An elegantly written, wryly affectionate mashup of Jane Austen and the Japanese immigrant experience. . . . Yamashita’s reimagining of Austen is sympathetic and funny—and as on target as the movie Clueless. ” —Kirkus, starred review
“Karen Tei Yamashita contends with the Western canon in this astute, pitch-perfect, and wryly funny short story collection. . . . A genuine pleasure to read.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Karen Tei Yamashita is one of America’s great unsung geniuses . . . Here she’s mapped a series of stories onto the plots of Jane Austen novels, telling the tales of Japanese immigrants to the United States through the lens of their shared themes: inheritance, marriage, familial heritage. Yamashita is writing some of her finest stories yet.” —Literary Hub
“The range of characters, sparkling humor, connective themes, and creative ambition all showcase Yamashita’s impressive powers.” —Buzzfeed
“A dynamic collection. . . . Yamashita reconsiders canonical works, questions cultural inheritance, and experiments with genre and form.” —The Millions
“Dazzling. An extraordinarily inventive collection of short stories that takes us from Japan to Brazil to the fractured heart of suburban postwar Japanese America. Whether she is riffing on Jane Austen, channeling Jorge Luis Borges, or meditating on Marie Kondo, Yamashita is a brilliant and often subversive storyteller in superb command of her craft.” —Julie Otsuka
“Through vignettes, recipes, and correspondence, master writer Karen Tei Yamashita takes us through the rabbit hole of Japanese America—in particular, her hometown of Gardena, California, where an ethnic community culturally transformed a middle-class bedroom town. Part Ozu meditation of everyday life, part modern folk tale with colorful characters like a truth-telling dental hygienist, Sansei and Sensibility offers a unique and necessary perspective of what it means to be the aging grandchild of Asian immigrants, wondering what you will leave behind for the next generation. As in all of her books, Yamashita deconstructs form and genre to create a work that both delights and challenges&rdquo —Naomi Hirahara, Edgar Award-winning author of Snakeskin Shamisen and Hiroshima Boy
“This capacious collection is witty, sharp—funny at times, angry at times—always amazing, and never, never dull. I think Jane Austen would be surprised, but delighted. I surely am.” —Karen Joy Fowler
Praise for Karen Tei Yamashita
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
“This powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is irresistibly evocative and overwhelming in every sense.&rdquo — Publishers Weekly
“Immensely entertaining.&rdquo — Newsday
&ldquoShaped and voiced with literary flair, this is clearly a book Yamashita felt compelled to write, and her sense of purpose makes this historical excavation feel deeply personal.&rdquo — Kirkus
“Yamashita incorporates satire and the surreal in prose that is playful yet knowing, fierce yet mournful.&rdquo — San Francisco Chronicle
★ 2020-03-02
An elegantly written, wryly affectionate mashup of Jane Austen and the Japanese immigrant experience.
Yamashita, author of the brilliant experimental novel I Hotel (2010), here delivers a book of stories in many voices. The first set is told, usually matter-of-factly, by sansei, third-generation Japanese Americans who often have only tenuous connections with the mother country. In the first, a sansei visits Kyoto, “cold with a barren sense of an old winter,” and there becomes part of a story within a story that revolves around bathing—but with many twists and turns, involving people made slow by old age, captured by terrorists, and lashed by typhoons, and all in the space of 17 pages. The closing line is a droll, note-perfect commentary on what has happened before. A more straightforward story, punctuated by haunting photographs from the early years of the last century, turns on certain differences between the descendants of Japanese immigrants to the U.S. and to Brazil (“What was a sansei? I was a figment of their imaginations”) but closes with the gently perceptive reminder that while it is winter where the narrator lives, north of the Equator, it is summer to the south. The second set of stories brings Jane Austen into the picture, she serving as the putative author of a book of stories whose characters “represent the minutiae of sansei life as it once existed in a small provincial island in an armpit of postwar sunshine.” Those stories share the once-upon-a-time incantation “mukashi, mukashi,” but they’re altogether modern, with Regency carriages giving way to gold Mercedes sedans and Fitzwilliam Darcy taking the form of one Darcy Kabuto II, football hero, class vice president, and best-looking member of his class, “which meant he looked like he was the son of Toshiro Mifune.” Yamashita’s reimagining of Austen is sympathetic and funny—and as on target as the movie Clueless.
A humane vision of people and their stories traveling, learning, sometimes suffering, and always changing.
