The Yokota Officers Club by Sara Bird

I really enjoyed reading this book. Even though I've had a pretty stable past, I can still relate to Bernie's awkwardness in each new town/base she moves to, and her longing to be more like her sister who can make friends instantly. But she has a rich inner life to compensate. There are certain set of the population who the psychiatry field has dubbed "highly sensitive person - HSP" (about 20% of us are), and are just wired a little more tightly. Bernie fits this profile to a tee for an introverted HSP, and Kit for an extroverted HSP. Kit is able to pick up on social cues and use them to her advantage, while Bernie is simply overwhelmed by each new move and having to start over each time.

It was interesting how military families, their is insiders and outsiders. I've seen this in really big families, too, where siblings have an almost unspoken shared language. I also like how the author used smells through out her novel to invoke memories, even titleing most of the chapters after smells.

It's the mystery of Fumiko that provides the momentum for the story. No one wants to talk about her, yet she was a big part of the family for 4 years that they were stationed at Yokota - a long-time for a military family. When she starts to finally tell Bernie her story, it begins all the way during WWII, when the Japanese lost the war. It does provide an interesting perspective, from a native Japanese woman who lived through it and survived. The author manages to tell a story that brings great tragedy to life, but still has room for humor and happiness as well. All in all, it was well crafted story.


ABOUT THE BOOK

After a year away at college, military brat Bernadette Root has come "home"; to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, to spend the summer with her bizarre yet comforting clan. Ruled by a strict, regimented Air Force Major father, but grounded in their mother's particular brand of humor, Bernie's family was destined for military greatness during the glory days of the mid-'50s. But in Base life, where an unkempt lawn is cause for reassignment, one fateful misstep changed the Roots' world forever. Yet the family's silence cannot keep the wounds of the past from reemerging . . . nor can the memory fade of beloved Fumiko, the family's former maid, whose name is now verboten. And the secrets long ago covered up in classic military style–through elimination and denial–are now forcing their way to the surface for a return engagement.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. Smells play a major role in The Yokota Officers Club. They are even used as titles for each chapter. What effect did they have on you as a reader?

2. The central image/metaphor of the book is the perfume factory. At the end of the book, Bernie says: "That honeysuckle is but one link in an endless limbic chain that contains all the smells of my family and of our life together." Then she goes on to name all the smells in the book, concluding that "each smell is a blossom that combines with all the other smells the same way real flowers would in a real perfume factory where the days of sunshine and growing, the days of storm and drought, the times of plenty, times of want, what the flowers got, what they didn't get, they're all squeezed together under preposterous pressure or boiled or tinctured or distilled into a few drops of a smell so beautiful it can make you remember everything." Do you agree with this metaphor of how family unity/memories are created?

3. Understanding what you do about Moe, Macon, Fumiko, and Bernie, is there anything any of them could have done to change their fate?

4. Are the pressures a military life puts on soldiers--particularly the kind of military life Macon Root had, involving highly classified, highly dangerous missions--compatible with being a warm and loving spouse? Parent?

5. Have you known any military families? How much did you know about their lives? Did the novel give you a greater appreciation of those lives?

6. It seems that military brats enjoyed their peripatetic childhoods in direct relation to how extroverted they were. The more outgoing they naturally were, the more they thrived on the constant moving. How do you think you would have fared as a military child? As a military wife?

7. Have you ever had an experience similar to the one Bernie had when you return to the scene of a childhood memory and find it strangely shrunken or diminished in some way? How is this idea of a diminution, of a degradation, of, in some cases, a fall from grace, carried out in other ways in the book? In Bernie's experience of Okinawa as contrasted with her memories of Japan? In Mace's career? In the military in general from World War II to the Vietnam War? In Moe's experience both with the military and with her marriage?

8. Did you ever reveal a secret as a child? What were the consequences? Can Bernie or any child of that age be held responsible for unkept secrets?

9. Moe and Mace seem to have come to a stalemate in their marriage. Who is responsible? What do you predict will happen to them? What do you think should happen?

10. Contrast the two mothers in the book, Moe and Fumiko's mother. How does each one react to the stresses placed upon her and her family by their respective countries?

11. One of the themes of the novel is silence, the silence of men flying reconnaissance missions, but more especially the silence of the women around them. How does each of these characters find her voice: Bernie? Moe? Fumiko?

12. This novel straddles the line between fiction and memoir. Does it take the best from each approach or the worst? What do you like and dislike about the two different approaches?

13. Did you believe that Mace and Fumiko had had an affair? Were you relieved that they hadn't?

14. Since Bernie could not have ever seen her father acting as Wingo's co-pilot, how is the crucial relationship they had in flight demonstrated?

15. Humor and tragedy collide throughout the novel. Do you prefer fiction that blends these parts of life or keeps them separate?