Coal Boy

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By (author): Alban Kojima

Coal Boy, is a human fiction that builds on the premise: love is universal; so is racism—the same mold as Colson Whitehead, James Hannaham, and Robert Dugoni. Geocultural attributes set my story apart from their works. The United States of America stages their stories, where Black Americans and slavery have long been one of the major human rights issues intensely debated in sociopolitical arenas. My story focuses on people of mixed racial heritage: namely, Black-Japanese—the children of Black Americans and Japanese women born in Japan during the post-World War II Occupation.

AUTHOR

Alban Kojima

A US citizen born and raised in Japan, Alban Kojima earned an M.A in musicology from Temple University and an M.S. in information science from Drexel University in Philadelphia. In 1988, he became Japanese Studies Informationist for Penn Libraries at the University of Pennsylvania, at the same time he taught a graduate seminar entitled Japanese Studies Resources and Problems of Research. Since late-October 2012, Kojima has focused on writing. He has published in Tokyo, Japan, Yuzo Kayama and His Music: A Global Fascination (Sairyūsha, 2014) and Alexei Sultanov (Alpha-Bata Books, 2017). Coal Boy is Kojima’s first work of fiction. He lives in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.