Asian America: The Ken Fong Podcast features Mako speaking about Secrets of the Sun and her journey to understand her brilliant father’s mental illness.
Listen to Mako interviewed by Sheilah Kast on WYPR’s “On the Record.”
WGBH interview with Haley Lerner, “Author Mako Yoshikawa turned guilt and grief into her new memoir, ‘Secrets of the Sun'”
Listen to the New Books Network podcast interview with Mako and G.P. Gottlieb by clicking HERE!
Read Mako’s interview with Quyen Pham in the LA Review of Books
Tokyo Weekender names Secrets of the Sun #1 in “10 Exciting Japan-Related Books to Read in 2024,” by Lisa Wallen
“After two lauded novels, Yoshikawa turns to memoir, revealing in 15 incandescent essays her struggles to understand the enigma that was her father.… Yoshikawa writes with gorgeous, unblinking lucidity through a morass of conflicting emotions and lingering shame to memorialize a father ‘elusive and capacious,’ yes, but also a man ‘intoxicated by stars . . . lit with the potential of science.’ Her closing acknowledgement to Shoichi will implode hearts.” — Terry Hong, Booklist (starred review) ⭐️
“Intense and kaleidoscopic, Secrets of the Sun tells the story of author Mako Yoshikawa’s physicist father, Shoichi Yoshikawa. A brilliant researcher into nuclear fusion, a man with bipolar disorder, and a violently abusive father and husband, he does not have a story that can be approached linearly. His daughter’s choice to structure this book as a memoir in essays reflects her fragmentary knowledge of him, as well as her emotionally complex mission to understand the forces that shaped him….This memoir is particularly brilliant at capturing the grief, guilt and fear that adults who experienced childhood abuse face when deciding how or whether to maintain a relationship with their abusive parent.” — Catherine Hollis, BookPage
“It started just hours before their rehearsal dinner. Novelist Yoshikawa (Once Removed) was finally about to tie the knot. She hated and feared her father, Shoichi, so she didn’t invite him. Then the call came that he’d died…. Moving and beautifully written. This poignant memoir is about a daughter’s hunt for answers and understanding about her father, his battles, and the complexities of their relationship.”
— David Keymer, Library Journal
A memoir of an estranged daughter’s mission to understand her deceased Japanese physicist father and the effects of bipolar disorder, violence, and genius on his relationships and career.
Mako Yoshikawa’s father, Shoichi, was a man of contradictions. He grew up fabulously wealthy in prewar Japan but spent his final years living in squalor; he was a proper Japanese man who craved society’s approval yet cross-dressed; he was a brilliant Princeton University physicist and renowned nuclear fusion researcher, yet his career withered as his severe bipolar disorder tightened its grip. And despite his generosity and charisma, he was often violent and cruel toward those closest to him.
Mako adored him, feared him, and eventually cut him out of her life, but after he died, she was driven to try to understand this extraordinarily complex man. In Secrets of the Sun, her search takes her through everything from the Asian American experience of racism to her father’s dedication to fusion energy research, from mental illness to the treatment of women in Japan, and more.
Mako gradually discovers a life filled with secrets, searching until someone from her father’s past at last provides the missing piece in her knowledge: the story of his childhood. Secrets of the Sun is about a daughter’s mission to uncover her father’s secrets and to find closure in the shadow of genius, mental illness, and violence.
“Mako Yoshikawa is on a mission. In her memoir, Secrets of the Sun, she sets out to resolve the enigma of her father, Shoichi, a physicist and man plagued by bipolar illness. Through vivid snapshots, Yoshikawa obsesses over the mystery of her father, a brilliant scientist in the field of nuclear fusion who failed to achieve greatness. With Shoichi’s death is where this fast-paced memoir begins, days before Yoshikawa’s wedding. Yoshikawa is getting ready for her rehearsal dinner in Boston in 2010 when she receives a call from a police officer in New Jersey. A 44-year-old novelist and creative writing instructor, Yoshikawa thinks the call will be about another breakdown her father has had, a familiar tale. She expects to hear he’s been found roaming the streets half naked, not that he died the night before of natural causes.” — Katya Cengel, River Teeth
Praise for Secrets of the Sun:
“In her harrowing, deeply felt new memoir, the novelist Mako Yoshikawa creates a haunting portrait of her troubled father Shoichi, a brilliant scientist who led a fusion research team at Princeton University…. Like Mary Gordon’s The Shadow Man and Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception, this book is an eloquent account of a writer’s quest to understand an impossible, larger-than-life father—and her own conflicting feelings of love and fear, confusion and dismay and forgiveness.”
–Michiko Kakutani
“Heartfelt and beautifully written, Secrets of the Sun is a tale of two quests—a father’s to solve the mysteries of the universe and a daughter’s to solve the mysteries of the father. One of the most compelling memoirs I’ve read in some time.”
—Jerald Walker, author of National Book Award finalist How to Make a Slave and Other Essays
“In this nuanced memoir, Mako Yoshikawa reckons with the enigma of her brilliant, terrifying father, creating a compassionate family portrait that does not minimize the complexity of his illness or the violence of his impact. The gaze is steady and the writing is beautiful. This book will haunt me.”
—Joan Wickersham, author of National Book Award finalist The Suicide Index
“In this moving account of her brilliant and abusive physicist father, Mako Yoshikawa disentangles the twisted strands of racism, misogyny, and cultural displacement that complicates both his madness and her love. A fascinating exploration that expands the boundaries of what a family memoir can be.”
—Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness
Mako’s first novel, One Hundred and One Ways, was published by Bantam in 1999. A national bestseller in the States, it has been translated into six languages, including German, Swedish, and Hebrew. Yoshikawa’s second novel, Once Removed, also published by Bantam, came out in 2003. Writing awards include fellowships from the Bunting Institute of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and MacDowell.
Her essays have been published in LitHub, Harvard Review, Southern Indiana Review, Missouri Review, and Best American Essays, among other places.
Yoshikawa, who was born and raised in Princeton, NJ, spent two years of her childhood in Tokyo. She has also lived in England, France, Switzerland, and New Zealand. She attended Columbia University, received a Masters in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama at Lincoln College, Oxford, and has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Yoshikawa is a professor of creative writing and director of the creative writing graduate program at Emerson College. She lives in Boston and Baltimore.
