Passage to Tokyo by Poppy Kuroki

 

If you could take a secret passage to any time period, what would you chose?  I think at this moment, I would pick the 1920s.  I’d like to go and visit my Great-Grandma Kile as a teenager and help her out during the terrible time when she and her siblings were abandoned by her father, and she was trying to keep care of her dying mother.

Thank you, Partner @bibliolifestyle @harperperennial for the review copy of Passage to Tokyo by Poppy Kuroki.

In 1995 Tokyo, Yui Sanada is struggling to help her mother make ends meet and raising her twelve-year old brother Hiro.  One day, Hiro disappears into a tunnel at Ueno Park.  Yui follows him and finds herself in 1923, Tokyo.  As she looks for her brother, she meets a young nanny named Chiyo.  Chiyo takes her home to stay with her family.  While she searches for her brother.  Yui realizes that the Great Kanto Earthquake will happen in a few weeks.  Will she be able to save her brother before the earthquake?  Without about Chiyo and her family?

My thoughts on this novel:

·       There was a historical romance between Yui and Chiyo as their relationship grows.

·       This was also a historical fantasy with time travel involved in the story. I love time travel in novels.  It brings up so many ethical concerns and interesting questions.  If two different time travelers leave at the same time, will they end up in the same time period? When you go “back,” what time period are you going back to?  How does the past change due to time travelers?  How many time travelers are there in this world?

·       This was a new time period for Japanese history for me and it was very interesting.

·       I did not know about this devastating earthquake.  It was written in vivid detail and would have been a terrible thing to see and experience.

·       Immediately after the earthquake there was terrible racism against Koreans and non-Japanese.  Thousands of deaths were actually people murdered after the earthquake due to the rumors that Koreans were poisoning the wells or doing other terrible things.  The rumors were not true, but they caused a lot of deaths.

·       I was sad again thinking about how many people died in the past due to not having proper medicine or medical care.

·       I was sad that at the end of this book, a character disappears during WWII, and it is never determined what happened to the character.

·       This was the second book in the Ancestor Memories series, but it can be read as a standalone.  I do want to go back and read the first book.

·       There was an interesting author’s note at the end as well as historical timeline and glossary.

Overall, Passage to Tokyo Poppy Kuroki was a fascinating historical fantasy sapphic romance that has the reader to experience the Great Kanto Earthquake in real time.