THE LOST RYŪ

Ten-year-old Kohei knows that his impossible memory is the key to fixing everything.

Somehow, he has a memory of large Japanese ryū marching in a war parade and a single Western dragon circling the sky while his grandfather watches it, awestruck. But large ryū have not been seen in Japan for the last 20 years, since the end of World War II. Kohei believes that seeing a large dragon again will allow Ojiisan to experience a range of emotions instead of his constant anger and heal Kohei’s family, broken even before his father’s death. When their new American tenants arrive with their daughter, Isolde, who is Japanese American and Jewish, Kohei is excited to hear that they have a dragon, but their Yiddish-speaking dragon, Cheshire, is even smaller than Kohei’s own tiny dragon, Yuharu; disappointed, Kohei lashes out. But when Ojiisan is hospitalized, Kohei convinces Isolde to go to New Ryūgū-jō, a replica of the underwater palace of the ancient dragon gods, in an attempt to hatch a large dragon egg. Their journey reveals a tragic truth that shakes Kohei to the core. Watanabe Cohen’s use of the fantastical both parallels and is juxtaposed against real history and trauma. Fleshed-out and flawed characters pose difficult questions and make mistakes; conflicts aren’t neatly resolved but rather are realistically depicted as ongoing. This quiet novel tackles complicated topics, including the devastation of war; readers with some knowledge of the period will likely get the most out of it.

A beautiful—though complex—exploration of generational trauma.