She has no money to pay her rent and works in a bar in Tokushima City to support herself. When she meets her well-to-do Japanese spouse, Yusuke, a businessman who owns an art gallery, she is down and out. Jill takes an art scholarship to Japan to get over her boyfriend, Philip. Jill Parker, the mother and the protagonist, states at the very beginning of the story, ‘I came to Japan because a man had broken my heart.’ The author uses the perspective of the protagonist to narrate the story in first person. Set in Japan, the focus of the story is on the mother’s struggle and inability to adjust to her marriage with a Japanese man in his own country.

The American mother leaves the Japanese father and their six-year-old son. Kei is the child from a marriage sundered by the incompatibility of the parents. Born and raised in Michigan and most recently from South Carolina, she now lives in rural Japan with her Japanese husband and bicultural twins.Losing Kei, a novel by Suzanne Kamata, an American expatriate living in Japan, highlights the story of a mother who abandons her child, torn by the clash of cultures. She is also the editor of two previous anthologies - THE BROKEN BRIDGE: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and LOVE YOU TO PIECES: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs, and is currently fiction editor of 'Literary Mama'. She is the author of a novel, LOSING KEI, and a picture book, PLAYING FOR PAPA, both of which concern bicultural families. Suzanne Kamata's short work has appeared in over 100 publications.

In this collection, women around the world, such as Xujun Eberlein, Violet Garcia-Mendoza, Rose Kent, Sefi Atta, Christine Holhbaum, Saffia Farr, and others, ponder the unique joys and challenges of raising children across two or more cultures. Whether through intercultural marriage, international adoption or peripatetic lifestyles, families these days are increasingly multicultural.

What happens when your child doesn't speak your native language? How do you maintain cultural traditions while living outside your native country? And how can you raise a child with two cultures without fracturing his/her identity? From our house to your house - to the White House - more and more mothers are facing questions such as these.

Losing Kei by Suzanne Kamata