The Breakwater

One morning in Toronto, Cathy Matsumoto’s father, Yasuo, calls to announce he intends to visit a dying cousin in Victoria.

Cathy’s  never heard of this mysterious relative before, but she begrudgingly  agrees to plan a cross-country family trip. It's only in British  Columbia that Cathy learns this “cousin” is actually Yas’s younger  brother, Stum, who’s been languishing in psychiatric care for decades,  abandoned, ever since Yas committed him to Essondale Asylum before World  War Two, inadvertently sparing Stum from the atrocities of the Japanese  Canadian internment camps.

Yas tries to fend off probing  questions from his daughter, but revisiting old haunts stirs up memories  of the brothers’ boyhood rivalry and coming-of-age near Victoria’s  Chinatown, when Yas’s steely resolve to hold their fractured family  together clashed against Stum’s troublesome turn toward a life of  gambling, crime, and consorting with prostitutes.

In this  stirring multigenerational saga, two brothers, both old men not far from  death, must at last confront long-buried family secrets — and their  lingering effects on subsequent generations.