How to Be an American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway

As a child, Shoko survived the bombing of Nagasaki.  As a young woman, she becomes the bride of an American GI and moves to California which causes a great rift between herself and her family.  Now she is a older woman with a potentially fatal heart condition and knows that time is running out to correct that rift.  Unable to make the trip to Japan herself, she sends her daughter and grand-daughter where they discover much that is new about Shoko and the life she left behind.  Each chapter is introduced with suggestions from a fictional 1950's manual intended for Japanese brides entitled "How to be an American Housewife."  They were not suggestions that Shoko followed but she is not sure if she has passed that inner strength onto her own children. It is a cross cultural generational discovery story told with both insight and humor.  Base on the experiences of the author's own mother, it is a fictional story that I suspect rings true for families where the blending requires respect for two very different worlds.