ABOUT THIS BOOK

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. Yoshikawa 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. Yoshikawa 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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mako Yoshikawa is the author of the novels Once Removed and One Hundred and One Ways. Her essays have been published in LitHub, Harvard Review, Southern Indiana Review, Missouri Review, and Best American Essays, among other places. She is a professor of creative writing and directs the MFA program at Emerson College. She lives in Boston and Baltimore.

REVIEWS

“In her harrowing, deeply felt new memoir, Mako Yoshikawa creates a haunting portrait of her troubled father, Shoichi, a brilliant scientist who led a fusion research team at Princeton University. Secrets of the Sun is the story of her father’s efforts to ‘unravel the mysteries of the universe’ even as he grapples with the effects of severe bipolar disorder. It is also the story of the author’s efforts to assemble the jigsaw puzzle pieces of his life and come to terms with his erratic, sometimes violent behavior and the role that racism and cultural dislocation may have played in the unhappy trajectory of his life. 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

“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)

“[A] deeply empathetic and human memoir-in-essays told with inquisitive subtlety.” —Kirkus

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dearly Beloved

Favorite Story

My Father’s Women

Unbeatable

Work Equals Force Times Displacement

Snapshot

American Fairytale

When Tojo Came to Visit

Clothes Make the Man

The Promise

Pressure Equals Force Divided by Area

Force Equals Mass Times Acceleration

Chess Superhero

Mandala

Tokyo Monsoon