Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei

by David Mura

Overview

Award-winning poet David Mura's critically acclaimed memoir Turning Japanese chronicles how a year in Japan transformed his sense of self and pulled into sharp focus his complicated inheritance. Mura is a sansei, a third-generation Japanese-American who grew up on baseball and hot dogs in a Chicago suburb, where he heard more Yiddish than Japanese. Turning Japanese chronicles his quest for identity with honesty, intelligence, and poetic vision and it stands as a classic meditation on difference and assimilation and is a valuable window onto a country that has long fascinated our own. Turning Japanese was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of an Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Book Award. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802142399
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	11/30/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

An American poet of Japanese descent, Mura first went to Japan in 1984, to live in Tokyo for a year with his wife. He learned Japanese, studied Noh and Butoh dance, traveled and found himself receptive to aspects of a culture that many Americans have found off-putting. A record of his observations, this volume is imbued with a youthful, exploratory tone that takes on greater seriousness as Mura realizes that in the U.S. he had labored under a subtle discrimination. Amid ``thousands of faces that look like mine'' he discovers a sudden, heady sense of belonging. Yet ultimately this is his working-through of what it means to be an Asian who feels more at home in America than in his ancestral country (``too rule-oriented, too polite, too circumscribed''). Mura's effort is not without flaws--the dialogue can be awkward and the book, at 370 pages, would have profited from tightening. But it seems an honest account, and is at all times interesting. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly