Sansei and Sensibility

Starred review from March 30, 2020
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.

Starred review from March 15, 2020
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.

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