There are different levels of scary right? Humans are, as far as I'm concerned the highest level of scary as compared to any monster, ghost, demon, etc. Racist shotgun-wielding humans are at the tippy top of the scary level because their hatred makes absolutely no fucking sense. So as a warning to those who may read this because you are looking for a good scary book with a jorogumo like I was, the yokai was the least scary thing about this book. Oh, and it was excellcent.
The year is 1944, Meiko and her daughter Aiko are living in a Japanese internment camp while Jaime, Meiko's white husband is doing his duty as a citizen of the U.S. and fighting over the Pacific after Jaime's best friend betrays them. Besides having a white husband Meiko is also issei (a Japanese immigrant to Japan) unlike most of her other neighbors in the camp who nissei or first gen Japanese American, this fact combined with her white husband and a tangled past with one of the Japanese leaders of the camp means Meiko and her daughter are looked down upon by their neighbors. It doesn't help that Aiko has become obsessed with yokai drawing terrifying images of the Japanese demons over and over again. One day a U.S. Army Truck shows up and Aiko warns Meiko that there is a demon in the truck and people will die. Meiko doesn't believe her daughter, of course, but as the people around her start to sicken and tempers flare Meiko realizes that something is very wrong in the internment camp and it will be up to her to stop it if she is to save herself, her daughter, and her people.
Katsu uses the idea of people being infected with hatred through the bite of a spider brilliantly, weaving the tale of Jorogumo into the rampant hatred the Japanese faced during WWII. By telling th story interchangeably between Meiko, her husband's best friend, and betrayer Archie, her daughter Aiko, and Fran a woman way ahead of her time she is able to paint a picture from several different points of view in terms of the decision to place American citizens in internment camps and how that affected those in the camps and those who choose to follow the crowd instead of doing the right thing. She also brings up many aspects of internment that were internal to the Japanese; the class differences, the Japanese viewing interracial marriages very much the same way white people at the time did, the cultural propensity to simply follow orders, and the internal struggles that came from these things individually that may be new to many Westerners.
The only thing that I have a complaint about is that I *really* was looking forward to Jorogumo being unleashed and that's not really what happened so I didn't get to read a book about Yokai wreaking havoc in the Pacific Northwest (that place I call home) however this was such an important comment on how fear and ignorance leads to hatred and how quickly those things can spread that I'll forgive the author for getting my hopes up. This also was clearly a work that was extremely personal to Katsu and I appreciate her taking the time to write something so close to her own family and I appreciate her family members for allowing her to share their story with us even in a fictional manner.
I want to thank Netgalley and the people at Penguin Group for the eArc to this exceptional book!
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