Where Are the Sunflowers? A Media Celebrity's Memoirs of Her Tragic Encounters with Anti-Korean and Buraku Prejudice in Japan

An autobiography by celebrated Japanese writer/television show host/journalist Kurihara Miwako, Where Are the Sunflowers depicts the failure of two over forty adults to find lasting happiness, while introducing social prejudice and discrimination as the catalysts for their misery. Protagonist Kyoko Igarashi’s fear of her parents’ prejudice toward buraku ancestry eventually destroys her short marriage to Taro Kaiji, a wonderfully warm and sympathetic man of buraku origin. The other man she wanted to marry, much earlier, was a third-generation Korean. That relationship was doomed because the man’s father continued to despise the Japanese for their historic mistreatment of his people and thus insisted that he marry a Korean woman. Thus are two of Japan’s most destructive social taboos, buraku heritage and Korean ancestry, introduced in a manner which is within easy reach of any reader.