While I Was Away

When twelve-year-old Waka’s parents suspect she's having trouble understanding the basic Japanese they speak to her, they make a drastic decision to send her to Tokyo for several months to live with her strict grandmother, Obaasama, so she can brush up on the language and reconnect to their family's culture. Forced to say goodbye to her friends and what would have been her summer vacation, Waka is plucked from her straight-A student life in rural Kansas and flown across the globe, where she faces the culture shock of a lifetime. In Japan, Waka struggles with reading and writing in kanji, doesn’t quite get along with her complicated and distant grandmother, and she gets made fun of by the students in her Japanese public-school classes. Even though this is the country her parents came from, Waka has never felt more like an outsider. If she’s always been the “smart Japanese girl” in America but is now the “dumb foreigner” in Japan, where is home...and who will Waka be when she finds it?