Allen Say, author and illustrator,
Home of the Brave.
Houghton Mifflin / Walter Lorraine Books, 2002.

“But what of the children?” Allen Say, in his latest children's book, tackles the difficult question of children and the Japanese Internement in a darkly shaded dream world from his imagination. Mr. Say is the author of a number of successful, highly original, and beautifully illustrated Asian-themed children's books, including Grandfather's Journey, Tea with Milk, and Allison.

Drawing upon his own past, Mr. Say has been the most effective at capturing the inner struggles of young individuals alienated within a larger society. But, unlike many of his earlier books, the inspiration for Home of the Brave was not childhood memories. Rather, during a recent retrospective of his artwork at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, Say was impressed by a separate exhibit on the Internment of Japanese Americans. Upon seeing it, the facts and statistics “took on a human face and voice. And what I saw and heard turned into yet another personal journey. This (Home of the Brave) is that story.”

It was one of the most haunting photos from the Internment, a photo of the Mochida family taken by the great Dorothea Lange, that was the source of inspiration for Home of the Brave. In it, two young children are waiting with identity tags tied around their necks, labels that make them nameless, but not faceless. Their vacant stares into the camera lens reveal nothing other than the eyes of utterly lost souls. Mr Say pays homage to that photo, virtually reproducing it with utmost care as the center-piece of Home of the Brave.

Home of the Brave ventures even deeper into the imagination and the unreal than Mr. Say's most adventurous earlier book, the Sign Painter. In this story a man in a kayak ventures down a wild river within the real world only soon to find himself tangled in an unreaal world of a darkened dream. There he encounters the children of the Internment. These children are both familiar, but distantly unobtainable to him, much like ghosts of deceased family relatives who visit us in our dreams at night. The protagonist sees the world of night in which they live, and is just as baffled by their circumstances as he is by their identity. In a turn of events, he realizes that his own name and identity is tied to theirs, and that there is a bright union after all in this nightmare.

As usual, Allen Say's artwork is stunning in its beauty and emotion. The paintings do their job effectively, drawing the reader into the twisted swirl of the story. The story may baffle some, and to truly enjoy and experience Home of the Brave one must suspend real world logic and enter Say's dream world where things unfold slowly and strangely.

Children see the world differently, and are often overlooked when great tragedies hit and adult issues overwhelm all things. The Internment of Japanese Americans was such an event, with its dominant issues of justice and civil rights, of jobs, land, property, and lives lost. Allen Say reminds us that it is the children who are left out of our thoughts and dialogs.

Home of the Brave shows us the vision of children, while quietly whispering to us — do not forget the us.

Paul Mori