We all have those family members who seem to know more about us than we do about them. D.K. Furutani, author of When Mikan Road Was Ours, is a master at conveying the awkwardness of that feeling. When his protagonist, who works as an English professor, attends a great-uncle’s funeral, a cousin he doesn’t know asks if he’d be willing to compile the dead man’s notes into a unified family history.
Murano, known to readers only by his last name, has a hard time with the assignment at first. He meets his grandfather again in the crinkled notebook pages, but the stories about an upstanding boy don’t fit with the memories he has of the same person as a sour old man.
Furutani brings his readers right to the gravel driveway lined with mandarin trees that the Murano family named Mikan Road. From there, it’s a shattering fall to the grey barracks at Heart Mountain and Tule Lake, where the U.S. government forced Japanese people to move during World War II.
Murano’s family story resonates from the 1920s straight through to his present. He’s a lonely, defeated man, far from perfect and too quickly tempted to take the easy way around a problem. Meeting his family through the memoir project pushes him to live for values greater than himself. Perhaps it’s fitting that the audience never learns his first name. For all the good and bad that comes with it, he is forever tied to those that come before.
I’ve committed to reading through the whole Bible, cover to cover, a few times, but genealogies are where my waning attention inevitably falls off. Names like Mahalel, Arphaxad, or Kehath don’t easily become a whole person in my imagination. The many members of Murano family could have faded into a similar list, but Furutani introduces readers to each one, leaving a brief but satisfying snapshot of what that person must have been like. Eito, Tomoya, Benjiro, Kazuki. Eiko, Judy, Kaiya: Some of these characters don’t get much more than a few paragraphs, but they all have a dimension that breathes life into them.
We never see Murano visit the land where Mikan Road once was, where the whitewall tires of his great-grandfather’s Chrysler Imperial sent up a cloud of gravel dust. However, he’s a braver man than at the start of the book, so he might just have the resolve to get up off that front porch. (Atria Books)