This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

This Light Between Us (2019) is an epistolary young adult novel in the historical fiction genre and is written by Japanese American author Andrew Fukuda, who is best known for his acclaimed trilogy, The Hunt. In This Light Between Us, Fukuda tells the story of Alex Maki, a Japanese American boy from Bainbridge Island, Washington, and his pen pal, Charlie Lévy, a Jewish girl from Paris, France. The two experience the persecution inflicted upon their respective communities before and during World War II, and they develop a close bond through their letters. This bond transcends time and space, and Fukuda even uses a touch of magical realism to allow this sweeping narrative to span years, distance, and the social conditions that separate them. Receiving positive critical acclaim, This Light Between Us won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and has also been listed as an ALSC Notable Children’s Book and a Children’s Book Council selection for the Notable Social Studies List.

This guide references the 2019 TOR Teen paperback edition.

Content Warning: This guide discusses wartime violence and death, depictions of genocide, and racial slurs in a historical context.

Plot Summary

As part of a school assignment, Alex Maki and Charlie Lévy begin exchanging letters in 1935, when they are both 10 years old. Alex is a blossoming artist, and he frequently sends Charlie doodles, comics, and illustrations as their long-distance friendship blossoms. In 1938, Alex confesses in one of his letters that he lied to Charlie by letting her believe that he is white, even though he is ethnically Japanese. Charlie is angry—not because of his race, but because he lied. Charlie refuses to send him a picture of herself until Alex sends one of him. Instead, he sends a doodle of himself as a turtle with its head in the clouds facing a girl on the Eiffel Tower. They continue to send the letter back and forth, adding speech bubbles to the illustration until Alex writes “I love you,” which gets scribbled out.

In 1941, during a church service, news reaches Bainbridge Island that Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor. The Maki family and the other Japanese Americans are suddenly treated as outsiders and even enemies by white society. Charlie’s older brother Frank, who is the star quarterback and captain of the high school football team, remains optimistic about their situation until Mr. Maki is taken away by the FBI without explanation. Charlie, meanwhile, faces increasingly hostile conditions in Paris, France, which is now occupied by Nazis who are intent on persecuting the Jewish population. Alex and Charlie both recognize the importance of resistance, but Alex finds himself unable to act.

Alex is afflicted by a growing sense of shame and anger as American society turns against people of Japanese descent. The Japanese Americans on Bainbridge Island are given only five days to pack their belongings in preparation for their “evacuation.” Uncertainty hangs in the air; nobody knows where they will be taken. On the night before the evacuation, Alex risks breaking curfew by going to the high school dance. He asks a white girl to dance with him, but she never shows up. Frank takes him home.

To everyone’s surprise, they are greeted by a huge crowd of white neighbors as they board the ferry to leave Bainbridge Island. After an arduous journey by train, Alex, his mother, and Frank arrive at their destination: the Manzanar War Relocation Center in Central California, where Japanese Americans are treated like prisoners. It is difficult to adapt to the harsh heat, the dust, and the barebones barracks. Families begin to fall apart, and Alex’s is no exception. Frank becomes withdrawn and bitter, and Mrs. Maki begins wasting away in the absence of her husband. There is no word from Mr. Maki, and their efforts to have him transferred to Manzanar are unsuccessful.

Alex gets a job in the Manzanar staff dining hall to help pay for the expensive postage to keep writing to Charlie. The position leads to his involvement in an investigation of a possible conspiracy in which camp officials are selling supplies meant for the prisoners. A riot breaks out, the military police are called in, and two prisoners are killed.

Charlie, meanwhile, experiences increasingly hostile conditions in France. After the infamous Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup, Charlie’s parents are sent to Auschwitz, and Charlie goes into hiding under the protection of her father’s friend, Monsieur Schäfer. While there, Charlie receives slips of magical paper from a Sinti woman who is also in hiding with her. Using this paper, she twice appears before Alex in Manzanar. Alex sketches a portrait of her after her first appearance. When she appears the second time, she is wearing the garb of a concentration camp prisoner, and she looks notably starved. She tells Alex to find her. Around this time, Japanese Americans are being encouraged to join the war effort, and an all-Japanese regiment is being formed. Worried about Charlie and encouraged by the words of the lieutenant who promises to get Mr. Maki transferred to Manzanar if Alex enlists, Alex decides to join the army. This decision causes a rift between him and Frank, who does not come to see Alex off when his brother leaves for boot camp.

Alex attends boot camp in Mississippi with other Japanese Americans and quickly makes a name for himself as a front observer: an important position in battle. He wins the respect of all his fellow recruits, including Mutt, a Hawaiian who becomes close friends with Alex. After boot camp, the newly formed 442nd all-Japanese American Regiment ships off to war in Italy. During the Atlantic crossing, Alex uses a slip of Sinti magic paper to appear before Charlie in the concentration camp.

On the front lines, Alex never stops thinking about Charlie. Alex and Mutt fight in battle after battle together, until the infamous battle of Suicide Hill, where the 442nd suffered devastating losses in an attempt to rescue a white regiment known as the Lost Battalion. After the battle, Alex and Mutt are sent to recover from trench foot, and Mutt leaves the medical camp in the night to try to retrieve the bodies of their fallen comrades, not realizing that the Germans rigged the bodies of the fallen Americans with explosives. Alex chases after him to try to warn him, but he is too late, and Mutt dies in an explosion when he tries to move a body.

Alex slips into numbness after the loss of his friend. During Alex’s time in the army and in the war, Frank never responds to any of his letters. Eventually, Alex’s unit is given leave to go to Nice for rest. Frank finally responds, apologizing for his long silence and telling Alex that he avoided contact due to his own shame that his younger brother enlisted when he did not. At Alex’s request, he provides Alex with Monsieur Shäfer’s address, and Alex tracks Monsieur Shäfer down in Nice. Monsieur Shäfer is at first reluctant to speak to Alex, but he eventually tells the young man that although he did everything he could to save Charlie, he believes that she is dead. He gives Alex the final letter that Charlie was writing to him when the police took her away.

Alex and his regiment are sent to Germany, where they come upon an outpost of the concentration camp at Dachau, which was the oldest and longest-running concentration camp in existence. Witnessing the horrors inflicted upon the Jewish people, Alex and his fellow soldiers help to liberate the camp, but Charlie is nowhere to be found. That night, he gets the same uncanny feeling that he did when Charlie appeared to him via the magic paper and rides out into the night searching for her, but instead he only finds the remains of a dead Jewish boy, frozen in the snow. He covers the boy with his jacket, the pocket of which still contains his portrait of Charlie.

Alex is finally discharged from the army, but he is determined to fulfill one last promise to Charlie before going home. In Paris, he finds the apartment building where Charlie lived, and the concierge confirms Alex’s worst fear: Charlie is dead. Devastated, Alex goes to Charlie’s room, where he finds that she has saved every illustration and every drawing that he has ever sent to her. Accepting Charlie’s death and the gravity of the situation, Alex sits at her desk where she wrote all of the letters to him and cries.

Alex returns to Bainbridge Island, Washington as a decorated war hero, and Frank is there to meet him at the dock. The two brothers embrace, reunited at last. Some years later, in Long Island, New York, Alex steps into the ocean with a paper lantern constructed from the pages of his latest successful comic book. He lights the lantern and sends it off over the ocean in memory of Charlie.