Shift of Scene

This essay gives account of Yamashita’s selected performance scripts gathered in Anime Wong and their bearing upon Asian American life. It gives due recognition to the role of fantasy, dada-ism, role-play. There is also emphasis upon the stagecraft involved, the pantomimic and kabuki sets, and the interactive use of dialogue, mask, costume, video, music and tableau.

Environment, Justice, Aesthetics

This essay compares the turns and costs of latter-day consumer appetite whether the Amazon as rainforest or cattle as prime foodway and as expressed in novels by Karen Tei Yamashita and Ruth Ozeki. The one, on the essay’s argument, turns upon Yamashita’s treatment of the Brazil rainforest as ecological fact-fantasy, the other on Ozeki’s pastiche of US media advertising. Both, for Adams, are to be compared as writers who bring a wariest satiric eye to how the earth’s resources risk fatal endangerment.

“Dancing with Goblins in Plastic Jungles”

Yamashita’s longstanding interest in the biosphere and environmentalism comes under scrutiny in this essay, especially as manifested Through the Arc of the Rainforest. The novel’s magic-realist vision of the depredations into the Amazon as one of the earth’s necessary lungs by corporate self-interest is linked to a long hinterland of interest in environmentalism – from Emerson to Rachel Carson. The essay explores Yamashita’s play of plastic and bacterial imagery within her narrative.

Karen Tei Yamashita and the Cultivation of Cosmopolitan Virtue

This chapter addresses the transnational/cosmopolitan thrust of Yamashita’s writings. While fully acknowledging Yamashita’s Japanese American heritage the author shows how each narrative goes beyond identity politics into how migrant life and history creates hybrid human tapestries and demographies. This is to insist upon how in her writings the local indeed becomes the global.

Introduction

The Introduction offers a succinct profile of Karen Tei Yamashita as author. Her biography, main publications, and general standing in contemporary American literature are all indicated. There follows annotation of the essays at hand, her autobiographical essay “Reimagining Traveling Bodies” and an interview as to how Yamashita envisages her main themes and craft.

Reimagining Traveling Bodies

This is the reworking of a lecture given at Aoyama Gakuin University in 2013 and offers a timeline for Yamashita’s life and travels in the USA, Brazil and Japan. She explores her bow into authorship and the histories, sites and languages that have shaped not only her ethnic but literary-creative formation.

House of Memory

This essay explores how Yamashita so fashions the ten hotel-novellas in her largest work, I Hotel, as to mirror the many-roomed historic San Francisco original with its old-time Filipino and Japanese worker population and whose demolition became a prime focus for the birth of 1960s Asian American radicalism. The hotel serves as both fact and image for the memory of a history from the 1882 Immigration Act to Order 9066 and wartime internment, and from West Coast labor history to US Asian student radicalism in the era of the Vietnam War. The one reflexively is carried in the other, text and history.

Narratives of Dislocation in the Novels of Karen Tei Yamashita, Joy Kogawa, and Julie Otsuka

This essay aligns three genealogical “Japanese” narratives. Wong first addresses Yamashita’s novels of migrant Brazil and residential California. Analysis follows of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan with its portrait of World War II internment in British Columbia. Julie Otsuka’s When The Emperor Was Divine is considered for its portrait of Topaz Camp, Utah, and The Buddha in the Attic as the story of Japanese picture brides. Each is compared with the other, subject and narrative technique.

Speaking Craft

This interview, conducted especially for the collection, falls into a sequence of themes. It begins from Yamashita’s starting out as a writer and, given the extensive travels and the obligations of family, her negotiation of a functioning work-life balance. Discussion turns to the process of composition of each of the novels as well as Anime Wong. She addresses the influence of popular as well as high literary culture in her writing and her career as a Professor of Literature and Writing at the University of California Santa Cruz.

(Re)Production Cycles

Ragain subjects the image and text collage of Circle K Cycles to a materialist-historical reading. He sees the store chain as Yamashita’s image of how Japan at large has commodified its own image – taken up with consumption, economic profit, and a transnational capitalism stretching from Tokyo to Brazil. He suggests the novel shows a Japan, in its consumerism, package overkill and proliferation of knick-knacks, more taken up with buying and selling itself than developing a more enduring cultural creativity.