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Award-winning author Suzanne Kamata has released a new book.

By on March 14, 2020

If you’re exhausted from sifting through every news to get the latest coronavirus update, take a break and lose yourself in a newly released book by Suzanne Kamata.

Suzanne Kamata is no stranger to the community in Japan. She is a U.S.- born mom living and raising two multi-cultural kids in Tokushima, Japan, while teaching English at a Japanese university.

Despite the demanding job of a working mom-in-chief, she still finds the time to do what she loves – to write. And she does it well. Over 100 publications have published her short stories, essays, articles and book reviews including Real Simple, Brain, Child, Cicada, and The Japan Times. She has received renomination for the Pushcart Prize five times, a Special Mention in 2006, and she is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest, the Paris Book Festival, and a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award.

After the success of Suzanne’s book Indigo Girl for which she received the “2019 Honorable Mention in Young Adult/High School Literature” by the National Consortium for Teaching Asia (NCTAsia), her new book will appeal to anyone interested in bi-cultural experiences and Japan.

POP FLIES, Robo-Pets, and Other Disasters , the title of her new “easy read” book with baseball as theme, captures the life of a 13-year old boy Satoshi Matsumoto who, after spending three years in America due to his father’s job, moved back to his hometown in rural Japan.

Written through the eyes of a young boy as he attempts to describe his daily life and social experiences and the stark contrast to the life he has had in the United States, the book gives you an insight on the surprising differences uncovered between being in a US’s school setting and the Japanese’s.

In Atlanta, Matsumoto was the “star of his middle-school baseball team—a slugger with pro potential,” according to his coach. But, living in Japan, the teenager has to deal with not being the nail that sticks out for fear of getting hammered down. 

All told in an amusing, lighthearted fashion, POP FLIES, Robo-Pets, and Other Disasters’s themes of humiliation, school punishment, jealousy, bullying, are all  relevant and relatable especially to children in the Japanese school system. But what gives power to this book is in learning that ‘grit’ grows when you persist in something you feel passionate about and persevere even when you face setbacks!

Now available on Amazon Japan in kindle and hard cover.

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