9 May 2011 FRIENDSHIP DOLL by Kirby Larson, Delacorte, May 2011, 208p., ISBN: 978-0-385-73745-6; Libr. ISBN: 978-0-385-90667-8

"I have to say my friends
This road goes a long, long way
And if we're going to find the end
We're gonna need a helping hand."
-- Elton John, "Salvation"

"Though he wasn't like Kurita -- a man whose endless boasts clanged like the chappa cymbal -- he was proud of his efforts.  His wife would be too, were she still living.  Miss Kanagawa was a doll like none other.  The size of a five-year-old- girl, she was even more exquisite than the doll he'd made for the infant Empress.  Two hands like graceful lilies rested at her sides.  Her eyes, so clear and proud, gazed into his own.  Her delicate cherry lips parted slightly, as if she were on the verge of speaking to him.  He was almost disappointed not to hear her speak, but he knew she'd been created for the children in the Land of the Stars, and not for him.
"He had dressed her in their daughter's best kimono, in its rich print of blue chrysanthemums against orange silk.  This was the very one his wife had stitched for the child's fifth birthday.  Her last birthday.  Tatsuhiko's heart had shriveled like a dried plum the day the sickness took their sweet daughter away.
"'You look lovely, little sister.'  The old doll-maker dabbed at his eyes.  The steamy tea must be making them water.  'I know you will serve your new role well, and will carry the message of friendship honorably.  But my wish is that you will find a doll's true meaning: to be awakened by the heart of a child.'  He fussed with the obi until it was tied just so and then gently wrapped the doll in a blanket."

Miss Kanagawa, who narrates small bits of her own story, arrives in the United States from Japan in 1928 and, in the course of finding a doll's true meaning, she will impact and be changed, herself, by a series of American children.  Over the next thirteen years -- the Depression years and the years leading up to World War II -- Miss Kanagawa finds herself in four corners of the United States meeting four girls.  First there is Bunny, an upper-class girl from Manhattan who participates in the dolls' welcoming ceremony.  Then there is Lois, from outside Chicago, who dreams of growing up to be an aviator.  When her great aunt Eunice takes her to the 1933 World's Fair, Lois encounters the doll in an exhibit.  Next, there is Willie Mae, a girl from a poor, rural Kentucky family.  A stellar reader, Willie Mae is offered a temporary job reading to the wealthy elderly woman who has purchased Miss Kanagawa at auction.  And, finally, there is Lucy, a motherless Okie girl who travels the Dust Bowl path to California and, then, Oregon with her grieving father.  She meet Miss Kanagawa in a local museum. 

Each of these four interconnected stories stands solidly on its own.  Each provides a wealth of detail about America during the desperate economic times of the "Dirty Thirties."  Author Kirby Larson has integrated famous people, events, and concepts of those days into these stories.  The tales are both enlightening and emotionally engaging.  The degree of love and loss set against the Great Depression makes this a notable book about friendship that will be enjoyed and remembered by young people who long ago locked away their own dolls.  And to those of us who never played with them.

"It appears that a boy is the one who opened my trunk.  Strange creatures, boys.  They tend to avoid dolls and thus avoid me.  I recall Brigitte telling me they were smelly, with disgusting things in their pockets.  This one doesn't look so bad.  And I don't smell anything but dust."

A final chapter brings the story up to the present.  And the author's afterword provides significant information about the history of the fifty-eight Friendship Dolls that arrived from Japan in the late Twenties, were celebrated and circulated and displayed until the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, and then were "removed from display, sold, lost, perhaps even destroyed."  Miss Kanagawa's current day whereabouts remain a mystery.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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