Excerpt from Midnight in Broad Daylight by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

PROLOGUE: SHOCKWAVE

San-u
kitaran to hosshite kaze ro ni mitsu
When strong winds begin to blow, showers cannot be far behind.

Nothing seemed amiss that first Sunday in December 1941. Ponytailed beauties strolled the boardwalk, bodybuilders paraded for show at Muscle Beach, and children shrieked aboard the Whirling Dipper coaster as it clattered over the metal track at the Santa Monica Pier. The day was young, the nation placid, and Christmas was just a few weeks away. No one could have guessed that at that moment, 2,500 miles across the Pacific, Japanese planes were zeroing in on military installations throughout the island of Oahu.

So it was that sometime before noon, a twenty-one-year-old gardener working in the scorching sun had no cause for alarm when his employer emerged from the shade of her house. He stopped the mower to catch her words. "Harry," she said, "Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor."

"Oh, is that so?" The news meant little to him. He nodded and the woman returned inside.

When she reappeared a short time later, he was puzzled. She said, "Japan has invaded Pearl Harbor."

"That's terrible." Harry didn't know what else to say. He had never heard of Pearl Harbor. Was it a bay fed by the Pearl River in China, where Japan had long been at war? He vaguely remembered a headline about an American ship sunk by the Japanese there a few years earlier.

The woman paused. "I think maybe you should go home."

"Why?" Harry asked and added without thinking, "I had nothing to do with it."

She stiffened. "Japan has invaded the United States." When Harry hesitated because he hadn't finished the job, she fired him. Stunned, he loaded his mower into his Model A Ford and drove home to Glendale fourteen miles away.

Harry had been let go before—at the end of a harvest picking peas and strawberries in Washington State. But this departure, from a normally friendly employer for whom he worked regularly, had struck out of the blue. Much later, he would recall feeling "wounded," as if a knife had drawn beads of blood without warning


ON THAT SAME MORNING, FOUR THOUSAND MILES from Pearl Harbor, a seventeen-year-old high school student named Katsutoshi walked from his house to the local train station in Takasu, an affluent district of country homes in greater Hiroshima. He passed wooden and ceramic-roof-tiled homes set back from the street, the post office staffed by a newlywed woman who loved to gossip, and the police kiosk manned by officers intent on prowling the neighborhood. In the haze of sunrise, Katsutoshi, blurry with sleep, saw the station platform awash in khaki and indigo. Soldiers, shouldering rucksacks, paced back and forth, and housewives, dressed in bloomers, huddled, clutching empty duffels.

Katsutoshi did not blink at the scene. Soldiers were always coming and going in Hiroshima, a major port of departure for the war in China. Women, too, were on the move daily, but they were traveling to black markets in rural areas, where they hoped to scrabble up radishes, pumpkins, and sweet potatoes for dinner. His mother often made this trek as well.

Nothing seemed amiss. The day was young, the nation long at war, and New Year's a few weeks away. Katsutoshi was conscious only of his extravagance. He wasn't supposed to take the train to school, but he had a track meet that morning and didn't want to tire himself out before his twelve-mile race. He patted his calves, stretched his hamstrings, and stood on his tiptoes to limber up.

As the train rumbled into the station, Katsutoshi moved toward the edge of the platform, peering for a spot inside the crammed coach. Above the din of the screeching wheels, he heard someone yell from behind. Before he could look for the source, the train doors opened. He jumped on, and the train rattled toward the city. The coach was quiet. All the way to school and during his race, lap after lap, he kept turning over in his mind the phrase that he had caught in passing. It had to have been garbled, or had he really heard "our victorious assault on Hawaii"?

Excerpted from Midnight in Broad Daylight by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto. Copyright © 2016 by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.