Gene Oishi, author of the novel-in-stories Fox Drum Bebop (winner of the 2016 Association of Asian American Studies Creative Writing Book Award), and the memoir In Search of Hiroshi: A Japanese American Odyssey, passed away on August 1st in Baltimore, surrounded by family, after being diagnosed with cancer earlier this year.

We are heartbroken at this loss, especially as we worked closely with Gene over the past year to publish the new edition of his memoir. We are honored to have published his crucial voice as one of the 110,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States that were arrested and put in concentration camps at the start of World War II. He wrote beautifully not just about the immediate experiences of this grave injustice, but with brutal honesty about how the trauma followed him through his life.

“I was eaten alive in the desert, not by ants but by doubts—doubts about myself, my parents, and my cultural identity. I was assailed by notions that there was something wrong with me, or with my parents, or with Japanese generally,” he wrote in the introduction to In Search of Hiroshi. In June, Gene was in conversation with his daughter, the scholar Eve Oishi, scholar Koji Law-Ozawa, and Hiroshi editor Ana Iwataki in collaboration with JANM and Discover Nikkei. It was a lively and powerful event, an important archive of one of the remaining and most powerful voices of Japanese incarceration.

In honor of Gene, the Oishi family asks you to please consider donating to lung cancer research foundations. Here are a few to consider:

• Lung Cancer Research Foundation
• Lung Cancer Foundation of America
• American Lung Association
• Lung Cancer Initiative
• American Cancer Society