“Much was beyond my knowing. If the wind blew a certain way, I might feel an unsettling presence as I stepped out of my family’s house of bamboo and earth. I imagined ghosts, even in daylight.

This was my Yokohama, or more accurately its remains, where a self-proclaimed master race had once launched a great navy to lord over the sea and to send armies abroad to rape, plunder, and murder millions. They were my mother’s people.

To thwart them, American airplanes had dropped napalm bombs on the city and burned it to the ground. They were my father’s people.”

“I was an incidental consequence of the war. But for the war, I would simply not be. Our family, which had sustained itself in the ruins of a failed empire, would surely succeed in America—in the new land on the greenest side of Earth.”

The boy is shunned by the Japanese as ainoko (mongrel) during his early childhood in Yokohama. Listening to stories from his American father, he becomes enamored of the world of cowboys and Indians. Later, as a schoolboy, he’ll navigate American ways, as a stranger in a strange land. New Jersey isn’t the wild west he pictured. He’ll be captivated by the new country, despite its reluctance to accept him. As he begins elementary school, he’s the yellow worm in the otherwise fine white apple. Still, he’s solaced by his parents and grandparents, until in a heartbreaking turn, when he’s eight, his mother deserts the family and returns to Japan. Soon after, his father foists custody of the boy on his grandparents.

How the Sayonara Cowboy responds to these life-changing events becomes the crucible for his search for connection, love, and meaning as he grows up, a search that’s alternately earnest and misguided; sometimes pathetic, but often funny. If there’s a credo to the story, it’s embedded in the rare advice he’ll receive from his wayward father—in a bar of course—“Don’t let the bastards grind you down—especially when you’re your own worst enemy.”

Cowboy’s Calendar