The Comeback Kid

It was four in the morning on the West Coast, and Cynthia Kadohata's phone was ringing. This had better not be bad news or a crank caller. Kadohata's boyfriend grabbed the receiver, listened to the excited librarian on the line from Boston, and passed the phone to her. The next moment, Kadohata was leaping up and down: her first children's book, Kira-Kira (S & S, 2004), had just won the Newbery Medal, the nation's most prestigious award for young people's literature.

Since Kadohata began writing fiction in 1981, her career has had more ups and downs than the Grand Tetons. Her short stories appeared in The New Yorker. The New York Times praised the "beautiful, clean yet lyrical prose" of her first novel, The Floating World (Viking, 1989). And two years later, she won a Whiting Writers' Award, a $30,000 grant given to a writer of exceptional promise.

Then, suddenly, her career hit the skids. Kadohata's second novel, In the Heart of the Valley of Love (Viking, 1992), met with mixed reviews. Her third, The Glass Mountains (White Wolf, 1995), was virtually snubbed. By the late-'90s, the one-time wunderkind was all but forgotten, working as a secretary at a food-processing plant and struggling to write screenplays. An old friend suggested she write for kids. Kadohata resisted, but her friend—Caitlyn Dlouhy, now an editor at Simon & Schuster's Atheneum Books for Young Readers—persisted. Giving in to Dlouhy's suggestion turned out to be the best career move Kadohata ever made.

Kira-Kira ("glittering" in Japanese) tells the tender story of a Japanese-American family that moves from Iowa to rural Georgia in the 1950s. The quiet novel radiates hope as its narrator, young Katie Takeshima, recounts her parents' struggles to earn a living and her older sister's battle with lymphoma. Like Katie, Kadohata was born in the Midwest to Japanese-American parents. She grew up in small-town Arkansas and Georgia, where her father, like Katie's, worked long hours in a chicken-processing plant. Kadohata spent her teen years in Los Angeles and studied journalism at the University of Southern California and creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. Now 48, she and her 20-month-old son, Sammy (whom she adopted from Kazakhstan), live in Long Beach, CA, where we caught up with her.

What was your reaction when you found out that Kira-Kira had won?

It was just complete, pure, uncomplicated joy. I kept screaming. I'm in my pajamas and robe, and I'm jumping up and down. Sammy didn't know what was going on. Caitlyn called shortly after I hung up, and then we both screamed.

I heard she convinced you to write for kids by sending you a box of children's books. Why were you so resistant?

I didn't really think that I could do it. It seemed like a whole other world. And then when I read the books, I realized that it's exactly the same process whether you're writing for kids or grown-ups. I thought, "Hey, I should try this."

How did you meet Caitlyn?

We were grad-school roommates at the University of Pittsburgh. Caitlyn and I would play backgammon and Trivial Pursuit. We became really good friends over Doritos. Her career blossomed, and just a few years ago, when she sent me all those books, she asked me to run some ideas by her. So I e-mailed her some ideas, and she didn't like them. [She laughs.] I remember feeling really annoyed and thinking, "Well, this was her idea." Then finally she liked the idea of a Japanese-American girl living in Georgia. I wrote her a proposal, and she told me, "You know, that's not really the way a proposal is written." [She laughs again.] I kept rewriting the proposal and finally she said, "Never mind. I'm just going to show this to [my boss]."

Describe how you work together.

Of course, when I finish something, I think, "This is great." And I send it to her. Then she will send me this really long letter that starts, "Oh, you're so wonderful. You're so wonderful." And the next seven pages will say all the things that she wants me to change. Sometimes, when it's a really difficult letter, she sends me chocolates. It's really not that exciting to get chocolates from her.

How did the idea for Kira-Kira originate?

Maybe with my father, because he worked really hard and many, many long hours. Then came the voice of the girl, Katie. When I'm writing a first-person novel, that "I"—that word alone—feels like it does something in my brain; it makes it seem like it's really me.

What events in the story are based on your own life?

The feeling of intensity in the family was very real. There are also a few details that are true. Everybody in the hospital did come to see my brother when he was born, because they had never seen a Japanese baby before. And I had a very heavy Southern accent when I was a little girl. I used to be a really huge taco eater. There's one point in the story when the sister dies, and Katie eats five tacos. That was definitely something I would have done as a child.

Do you have an older sister?

I do, and she is still alive. She took care of us a lot, even though she is only a year and a half older than me. She had a maternal quality about her even then. So I always looked up to her. When I told her what the book was about, she got mad at me. I guess she thought that I was "secretly hostile toward her." Then, after she read it, she was happy.

What was it like to be Japanese American in the South during the 1950s and '60s?

We fit in by not fitting into it, by being part of a very small community. When we went to a party, it was almost always with a group of other Japanese or Japanese Americans who worked as chicken sexers, separating male and female chicks in the hatchery. I remember a little girl asking me something like, "Are you black or white?" I really stumbled for an answer. I said, "I don't know."

Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?

When I was 17, I wrote the most idiotic story in the world. It was about all these ducks that had only one leg. They lived on another planet and were a metaphor for humans. I actually sent that story to The Atlantic Monthly and, of course, immediately got a rejection. I don't think I wrote anything again until I was in college, when I wrote for the school newspaper.

When did you get serious about writing fiction?

In 1981 or 1982, I started sending short stories to both The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. I wrote 20 to 40 stories, and I got rejections for all of them. But I got letters back that were encouraging, so I kept writing. I remember in 1986, right before I sold my first story to The New Yorker, I told a friend that I didn't think I was ever going to sell a story; I wondered if I should stop writing. About three weeks later, I got a phone call from an editor at The New Yorker.

Were you surprised when The Floating World got such great reviews?

I didn't realize how fortunate I was. I just had this sense that your book comes out, and everybody gives you some nice reviews. I didn't know that much about publishing.

Were you discouraged when your next two novels were greeted less enthusiastically?

The first review of my second novel, In the Heart of the Valley of Love, was extremely positive. It was in the LA Times Book Review. I was getting married in Las Vegas when a terrible review came out in the New York Times. The reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, was extremely negative. When she gives you a bad review, she really gives you a bad review. Caitlyn was one of my bridesmaids. She or another friend said, "We were trying to keep that from you, because we didn't want to ruin your day." It was really sad.

I am not sure if my next novel, The Glass Mountain, got any reviews. It was just there and gone. Having no reviews is actually worse than having bad reviews, because you have all these expectations that are just not met.

What kept you going?

Some time in the late '90s, I got a Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellowship. It wasn't a lot of money; I think it was about $20,000. I was married, and so it kept me going. And I worked as a secretary.

Was screenwriting a good fit?

No. Part of the reason was that I totally abandoned myself as a writer. I thought, "Oh, I am going to try to write an action script." It is not as if I could write an action novel or would even think of trying. But I thought, "Screenplay: I have to write an action movie." Part of what happened was that I abandoned what I think of as my home as a writer. Something about the screenplay—well, I'm sure that the great screenplay writers write from the inside out—made me feel like I was doing it from the outside in.

What turned things around?

I got divorced in 2000. I did some writing then. Actually part of that is the novel Weedflower that Caitlyn bought last year or the year before. But, basically, in terms of making it all sort of click, it probably wouldn't have happened without Caitlyn. That's what's so amazing, that we were ever roommates. For years, she had been wanting me to write a novel for her.

How did you come up with the title Kira-Kira?

Actually, the first title was "I Wish." Then I played around with another Japanese word, pika-pika. It basically means "glittering," as well, but a slightly different kind of glittering. It sounds sharper, and so at some point, I thought it just wasn't the right word. I didn't know the word kira-kira. Someone who was born in Japan ran a bunch of words by me, and that was one of them. Some people said that either pika-pika or kira-kira would do fine. Then I heard about a commercial in Japan about a toilet-bowl cleaner that goes pika-pika. The toilet gets so clean that it's shining. That was the beginning of the end for pika-pika.

What do you think of when you hear the word kira-kira?

Stars. Fireflies. I think the title itself stands for hope in the end. It's definitely the right word.