Star Sand

In 1958, a diary is found in a cave on the small Japanese island of Hatoma. Alongside it are the remains of three people.

The journal reveals the story of Hiromi, a sixteen-year-old girl who’d grown up in the United States before living in Japan in the midst of World War II. One day, while collecting star sand—tiny star-shaped fossils—Hiromi finds two army deserters hiding in the seaside cavern—one American, one Japanese. The soldiers don’t speak the same language, but they’ve reached an agreement based on a shared hope: to cause no more harm and survive. Hiromi resolves to care for the men—feeding them and nursing their ailments—despite the risk that, if caught, she’ll die alongside them as a traitor. But when a fourth person joins in on their secret, they must face a threat from within. The diary abruptly ends, leaving everyone’s fate a mystery.

Decades later, in 2011, a young female university student decides to finally determine who died in that cave and who lived. Her search will lead her to the lone survivor—and bring closure to a gripping tale of heroism at a time when committing to peace was the most dangerous act of all.

Roger Pulvers is an author, playwright, theater director, and translator. He has published more than forty-five books in English and Japanese, including novels, essays, plays, and poetry. He also translates works from Japanese, Russian, and Polish.

Productions of Pulvers’s plays have run in the United States, Japan, and Australia, including his translation and adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector at the Sydney Opera House. He regularly appears on television and radio in Japan, and he wrote and hosted the popular weekly NHK television show Gift E-Meigen.

Pulvers is the recipient of several literary prizes, including the Kenji Miyazawa Prize (2008) and the Noma Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature (2013).

He originally wrote Star Sand in Japanese and first published it in that language in 2015.