Unending Nora

by Julie Shigekuni

Book Overview

Unending Nora is a love story, though not in the ordinary sense. Having retreated to the streets of the east San Fernando Valley amidst an intense heat wave, Nora Yano, who has lived the first 29 years of her life as a devout Christian and an outcast, strikes up a relationship with a stranger and experiences sexual intimacy for the first time. When Nora mysteriously disappears, her best and only friends Caroline and Melissa, each with their...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1597091227
• ISBN13: 9781597091220
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Another strong work by Shigekuni

As a teacher of American literature at a community college in Dallas, Texas, I shared Unending Nora with my students last year, and it is the third Shigekuni novel that my students have enjoyed with me over the past decade. Julie Shigekuni is a great story teller, and she continues to focus on the Japanese American experience in fresh and insightful ways. By now many American students have some familiarity with the World War II internment period, but what has gotten far less attention is the effect of this devastating and uniquely racist persecution afterwards -- upon the generations of Japanese Americans that followed the end of the war. The camps have long been emptied, but no matter how much economic achievement and 'blending in' Japanese Americans manage, the internment hangs over them like a dark shadow. Shigekuni's characters in Unending Nora all grapple with identity issues to one extent or another. Some of them cope successfully, and they are inspirations to the rest of us. It may be news to many readers that for some Japanese Americans Christianity emerged as one refuge in the post war years. In a wickedly pointed fashion, Shigekuni explores ways that Christianity was unable to provide support or community or relevance to psychologically vulnerable characters. Nora is the misfit girl in a church going community that itself feels misfit to the mainstream dominant society. Nora commands the reader's sympathy, and she haunts the other characters in Shigekuni's book. From her first book, A Bridge Between Us, to this one, Unending Nora, Shigekuni has written with such courage and imagination and variety. As an artist she continues to grow. Shigekuni is a little bit Amy Tan and a little bit Franz Fanon; that is, your commumnity matters, but it can not save you. I think she is saying this. You have to recognize your circumstances in a society that can be both seductive and oppressive, and you have to reach within your strengths in order to establish your sense of self. I can't wait for Julie Shigekuni's next book!

A fine novel and a warning against future social injustices

What is the legacy of a people oppressed? "Unending Nora" is a novel following offspring of the victims of America's notorious Japanese internment policy during World War II. Telling the story of four young women during their coming of age, and painting a picture of the lasting effect of such a harsh policy by the government, "Unending Nora" is a fine novel and a warning against future social injustices.

Unending Praise

This book is amazing and I read it slowly because I didn't want it to end. The angst-filled character of Nora was the somewhat removed center of onion-like layers of intense relationships, dialogue, stories, and heart-wrenching discoveries. I found myself underlining sentences and paragraphs packed with beautiful prose, and soon my book was fully highlighted. I appreciate Shigekuni's thoughtful details and imaginative ideas that make this story the great read it is.

powerful book

I couldn't put this book down. It is at times dark, honest, brutal, hopeful, mysterious, and very real. Highly recommended.

A wonderful map of previously uncharted lives

If you have ever watched a group of people through a restaurant window, gathered in front yard or at a church service and wondered about the stories that connected them to each other or how the unspoken experiences of one generation take on unending narrative power in a subsequent generations, then you will find a like mind in Julie Shigekuni and her third book, "Unending Nora." This book takes on large themes in the Japanese American community that have formed one generation after the Internment Camps by treating them not as ideas but as lived experiences. Shigekuni can take ideas about culture, religion, friendship and the recuperation of love, wrap them in an engrossing mystery story, bind them to the flesh and bone of complex characters, and set them loose to work on the reader as if they were reading about his or her own life. I loved this book for its take on the post-internment Japanese American community, for its treatment of young Japanese American women as the holders of their own stories, and for just being so damn pleasurable to read.