Author of Gaijin - Sarah Z Sleeper

Sarah Z Sleeper

Sarah Z. Sleeper's novel, Gaijin, debuted in 2020 to glowing reviews. Her short story, “A Few Innocuous Lines,” won an award from Writer’s Digest. Her non-fiction essay, “On Getting Vivian,” was published in The Shanghai Literary Review. Her poetry was published in A Year in Ink and others, and exhibited at the Bellarmine Museum. In the recent past she was an editor at New Rivers Press, and editor-in-chief of the literary journal Mason’s Road. She completed her MFA at Fairfield University in 2012. Prior to that she had a twenty-year career as a business and technology writer and won three journalism awards. She lives in Rancho Santa Fe, California, with her husband, two dogs and a cat. Her daughter, Vivian, is in college in Boston. Sarah is hard at work on her second novel.

Gaijin

The Japanese word gaijin means “unwelcome foreigner.” It’s not profanity, but is a slur directed at non-Japanese people in Japan. Lucy is a budding journalist at Northwestern University and she’s obsessed with an exotic new student, Owen Ota, who becomes her lover and her sensei. When he disappears without explanation, she’s devastated and sets out to find him.

This story of the “unwelcome foreigner” is not an easy one, and it takes an award-winning journalist like Sarah Sleeper to give it the precision, sensitivity, and depth it deserves. The Far East and the Midwest are both on trial as Sleeper investigates the past and present of Japanese-American relations through a haunting, unforgettable story of love lost. Sleeper’s prose is full of natural poetry as she explores all the different shades of heartbreak where personal and political intersect.
— Porochista Khakpour, author most recently of Brown Album