At La Jolla High, Wyatt Roth is the shy geek with a missing sister and a mother lost to suicide. His agoraphobic father, Stewart, spends his days scouring the internet for any trace of his daughter. When Wyatt learns that his sister is modeling in Tokyo, the pair fly to Japan—but Stewart suffers a crippling panic attack in Shinjuku Station, leaving Wyatt to navigate the city alone.

In the neon-lit streets, Wyatt befriends Yoshimi Watanabe, a fiercely defiant Fukushima refugee whose nightly graffiti protests the evacuation of her home. Together, they venture into the abandoned towns and haunting landscapes of the Fukushima exclusion zone, confronting grief, injustice, and the fragile possibility of hope.

The Ghosts of Okuma is a luminous story of courage, connection, and the lengths we will go to reclaim what has been lost.

Praise for The Ghosts of Okuma

"A strange, beautiful, and unexpected exploration of the fallout of family tragedy."

—Kirkus Reviews, (starred review) [read full review]

“By turns comic and tragic, Mitch Wieland’s The Ghosts of Okuma is a sharply-written and brilliantly-paced novel that manages to become both a satisfying love story and a devastating look at the lives of one family shattered by suicide and another displaced by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. It’s so funny, charming, and infused with tenderness that it’s a pure pleasure to read—even as it’s simultaneously deadly serious. Like Virgil leading Dante through the underworld, Yoshimi leads Wyatt ever closer to the damaged reactors, where they find love and a path toward rebuilding their shattered families.”

—Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“When sixteen-year-old Wyatt Roth lands in wintery Tokyo, he’s carrying more than just jet lag—his mother’s ashes are hidden in his backpack, and his family is unraveling back home. While his anxious father is paralyzed by grief, Wyatt shoulders the impossible task: track down his runaway sister Erin, lost somewhere in the neon sprawl. Streets slick with melting snow lead him to Yoshimi, an audacious, wounded local girl displaced by Fukushima’s nuclear fallout. Together, they forge an unlikely alliance through Tokyo’s quiet parks, raucous back alleys, and the invisible fringes where outsiders drift. As Wyatt and Yoshimi search for answers—about Erin, about their fractured families, about themselves—they confront the aftershocks of disaster, both nuclear and personal. Their journey is tangled with grief, resilience, and fleeting connections, revealing a Tokyo pulsing with beauty and sorrow far from the glossy surface. The Ghosts of Okuma is a luminous, searching novel about memory, displacement, and the longing for home—whether across continents or at the edge of mourning. Mitch Wieland’s vivid, unsparing prose conjures a Tokyo of snow and light, loss and belonging. Reminiscent of Kobo Abe’s The Ruined Map and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, this haunting story lingers like frostbite—quietly transformative, achingly real, and unforgettable.”

—Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice, Tokyo Noir and The Last Yakuza

“Like many good novels, The Ghosts of Okuma can be read on different levels. The novel’s own performative characters would like that, as they’re way more clever than mere participants in the subtitle’s love story. The Ghosts of Okuma is a convincing exploration of love, but it’s also about loss within love, ghosts, specters of a not easily comprehensible, vanished world, in which these characters have been minor, though nevertheless important, players. Powerful, and at times playful, the story suggests that our vulnerabilities are a beginning, rather than an end, once we remove our masks.”

—Ann Beattie, author of Chilly Scenes of Winter, Park City, and The New Yorker Stories

“Wieland’s haunted teen-aged lovers are both wildly funny and pierced by yearnings everyone in our crumbling world will recognize. A charming and memorable novel.”

—Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever, winner of the National Book Award

“The Ghosts of Okuma is both dire and comic, and at its heart is someone who has disappeared, seemingly having evaporated. Those who love her and who have gone in search of her take us through a phantasmatic Tokyo. This novel is a wild ride, and it leaves you breathless.”

—Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love, National Book Award Finalist

“I loved this book. Part mystery, part coming of age, part quest story of a stranger in a strange land, this stark and lyric tale resonates as coolly and beautifully and darkly as the temple bell at Chion-In. What happens when Wyatt and his father—and, in a way, his mother too—seek their missing sister and daughter in Japan is haunting in ways that last, and matter. Read this book.”

—Bret Lott, author of Jewel, an Oprah Book Club selection

“Joy and grief, fueled by hunger and humor, are intertwined as inextricably in The Ghosts of Okuma as they are in real life. When readers a hundred years from now ask, What was it like, back then? they can be directed to this splendid novel.”

—Rick Bass, author of With Every Great Breath, For a Little While, and The Watch

“A broken family tries to piece itself back together on a wild journey that takes us from California to the neon-lit maze of Tokyo to the irradiated wasteland of Fukushima. The Ghosts of Okuma is a story of healing told with quirky humor, compelling mystery, and moving insight into the human heart.”

—Benjamin Percy, author of The Ninth Metal, Red Moon, Suicide Woods, and Thrill Me

“The Ghosts of Okuma is a delicious cocktail: ingredients including a classic noir quest narrative, but rendered in bright anime colors. Mitch Wieland, always an original, has found unaccustomed depth in the teen romance that frames a father’s search for a runaway child, and achieved a remarkable blend of American and Japanese modes of storytelling.”

—Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising, National Book Award Finalist

“The Ghosts of Okuma is a feat of storytelling, at once a mystery, a love story and a clear-eyed meditation on the human condition. It is about broken lives aching to be whole. It is about finding beauty in unexpected places. It is about wandering, lost and bereft, and being found. Mitch Wieland has written a novel that is vibrant, lyrical, and devastatingly true.”

—Brady Udall, author of Letting Loose the Hounds, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, and The Lonely Polygamist

“If you have ever been in love, Mitch Wieland’s funny, open-hearted story of teenage love set against mysterious loss will lasso your spirit and refuse to let go. The Ghosts of Okuma is also the story of a quest, a brother’s devotion and a son’s cherished duty, but it is mainly a poem to the kind of innocent passion life only offers once. Wyatt is the unforgettable boy everyone wanted to find. I sat down to skim a few pages and woke up five hours later, as if from a dream, having read the whole thing at a single go. To turn away from this story of hope and grief and adventure, by one of our most talented writers, you would have to have a heart of stone.”

—Jacquelyn Mitchard, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Deep End of the Ocean, A Very Inconvenient Scandal, and The Birdwatcher

“The Ghosts of Okuma is a visceral reminder of the failures and promises of mankind. It is at once entertaining, erudite and educational. The novel’s quirky heroine is both tour guide to an underside of Tokyo and a savant capable of unbraiding human emotion. I laughed, I felt ashamed (as a member of a nuclear-powered society), and I lingered in the twilight glow of young love. Tragic and empowering, The Ghosts of Okuma delivers on multiple levels, as rare as a perfectly executed snow angel following a winter dusting.”

—Ridley Pearson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer, Undercurrents, and The Risk Agent

“The Ghosts of Okuma is a love story, a quest, and a psychedelic trip into haunting realms that turn out to be spectacularly real. In the shadow of suicide and nuclear catastrophe, our teenage hero, Wyatt, along with the unforgettable Yoshimi, navigate a labyrinth of pulsing streets, underground music scenes, love hotels, and exclusion zones. Mitch Wieland has built a world of neon and fog; love and loss; devastation and, ultimately, transcendence.”

—Anna Caritj, author of Leda and the Swan

“The Ghosts of Okuma is an ethereal escapade of emotion and transcendence. Mitch Wieland has built a gorgeously vivid world and a captivatingly realistic narrative of young love—and a search to find what is missing, both concrete and abstract. The novel draws you in from page one. From the authenticity of the characters to the wonderment and beautiful intricacies of the world around them, we’re transformed by the ride. Heroes like this impact us far beyond the back cover.”

—Marion Dayre, screenwriter for Better Call Saul and The Act, and showrunner for Marvel’s Echo