The Diplomat’s Daughter
Japanese internment camps set up inside the United States during WWII have been tackled in historical fiction a number of times in recent years: Isabel Allende’s The Japanese Lover and Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls, to name but two. Now Karin Tanabe, author of The Gilded Years, brings to life the turbulent period around Pearl Harbor through the stories of three young people whose lives change radically because of the war.
There is a Japanese girl, Emi Kato—the diplomat’s daughter of the title—who finds herself detained in a Texan internment camp before being abruptly sent back to Japan. There is also the story of Leo Hartmann, Emi’s first love, who she met in Vienna in the 1930s and from whom she is parted when Leo’s Jewish family are forced to flee as Hitler rises to power. And lastly, there is Christian Lange, the handsome young German-American Emi meets in the camp in Texas, only to be parted from him as the war spins them in different directions.
Crossing continents and spanning several years, the novel has a saga-like quality; clearly headed chapters are vital in helping keep the reader on track with the time and character in focus at any given point.
Above all, this is a novel about people from different backgrounds and walks of life being flung together by circumstance and finding love. In The Diplomat’s Daughter, that circumstance for Emi Kato was being sent to a mixed internment camp where Americans of both Japanese and German descent were detained. Tanabe describes herself as person of mixed race—she has a Belgian mother and a Japanese father—and so for her, she says, this novel ‘felt like a natural one for me to write.’ Her attachment to her characters and passion for the period shine through.
