For generations, Zainichi (ethnic Korean residents of Japan) have faced a gauntlet of injustices that range from inconvenience to discrimination to harassment, a reality that the Japanese public has never fully understood or been educated on. Author Chesil¡¯s ¡°The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart,¡± which won the Oda Sakunosuke literary prize in 2016 and was recently translated into English, takes a bracing look inside the mind of a Zainichi teenager to challenge readers with a deeply traumatized consciousness and the pain and liberation that comes in processing that trauma.
¡°The Color of the Sky¡± is an explicitly Zainichi novel: It tells the story of a young girl struggling to find her place in the world after transferring from a regular Japanese junior high school to the biggest North Korean school in Tokyo, and subsequently getting kicked out and shipped off to rural Oregon to live with a host mother.
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