Böcker av Suzanne Kamata

Divorced American mom Lauren Murata has stumbled into a university job teaching Home Economics at a conservative Japanese women's college with a dwindling student population. Although she has achieved success as a "domestic goddess," she is actually a scholar of gender studies. She meets widower dad Kazu Mori at her daughter's international school holiday bake sale. Mori manages talent, including a famous pop star who has just broken away from a popular all-male J-pop group. They discover that their children are good friends. The couple - and their kids - start going on playdates to iconic sites around Tokyo. They visit the pandas in Ueno Zoo. They go ice skating at Tokyo SkyTree. As their attraction to each other grows, they both try to figure out how to get out of the "friend zone" and move from playdates into real dates. But when a hashtag about Kazu's famous client goes viral, putting both and Kazu's and Lauren's careers at risk, their relationship begins to crumble.

Thirteen-year-old Satoshi Matsumoto spent the last three years living in Atlanta where he was the star of his middle-school baseball team-a slugger with pro potential, according to his coach. Now that his father's work in the US has come to an end, he's moved back to his hometown in rural Japan. Living abroad has changed him, and now his old friends in Japan are suspicious of his new foreign ways. Even worse, his childhood foe Shintaro, whose dad has ties to gangsters, is in his homeroom. After he joins his new school's baseball team, Satoshi has a chance to be a hero until he makes a major-league error.

Fifteen-year-old Aiko Cassidy, a bicultural girl with cerebral palsy, grew up in Michigan with her single mother. For as long as she could remember, it was just the two of them. When a new stepfather and a baby half sister enter her life, she finds herself on the margins. Having recently come into contact with her biological father, she is invited to spend the summer with his indigo-growing family in a small Japanese farming village. Aiko thinks she just might fit in better in Japan. If nothing else, she figures the trip will inspire her manga story, Gadget Girl.However, Aiko's stay in Japan is not quite the easygoing vacation that she expected. Her grandmother is openly hostile toward her, and she soon learns of painful family secrets that have been buried for years. Even so, she takes pleasure in meeting new friends. She is drawn to Taiga, the figure skater who shows her the power of persistence against self-doubt. Sora is a fellow manga enthusiast who introduces Aiko to a wide circle of like-minded artists. And then there is Kotaro, a refugee from the recent devastating earthquake in northeastern Japan.As she gets to know her biological father and the story of his break with her mother, Aiko begins to rethink the meaning of family and her own place in the world.

SQUEAKY WHEELS: Travels with my Daughter by Train, Plane, Metro, Tuk-tuk and Wheelchair is a mother-daughter travel memoir woven with comparative culture and accessibility awareness. Kamata's adventures with her teen-who happens to be deaf, with cerebral palsy, and in a wheelchair-through subterranean Tennessee, to the islands of Japan, and to the top of the Eiffel Tower ultimately lead to a daughter's increasing independence, a mother letting go of expectations, and advocacy for travel which prohibits discrimination.

The American writer Suzanne Kamata had lived in Japan for more than half of her life, yet she had never explored the small nearby islands of the Inland Sea. The islands, first made famous by Donald Richie's The Inland Sea 50 years ago, are noted for displaying artwork created by prominent, and sometimes curious, international artists and sculptors: Naoshima's wealth of museums, including one devoted to 007, Yayoi Kusama's polka dot pumpkins, Kazuo Katase's blue teacup, and a monster rising out of a well on the hour in Sakate, called "e;Anger at the Bottom of the Sea"e;-to name a few. Spurred by her teen-aged daughter Lilia's burgeoning interest in art and adventure, Kamata sets out to show her the islands' treasures. Mother and daughter must confront several barriers on their adventure. Lilia is deaf and uses a wheelchair. It is not always easy to get onto -- or off of -- the islands, not to mention the challenges of language, culture, and a generation gap. A Girls' Guide to the Islands takes the reader on a rare visit by a unique mother and daughter team.

Anna and the French Kiss meets Stoner & Spaz in a contemporary young adult coming-of-age novel about a girl, her struggles, and her art. Aiko Cassidy is fifteen and lives with her sculptor mother in a small Midwestern town. For most of her young life Aiko, who has cerebral palsy, has been her mother's muse. But now, she no longer wants to pose for the figures that have made her mother famous. Aiko works hard on her own dream, becoming a sought-after manga artist with a secret identity. When Aiko's mother invites her to Paris for a major exhibition of her work, Aiko resists. She'd much rather go to Japan, Manga Capital of the World, where she might be able to finally meet her father, the indigo farmer. When she gets to France, however, a hot waiter with a passion for manga and an interest in Aiko makes her wonder if being invisible is such a great thing after all.

This collection about expatriates in Cuba, Egypt, Australia, Japan and France confronts universal matters of the heart.

The first collection of literary writing on raising a child with special needs, Love You to Pieces features families coping with autism, deafness, muscular dystrophy, Down syndrome and more. Here, poets, memoirists, and fiction writers paint beautiful, wrenchingly honest portraits of caring for their children, laying bare the moments of rage, disappointment, and guilt that can color their relationships. Parent-child communication can be a challenge at the best of times, but in this collection we witness the struggles and triumphs of those who speak their own language-or don't speak at all-and those who love them deeply.