When Mikan Road Was Ours is a gripping novel set across four generations of a Japanese American family living in California’s vibrant agricultural heartlands, exploring the sharp edges of inheritance and what it means to truly belong.
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About When Mikan Road Was Ours
Amid a sweltering Los Angeles heat wave, Murano, a reclusive high school English teacher, is muddling through life. Reeling from his father’s sudden death as well as his own recent cancer diagnosis, he passes time hazily grading papers and appeasing disgruntled parents while counting down each day until summer vacation.
The monotony breaks when he inherits his great-uncle Benjiro’s unpublished memoir. What Murano expects to be a grim reminder of his position as the half-white son of the family’s outcast instead whisks him away to 1930s California, to a time when the Murano family was inseparable, relishing life together on their bucolic farm. As the memoir introduces him to relatives he never knew existed and unearths hidden complexities of the past, Murano is pulled close to the Japanese identity he’s dismissed all of his life.
Faced with the reality of his family’s dissolution, Murano becomes determined to understand its breaking point following their incarceration in American concentration camps during World War II, no matter what hidden truths he might uncover about his ancestors or himself.
Lovingly crafted with poignant and profound attention to historical detail, When Mikan Road Was Ours is a rich meditation on belonging that seamlessly blends the intricacies of heritage, the resilience of family bonds, and the struggle to reconcile a past filled with both heartache and hope.
Praise for When Mikan Road Was Ours
“Identity isn’t a destination but a long, uneasy negotiation—especially for mixed-race people, where two selves can feel conjoined but not always in harmony. This novel lives in that tension, exploring what it means to be both in a family, and a world, that insists on either/or. Deeply resonant, perfectly paced, and at times enraging, this is one of those books that isn’t something for everyone, but everything to someone—and when you read it, it feels like that someone is you.”—Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet and The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
“A stirring novel of historical resonance. When Mikan Road Was Ours sets readers on a century-long journey into the wounds and triumphs of a Japanese American family whose story reverberates long after the final pages. Written with remarkable empathy and tireless research, D.K. Furutani’s debut presents an important and absorbing portrait with the highest stakes.”—Thao Thai, bestselling author of Banyan Moon and The Seekers of Deer Creek
“This elegant debut novel is sure to break your heart. Murano, a young mixed-race Japanese American teacher in South Pasadena, California, is floundering. The last thing he wants to do is to piece together his family’s history, but the inheritance of a great-uncle’s memoir forces him to mentally and emotionally transport himself to El Monte farmlands and the World War II diaspora that follows. When Mikan Road Was Ours arrives at a time when the world needs to reconstruct torn pieces of the past to understand the present. A beautiful symphony of voices, conducted by an exciting new novelist.”—Naomi Hirahara, author of Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning Clark and Division
“A kaleidoscopic account of Japanese displacement and resilience, expertly weaving archival material with a nuanced contemporary struggle to find oneself inside of a silenced history. Absorbing, richly researched, and artfully constructed, When Mikan Road Was Ours is a phenomenal debut.”—Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, bestselling author of Every Drop is a Man’s Nightmare
“A luminous meditation on memory, belonging, and a powerful reckoning with the stories we inherit, even the ones we choose to ignore. Profoundly intimate, this story asks what it means to truly claim your history, and in doing so, to finally claim the wholeness of yourself. Furutani delivers a timely novel about inheritance, identity, and courage, illuminating one of the most unjust and under-acknowledged chapters in U.S. history: the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans, and its lasting impact on what it means to belong.”—Elba Iris Pérez, inaugural winner of the Books Like Us Contest, bestselling author of The Things We Didn’t Know
“I breathlessly read When Mikan Road Was Ours, a beautifully woven tapestry of family, loss, grief, and careful archival research that takes on the important task of highlighting a moment in our country’s shameful history—one that has come back to us, newly urgent. D.K. Furutani is a writer to watch.”—Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of Somebody’s Daughter and The Evening Hero
“Honest and tender. In telling the story of one Japanese American family—set in an America throbbing with entitlement and people who stay silent in the face of injustice—Furutani has managed to conjure the terrifying reality of present-day America.”—Ru Freeman, author of Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship, and a Creative Life and On Sal Mal Lane
About D.K. Furutani, Author of When Mikan Road Was Ours
Born and raised in Southern California, D.K. Furutani is the author of When Mikan Road Was Ours, winner of Simon & Schuster’s third-annual Books Like Us contest. His work has received support from the Periplus Collective and the Tin House workshops. He resides in Los Angeles with his wife and three cats.
You can engage with D.K. Furitani on his website.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Atria Books
ISBN Hardcover 9781668086926
Pub Date: July 28, 2026
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