Snow Hunters

After surviving the Korean War, Yohan spends another year in a prisoner-of-war camp south of the new border that splits the country in two. Rather than return north, where no one awaits him, Yohan begins life anew in a faraway coastal Brazilian village as a Japanese tailor's apprentice. As the years pass, "He wondered what choice there was in what was remembered; and what was forgotten." Yohan soon realizes that his life both before and after the war has been defined by quiet relationships—first with his widowed father and a childhood friend, then with the tailor Kiyoshi, the church groundskeeper, and two parentless children: "that in their silences there had been a form of love." Having already lost family, friends, language, and country, Yohan slowly sheds his solitude when gentle Kiyoshi dies and opens up to the possibility of attachment and love.