University of Hawai'i Press

Chapter Title: Introduction

Chapter Author(s): A. Robert Lee

Book Title: Karen Tei Yamashita

Book Subtitle: Fictions of Magic and Memory
Book Editor(s): A. Robert Lee
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press. (2018)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvvn076.4

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Karen Tei Yamashita

This content downloaded from 169.231.44.170 on Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:46:27 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Introduction

•
A. Robert Lee

If . . . I live to be ninety-six, I could maybe be the last sansei. . . .

House me in any museum that’s a swooping architectural
extravaganza, preferably with water and glass and spectacular
views and heights, and surround me with sycophantic handlers
who invent exotic cocktails and precious gourmet fusion tapas;
wash my body and hair in lavender oils; perform the nostalgic
and the rude in arts and music.
—Karen Tei Yamashita, “Call Me Ishimaru”1

In so ending her address to the International Melville Conference at Keio

University, Tokyo, in June 2015, Karen Tei Yamashita operated in custom-
ary stride. Little wonder. Her own authorship itself rarely has been other
than “architectural extravaganza,” given to “spectacular views and
heights,” nothing if not “gourmet fusion.” The immediate occasion may
well have been Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick, whose story of Ish-
mael as much reknots as unknots as the world-ship Pequod hunts for the
global white whale through oceans both womb and storm. But the lecture
also calls attention to Yamashita’s own expansive reaches of imagination.
The summoning of place and time from Japanese America to Japanese
Japan, from Los Angeles to São Paulo, has rarely been less than striking. It
would be remiss to doubt the ongoing dare, the inventive appetite, of all
her writings. Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory, the first-
ever collection of essays about her, seeks to open new interpretative path-
ways into her literary achievement.2
To say of Yamashita that she is Japanese American, sansei or third
generation, born in 1951 in Oakland, raised in Los Angeles, and with a BA
in English and Japanese literature (Phi Beta Kappa) from Carleton Col-
lege, Minnesota, in 1973, gives us a point of departure. Further biography
requires mention of the Watson Fellowship that first took her to Brazil in
1974, where she stayed for almost a decade studying Japanese ­immigration

This content downloaded from 169.231.44.170 on Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:46:27 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
2 Introduction

and community settlement, of marriage to the architect Ronaldo Lopes de

Oliveira, motherhood of two children, and frequent sojourns in Japan, no-
tably as a visiting scholar at Meiji University in 2006. The same holds for
the ongoing professorship in literature and creative writing she has held
at the University of California, Santa Cruz, since 1996, together with the
plethora of lectures and seminars given in and beyond the United States.
Yamashita’s family legacy of transpacific journey finds its succession
in the urban California of her upbringing, residences in the Brazil of both
metropole and rain forest, and her frequent academic visits to Japan to at-
tend conferences, take up semester-long residences, and offer keynote
talks and readings. The fact, too, that she was early in involving herself in
the continuance of 1960s ethnic-political radicalism, whether Vietnam
War protest, Berkeley-style activism, or antiracism movements, adds to
the sense of a career as politically aware and engaged as it has been liter-
arily creative. She has long aligned herself, as both observer and partici-
pant, in calls for human rights (especially those involving migration), a
correct balance of ecology spanning the Amazon Basin to the world’s cit-
ies, full participatory multicultural feminism, and the historic redress due
to all indigenous populations.
It is within this profile that Yamashita’s writing career made its bow
with Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), a stunning debut in novel
writing that, early on, and sometimes to her consternation, positioned her
as one of any number of compositional identities: magic realist, historical
novelist, telenovela writer, ecologist, feminist, doyenne of the t­ ransnational
turn, planetary fabulist.3 Her virtuoso dexterity in availing herself of
these styles of narration, not to mention poetry and graphic art, equally
marks out the work that has followed: Brazil-Maru (1992), Tropic of Orange
(1997), Circle K Cycles (2001), I Hotel (2010), and the collected pieces that
make up Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance (2014). Her book and journal
short pieces, anthology work, many panel appearances and videos, the
online contributions to the Japan-based Cafe Creole: Journals and Travel-
ogues, and her various roles in the theater stagings of her work, all further
add to the sense of a writer willing to avail herself of whatever expressive
forms best give body to her interests. Plaudits have been frequent, from
the James Clavell and Amerasia Journal awards in the 1970s for her short
stories, to the American Book Award in 2011 for I Hotel.
Given the different directions in Yamashita’s choices of “Asian” sub-
jects and the highly various fashioning that attaches to them, the need to
resist categorization persists. Three converging perspectives help under-
line the point. In Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Ya-
mashita’s Transnational Novels (2012), the only full-length study of her work

This content downloaded from 169.231.44.170 on Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:46:27 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Introduction 3

to date, Jinqi Ling is wholly right to insist upon her contribution to “the
reshaping of the Asian American literary imagination during the past
two decades” and, in not the least of respects, her resolve to place the dif-
ferent Asian Americas within an encompassing wider berth.4 Likewise,
Helena Grice speaks of “politically charged books,” “wide-ranging
themes,” a writer at once heritage-specific but given in life, as in imagina-
tion, to global range.5 It is for this reason, too, that Kandice Chuh calls for
situating Yamashita’s oeuvre circumnavigationally across a crosshatch of
hemispheres and their peoples, whether the Asia of Japan; the American
Pacific Rim, with Los Angeles as a prime hub; the Latin-indigenous
Americas to the south; or diasporic Africa from the Antilles to Oakland.
“Cultural hybridization,” Chuh writes, “intersectionality, and most of all
change—in place, identity, and worldview—dominate in Yamashita’s lit-
erary world.”6
The concern to map changing modern boundaries, cartographic and
ideological, demographic and cultural, has been key throughout the writ-
ings. To be sure, Yamashita is far from the only literary modern to recog-
nize, and excavate, the dynamics involved. How not to acknowledge
emergent postcolonial Africa in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958),
or Independence India in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981)?
Would not a shared roster include the multigenerational latinidad of Ga-
briel García Márquez’ Cien años de soledad (1967), the China-to-London
transformations of Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet (1982), the Filipino-US mir-
ror histories of Home and Away in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990), or
the Pan-American fault lines of indigeneity and the hegemonic explored
in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991)? Rare, not to say stir-
ring, literary company this may be. But Yamashita’s writing inhabits any
number of intersections, whether postcolonial, magical, diasporic, or
hemispheric. For that reason she has never been lodged exclusively as a
Japanese American writer. The present collection speaks, precisely, to her
range of vision, as of genre.
Two kinds of overview set up latitudes and longitudes. In his tour
d’horizon Cyrus R. K. Patell addresses the cosmopolitan gradient in Ya-
mashita or, to adopt a term taken from the cultural studies critic Ray-
mond Williams and with an implicit nod to Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts:
On Asian American Cultural Politics (1996), the “emergent” (as against “re-
sidual” in the broad sense of “canonical”) dimension of her fiction.7 He
shows how her texts step beyond identity politics or standard binaries of
center and periphery. Migrant flows and contra-flows, unborderings and
interethnicities, the burgeoning of hybrid demographics across ocean and
continent, all serve as touchstones. Working through Yamashita’s ­different

This content downloaded from 169.231.44.170 on Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:46:27 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
4 Introduction

narratives, Patell thus takes full cognizance of her rootedness in Japanese

and Japanese American history, but also of her resistance to any one ho-
mogeneous menu of legacy. Through the Arc of the Rain Forest can be
thought “speculative” rather than dutifully Asian American or even neo-
Brazilian text. Circle K Cycles deploys its word-and-image collage as much
to counter the ethnographic purity she encountered on first reaching Ja-
pan as to subvert literary purity of genre. I Hotel Patell sees as an epic
story-mural of none other than “cosmopolitan conversations.” Yamashita,
in other words, indeed writes globally, a challengingly larger kind of
“ethnic” fiction.
Karen Tei Yamashita, Joy Kogawa, Julie Otsuka—each a seminal au-
thor in Cynthia F. Wong’s purview—invite comparison for their styles of
single and multiple voice in depicting Japanese generational experience,
whether in America, Canada, or Brazil. Wong emphasizes the ways in
which dislocation, and its remedying but not forgetting, operates across
their fictions. The span is considerable, be it Yamashita’s meta-narratives
of the Americas and Japan, Kogawa’s signal memoir-chronicle of family
internment in Slocan, British Columbia, in Obasan (1981), or Otsuka’s sto-
rytelling of the Topaz, Utah, camp in When the Emperor Was Divine (2002)
and of Japanese picture brides in The Buddha in the Attic (2011). In their
voice effects—variously reflexive, memorial, fact-fictional as Wong finds
them—a wholly distinctive “Japanese” spectrum is to be met with and
celebrated.
Guarding the biosphere against the appetites and ravage of market
consumerism can have found few more defiant plotlines than Through the
Arc of the Rain Forest. The Japan-in-Brazil story it unfolds—Borgesian, fan-
tastical, assuredly environmentalist, a flag against “miraculous” com-
modity and its manipulations—gave an early marker of Yamashita’s read-
iness to try for new circuits of story. Whether Kazumasa Ishimaru’s
speaking ball, the plastic Matacão that heralds destruction of the Amazon
rain forest cyclically itself to be destroyed by bacteria, or the dense plait of
motifs involving feather cults, bird specicide, three-armed entrepreneurs,
and rainbows as preternatural curtains, no reader could be in doubt of
the book’s fertility in confronting “the darkly magical cycles of profit, re-
allocation, and renewed competition,” as J. Edward Mallot calls it in his
account of the novel.8
John Gamber’s reading of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, if environ-
mentalist, at the same time takes assiduously historicist bearings. What
images of nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson to Rachel Carson, lie behind and
within Yamashita’s vision of Brazil as symptomatically threatened ecol-
ogy? How does the magic-ball journey of Kazumasa Ishimaru, Japanese

This content downloaded from 169.231.44.170 on Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:46:27 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Introduction 5

rail engineer Ishmael, and his exposure to the plasticization of the ecosys-
tem to be exploited by the likes of Jonathan B. Tweep’s corporation, open
into the larger menace of world pollution? In this respect Gamber exam-
ines the trope of the dead birds, avian destruction and its reversal, for
how it throws light on the forging of a possible new balance between na-
ture and civilization. Bella Adams pursues a connecting thread. She ap-
proaches Through the Arc of the Rain Forest and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of
Meats as comparative treatments of consumer appetite, be it exploitation
of Amazonian and related natural resources or cattle as prime food
source. In both novels, she argues, the presentation of “family” is cen-
tral—Japanese Brazilian in the face of ecological disaster in the one,
­TV-idealized American in the other. Yamashita’s fact-fantasy parable or
Ozeki’s media pastiche—whether given over to the fabling of talismanic
forest or to lavishly advertised beefsteak, the two texts can be seen to
share timeliest environmental forebodings.
None of this is to underplay Yamashita’s dark laughter, the sly wit that
thickens the grain of her writing. In his account of Through the Arc of the
Rain Forest and Brazil-Maru, Chris LaLonde takes up her too often under-
remarked irony, the comic torque. In the former novel he so identifies the
purposive whimsy in the self-talking by the ball, the absurdist gain and
distribution of wealth on the part of Kazumasa Ishimaru, the preposter-
ous Chicolandia theme park, and the snippets of aphorism and wit sent
out by the eventual super-affluent pigeon carer Batista Aparecida Djapan.
In the latter, LaLonde deconstructs Ichiro Terada’s being caught out sexu-
ally in the chicken shack and, of greater import, the resigned humor of
Ichiro’s bathtub discussion with Saburo as to the duplicitous role of Kan-
taro Uno, Esperança ascetic leader yet São Paulo playboy. The conversa-
tion foreshadows, with almost sardonic relish, the built-in likelihood of a
catastrophic end to the intended idealist Nikkei-Brazil settlement. Ya-
mashita’s ironies, throughout both texts, run comically but ever to serious
good purpose.
If Brazil-Maru, Japanese migrant history in the Americas, looks to a
presiding spirit it assuredly has to be Rousseau, Enlightenment luminary,
philosopher of citizenship and education. Whether Du Contrat Social
(1854) or Émile, ou De l’éducation (1761), the footfalls are many and meticu-
lously taken up by Nicholas Birns in his account of the novel. He exam-
ines the Rousseauism behind the creation of Esperança as utopian com-
munity, the witnessing of its history by the Émile figure, Ichiro Terada, by
the enduring wife-mother Haru, by the charismatic but Iscariot colony
leader Kantaro Uno, by Kantaro’s largely uncomprehending nephew
Genji Bafu, and by the disenchanted epilogist to Japanese Brazilian

This content downloaded from 169.231.44.170 on Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:46:27 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
6 Introduction

­ nemployment and lost tribes, Guilherme. The shadow of Rousseau in

u
the novel, with acknowledgment of the influence of Melville’s Ahab and
the fate of the Pequod, argues for fuller recognition of the novel’s philo-
sophical as well as narrative forte.
In the case of Tropic of Orange, a novel whose vision of Los Angeles as
transnational interzone and living film noir, at once multiethnic and mu-
tually contingent, it might be thought wholly apposite to bring chaos the-
ory to bear. Ruth Hsu posits such as a way of understanding Yamashita’s
third novel, which, aptly, Elizabeth Mermann-Jozwiak has described as
“a postmodern, multi-voiced, fragmented, and hybrid text whose hyper-
bolic plot defies order, stability, and homogeneity.”9 For Hsu, the seven
principal voices—from Manzanar as Gómez-Peña-like magus who musi-
cally conducts the Freeway to the sixth-generation Japanese American
teenage adventurer Emi Yamane—are to be seen as caught in a colliding
speed-circuit of gender, class, wealth or its lack, as much as race. The giant
equatorial orange that moves north and the figuring of the Harbor Free-
way as symptomatic traffic and standstill bespeak changing demographic
latitudes, the shift of previous boundaries. Chaos theory as it applies to
the novel, Hsu suggests, helps to understand, and locate, the multiple di-
rections at hand.
Circle K Cycles, Yamashita’s collagist, image-and-text composition, in-
vites from Nathan Ragain quite another kind of pathway, one that is
materialist-historical, centered in how the alimentary commodities (es-
pecially totemic rice) sold by the store chain find their larger mirror in
the commodification of Japanese identity, both within the homeland
and under Nikkei auspices in Brazil. Recognizing the work as variously
field study, visitor diary, English-Japanese-Portuguese language com-
pendium and sparkling pop culture and media exhibit, he examines its
shared concerns with economic production and consumption within
transnational capitalism and their relation to Nihonjinron, or Japanese-
ness. The case on offer is of how Japanese identity across both geogra-
phies, state-national, dekasegi or Brazilian Japanese in Japan, and Japa-
nese in Brazil, has labored (so to speak) to sell itself both to and
be­yond itself.
With I Hotel Yamashita entered the epic literary stakes, her Odyssean
narrative a huge memory fiction of the West Coast 1960s, with its birth of
Asian American radicalism and for which the eviction of old-time Fili-
pino and other Asian workers from San Francisco’s International Hotel
served as gathering point. My account seeks to confront how the novel’s
ten constituent hotel-novellas build into remembrance, a mosaical history,
of “now.” How does Yamashita fashion the dense memorial web of labor

This content downloaded from 169.231.44.170 on Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:46:27 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Introduction 7

and student activism, place, and ideology? That implicates the text in the
rise of a politically charged Asianness with ties both to the Asia of Mao
and postwar Japan and to a domestic American history that embraces the
1882 and 1924 Immigration/Alien Acts, Angel Island detention, and Ex-
ecutive Order 9066 and the phobia that led to the Manzanar, Topaz, and
the other Japanese American internment camps. Focus is given to the
manner in which parts, the complex threads of fact and fiction, are made
to weave into a dual narrative whole.
The concluding pieces bring Yamashita herself even more directly into
view. The reviewing I offer of Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance is meant
to recognize the virtuosity of her theater work, contemporary Asian Amer-
ica made subject to an audacious mix of history and fantasy, stagecraft,
and costume. “Re-imagining Traveling Bodies—Bridging the Future/
Past,” the reworking of Yamashita’s lecture given at Aoyama Gakuin in
2013, offers a personal itinerary into Japan as both place and timeline. She
explores, from her own sansei life experience in the United States, Brazil,
and Japan, the many cultural intermediations of dynasty and migration, a
historical bandwidth that can span Japanese “I, Kitty” pop culture, the
haunt of Japanese American internment during World War II, and latest
California. These, each bound into issues of identity, transnationalism,
and the environment, resurface in the collection’s interview. The emphasis
falls again on the craft brought to bear in the shaping of these concerns. In
each and all of these respects, and as the contributions to Karen Tei Ya-
mashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory readily affirm, there can be little
doubt that we are in the presence of a major contemporary writer.

NOTES
1. Karen Tei Yamashita, “Call me Ishimaru,” keynote speech, The Melville Society of
Japan, 10th International Melville Conference, June 2015.
2. For a useful overview of recent Yamashita scholarship, see Pamela Thoma, “Travel-
ing the Distances of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Fiction: A Review Essay on Yamashita Scholar-
ship and Transnational Studies,” Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies 1
(2010): 6–15.
3. Min Hyoung Song, in arguing on the basis of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest for a
version of Yamashita as “planetary” writer, for good reason cites an interview with Mi-
chael S. Murashiga in King-Kok Cheung, ed., Words Matter: Conversations with Asian Ameri-
can Writers (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), 557. “ It wasn’t Asian American
feminist literature; it wasn’t magic realism. It wasn’t science fiction. . . . That was and still is
my problem.” See Min Hyoung Song, “Becoming Planetary,” American Literary History 23.3
(Fall 2011): 555–573.
4. Jinqi Ling, Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Transna-
tional Novels (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), xi.

This content downloaded from 169.231.44.170 on Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:46:27 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
8 Introduction

5. Helena Grice, “Karen Tei Yamashita,” in Deborah L. Madsen, Dictionary of Literary

Biography, 312: Asian American Writers (Farmington Hills, MI: Thompson Gale, 2005), 338.
6. Kandice Chuh, “Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres: Navigating Karen Tei Yamashi-
ta’s Literary World,” American Literary History 18.3 (Fall 2006): 622.
7. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1996). Patell’s fuller study of “emergence” as a term to meet the augmenta-
tion of America’s multicultural literary order is to be found in Emergent U.S. Literatures:
From Multiculturalism to Cosmopolitanism in the Late Twentieth Century (New York: New York
University Press, 2014).
8. J. Edward Mallot, “Signs Taken for Wonders, Wonders Taken for Dollar Signs: Karen
Tei Yamashita and the Commodification of Miracle,” Ariel 35.3–4 (2004): 136.
9. Elizabeth Mermann-Jozwiak, “Yamashita’s Post-National Spaces: It All Comes To-
gether in Los Angeles,” Canadian Review of American Studies 41.1 (2011): 1.

WORKS CITED
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958.
García Márquez, Gabriel. Cien años de soledad (1967). Translated by Gregory Rabassa as One
Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Hagedorn, Jessica. Dogeaters. New York: Random House, 1990.
Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Boston: David R. Godine, 1981.
Ling, Jinqi. Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Novels. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1996.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851.
Mo, Timothy. Sour Sweet. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990.
Otsuka, Julie. The Buddha in the Attic. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
——— . When the Emperor Was Divine. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2002.
Ozeki, Ruth. My Year of Meats. New York: Viking, 1998.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Yamashita, Karen. Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House
Press, 2014.
——— . Brazil-Maru. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1992.
——— . Circle K Cycles. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2001.
——— . I Hotel. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2010.
——— . Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1990.
——— . Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1997.

This content downloaded from 169.231.44.170 on Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:46:27 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms