What the Scarecrow Said

Stewart David Ikeda's epic novel begins with the perilous birth of its hero. William Fujita, aboard a steamer bound for America in 1897 and ends in the aftermath of a great national shame: the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. At the outbreak of World War II, Fujita is torn from his beloved family nursery in Pasadena and exiled to a prison camp where he is beset by an almost unbearable loss. Barred from his home, a grief-stricken Fujita relocates to New England, where he and two widows, Margaret and Livvie, and Livvie's young son, Garvin, attempt to turn the harsh and unforgiving landscape of Widow's Peak, Massachusetts, into functioning farmland. Lavishly praised and masterfully written, What the Scarecrow Said is an expansive, multilayered story of family, reconciliation, and the cost of America's war on its own people. In this impressive debut novel, Stewart David Ikeda proves how even in the harshest soil the roots of community, love, and family can thrive.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.