SECRETS OF THE SUN | Kirkus Reviews

A collection of essays about a complicated father’s unsettling truth.

The afternoon before her wedding, novelist and essayist Yoshikawa learned that her father, Shoichi, had died. Though he was plagued by a heart condition for years, the author focuses mostly on his bipolar disorder, alcoholism, gambling, and abusive outbursts. A Japanese immigrant to the U.S. in the wake of World War II, Shoichi was a respected fusion energy scientist. Just as the technology fell short of its promise to revolutionize energy, Shoichi, too, failed to live up to his own predicted potential for genius. The memories, relationships, and conversations that fill this book center around disappointment, eccentricity, and rage, rather than breakthroughs, pride, and awards. Still, the refrain that Yoshikawa has heard her entire life—“He’s good inside”—haunts her. In a quest to find a cause or an explanation for her father’s illness and decline, and to examine and perhaps forgive the havoc he wreaked on his family and other relationships, the author examines a series of frightening, painful, and embarrassing episodes and oddities. As she casts about for some sort of understanding and closure, she considers topics like the bombing of Japan during the war, racism and immigration, and gender roles and expression. It is a somber reality of mental illness that the damage left in its wake gains a life of its own, anchoring the lives of others. This reality, with its attendant frustration, desperation, and inherent dissatisfaction, leaves Yoshikawa unsure of her own purpose in her project. Readers will also feel this lack of tidy understanding, but the narrative’s open, curious, and at times meandering search hints at how reason and heart do battle with each other—and how memory complicates both.

A sometimes stumbling but deeply empathetic and human memoir-in-essays told with inquisitive subtlety.