Sansei and Sensibility
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Generations of Japanese Americans merge with Jane Austen’s characters in these lively stories, pairing uniquely American histories with reimagined classics.
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 wit and humor.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yamashita (I Hotel) returns with a career-spanning collection of stories originally published between 1975 2019, each of which is in dialogue with the work of Jane Austen. The stories are mostly set in California's third-generation Japanese Sansei community. "Bombay Gin" is the comic, emotionally charged narrative of a woman locked in her dead aunt's house who takes inventory of the kitchen, then cooks her aunt's recipes with expired food. "The Bath" is a moving look at twin girls' bathing rituals with their family. About half of the stories are micro Jane Austen pastiches the Emma homage "Emi," and "Giri & Gaman," which references Pride and Prejudice, are standouts. "Omaki-San" is the high point, an epistolary sequence inspired by Lady Susan, with letters between family members and friends who live in Japan and the U.S., revealing the thrilling postwar story of a young Japanese woman and her American soldier husband. The collection is rounded off by an amusing inventory of Sansei recipes (instructions for KT's Crab Miso Bake with Egg: "Offer to guests to test their Asian quotient") and a timeline of Japanese-American life in America. The range of characters, sparkling humor, connective themes, and creative ambition all showcase Yamashita's impressive powers.
