Somewhere Among by Annie Donwerth-Chikamatsu

On March 11, 2011, a five-minute-long earthquake shudders through Japan, changing their lives forever.

Maya, half Japanese, half American, lives in a suburb a few miles outside of Tokyo.

Things heat up even more for Ema when a bully at the neighborhood school that she has to attend in the fall makes her life miserable as well.When Japan is left in ruins by a massive earthquake, one child must navigate through fear to help the community. It is always on her grandfather never misses the news. She finishes the schoolwork for the semester under her grandmother’s nose and in front of the television. Ema is miserable trying to keep peace between her grandmother and mother, to keep cool in the summer heat, and to keep up her studies. Ema’s grandmother takes care of them and makes sure that Ema knows the finer points of Japanese culture. She and her parents go across Tokyo to stay at her grandparents’ house. Ema has lived in Japan all her life, has attended Japanese public school, has done well and has friends that she has to leave for a few months because of her mother’s difficult pregnancy. Ema is an eleven-year-old American-Japanese girl bi-cultural, bilingual and bi-national with an American mother and a Japanese father. Here as in the Acknowledgements, I would like to thank my children for skyping me away from the manuscript, to Papa and friends Mari Boyle, Kathy Schmitz, Kristin Ormiston and Cam Sato for pulling me away to do fun things to SCBWI Japan’s advisors Holly Thompson, Naomi Kojima, Mariko Nagai, Avery Fischer Udagawa for always organizing an active calendar of events for us to Mariko Nagai, Mari Boyle, Avery Fischer Udagawa, Emina Udagawa, and Cam Sato for reading … After these 4+ months of uncertainty, confinement, and sadness I can still hold strong to the things I wrote about and what got me through Tokyo’s month of aftershocks family, friends and pets, and tending Earth (for me gardening). After 3 years of remembering, researching and writing it, we were advised to self-isolate for COVID before being quarantined in March. Last February, I was so thankful to have finished the final galleys of my second verse novel, Beyond Me, based on our west Tokyo experience of the aftershocks from the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of 2011.

Somewhere Among by Annie Donwerth-Chikamatsu