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  Praise for The Gilded Years

  An Us Weekly “Sizzling Summer Read” • A TIME Magazine Summer Read

  “In a story at once heartbreaking and uplifting, Karin Tanabe limns the tensions of a young woman’s desire to participate fully in a world in which she doesn’t dare reveal her full self, the myopia of a society twisted by soul-straitening rules, and the wonders—and frustrations—of the highest rung of women’s education at the turn of the last century. Most impressive are the characters’ emotional complexity; Tanabe understands that human relations are never so simple as black and white.”

  —Christina Schwarz, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “Tanabe’s thought-provoking novel raises challenging questions about how race, gender, and class advance and limit opportunities. There is plenty of material here for book group discussions.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Think: ‘Gatsby’ meets college meets an impressive beach read.”

  —theSkimm

  “Tanabe immerses the reader in a world of romance and manners, but also leaves you gripping the edge of your seat. . . . An elegant and extremely gratifying imagining of one remarkable woman’s life.”

  —USA Today

  “Smart and thoughtful, The Gilded Years is a must-read this summer.”

  —PopSugar

  “Enticing . . . As Anita is drawn into Lottie’s elite world, her secret roars beneath everything, threatening every step she takes.”

  —Bustle

  “Tanabe smoothly blends history, race and class into a whip-smart novel [with a] vividly complex heroine.”

  —Essence

  “In this gripping, tension-filled story, Karin Tanabe reveals to us the impossible choices that one woman was forced to make when she decided to follow her dream for a better life. As with many courageous acts, controversy follows our heroine, and for that reason alone book clubs will find much to discuss here. An utterly captivating narrative that kept me turning pages late into the night.”

  —Kathleen Grissom, New York Times bestselling author of The Kitchen House

  “This fictionalized take on Hemmings’s real-life story animates her struggle to straddle two worlds, each with its own separate definition of freedom.”

  —Good Housekeeping

  “Tanabe has written a moving portrait of a fascinating and complicated woman who crossed the color line when the stakes were high. This richly imagined novel about a woman of brilliance and fierce self-creation is sure to captivate readers as it did me.”

  —Heidi W. Durrow, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

  “In Anita’s captivating story, heightened by richly drawn characters, Tanabe insightfully grapples with complex and compelling issues.”

  —Booklist

  “The Gilded Years tells the compelling story of Anita Hemmings, a woman who defied the expectations and limitation of her world to follow her mind and her heart. Karin Tanabe weaves a tale rich with historical detail and heartbreaking human emotion that demonstrates the complex and unjust choices facing a woman of color in nineteenth-century America. That so many of the questions explored by Tanabe about race, gender, ambition and privilege still resonate today makes this novel required reading.”

  —Tara Conklin, New York Times bestselling author of The House Girl

  “The Gilded Years is a thrilling and foreboding tale about social and racial rules in nineteenth century America. Anita Hemmings begins her senior year at Vassar in 1896, the year that the Plessy doctrine of separate but equal became the law of the land. She is at the top of her class, speaks five languages, and is the class beauty. One rumor away from disaster, Anita lives with a secret that could get her thrown out of Vassar, injure her family, and destroy her academic future. Tanabe’s narration is reminiscent of novels of the 1890s, with dialogue that is spot on for that era. The compelling story covers a shameful time in American history, and is unrelenting in its tension and gripping detail.”

  —Anna Jean Mayhew, author of The Dry Grass of August

  “[The Gilded Years] is trademark Tanabe: a juicy plot, charming writing, shrewd observations. But here, there are also shades of Edith Wharton. . . . This story of race and class is compelling and wise.”

  —Toronto Star

  “The true story of Anita Hemmings, Vassar College’s first African-American graduate, comes to life in vivid detail in Tanabe’s The Gilded Years. Hemmings’ gut-wrenching decision to pass as white in order to obtain an education is a poignant journey and Tanabe’s lyrical style is sure to keep readers turning pages.”

  —Renee Rosen, author of White Collar Girl

  “The Gilded Years really brought home the horrific limitations and choices that were faced by black people post–Civil War, even in the supposedly more enlightened North. The characters were vivid and compelling, and it was heartbreaking to witness the terrible lie Anita was forced into to achieve her dream of a Vassar education. That the story is based on true people only added to its richness.”

  —Laila Ibrahim, author of The Yellow Crocuses

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  For those seeking refuge today. May you find open doors and open arms.

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  EMI KATO

  OCTOBER 1943

  Emi Kato had always liked boats. She’d been sailing on them since she could hold her head up, and had grown to feel like they were the most authentic place for her to be—floating on water between countries.

  At twenty-one, she’d embraced her status as a wanderer, though her parents encouraged her to call it journeying. They often reminded Emi that the family was perpetually heading abroad not for curiosity’s sake, but for her father’s important career. Norio Kato was a Japanese diplomat, and Emi, his beloved only child. Her circumstance, always wedged right between her elegant parents, meant she’d been packed up like a suitcase since she was small, transported to countries so different from hers that they felt inverted. Over time, she learned that they’d slowly rotate, eventually becoming an extension of her home.

  But in the fall of 1943, Emi’s world had rotated the wrong way. After four years in America, she found herself standing on a boat quite unlike the luxury ocean liners of her childhood. Crowded in like a matchstick, she was being forced to sail back to Japan and into the uncertainty of war.

  For two hours, Emi had been moving restlessly around the massive Swedish ocean liner, bracing herself in the cold as she tried to get as close to the bow as possible. Finally, unable to remain polite any longer, she jostled a young couple that had stood as firm as figureheads for the last thirty minutes, and thrust her thin frame past them and into the railing, ignoring their protests. She hoped that if she stared straight ahead, she might experience even a fleeting sense of freedom, a feeling she’d been desperate for since 1941, when she was corralled away from her home in Washington, D.C.

  Emi looked out at the line where the ocean met the sky and was mesmerized by the perfect, threadlike offing. In a few moments, just past dusk, as the massive white boat floated through the warm waters of the Southern Hemisphere, the water and the evening sky would blur the line and blend into a pigmented squid-ink blue. She watched the world in front of her, t
he horizon line now impossible to discern, and thought that even when men were trying their best to become monsters, nature refused to give in. What was beyond her couldn’t be easily altered by human stupidity.

  Emi turned around on the illuminated boat deck and looked down at her dirty black loafers, the toes almost worn through. Before she left America, her father had written and said that all the women in Japan, even the ones of a certain ilk, were wearing monpe, the baggy cotton pants donned by farmers, and not to bother with anything but her shabbiest clothes. Practicality and warmth was all she need be concerned about in Japan. Since the boat was so dirty, Emi had started dressing for war already, though she would have to wait until she was home to buy what he’d recommended. She frowned at the thought of herself in the shapeless baggy trousers. What a long way it was from her old life of tailored dresses and starched school uniforms.

  “Where are we?” her mother asked quietly. She’d come up behind her daughter and placed her hands on Emi’s slight shoulders, interrupting her worries. Where Emi was tall and confident, her mother, Keiko, was delicate and quiet, with a ghostly pale face and nearly black eyes. An expert at floating through life effortlessly, she always seemed to materialize out of nowhere. “We’ve been on this boat for so long it’s starting to feel like they’re taking us the wrong way around the world.”

  Emi turned around and watched her mother rub her temples with her thin, papery hands. They looked dry and tight—surely from all the time they’d spent in the sun—as if they might creak like a door hinge when she folded them. Her fragile fingers reminded Emi of the part of the world they just left. She hoped to never see it again. “We are enclosed in barbed wire,” Keiko had written to her best friend when they’d arrived in the American Southwest. Emi had leaned over her shoulder and told her not to bother complaining. That the censors would black out all the important words anyway, especially the grievances.

  “I think we’re near Africa,” said Emi, turning back around and leaning closer against the railing. They weren’t supposed to get so close to the edges of the ship, her mother reminded her. The crew was afraid a wave might bump the thin Japanese women right off the boat. Or that they’d pitch themselves overboard in a fit of anxiety.

  “Africa?” said Keiko, trying to move her daughter back a few inches. She grabbed the sleeve of her gabardine coat, which had been in the bottom of a suitcase since the spring of 1942. “You know better than to say something so ill-informed. Where in Africa?”

  “South Africa,” said Emi, squinting in the darkness and taking a tiny step back to appease her mother. “Port Elizabeth. On the coast between Cape Town and Durban. I don’t know a thing about the town past its geography so we shall see what it brings.”

  “I doubt that,” said her mother, reaching up and resting her hand on her daughter’s head. “Despite your charm, they’re not going to let you sightsee on this stop.”

  Emi moved her forehead back so that Keiko’s hand slipped off. She was in the mood to shut out the world as best she could, even her mother’s comforting touch. “I’m sorry, Mama,” she said. “I’m desperate to be alone.”

  “Come back down soon,” said Keiko, giving her daughter some space. “If you haven’t noticed, it’s about to storm.” She pointed to the choppy water and said, “You’re only feet from plunging into the ocean and I’m not dressed for mourning, so please don’t sink to the bottom. Not tonight.” Emi nodded and went to move her long black hair out of her face, the strands, hard with salt water, clinging to her skin like octopus tentacles.

  “Be careful,” said Keiko, pulling Emi back a few more inches before leaving her to herself.

  Despite years of her mother pecking over her appearance, Emi cared very little about how she looked, a privilege granted to the beautiful. She let Keiko and her amah choose her clothes until she turned sixteen and, surprisingly, had never adopted the vanity they thought she would. But recently, she’d grown aware of how weeks on a crowded ship could make a person unsightly. She saw plainly how gaunt her body had become, how her cheekbones looked jagged and hollow, her breasts flat, her stomach concave. And she knew that she smelled like the boat, too, giving off the sharp scent of salt water and sweat with every step she took.

  At the sound of thunder close by, Emi and the other passengers on deck craned their necks, imagining the storm clouds starting to collect overhead like a swarm of hungry birds. Emi looked at the other tired Japanese passengers around her, as pale and gaunt as she, and was glad that the whistling wind and increasingly choppy water drowned out their sounds. She didn’t want to focus on where she was at present, but where boats had taken her before—to London, Vienna, Berlin—the cities she had multiplied in.

  It wasn’t just her cells that had expanded over the years; it was her spirit. In Europe, she’d shed the skin of a girl with finite possibilities and become one who spoke three languages, who was as happy out of her country as in, who could discover the world and fall in love with it, without the boundaries of her nation, or gender, getting in the way. She had managed to remain that girl until the war broke out and suddenly her future became uncertain, riddled with fear and anxiety.

  “Wien,” she said out loud in German as the water started to splash onto the deck. She’d been speaking English for the last four years and the word sounded strange on her tongue.

  Vienna. It was the place she missed the most.

  The wind was starting to get too strong for her to stay on deck. A moment more, Emi thought, and laid her head down on her prime spot of railing, her left cheek cold against her intertwined hands. She was well aware that Vienna might not exist in a few years. And if it did, it certainly wouldn’t be her Vienna.

  “But I lived there once,” she whispered, remembering the sweeping view of several ornate Gothic buildings from her family’s apartment windows. The St. Stephan’s Cathedral spires, the tarnished brass dome, the tower with its swinging bell cast from cannons—these were as familiar to her as her childhood home.

  And Leo. The best part of Vienna was of course Leo Hartmann.

  For two years, he was the fuel that fizzed inside her, racing through her electric blue veins like the most perfect disease. He had defined her adolescence in Vienna and helped keep the realities of what was happening in the city away. But even a love as new and rope-strong as Emi and Leo’s couldn’t push war away forever. In 1938, hate took over the gray city like a fire bathed in oxygen.

  It was the year that the world started melting at the edges, tolerance receding through the cracks, unable to be saved.

  Emi thought it couldn’t get worse than 1938, but two years later, her own Japan aligned themselves with the Third Reich, and with that decision came the culpability of Emi Kato.

  It had nothing to do with her, Keiko had said countless times, helping her daughter into bed the night the news broke that Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and fascist Italy. They had done all they could to help the Hartmanns, and Leo’s fate was anything but her fault.

  “But we are contributing to it!” she had yelled. “Father is! He works for the government. Our family—we are all complicit now!” Tears had swallowed her words as her mother had tried repeatedly to assure her that Leo would be safe.

  “He won’t be,” Emi had moaned. “It’s 1940. No one is safe, especially not him.”

  But despite the feverish guilt that Emi felt about Japan’s alliance with Germany, Leo didn’t blame her. He assured her in his letters that of course he was able to separate her from the machinery of the Japanese government. They were both victims of circumstance.

  It had been four years since she’d lived in Vienna, since she’d seen Leo, but before she was forced to move from the East Coast, they had written to each other weekly. Now that was all she wanted. To be able to talk to him again, if only through ink stains.

  But did she deserve to? The thought nagged at her as she shifted her feet on the slippery deck, bracing herself against the weather. Would her new shame be pai
nfully apparent in her letters?

  She shut her eyes, wincing with guilt.

  Why had she done it? It was just the situation she’d been forced into, she told herself. Locked in like a prisoner, desperate for company, for some sort of happiness. And Christian was so much like her. He was American, not Japanese, but he was a German-American. Almost as hated as she was. Besides, he was just a child. Not even eighteen. It wasn’t serious, not like Leo.

  Christian Lange was a fling that should have been avoided. She could have avoided it, she scolded herself. But she didn’t. Because, if she was honest, there was something about him that she was feverishly drawn to, something she needed in those painful months, locked inside their peculiar desert prison, that only he could give.

  Emi looked out at the water, and despite the darkness engulfing the boat, felt certain that they were approaching South Africa. It had been days since they’d seen land. How far behind her Christian and Leo both were now. She was no longer buoyed by love or lust, the dual forces that had carried her through the uncertainty of the last four years. All she had were the wood and steel of the boat keeping her alive and the deep black water she hoped would deliver them safely back to Japan.

  “And then what?” she asked her mother, finally inside the boat, safe from the carrying wind. “What happens once we’re home?”

  “What else?” Keiko said, smiling sadly. “Survival.”

  CHAPTER 1

  CHRISTIAN LANGE

  JANUARY 1943

  River Hills, Wisconsin, boasted nights marked by silence, as if everyone inhabiting the curling streets was lying peacefully asleep, pink mouths slightly agape, breathing one collective breath. Villages and towns had sprung up all along Lake Michigan over the years, but only River Hills began with the promise that residents’ palatial homes would be concealed by the area’s wild verdancy. Houses were built on lots no smaller than five acres, hidden down winding driveways, behind a camouflage of trees. The village’s founders had reasoned that wealth and nature should exist in perfect tranquility, and the 560 inhabitants who had sunk their roots there agreed.