National Network for Equitable Library Service

A vivid and powerful novel set in post-WWII Japan, Fireflies chronicles the lives of four interweaving characters navigating the war-torn streets of Tokyo during the American occupation. August 1945. Japan has been defeated in the Second World War. The country lies in ruins. Satsuko Takara and her teenage brother, Hiroshi, have lost their parents, and each other, during the firestorm that devastated Tokyo five months before. Hal Lynch, a haunted US reconnaissance photographer, has now become a photojournalist in Japan, where he stumbles upon a shocking story, concealed in the aftermath of war, and is determined to bring it to light. And Osamu Maruki, a dissolute writer, and once Satsuko’s beloved, has returned from the South Pacific a broken and changed man. As these characters’ stories spin out and converge, the war-torn streets of Tokyo come alive in this dazzlingly observed novel. Cinematic, brutal, yet beautiful, Fireflies powerfully portrays the shock, the struggles, and the choices that arise from the destruction of war.