Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

Reviewed by Ellen

Ratings

Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content

Guide to Rating System

LANGUAGE

VIOLENCE

SEXUAL CONTENT

ADULT THEMES

hotelonthecornerofbitterandsweet

Ratings Explanation

Language:  “Jeezus”, several racial epithets (Jap, Chink, and nigger.)

Violence:  Children beat Henry up at school and steal his lunch. Policemen raid a nightclub, manhandle and throw Japanese patrons to the ground and hold them at gunpoint. Chaz and Henry get in a fight at school; Henry punches Chaz in the face, and Chaz knocks Henry down. A Japanese man is shot and killed in an internment camp.

Sexual Content:  Henry and Keiko hold hands and share an innocent kiss.

Adult Themes:  Bootlegging in nightclubs was common during the war. People would pour the liquor down the drains when there were raids. Henry and Keiko are sent to a pharmacy to purchase illegal liquor and bring it back to the club in a brown paper sack. Mrs. Beatty, the lunch lady, smokes like a chimney. When the Japanese were rounded up and sent to internment camps, white people would frequently enter their homes and take whatever they wanted, and many Japanese returned home to nothing. Japanese businesses were looted and destroyed. Interracial marriage was illegal. Henry and his father have a strained relationship, and his father disowns him for forming a friendship with Keiko, a Japanese girl.

Synopsis

Seattle, 1986. A large crowd has gathered outside the Panama Hotel, a pearl of a hotel in Japantown during its heyday, but which has long since been abandoned and boarded up. A new owner has taken possession, and the crowd watches as she brings out and displays the recently discovered belongings of hundreds of Japanese families sent to internment camps during World War II–families who brought their possessions to the hotel’s basement for safekeeping while they were away, but never returned to claim them. Among the crowd is Henry Lee, a Chinese American and now an old widowed man, whose eyes grow misty at the sight of a painted paper parasol that reminds him of Keiko Okabe, the Japanese girl he once knew and loved (much to his father’s disapproval). But Keiko’s family and thousands of other Japanese were forced to leave behind their homes, their livelihoods, and all they possessed when the internment orders were issued. Though Henry tried to maintain contact, his father intercepted their correspondence and even disowned him for falling in love with a Japanese girl, and the two lost touch and wound up living separate lives. Now more than forty years later, the memories and emotions stirred up again, Henry is determined to search for the long-lost object that symbolized his first love, and perhaps open the door to finding Keiko again.

This story of young love is made colorful by the historical context of World War II and the forcible internment of thousands of Japanese Americans in camps throughout the western U.S. The story jumps back and forth between 1986, when Henry is a widower and attempting to mend a strained relationship with his only son, and 1942, when Henry was 12 and at odds with his own very traditional Chinese father. The author also pays homage to Seattle’s jazz musicians of the 40s and details life as an Asian American in WWII, which adds a richer backdrop to the sweet love story of Henry and Keiko. At times the story is rather cliché, but still an interesting and enjoyable read.