All Sorrows Can Be Borne

Loren Meyer Stephens ’65

In a novel inspired by true events, Stephens tells a tale that spans from World War II to the early 1980s and from Japan to Montana. It’s narrated by a Japanese woman whose husband is seriously ill, and who makes the heart-wrenching decision to send her young son to live with relatives in America. Decades later, when the boy has grown up and is stationed in Japan with the U.S. Navy, mother and son finally reunite. “My last memory of Hisashi was as a toddler dressed in his navy-blue and maroon suit with a matching cap on his head that his father kept taking off,” Stephens writes in her protagonist’s voice, “so they could play one more game of peek-a-boo before he boarded the plane and disappeared.” In addition to her fiction and nonfiction work, Stephens is a former documentary filmmaker and the founder of a ghostwriting service for memoirs.