Ayumi's Violin

This book is about a 12 yr old girl from Japan. When she is forced to leave her beloved country and travel to America she faces discrimination, cruelty and despair. Trying to fit in with her new family is very hard. The only thing that keeps her from falling apart is her precious violin. When she plays it all her worries go away. How will the Japanese girl cope with living in strange and different America? Please read this fascinating book. I would definitely recommend for +10.

I think I'd recommend to not judge this book by its cover. I started reading last night and from the cover, expected a much less sophisticated and engaging voice...but what I got was a pretty compulsively readable story with the quiet, earnest, and heartfelt voice of a biracial Japanese girl suddenly thrust into middle class white Californian society .Ayumi's mother dies, forcing her to leave her home in Japan and travel by ship to Pasadena to live with the father she had never known. Being biracial in post-WWII 1950's wasn't easy. Even before Ayumi gets on the ship she has been bullied for being "American" in Japan. On the ship she is called "ainoko" or love-child by the captain, and despite the warm love of her father, her new stepmother and sister are not pleased to see her.There is bullying in the schoolyard, Ayumi's unfamiliarity with American culture, her love of classical music and her violin that her stepmother won't let her play in the house, and new found friendship with other marginalized people-- Mexican housekeeper and her grandson Diego who yearns to become an artist in the same way Ayumi wants to be a musician--and the navigation of how far Ayumi will go both in "gaman" (or bearing up under difficulty) the blatant racism around her and also what she will do to keep her music.Up until Ayumi makes a fateful decision that goes against the quiet dignity her mother has instilled with her, I was all in for this book. It reads smoothly, Ayumi is super-engaging, the racism present in her everyday world an important aspect of U.S. history kids and adults should be familiar with.Once Ayumi makes the bad decision, things get a little bit harder for me to invest emotionally in. Without spoiling the latter half of the book, let me just say that a famous person gets involved, along with a local priest, and these two along with Ayumi's father are so quick to forgive Ayumi and explain away her behavior that it didn't sit right with me.The punishment for her betrayal of Diego and her bad decision is literally--playing her violin. And it was a little hard for me to stomach the complete reversal stepmother and stepsister had without equating it (as Diego did) to Ayumi's violin talent.Still...despite these quibbles I did read the book all in one night unwilling to set it down because I had to find out what would happen to Ayumi and Diego. And the everyday incidents of racism (being called "jap" by neighbors, folks in a restaurant unwilling to sit next to Ayumi, boys calling her father a commie, etc) quite poignantly drawn and disturbing in a way that is necessary for the people of the U.S., particularly children, to be aware of.I would totally recommend this as thoughtful, informative, and engaging reading for children 8 and older. And although I read it as an adult, I imagine its geared mostly for the 8-15 age range.

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.

Have you ever moved to a new place, felt surrounded by different faces, lost amid unfamiliar customs? Aching, poignant, and yet ultimately uplifting and inspiring, in Ayumi’s Violin author Mariko Tatsumoto looks through the eyes of a girl overwhelmed by tragedy, sent to live in a world she doesn’t understand. She tells Ayumi’s story with warmth, sensitivity, and heart.Ayumi's Violin strikes a stark contrast between cultures, but also similarities. There is racism: Ayumi finds ridicule and rejection both as a half-gaijin in Japan, and in post-WWII California as a half-Japanese child. In Japan's impoverished economy she is taught the nobility of humility and self-denial, while in America's booming economy she witnesses gross excess and crass consumerism. And still, she also encounters beauty, generosity, and sacrifice in both countries.In lovely prose, the book will touch you, inform you, and warm your heart. Your family will come to love Ayumi’s Violin and read it over and over again.

Ayumi’s Violin is wonderful book. Like Charlottes Web by E B White it’s especially for younger people but it’s a story that’s a joy to read no matter your age. Like Charlottes Web, Ayumi’s Violin has much to say about living a worthwhile life. From page one you are drawn into Ayumi’s life and want to keep reading, to keep enjoying Ayumi’s life as she lives it and overcomes challenge after challenge beginning with the loss of her mother, the tensions of adapting to a stepmother and stepsister, adapting to an alien culture, and to racial tension. Seeing Ayumi overcome the difficulties in her life will certainly inspire any young person who faces the similar problems. The author does a masterful job of bringing out Japanese culture as the story unfolds. You learn for example about the Japanese Zen notion of Gaman - enduring the seemingly unendurable with patience and dignity. I am convinced everyone has some talent to bring out as Ayumi did her music and that talent will enable them to better overcome adversity. Ayumi's Violin dramatizes, not preaches, how talent born of passion, dedication, hard work can pull a person through hard times.