August 12, 2025
Kakigori Summer, by Emily Itami
“There’ll be days when the way things are will make you weep, and the fact of the world is too heavy to get out from underneath. And then other days, when you can’t believe you’re here, with people you love in the world that contains barley tea and kakigori, sun after rain, watermelons and grumpy cat, and this front door. Hikaru runs through it, in such a rush he barely has time to get his shoes on, roaring at me that it’s time to go. Sunshine catches one half of his face, and the only thing I want to tell him is to keep his face turned towards it. The light, always the light.”
Emily Itami’s sophomore novel KAKIGORI SUMMER is a beautiful summer novel about sisterhood, the story of three sisters—the eldest working in finance in London, the second a single mother in Tokyo, and the third a famous J-pop star—who together retreat to their childhood home on the Japanese coast one summer after the youngest suffers a national scandal that puts her mental health at risk. Their mother has died years before, their English father lives his own life far across the sea with a new family, and their grumpy great-grandmother is impossible to get along with, which means the sisters are on their own, the way they’ve always been, making sense of their place in the world as mixed-race Japanese, if being “haafu” means that they’ll never be whole. And the novel explores the sisters’ unique position between two different cultures and ethnicities, as well as their legacy of mental illness and secrets, moving between three different characters’ voices to tell a story that sparkles like kakigori, the Japanese shaved ice dessert.
