After her mother passed away 15 years ago, Margaret Dilloway found a copy of a book stashed in a drawer at the family’s San Diego home.

"The American Way of Housekeeping" was, essentially, a handbook created by the wives of American officers for their Japanese housekeepers soon after World War II ended. Written in both English and Japanese, it provided a guide for how to do everything from cooking proper American food and using household appliances to cleaning room to room in a precise sequence.

Dilloway’s mom, Suiko, who was from Kumamoto, Japan, had received the book from her father after they wed. The couple met in Iwakuni when her dad, who grew up in Pennsylvania, was stationed there with the Navy.

"My dad thought the book was for housewives," said Dilloway, 36, a stay-at-home mom who lives in Hawaii Kai with her husband, Keith, and three children.

It turned out that many American men thought that way, too, and bought the handbook for their Japanese war brides.

This stayed with Dilloway for years.

In 1999, while living in Lakewood, Wash., she wrote a one-act play about a Japanese mother and her daughter and their various misunderstandings. It got a staged reading at a festival there, but Dilloway never developed it further.

"But I kept thinking about it," she said.

About five years later, she thought again about that handbook for Japanese housekeepers she had found among her mother’s cookbooks. She was pregnant with her third child and wondered how strange it must have been for her mother to live in an American suburb, how isolated she must have felt.

After several years of rewrites and searching for an agent — not to mention raising three kids and moving to Hawaii — Dilloway found a publisher for her first novel, "How to Be an American Housewife" (Putnam Books, $24.95), based on her strained relationship with her own mom.

The book, which was released last month, tells the story of Shoko, a Japanese woman who married an American GI after World War II. It centers around Shoko’s bittersweet life in San Diego, the trauma of war and her thorny relationship with her daughter, Sue.

Dilloway structured the book around fictitious excerpts from the housewives’ handbook, which offered advice such as not to give babies sharp objects and to say "yes" only when you are certain you understand what your mistress is saying.

"For the first time, I thought of how difficult it must have been for my mother, coming to this country and not knowing a lick of English, to live among people who perhaps thought she had just crawled out of a mud hut where she ate parasite-laden food and picked up infants by their ankles," Dilloway said. "I wondered what inner life my mother had, what her hopes and dreams were, and how I managed to fulfill or fail these."

DILLOWAY WAS 20 and attending Scripps College in California when her mother died due to complications from an enlarged heart. She was 62.

"She had been wasting away for a year," Dilloway recalled. "I was in college and coming home to see her. It was a really hard time."

The author admitted she wasn’t particularly close to her mother, who tended to be hard to her. "We never had the sort of relationship where I could pour out my troubles to her. She wasn’t receptive in that way," Dilloway said.

Having her own children changed how Dilloway perceived her mom, who didn’t live long enough to see her grandchildren. It made her want to understand the woman more — and writing the book was, in a way, part of that therapy.

"I wanted her to live again," she said, "so I wrote about her. I felt, somehow, it was a way to get to know her again."

Dilloway just finished her second novel, "The Cupcake Queen," set in both Hawaii and California. It’s about a cupcake baker who is haunted by her dead husband.

"I actually began working on it before my husband got a job in Hawaii," she said, "so the novel has benefited greatly from my hands-on experience here. It seems like just about everyone I talk to who’s grown up in Hawaii has a few ghost stories to tell, and I wanted to capture that feeling in the book."