Dear Reader –

As I dig for wild orchids

In the autumn fields,

It is the deeply-bedded root

That I desire,

Not the flower.

Izumi Shikibu

Heian-era poet, c. 974-1034

As I write this letter in September of 2026, I am astonished to have just come across a poem by a Japanese noblewoman of the Heian-era that encapsulates, in five brief, haunting lines, the central question of my novel The Rogue Wave. What’s more, by pure coincidence - almost unbelievable, actually - the novel contains a scene in which a mother and daughter search for wild orchids at a time of change and uncertainty in their lives. And like the voice in Lady Shikibu’s poem, the narrator of The Rogue Wave does not speak from the perspective of summer and its optimism, but from a quieter, later place of experience and bitterness. Flowers bring us joy and remind us of beauty, but roots are essential to our understanding of ourselves.

I always knew I would write about my Japanese family, about the unusual way my great-grandfather established us in this country, the circumstances of family life at Point Lobos and the tragedy of the removal and incarceration of the Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbor. I liked that the story (in elements both real and imagined) was a complete one, not solely focused on later disaster but starting in earlier times and giving a full picture of what was lost. Writing is the only way I know to satisfy curiosity - to write myself into that place and time, to better understand how my grandparents’ lives and history have shaped me. And I have been deeply shaped. I share my predecessors’ pleasure in and attunement to the natural world. I have their personal reticence and propriety, both inherited and learned, which is something about myself that I am not proud of. And I have the experience of possessing a Japanese face. It was a difficult circumstance in 1942 and it is still an uneasy one. In 1942 120,000 people disappeared without due process under public watch. It is happening again – and in far greater numbers - today.

And so out of the blue a poem arrives, like a message. Direct from the far and unimaginable Heian era, yet full of the very same tenderness and sense of loss. We write – poet and novelist both – because the impulse to break the surface is stronger than anything else in our lives. We go deep, for the roots, out of curiosity, out of concern, out of desperation, out of love. It is a human impulse that is eternal. The voice endures.