While I Was Away

Waka T Brown's While I Was Away is a warm, true-feeling story for 11 year olds about a Kansas girl sent to Japan for five months to finally learn Japanese properly.

What happens

It starts with a pile of laundry. Waka's mum asks her three times, in Japanese, to help fold it. Waka is busy keeping an eye on her little brother and trying to beat her older brother to the TV. So she doesn't answer.

Her mum decides that means Waka doesn't understand Japanese. Waka is outraged (she understood perfectly well, she just didn't want to fold the laundry!).

A week later the plan is announced over the stir-fry. Five months in Japan, on her own, at the local school where nobody speaks English. She'll miss the end of sixth grade, the whole summer and the start of seventh. And she'll be living with Obaasama, the grandmother who used to peer at the grandchildren through thick glasses as if she didn't approve of them.

What follows is Waka's Operation Stay in Kansas, in three phases, and none of them work. Who hasn't tried to change a parent's mind by suddenly being very, VERY helpful?

The narrator shares the author's name, and it's written with that kind of close-up honesty. You feel every bit of her dread about the kanji she doesn't know. You feel her sadness on the last day of sixth grade, swinging higher and higher so she doesn't have to talk to anyone. And you feel how grown-up and how small she is on the plane.

Then she lands. The cousins are lovely, the dinner table is full of food she can't name and the Japanese bath is the best bath she's ever had. It's a brilliant peek into everyday life in a Japanese family in the 1980s, with the words explained as you go.

It's a gentle read, but it isn't all sunshine. Waka's mum lets slip that Obaasama used to hit her children with the handle of the scissors (just after the War, when life was very hard for her). And after her first night in Japan, Waka wakes up to find she's wet the bed, which she's utterly mortified about.

If your reader has ever felt caught between two places, or been the new kid who doesn't know the rules, they'll feel right at home here.

What to read next

For another girl from a Japanese family by the same author, Dream, Annie, Dream follows a twelve-year-old who spends her summer at theatre camp.