to raise Tomi's father's boat from the canal. In the end, House of the Red Fish is a book about the joy and bonds of friendship, as well as what it truly means to look beneath a person's skin color and speech patterns to understand what he's truly made of. It's also a story about one boy's struggle to live with integrity in the face of enormous prejudice, while offering eloquent testimony to the courage and loyalty displayed by Japanese Americans during a difficult time in American history.