Saturday, October 14, 2023 - 10am-4pm at Florence Filberg Centre in Downtown Courtenay

Kunio Yamagishi

About:

Author headshotBorn in Fukushima, Japan, Kunio Yamagishi graduated from Hosei University, Tokyo, and immigrated to Canada. He worked at the Consulate General of Japan in Toronto as a researcher, wrote numerous reports, and worked in Toronto, Tokyo, and New York as an investment banker.
His publications include short stories, magazine articles, and academic translation work. His novel, The Return of a Shadow, was a finalist for the 2019 International Rubery Book Award in Great Britain. The University of British Columbia Library has my book in its “Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC)” section. Also, the University of Victoria Library keeps my book in the “Special Collections” section.

 

Books:

The Return of a Shadow (Literary Fiction)

 

Kunio is based in Courtenay.

Synopsis:

Eizo Osada had his shadow, always there inside his head, ready, unbidden, to announce itself. And it did; criticizing, asking awkward questions, prompting. It had been there since he left Japan for Canada over forty years ago. He had left his wife and three young sons, one of them only two years old, to earn money to maintain the family back home. Then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. A worried Canadian government interned Japanese people. Eizo spent the next few years in camps. After his release, his shadow questioned why he did not go back to his family, but there was always a reason why he could not. Then there was the last letter from his wife twenty-three years ago asking him to stay in Canada as there was no employment in war-torn Japan. So he stayed, living a lonely life, saving so he could send money back. Now, approaching retirement, the time had come to return to the wife and family he had never known so long. Little did he know what awaited him and how he in turn would become a shadow.

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