Stories and essays by Karen Tei Yamashita
April 1, 2001 • 7 x 9 • 220 pages • 978-1-56689-108-0
With skill, imagination, and wit, Yamashita defines an emerging challenge of twenty-first century global society.
When second-generation Japanese Brazilians emigrate to Japan to assume the manual work its citizens no longer want, their need for cultural belonging, along with their homesickness for the food, culture, and language they left behind is exacerbated by Japan’s reverence for all things “purely Japanese.” This stunning book of hybrids merges fiction, essay, and pop culture collage to illustrate a global society that resists heritage-by-hyphenation and opens the door onto important issues of the new century; labor, nationalism, and cultural assimilation.
In the short stories, we meet Miss Hamamatsu ’96—a Euro-Asian beauty who covets the Miss Nikkei pageant crown, conwoman Marie Madalena and her ad scams and phone sex business, Zé Marias as he is embroiled in a debacle with a sinister employment agency, and other unique characters who are somehow enmeshed in a Japanese Brazilian employment scam and its unsolved, deadly outcome. Interspersed within these tales are Yamashita’s personal essays that detail the Asian American author’s travels to Japan with her Brazilian husband and family—a time spent straddling the fence between boisterous Brazilian customs and the conservative Japanese tradition.
About the Author
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Letters to Memory, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, and Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She has been a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellow and co-holder of the University of California Presidential Chair for Feminist & Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. She is currently Professor Emeritus of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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