Shizuka

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Shizuka tells of four generations of Japanese and Japanese-Americans and their lives in the great Central Valley of California. A chance meeting between Martin, a middle-aged Caucasian, and Pat, a young Japanese-American woman who knows little about the life of her pioneer ancestors, leads by mutual impulse into the wilderness of the Sierra Nevadas to a greatly revered but little-known, century-old gathering place for early Japanese settlers, Pat's ancestors. This is Shizuka. Austere and imposing, Shizuka ("a place of tranquility") comes to life with the discovery of diaries, written in Japanese and dating from the 1890s. They describe a tight knit, dynamic family with close ties to early Yankee and Mexican settlers, yet the cryptic entries can do no more than whet the imagination. It is only the unfolding story of Kazuo Kono, the family's patriarch, that tells the true tale of Shizuka and of those who built it against great odds and were able, from time to time, to find tranquility there. Kazuo's origins in Meiji Restoration Japan, his immigration eastward to America, his establishing a family with Motome, his brilliant and passionate wife, and his agriculturally important contributions to his adopted country give warmth and texture to a virtually forgotten era and its obscure heroes.