The Yokota Officers Club Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

1. Smells play a major role in The Yokota Officers Club. They are even used as titles for each chapter. What effect did they have on you as a reader?
   


2. The central image/metaphor of the book is the perfume factory. At the end of the book, Bernie says: "That honeysuckle is but one link in an endless limbic chain that contains all the smells of my family and of our life together." Then she goes on to name all the smells in the book, concluding that "each smell is a blossom that combines with all the other smells the same way real flowers would in a real perfume factory where the days of sunshine and growing, the days of storm and drought, the times of plenty, times of want, what the flowers got, what they didn't get, they're all squeezed together under preposterous pressure or boiled or tinctured or distilled into a few drops of a smell so beautiful it can make you remember everything." Do you agree with this metaphor of how family unity/memories are created?
   


3. Understanding what you do about Moe, Macon, Fumiko, and Bernie, is there anything any of them could have done to change their fate?
   

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Ballantine Books. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.