Wildcat Dome was a super interesting read. I loved the character study and the writing felt propulsive. I'd read more from the author.

Yuko Tsushima, perhaps one of Japan’s most quietly radical literary voices, is best known to English readers for Territory of Light and Woman Running in the Mountains—her early, semi-autofictional novels made up of domestic scenes of motherhood and explorations of non-reproductive female sexuality. In her later works, however, she turned away from the spare style that characterized her early work and towards larger-scale examinations of post-war Japan. Her newest book in translation, Wildcat Dome, in a graceful translation by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, introduces English-language readers to these powerful historical reckonings.

Originally published in 2013, in the wake of the tsunami that triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Wildcat Dome is both a sweeping epic and a thoughtful meditation on memory, grief, and the unfinished business of history. Told through shifting narrative voices, the novel starts with a buzzing energy: a swarm of scarab beetles consuming leaves in an eerie forest, their appetite so immense that “time flows on and on, a river of emerald.” It’s a place where “insect time” collides with human time, and the buzzing doesn’t stop.

At the novel’s center are Mitch and Kazu—two children born to Japanese mothers and American GIs, then abandoned at an orphanage—and their friend Yonko, the niece of the woman who runs the orphanage. Throughout their lives, the three children, now adults, carry with them the weight of vague memories and a diffuse “prophecy.” This cryptic warning seems linked to a traumatic event that continues to haunt them into adulthood: the mysterious drowning of a fourth child, Miki-chan, a fellow orphan. As witnesses to the event, their young ages and fallible memories keep the circumstances of her death shrouded in mystery. Was it an accident, a crime, or something else? What about the strange boy, Tabo, who, unlike Mitch, Kazu, and Miki-chan, is “fully” Japanese and has a mother who will do anything to protect him—including covering his potential crimes? As the novel investigates the contradiction between the relentless passing of time and the stand-still of a history that has not been properly addressed, the prophecy shifts and mutates. Its warning comes to function as a narrative refrain rather than a concrete plot device, keeping the three main characters forever anchored to their pasts, unsettling any attempt at closure.

The novel’s narrative voice also shifts and changes; narrators slip between Mitch, Kazu, Yonko, and other minor characters, and memories surface in fragments, out of order, often overlapping and contradictory. This unstable structure mirrors the novel’s central concern: the unreliability of memory and the mutability of “truth”. At times, characters seem to put words into each other’s mouths or misremember events altogether. “In truth, it was your own voice you were hearing,” a narrator says, blurring boundaries between self and other, past and present, speaker and listener.

As mixed-race children in post-war Japan, Mitch and Kazu are seen as inherently suspicious, marked by their difference. “Even now, there were people who suspected them of being involved in Miki-chan’s death,” the narrator reflects. In contrast, Tabo, born to two Japanese parents, avoids accusation though he may well have been involved in her drowning. Mitch and Kazu, and, the novel implies, other children like them, are “left behind”—by their American fathers, by their Japanese mothers, and by the nation itself, with the children’s presence in the country viewed as an unwanted reminder of the humiliation associated with the American occupation.

As adults, Mitch, Kazu, and Yonko begin to question what they saw, what they failed to do, and whether someone—or indeed everyone—might have been responsible. “What was it we actually saw?” one asks. “Why didn’t we try to help Miki-chan?” The longer the event remains unspoken, the more it mutates into myth and rumor, as dangerous as any formal accusation, implicating the orphaned outcasts as murderers. “The shadow of a rumor never disappears,” the novel observes. “It warps, bends, propagates on its own accord.” The woman who runs the orphanage, Sister Yae, eventually adopts Mitch and Kazu. Alert to the ways society will cast blame on any reminder of the American occupation, she sends Mitch and Kazu abroad to escape the weight of judgement. And just like Japan has never fully acknowledged these orphaned children and their part in WWII, the three main characters fail to deal with their collective trauma—and as a result, the ghosts of the past grow bigger and bigger.

The atmosphere of a post-war Japan still bearing the wounds of American military occupation is crucial to the novel. The eponymous dome—a reference to the Runit Dome constructed by the U.S. on the Marshall Islands to dump the residues of nuclear testing—can be seen as a symbol of abandonment, of lives built in the ruins of a war that left some children and parts of history unclaimed by either side of the conflict. The legacy of this history, buried and undealt with, buzzes beneath the surface and eats away at society, like the scarab beetles devouring the leaves on the trees. The children’s parentage renders them outcasts in a society that refuses to acknowledge the legacy they represent, and so they live on the margins of a society that never fully accepts them. The dome, simultaneously scarring and sacred in their memory, becomes a kind of refuge for the nation’s displaced ghosts, both literal and symbolic. In this landscape, history itself is something unstable—remembered, misremembered, or actively forgotten.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster acts as a catalyst to unearth these histories: when Mitch, living abroad, hears the news, he is prompted to return to the Japan he has avoided for decades. He moves into an apartment once owned by Kazu—now deceased though, due to the novel’s nonlinear chronology, present in the story as both a living character and a narrative voice. As he does, pieces of the past begin to surface, disjointed, unresolved, and full of gaps. The footage of the tsunami and the exploding reactors ignites something dormant: “Distant memories, long submerged inside him, begin to wiggle and squirm as though irradiated.” The media’s phrase “tsunami orphans” opens a deep hole in his psyche, connected not only to Miki-chan’s death but to his own dislocation and identity, so intimately tied to the bombings that were the first nuclear disaster in Japan, the American military occupation, and the underlying, racialized suspicion that has long clung to children like him and Kazu.

The novel’s depiction of memory is inseparable from trauma—personal, national, and generational. Mitch’s return to Japan after decades of self-imposed exile is folded into a longer historical continuum, linking the Fukushima nuclear disaster with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which form the backdrop of Mitch, Kazu, and Yonko’s childhoods. Radiation—its violent atomic instability—acts as a metaphor for this unresolved history. It lingers invisibly, mutating and decaying, transforming what it touches, and it outlasts any human efforts to contain or suppress it.

Tsushima is subtle yet unflinching in her indictment of Japan’s collective amnesia regarding its past and the aftermath of war. At the same time, she acknowledges the futility of what-ifs:

What if the girl hadn’t been standing by that pond alone? What if she hadn’t been abandoned by her mother? What if the American GI had never met her Japanese mother? What if the American GIs had never set foot in Japan? What if Japan had never gone to war? The mother had asked herself these questions hundreds, no, thousands of times.

The implication of these recurring questions is clear: the characters’ personal traumas are products of larger geopolitical events and Japan’s refusal to fully confront that legacy. The novel doesn’t frame Miki-chan’s death and Japan’s nuclear disasters merely as historical tragedies, but as an ongoing moral failure.

This can be seen most clearly in one of the most devastating motifs in Wildcat Dome—the chasm between children and adults, a gap defined by secrecy. “Children can’t just go around asking questions of adults,” one character observes. “Adults are always on guard against children, keeping them far away from their secrets.” In this way, Tsushima portrays adults as emotionally shut off and too broken by the events of the past to protect the next generation. This leads to a profoundly ironic scene in which the children play at war, impersonating American soldiers, ignorant of the significance of such behavior because no one speaks about this history. Children, perceptive and silent, learn to navigate around these absences: “children notice, careful never to get too close to those secrets, either.” In the past, as no one intervened to stop the rumors about who might have been responsible for Miki-chan’s death, silence itself became a form of complicity, passed from one generation to the next: “Each day it got harder and harder to broach the subject… and as time dragged on, it only became more difficult to speak about.” Time, in Wildcat Dome, doesn’t heal—it congeals.

Thus, when Yonko wonders, as an adult, “What was it we actually saw?” she’s not just asking about the drowning; she’s interrogating the entire architecture of adult and collective memory. But as the Fukushima disaster brings on memories from the past and makes it impossible to ignore their ghosts, these children, now adults themselves, are forced to confront their own histories, whether they want to or not. “Secrets never stay hidden forever. It’s only a matter of time,” it says. “That’s the scary thing about them.” Sooner or later, Japan and the novel’s central characters must all confront their past in order to move on. The congealment can only be temporary and perhaps this is the generation, and novel, to start the conversation.

As form and content work together in this way, the novel unfolds not with decisive clarity but with dreamlike uncertainty—its power lies in what it withholds as much as what it reveals. Tsushima’s prose is sparse and restrained yet evocative, confronting Japan’s most uncomfortable legacies—imperial violence, racial marginalization, postwar abandonment—not with grand statements or sweeping generalizations (although, as the translator Hoffman-Kuroda acknowledges, the racial imagery at times does rely on stereotypes), but with nuance and emotional depth. The disjointed structure mirrors the thematic concerns of the novel—fragmented memory, submerged trauma, historical denial. Just as the characters struggle to remember (or to forget), the reader is made to inhabit the same disorientation.

But it is perhaps also here that Tsushima risks losing some of her readers. The complex narrative structure makes it hard to follow who’s narrating and what actually happened, forcing readers to attempt to keep track of who’s speaking and puzzling together the timeline. This is clearly done on purpose, mimicking how memory works, but it occasionally delays the novel’s emotional impact.

While Tsushima’s earlier works like Territory of Light centered on the intimate struggles of women on society’s margins, Wildcat Dome expands that lens, confronting larger, structural forces and their impact on personal lives and memories. It is a ghost story of sorts: one that insists that we sit with the past. In the end, Tsushima’s style demands a reader willing to surrender to ambiguity. For those who do, Wildcat Dome offers hard-earned rewards: a novel that grieves, remembers, and accuses in equal measure—without ever raising its voice.

Wildcat Dome by Yuko Tsushima is a quiet cataclysm, tracing the liminal edges of womanhood, memory, and the spectral inheritance of trauma with a gaze that is at once tender and unflinching. Tsushima writes in a voice like wind through paper doors—subtle, insistent, and full of absences that ache louder than speech. Beneath its surface of everyday gestures lies a subterranean howl, a protest against vanishing that feels all the more potent for being whispered.

Reading Wildcat Dome feels like entering a convoluted dreams overlapped with reality with no boundaries as the world was spinning around, dragging you through the inexplicable of unknowns, truths buried in lies, and a nightmares that shackled you to its past. The intertwining monologues of one character with another, the lack of dialogue punctuations & the thoughts flitted & merged between voices with no distinctions of who is who proven to be a challenge as the flow of the story gets progressively harder to read. To which it took me months to finish this. Yet I dont feel thats a bad thing. The themes of this novel was diverse, ones that need deeper discussions.

Full RTC

Thank you to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the e-arc

I truly attempted to dive into this book, even setting it aside for a while before revisiting it, but the disarray was overwhelming. Reading it felt like chasing a pinball: the constant shifts in character perspectives, the jarring jumps between time periods, and the convoluted dialogues created an impenetrable chaos. It's a shame, because the themes genuinely piqued my interest, but I ultimately had to concede defeat; the effort to decipher 'who, where, and when' was simply too headache-inducing.

"It's not the dead who suffer most, but the ones who go on living."
This haunting novel, published yesterday in translation (originally 2013), is by Osamu Dazai's daughter, who explores trauma and memory through a dream-like, non-linear narrative. Set in post-war Japan, it follows mixed-race boys abandoned by American GIs and raised alongside their cousin, Yonko. Despite being born in Japan, they endure prejudice and navigate fractured identities.
The story weaves through decades, from the accidental death of a girl at their orphanage to the boys being adopted into American families—some later drafted into the Vietnam War. When the orphanage founder gets cancer, everyone returns, but as adults, they face the fallout of the Fukushima disaster. War’s poison lingers—broken children grow into wounded adults, and the dream of a stable family remains elusive, haunted by loss and survivor’s guilt.

Wildcat Dome was the last novel by Japanese author Yuko Tsushima. Written and set in the aftermath of the Japanese tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear accident it centres aroung three characters rasied in an orphanage. Tsushima uses these characters to explore and reflect on Japanese history and how it informs the challenges of the present. This is a tough but rewarding book.

Frustrating, but a story that highlights and tells important lessons that everyone can take away from. This feels very realistic and timely, and although hard to follow/understand at times, a powerful read nonetheless

I’ve loved the works of the late Yuko Tsushima that I have read in the past, and was excited to read this newly published English translation of her penultimate novel Wildcat Dome (translation by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda), first published in 2013 as ヤマネコ・ドーム. This was more hazy and ambiguous in nature, suited to its rumination on identity, (found) family, trauma, memory, and the legacies of violence, US imperialism, colonialism, and nuclear fallout.

The novel opens in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, with Mitch (now in his 60s) returning to Japan to seek out Yonko, hoping to convince her to leave Japan for safety. But she is reluctant, memories of their childhood friend Kazu, family ties, and histories all keeping her tethered. The novel is seen primarily through the experiences of this group of mixed-race orphans, children born between Japanese mothers and American GI fathers during the US occupation of Japan.

As with much of the book, the backstories are never explicitly outlined, reflecting the broad realities they live in as is. As a whole, they are stigmatised by Japanese society, for non-specific reasons that perhaps include post-war psychologies, anti-black racism, being of mixed race, single motherhood; just being different. Raised in an orphanage, their fond memories of this time is forever tainted by a tragic death of one of their own in their midst. Details elude them well into the future, the truth of this horrific event unable to be confronted directly yet remaining present all the same. Later dispersed across the globe, the narrative flits between the characters across their individual and collective pasts, present, and future.

Wildcat Dome is a haunting read, a feeling of fear, shame, and alienation pervading the book. There’s a sense of denial present, an unwillingness to reckon with a past that continues to have long-reaching repercussions, at an individual and societal level. This is all enriched by the beautiful writing, rich in imagery, atmosphere, and recurring motifs. It reads like a lament for human suffering on a global scale, the painful cost of colonialism, war, and violence borne by citizens across the globe.

At the same time, it looks inwardly, grieving the lives impacted by nuclear disaster and violence. While some of this is caused by external forces, such as the effects of US militarism and their bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the author casts a critical eye on Japan’s own role in perpetuating violence and suffering, through the part of government and company leadership in the Fukushima nuclear disaster, society’s marginalisation of vulnerable minority groups and anyone deemed different, and its own imperialist legacies.

I did also appreciate its examination of mixed-heritage identity, the characters simultaneously insider-outsiders, never quite belonging in Japan or elsewhere. Interestingly, Kazu had moved to New Zealand for a time, and he spoke of being mistaken for Māori, this minor plot point noting not just his difference, but also an occasion to draw on the similarities between te reo Māori and the Japanese language, as if building solidarities through literature. Similar parallels are drawn throughout the narrative, such as via Odile, a mixed race character Mitch meets later in life, herself a legacy of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. While these identities have impacted the course of their lives, it doesn’t need to define any of them either, their paths forward still open to their own making.

It is Odile that remarks on wildcats being present in Paris, though she has never seen them. She says to Mitch: “sometimes when your eyes flash green they look just like a wildcat’s.” Unseen, but there, its registered presence heightening one’s consciousness. The original Japanese cover has a picture of the Runit Dome, a bomb crater repository of radioactive waste accumulated in the wake of US nuclear testing in the Pacific, located on Runit Island in the Enewetak Atoll of the Marshall Islands. Concerns to do with its structural integrity and surrounding environmental contamination were raised then, pressing still with climate change and rising sea levels, as well as the threat of deep sea mining. From this point in space-time, it’s concerning still as the same old warmongering colonial powers continue to plunder, stoke fear in the masses, and attempt to manufacture consent for increasing (nuclear) militarisation.

I finished this with all that in mind, wondering what the author would think if she was alive today. I was so curious to know what she had in mind while writing this as well, and how it was received by readers at the time. There’s a heading titled ‘Author’s Note’ in the galley I read, with nothing to follow, unfortunately. Perhaps the final copy will include one.

A beguiling, compelling work that confronts identity, trauma, memory, truth, and survival, as well as the legacies of nuclear colonialism and imperialism that is still scarily relevant today. We are all connected. It is never too late for us as a people to reckon with the truths of our pasts, our present global realities, and determine the futures we wish to see. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for my copy of this!

I tried, I really tried to read it, put it down for some time, picked it up later, but it was too chaotic.
I felt like reading this book was like trying to follow the ball in a game of pinball. The different character viewpoints, the time period changes back and forth, the dialogues that weren't really dialogues : chaos !
And that's too bad because the themes really interested me, but I gave up because this book was giving me a headache trying to figure out who was where and when.

"She'd told her son this long ago: it's not the dead who suffer most, but the ones who go on living."

This translation was published yesterday! The original was published in 2013, a few years before her death. I just learnt that the author is Osamu Dazai's daughter, though he wasn't around to raise her. The narrative style is dream-like and flits between different narrators with no clear attempt at linearity so you have to piece the story together and be comfortable with uncertainty, the same uncertainty that plagues the characters as they examine their incomplete memories of their past.

This is a story set in post-war Japan about children who were the direct products of or directly affected by the war. Two mixed-race boys left behind by American GIs were adopted by a woman, and the boys grew up alongside their cousin, Yonko. Mixed-race children have to endure prejudice from the other locals despite being born and raised in Japan. Many years ago, these children witnessed the accidental death of another girl from the orphanage but everyone tried to move on from it. The only who could not was the boy responsible, who commits suicide decades later. Over time, the children from the orphanage got adopted into American families one by one. Some of the boys who survived one war ended up drafted into another in Vietnam by virtue of their new American nationality.

Everyone returns a decade later when the founder of the orphanage gets cancer. More years later, when the children have become adults in their 50s, the Fukushima nuclear disaster happens and Tokyo itself becomes poisoned; insects breed like crazy and plants mutate. It becomes clear that everyone in this story is poisoned in some way by the war—damaged children grow up 'lopsided' (to borrow Yiyun Li's term) and unable to move on from their past traumas, women struggle to raise children who then grow up to struggle themselves, and the idea of a complete and stable family is but an ideal—or worse, haunted by signs and survivor's guilt.

I struggled with this. It's a challenging and dense read with themes that range from the way biracial children are treated in Japan to forgiveness. And at the heart of it, sort of, is a murder of a child by other children. The colors orange and green loom large but regrettably I didn't understand exactly why. That said, this is one I'm glad to have tackled. I admired it more than enjoyed it. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. For fans of experimental, world, and/or literary fiction.

In post-war Japan, a group of children (consisting mostly of biracial kids born of Japanese mothers and US service members) witness a tragic event that haunts them. As they grow older and go in different directions, they continue to be drawn together by the unanswered questions around the event. The different voices and perspectives add layers of uncertainty to the story, and it was difficult to follow at times. Parts felt tedious and while I'm glad I stuck with it till the end, I didn't find this book particularly memorable.

3.75

This book feels different from other Yuko Tsushima's works but as I advanced to the story, it feels familiar. It took me quite a long time to finally finish this because the narrative took a bit of effort to grasp but the moment I read the first sentence I know I would love it. Which I did. I loved the narrative, it feels quite poetic, a bit distant but beautiful.

This book dealt with unresolved trauma and denial, alongside with events that happened in the world and the effect of those such events, such as Vietnam War and the earthquake and nuclear incident that followed it in Japan in 2011. But what I caught the most in this book is actually the way all the characters were trying to live their own respected lives carrying the trauma and the prejudice they have for being mixed-race children. I just wished the ending to be more concluded but I guess it's fine.

In all its difficulty and challenges, this book is about the many ways of people living their lives, continue on living even if it's taking a lot from them, while carrying something deep in their hearts.

It's either you love it, or you miss it.

Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the ARC.

I ended up finding this book frustrating.

It had a really good premise to pull me in with this group of children witnessing the drowning of another child, but as the plot developed it found it more and more enigmatic with no real conclusions or character arcs that made any sense to me.

The writing was beautiful with lots of imagery particularly surrounding the colours green and orange. Unfortunately, I failed to make sense of it so I'm afraid it was wasted on me. The changing perspectives and timelines along with the lack of speech marks were disorientating.

Ultimately, I just didn't feel clever enough to follow what the author was trying to do here. There were themes that never seemed to go anywhere, character arcs that ended in them abruptly dying and an enigmatic prose and plot that just became frustrating.

Sorry, not one for me.

This honest review is given with thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book.

The book is definitely very philosophical, maybe too much so and some of the timelines and perspectives are a little unclear. But otherwise, I like the translation. It feels unforced, real. It has brought me closer to a period in time in Japanese culture that I knew very little about. And yet, some chapters/sections felt a little long-winded. The children were at the pond when the little girl fell in but it’s is a lot of reiterating and even some repetition.

It is mortifying to read that the mother of the (possible) killer covers for him. This was definitely a hard read especially as through the entirety of the book it was so clear how much the death of the little girl impacted all the children and their mothers. It is ironic that the mother of the murderer felt so superior to the orphans and the adoptive parents.

I also don’t quite understand the conversations in the book. People “talk” to each other in their heads, they have conversations with someone that isn’t even there. It confused me. Overall, I must admit, I didn’t quite understand the book. Especially the ending.

First I want to give my thanks to NetGalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Yuko Tsushima for allowing me to read this ARC!

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐.5/5

I was really looking forward to reading this book, but unfortunately, it didn’t quite resonate with me. Despite being just over 250 pages, it took me 25 days to finish, as I struggled to follow the characters and their timelines.

That said, I appreciate how the story captures the harsh realities faced by GI children and the challenges of being biracial. However, I felt that the narrative became too fixated on the Murder of Color Orange, to the point where it overshadowed other aspects of the story. At times, I found myself wishing the characters would simply confront the truth or move forward, rather than remaining stuck in their unresolved pasts.

While this book wasn't for me, I can see how it might appeal to readers who enjoy introspective and layered narratives about identity, trauma, and justice.

This is also the first time that a book cover didn’t appear on my Kindle, which was a bit disappointing

A modern novel about Japan dealing with issues from biracial children and their treatment after WWII ( nicknamed Wildcats ) to the Fukushima nuclear disaster and a murderer triggered by the colour orange. In the beginning, I found the writing style and translation difficult to follow and dizzying structure but after a while, you get used to it and get your bearings. The topics hit on the truth of Japanese society issues and are a form of protest against injustice and conservatism of Japanese society. The writing is elegant, true to the form of literary fiction there is a threading of the colour orange that is skillfully placed throughout the novel drawing us into the mystery aspect of the novel and keeping the reader drawn into the story.

Thanks to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this ARC. This is my honest review.

While the writing was sometimes beautiful, the story was so disjointed and unorganized that I felt very removed from the book.

The characters and their motivations didn’t make much sense to me. There are heavy subjects here, but I had a hard time focusing when I already felt so disconnected, and as a result much of this story fell flat for me.

I think this was simply a case of me being the wrong reader for this novel, because I get the sense that someone with more knowledge of Japanese culture would get much more out of this book. I would still recommend this to the right reader.

the writing style is intense, iunterwoven, and a bit hard to understand at times, but it's still so beautifully written and the charactes are awesome. 4 stars. tysm for the arc.