Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo gets a love letter in new YA novel set in Asian American community
In “From Little Tokyo, With Love,” author Sarah Kuhn weaves together a story that is part YA romance, part family drama and entirely a love letter to the neighborhood in which it is set.
Kuhn, the author of the Heroine Complex novels, was introduced to Little Tokyo through friends after she moved to Los Angeles, and she’s long been enamored with this section of downtown. “Seeing how it has become, really, a hub for a lot of the local Asian American arts community in L.A. was just really beautiful and inspiring to me,” says Kuhn by phone, “and that was something that I really wanted to put in a story.”
In the novel, out now from Penguin Young Readers, Rika is a mixed-race teenager who has grown up in Little Tokyo with her two aunts and two cousins who are more like sisters. A chance run-in with a celebrity prompts her to learn more about herself and her family.
Kuhn says that developing Rika began with a few questions: “What if there was a girl who did not believe in fairy tales or happy endings, or romance, and then finds out that she actually has a connection to someone who is one of the biggest perpetrators of the whole happily-ever-after myth? What would that be like and what would it take to actually get her to change your mind?”
Through Rika, Kuhn also addresses young women about anger. “When I was growing up, I always thought I had this really bad temper; my mother was always telling me, ‘Calm down,’” says Kuhn. “As I’ve gotten older, I started to think that we tell young girls — and I feel like this especially affects young Asian girls — that being angry is something that’s inherently bad.”
Kuhn counters that belief with Rika, who struggles with her own anger over the course of the story. “I want to, I guess, tell her and tell myself, and maybe tell other girls out there that being angry is not inherently bad,” says Kuhn. “It is often a correct response to something, or it is a protective response to something.”
The celebrity is a Japanese American film star known for her romantic comedies. Kuhn was inspired to create her after seeing the film “Crazy Rich Asians,” which had prompted her to wonder, “What if, when I was a kid, we basically had an Asian American Meg Ryan?”
Kuhn posits, “I think that would have really changed my perspective on a lot of things. I think that would have changed how I saw myself.”
Kunh herself is third-generation Japanese American and mixed race. She grew up in rural Oregon. “I had my family, but I wasn’t really surrounded by a lot of Asian people in my daily life,” she says. “I guess I didn’t really have that sense of greater Asian American community and that was something I think I was always longing for without even knowing exactly what that was.”
That all changed after she moved to Los Angeles and became a writer. “The Asian American community has always shown up for me,” says Kuhn. “Especially locally, we really show up for each other and each other’s projects, each other’s causes.”
In the novel, Kuhn explores the complexities of ethnic identity and community. “Coming into different Asian American communities as a mixed race person, I think there was a part of me that had kind of this thought of like, will I be accepted,” says Kuhn. “What has been so just enlightening and revelatory is talking to a lot of other Asian Americans in the community. We’re all kind of under this big umbrella that brings our identities together, but there are a lot of identities contained under that umbrella. There are a lot of nuances between them. There are things we have in common and things we don’t.”
Much of this happens in and around a fictional Little Tokyo filled with real details that could have only been written by someone who has spent a lot of time in the area. There are nods to the long-running Japanese comfort food spot Suehiro Cafe, the nearly hidden garden at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center and even a local cat named Mr. Sherman.
While writing “From Little Tokyo, With Love,” Kuhn herself spent time downtown exploring the routes that characters might take. She knew early on that she wanted to have a scene set inside Central Library. “I just love that building. It’s so beautiful,” she says, “and I find it so inspiring as a writer and as a person.” When Kuhn would visit Central Library, she would sometimes park in Little Tokyo, grab something to eat and then walk from there. Other times, she would park and eat at Grand Central Market, which is also in the book, before heading to the library. “I would walk to the library and I would walk back and it kind of gave me this nice little time to also think about what am I writing today, what am I doing,” she says.
This attention to the setting makes for a novel will truly come alive for local readers. “I want to really show how I think LA and Little Tokyo are quite magical and just beautiful places with so much history and so much culture,” says Kuhn. “I was really happy that, hopefully, I could get some of that on the page.”