Ayumi’s Violin is an outstanding work of YA historic fiction. As the grandfather of a biracial child, I was immediately drawn to it by the overview on the book’s back cover. But Ayumi’s story touched me on many more levels. Author Tatsumoto takes her readers back in time to post World War II America, a time when tensions between Whites and Asians are volatile. Twelve-year-old Ayumi, being both Japanese and Caucasian, is an outcast in both her native Japan and her father’s America, where fate has brought her following the death of her mother. Music, her violin, is Ayumi’s sole source of solace.
Tatsumoto fashions a literary symphony fusing Ayumi’s core Japanese culture with the pressures of 1950’s middle class America. Schoolyard bullies, a bigoted music store shopkeeper and a self-absorbed, society-climbing stepmother become a discordant harmony to tender movements of support from newfound friends and an estranged father. Turmoil builds to a crescendo as Ayumi battles her conscious, knowing she must right a personal wrong, but the consequences might spell disaster for her American family and worst of all, could result in the loss of her father’s love.
As a simple bow draws sound from a taut set of strings, Ayumi’s plight moved me from despair to hope, from tears to laughter, from fear to calm, and back again. Ayumi’s Violin is a story to be read and re-read for the wisdom it imparts, a book to be truly treasured.
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