A Letter To Okasan

By: Santos, Paulo J.

A Letter to Okasan is a literary novel about Claudio, a Portuguese artist living in London, who writes to his former Japanese mother-in-law a decade after the collapse of his marriage to Akira. He does not write to accuse her daughter or to defend himself. He writes because time has passed, because the emotional wound has cooled, and because he wants to leave behind a truthful account of a family that once seemed to bridge love, duty, migration, and hope.
Claudio never wanted marriage or children. Having grown up too close to instability, and trying to protect his life as an artist, he believed both demanded more security than the world was likely to give him. But Akira became the one woman who made both seem possible. Married in London and later celebrated ceremonially in Japan and Portugal, they build a life between cultures, languages, and expectations. Then ordinary pressures begin to harden: money dissatisfaction, long work hours, unsupported dreams, motherhood, silence, separate rooms, and the slow disappearance of intimacy.
When the marriage finally ends, what follows is not liberation but consequence. Claudio's life unravels through a chain of financial hardship and housing instability that eventually leads to homelessness. Emotionally he recovers. Financially he does not. Ten years later, he writes to Okasan, not to reopen blame, but to honour what was real: the marriage that failed, the children who remain, and the truth that no family story belongs to one person alone.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GYNP37RV
• ISBN13: 9798258790125
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 148 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 8.5" x 11.0"