Kira-Kira

Katie Takeshima grows up worshipping her older sister Lynn, who teaches her the Japanese word kira kira, meaning glittering, and uses it as a private philosophy for finding something to love in even the hardest days. The family moves from Iowa to Georgia in the 1950s after their small grocery store fails, chasing work at a poultry hatchery where both parents put in exhausting, poorly paid shifts, and Katie narrates the years that follow as an outsider twice over, one of the very few Japanese American students in her school and a middling one next to Lynn's effortless brilliance. A younger brother, Sammy, arrives and gradually pulls Lynn's attention away from Katie toward more typical teenage interests, and the family's fragile stability starts to crack for real when Lynn is diagnosed first with anemia and then with lymphoma, an illness that worsens through the second half of the book rather than announcing itself all at once. Katie keeps watch over her sister through failed treatments and long hospital stretches, and Lynn eventually dies, a loss Kadohata does not soften with a late recovery or a gentle fade. In the aftermath, Katie's father, pushed past what he can absorb, smashes the hatchery owner's car, then confesses and loses his job, and plans to take work at a new hatchery opening in Missouri, a longer drive from home. Katie later finds Lynn's diary and realizes her sister knew for some time that she was dying and kept writing kira kira anyway, and the novel closes on a family trip to California where Katie hears her sister's voice in the sound of the waves.

Kadohata writes in Katie's plain, close first person voice, and the book moves gently and slowly by design, more interested in the accumulation of small domestic detail, hatchery shifts, school lunches, sisterly arguments, than in incident. It asks real patience of a young reader in exchange for an unusually honest account of a child watching illness take someone she loves, and the ending offers comfort without offering a cure.