TWO NAILS, ONE LOVE

A gay man and his Japanese American mother seek to find common ground in this debut novel.

New York City, 2000. As Ethan Kenichi Taniguchi waits for his mother to arrive at the airport, he’s filled with apprehension. He and Mom haven’t talked in over a decade, not since his father’s funeral back in their native Hawaii. At the time, they fought over whether Ethan’s live-in boyfriend, Lucas, was welcome at the ceremony. Mom has come east to visit an exhibit in Washington, D.C., the new Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II, a topic to which she has a fraught connection. When she was a girl, her family was placed in an Arkansas internment camp and, in the middle of the war, deported to Japan, where she spent the rest of her childhood. Mom hopes Ethan might accompany her to the memorial, though first, they will have to make it through several days together in New York. Can Ethan communicate the fears he felt living as a gay man during the AIDS crisis, guilt-ridden about not being the type of son his parents wanted? Can he begin to grapple with his mother’s own unvoiced experience of oppression and loss? Will this trip be one of reconciliation or the last time they see each other? Hayashi’s prose is clear and unadorned, offering frank descriptions of everything from Ethan’s small apartment to his mother’s tumultuous childhood. Here, he describes Mom’s family disembarking in Japan in the midst of war: “The port city was clearly under siege, with burnt structures and a few buildings reduced to rubble, and the Japanese looked like they were dressed in ragged pajamas, their faces so dour and their bodies underfed….‘I thought Japan was winning the war,’ Mom whispered to Aunt June.” These sections are perhaps the story’s most compelling, in part because the history is not widely known. The book doesn’t quite work as fiction—Ethan and the author feel too close together, as though they are conspiring to achieve a certain outcome—but it manages to get at something universal in the desire of children to understand their parents and their wish to be understood in return.

An absorbing but somewhat predictable tale about history and family.