Riku and the Kingdom of White

Randy Taguchi first began writing online in 1996 and soon attracted a large following in Japan, where she is sometimes referred to as the "Queen of the Internet." She is a popular and prolific author, whose work includes a busy blog, many short stories and essays, and fourteen novels, two of which-Outlet and Fujisan-have been translated into English. She was one of the major supporters of the Fukushima Kids' Summer Camp program, which helped children impacted by the 2011 earthquake.

Her work, Outlet (Konsento in Japan), was commended by a leading light of contemporary Japanese literature, Ryu Murakami, as one of the best novels he had read in a decade. The novel also went on to become a finalist for the prestigious Naoki Prize.

Riku Sato is in the fifth grade, when he moves from Utsunomiya to Fukushima to switch schools. Minamisoma, the town he arrives in, is virtually deserted-after the devastating earthquake and tsunami disaster of March 11, 2011, which struck the Tohoku region in Japan and triggered a nuclear meltdown, not a single soul is in sight; not in the roads, nor in the school grounds. Riku spends endless, humdrum days in this ghost town, yearning to play outside, to take his bicycle out for a spin and ride like the wind, when he comes across the otherworldly, sparkling snowscape of a mountain in northern Japan. There, in the majestic kingdom of white, he befriends good-natured grownups; encounters wild animals in the mountains; and comes into contact with a mysterious boy and his equally mysterious companion, Tonchi...

Riku and the Kingdom of White is a coming-of-age story of a wide-eyed boy's courage, brimming with hope of a bright and shining future. It is also the story of the lost innocence of an untold number of children who continue to live, day after day, undaunted, in Fukushima, after March 11, 2011, in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake.