In 1988, Daishowa Paper Manufacturing Company, Japan's second largest papermaker, invested $75 million in an aging American paper mill in Port Angeles, Washington. Evelyn Iritani set out for Port Angeles with the hope of writing a book about the mill and its new Japanese owners. She didn't want to do yet another book contrasting the Japanese way of doing business with the American way; she wanted to present the voices that weren't being heard in the halls of Congress or in the Diet building in Tokyo.

What she discovered was a story that began not in 1988 but in 1834 - when three of the earliest visitors from Japan to North America were washed up on a beach on the Washington coast.

In An Ocean Between Us, Evelyn Iritani presents four moving, eloquent, true stories from the life of Port Angeles. The first story is of the three shipwrecked Japanese sailors. Enslaved by a Native American tribe, they were eventually sold to the Hudson's Bay Company, which attempted to use them as pawns to open up trade with the Hermit Kingdom. The next tells of a Japanese-American boy betrayed by his father (who abandoned him) and by his country (which sent him to an internment camp).

The third story involves a pregnant American woman killed by a secret weapon - built by Japanese schoolgirls and dispatched across the ocean on currents of air. The final tale is of four American millworkers now dependent on a Japanese executive - and the almost disastrous chain of events that resulted during their two-week "goodwill" trip to Japan.

Entwined with each story are portraits of Americans and Japanese who are now making connections with each other while grappling with the legacy of this turbulent history.

An Ocean Between Us is a tour de force, distinguished throughout by its riveting storytelling, impressive research, and spare, elegant prose. The empathy that Evelyn Iritani displays is the emotion that has been missing from the recent debates between America and Japan. An Ocean Between Us is essential reading for anyone who believes that more can be learned from studying history and listening to people than from analyzing the size of a trade deficit.