Karen Tei Yamashita

In February 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the secretary of war to remove 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and corral them into inland concentration camps. To be considered for release, they were required to answer the so-called loyalty questionnaire. Question 27 asked the inmates--who had been imprisoned without cause by the US military--whether they were willing to serve in combat for the US military. Question 28 asked them--many of whom American citizens who had never visited Japan--to renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Answering these questions caused volatile divisions within the camps, tore families and friends apart, and had lasting repercussions in the decades postwar. Questions 27 & 28 reaches backward and forward from the time of the questionnaire, chronicling the individuals who arrived in the US from Japan at the turn of the century, their children who came of age during war and incarceration, and their descendants who lived in its aftermath. Yamashita mixes fact with fiction and layers genres from James Bond movies to haiku to oral history, transfiguring an enormity of archival research into a chorus of stories. With her signature wit and aplomb, she gives voice to laborers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists who, over three generations, defined an immigrant community.

A young Japanese woman leaves the only home she's ever known for married life in nineteenth-century Ohio in a delightful and charming memoir about learning your own strengths and finding your way between two cultures. Born into a high-ranking samurai family at the onset of the Meiji period, Etsu Sugimoto is originally destined to be a Buddhist priestess. She grows up as a curly-haired tomboy in Echigo, a beloved daughter of a traditional family, certain of her future role in her community. But her life changes when, as a young teenager, she is instead engaged to a Japanese merchant in Cincinnati. As a result, Etsu undertakes a new education--one focused on learning English as well as the traditional duties and ways of a Japanese wife, knowing that she will have to leave the only world she has ever known for life in the United States. Keenly intelligent and observant, Etsu arrives in Ohio as a bright-eyed twenty-six-year-old, puzzled by the differences between the two cultures and alive to the contradictions, ironies, and beauties of both. Her memoir, reprinted for the first time in decades, is a tribute to the struggles of the first generation of Japanese immigrants and the unforgettable story of a strong and determined woman.

In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance—familial, cultural, emotional, artistic—really means. In a California of the sixties and seventies, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L. A., bake sales replace ballroom dances, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with and humor.

Dazzling and ambitious, this multivoiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco near the end of the 1960s. As Karen Tei Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies, and personal turmoil. The tenth anniversary edition of this National Book Award finalist brings the joys and struggles of the I Hotel to a whole new generation of readers, historians, and activists.

"Fiercely satirical. . . . Yamashita presents [an] intricate plot with mordant wit." ? New York Times Book Review "A stunner. . . . An exquisite mystery novel. But this is a novel of dystopia and apocalypse; the mystery concerns the tragic flaws of human nature." ? Library Journal (starred review) "Brilliant. . . . An ingenious interpretation of social woes." ? Booklist (starred review) "Yamashita handles her eccentrics and the setting of their adventures with panache. David Foster Wallace meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez." ? Publishers Weekly Irreverently juggling magical realism, film noir, hip hop, and chicanismo, Tropic of Orange takes place in a Los Angeles where the homeless, gangsters, infant organ entrepreneurs, and Hollywood collide on a stretch of the Harbor Freeway. Hemmed in by wildfires, it's a symphony conducted from an overpass, grandiose, comic, and as diverse as the city itself. Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of 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.

"Fluid and poetic as well as terrifying." ? New York Times Book Review "Dazzling . . . a seamless mixture of magic realism, satire and futuristic fiction." ? San Francisco Chronicle "Impressive . . . a flight of fancy through a dreamlike Brazil." ? Village Voice "Surreal and misty, sweeping from one high-voltage scene to another." ? LA Weekly "Amuses and frightens at the same time." ? Newsday "Incisive and funny, this book yanks our chains and makes us see the absurdity that rules our world." ? Booklist (starred review) "Expansive and ambitious . . . incredible and complicated." ? Library Journal "This satiric morality play about the destruction of the Amazon rain forest unfolds with a diversity and fecundity equal to its setting. . . . Yamashita seems to have thrown into the pot everything she knows and most that she can imagine?all to good effect." ? Publishers Weekly A Japanese man with a ball floating six inches in front of his head, an American CEO with three arms, and a Brazilian peasant who discovers the art of healing by tickling one's earlobe, rise to the heights of wealth and fame, before arriving at disasters?both personal and ecological?that destroy the rain forest and all the birds of Brazil. Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of 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.

Praise for Karen Tei Yamashita:"It's a stylistically wild ride, but it's smart, funny and entrancing." ? NPR"Fluid and poetic as well as terrifying." ? New York Times Book ReviewWith delightful plays of voice and structure, this is literary fiction at an adventurous, experimental high point." ? Kirkus"Magnificent. . . . Intriguing." ? Library Journal"This powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is irresistibly evocative." ? Publishers Weekly (starred review)Scintillations is an excursion through the Japanese internment using archival materials from the Yamashita family as well as a series of epistolary conversations with composite characters representing a range of academic specialties. Historians, anthropologists, classicists?their disciplines, and Yamashita's engagement with them, are a way for her explore various aspects of the internment and to expand its meaning beyond her family, and our borders, to ideas of debt, forgiveness, civil rights, Orientalism, and community. Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of 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.

"Immensely entertaining." ? Newsday"Poignant and remarkable." ? Philadelphia Inquirer"Warm, compassionate, engaging, and thought-provoking." ? Washington Post"With a subtle ominousness, Yamashita sets up her hopeful, prideful characters?and, in the process, the entire genre of pioneer lit?for a fall." ? Village Voice"A splendid multi-generational novel . . . rich in history and character." ? San Francisco ChronicleParticularly insightful." ? Library Journal"Informative and timely." ? Kirkus"Yamashita's heightened sense of passion and absurdity, and respect for inevitability and personality, infuse this engrossing multigenerational immigrant saga with energy, affection, and humor." ? Booklist"This enriching novel introduces Western readers to an unusual cultural experiment, and makes vivid a crucial chapter in Japanese assimilation into the West." ? Publishers Weekly The story of an idealistic band of Japanese immigrants, who arrive in Brazil in 1925 to carve a utopia out of the jungle. The dream of creating a new world, the cost of idealism, the symbiotic tie between a people and the land they settle, and the changes demanded by a new generation, all collide in this multigenerational saga. Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of 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.

Anime Wong is a memory book of performances, most of which were produced collaboratively, reflecting questions of gender, identity, Orientalism, and racial politics. Yamashita's theatrical work is fiction interpreted by the body in real time; these kinetic encounters, complete with giant foam-rubber sushi and cyborg kung fu fighters, create a space for humor, interaction, and epiphany. Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of five novels, including I Hotel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was awarded the California Book Award and the American Book Award.

"Yamashita is so tuned into now, she can see tomorrow."--Booklist on Tropic of Orange, starred review "Through the Arc of the Rainforest progresses toward an apocalyptic resolution that spreads out like a Bosch triptych reproduced by Gauguin. In this, her first novel, Ms. Yamashita presents a critique of human waste and stupidity that is fluid and poetic as well as terrifying."--The New York Times Book ReviewYamashita's innovative melding of fiction and essay explores issues such as labor, nationalism, and cultural diaspora. When the grandchildren of Japanese immigrants to Brazil move to Japan to assume the manual work native Japanese people no longer want, their need for cultural belonging, their homesickness for details of their birthplace, clash with the status quo. This book of hybrids--merging collage with text, story with history--opens a door onto one of the important issues of the new century. Yamashita has a powerful story to tell about a community that is globally extensive and the freedom--physical and emotional--implied by that new geography. Karen Tei Yamashita is a winner of the American Book Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Award. She is an assistant professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California in Santa Cruz.