Robert H. Kono

Robert H. Kono (1932-) was born to Isamu Kono, a fisherman, and Masuko Mildred Kono, a Nisei, and was raised in the environs of Los Angeles, California until the outbreak of WWII when he and his mother were evacuated to the inland concentration camps because of President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 while his father was arrested the night of the Pearl Harbor bombing and put into separate detention centers. His father, an Issei, decided to repatriate to Japan after the war, and he and his ill mother accompanied him. In postwar Japan, languishing in the boondocks of Shikoku all alone with only his mother to talk to, he discovered a cache of books in English the small, local library had acquired and devoured its contents, so starved for the English language was he that he spent the entire summer vacation reading. It was then that he decided to become a writer--after having read all the novels. Starting later in life when he was 69-years-old, he at long last produced his first novel, The Last Fox, A Novel of the 100th/442nd RCT, and followed it with a collection of short stories, The River of Time, and in 2018 came out with a third work of fiction, Westward Lies The Sun. Starburst Over China is his most recent work which follows the publication of two other novels stored away: Eye of the Star and The StarMind Alert. Still other novels and a collection of short stories are in the works.