Beside the River

Beside the River weaves the story of Mrs. Kazumi Matsuoka, an eighty-four-year-old winery owner and haiku master, with the thematic warp and woof of long-term effects of the internment of Japanese Americans while trying to honor her late husband, Senator Sam Matsuoka. “Mattie,” as her friends know her, is trying to realize her dream of transforming a portion of her vineyard property in Sonoma County, California, into a wildlife preserve connected to the Mexico-to-Canada coastal walk. To do this, she enlists an injured young Afghan war veteran and comes to terms with a nearby homeless group, some of whom had been co-opted into working in an illegal marijuana grow site in a State Park on the other side of the Russian River.