Karen Tei Yamashita's Books

Karen Tei Yamashita

Fictions of Magic and Memory

By: A. Robert Lee

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Karen Tei Yamashita

Fictions of Magic and Memory

By: A. Robert Lee

Karen Tei Yamashita’s novels, essays, and performance scripts have garnered considerable praise from scholars and reviewers, and are taught not only in the United States but in at least half a dozen countries in Asia, South America, and Europe. Her work has been written about in numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory is the first anthology given over to Yamashita’s writing. It contains newly commissioned essays by established, international scholars; a recent interview with the author; a semiautobiographical keynote address delivered at an international conference that ruminates on her Japanese American heritage; and a full bibliography. The essays offer fresh and in-depth readings of the magic realist canvas of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990); the Japanese emigrant portraiture of Brazil-Maru (1992); Los Angeles as rambunctious geopolitical and transnational fulcrum of the Americas in Tropic of Orange (1997); the fraught relationship of Japanese and Brazilian heritage and labor in Circle K Cycles (2001); Asian American history and politics of the 1960s in I Hotel (2010); and Anime Wong (2014), a gallery of performativity illustrating the contested and inextricable nature of East and West. This essay-collection explores Yamashita’s use of the fantastical, the play of emerging transnational ethnicity, and the narrative tactics of reflexivity and bricolage in storytelling located on a continuum of the unique and the communal, of the past and the present, and that are mapped in various spatial and virtual realities.

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Page Count

216

Publisher

University of Hawaii Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0824874056

ISBN 13

9780824874056

Tropic of Orange

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Tropic of Orange

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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.

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Page Count

257

Publisher

Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566895022

ISBN 13

9781566895026

Letters to Memory

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Letters to Memory

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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 Review With 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.

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201

Publisher

Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566894980

ISBN 13

9781566894982

Sansei and Sensibility

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Sansei and Sensibility

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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.

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Page Count

199

Publisher

Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566895863

ISBN 13

9781566895866

I Hotel

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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I Hotel

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

An epic journey through one of America's most transformative decades via the stories of the activists, laborers, and students who shaped it.

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648

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566895456

ISBN 13

9781566895453

Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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.

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Page Count

209

Publisher

Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566895049

ISBN 13

9781566895040

Anime Wong

Fictions of Performance

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Anime Wong

Fictions of Performance

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

Giant foam rubber sushi and cyborg kungfu fighters populate performances that reflect questions of gender, identity, orientalism, and racial politics.

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Page Count

410

Publisher

Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566893402

ISBN 13

9781566893404

Brazil-Maru

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Brazil-Maru

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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 Chronicle Particularly 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.

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Page Count

273

Publisher

Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566895030

ISBN 13

9781566895033

1970: "I" Hotel

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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1970: "I" Hotel

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

The third novella in I Hotel, a 2010 National Book Award finalist and epic of America’s struggle for civil rights.

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Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566893690

ISBN 13

9781566893695

1968: Eye Hotel

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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1968: Eye Hotel

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

Eye Hotel" is the first novella of I Hotel, a National Book Award finalist and epic of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Yamashita’s cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, caught in riptides of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil.

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Page Count

115

Publisher

Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566893887

ISBN 13

9781566893886

1974: I-Migrant Hotel

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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1974: I-Migrant Hotel

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

I-Migrant" is the seventh novella of I Hotel, a National Book Award finalist and epic of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Yamashita’s cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, caught in riptides of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil.

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Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566893895

ISBN 13

9781566893893

Letters to Memory

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Letters to Memory

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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201

Publisher

Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566894980

ISBN 13

9781566894982

Anime Wong

Fictions of Performance

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Anime Wong

Fictions of Performance

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

Giant foam rubber sushi and cyborg kungfu fighters populate performances that reflect questions of gender, identity, orientalism, and racial politics.

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Page Count

410

Publisher

Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566893402

ISBN 13

9781566893404

Tropic of Orange

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Tropic of Orange

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Page Count

257

Publisher

Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566895022

ISBN 13

9781566895026

Brazil-Maru

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Brazil-Maru

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Page Count

273

Publisher

Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566895030

ISBN 13

9781566895033

1970: "I" Hotel

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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1970: "I" Hotel

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

The third novella in I Hotel, a 2010 National Book Award finalist and epic of America’s struggle for civil rights.

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Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566893690

ISBN 13

9781566893695

1968: Eye Hotel

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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1968: Eye Hotel

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Page Count

115

Publisher

Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566893887

ISBN 13

9781566893886

Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

By: Karen Tei Yamashita

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209

Publisher

Coffee House Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1566895049

ISBN 13

9781566895040

Ecoambiguity

Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures

By: Karen Thornber

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Ecoambiguity

Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures

By: Karen Thornber

Delving into the complex, contradictory relationships between humans and the environment in Asian literatures

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Page Count

703

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472118064

ISBN 13

9780472118069

Serve the People

Making Asian America in the Long Sixties

By: Karen L. Ishizuka

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Serve the People

Making Asian America in the Long Sixties

By: Karen L. Ishizuka

A narrative history of the movement that turned “Orientals” into Asian Americans Until the political ferment of the Long Sixties, there were no Asian Americans. There were only isolated communities of mostly Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos lumped together as “Orientals.” Serve the People tells the story of the social and cultural movement that knit these disparate communities into a political identity, the history of how—and why—the double consciousness of Asian America came to be. At the same time, Karen Ishizuka’s vivid narrative reveals the personal epiphanies and intimate stories of insurgent movers and shakers and ground-level activists alike. Drawing on more than 120 interviews and illustrated with striking images from guerrilla movement publications, the book evokes the feeling of growing up alien in a society rendered in black and white, and recalls the intricate memories and meanings of the Asian American movement. Serve the People paints a panoramic landscape of a radical time, and is destined to become the definitive history of the making of Asian America.

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Page Count

289

Publisher

Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1781689989

ISBN 13

9781781689981

National Abjection

The Asian American Body Onstage

By: Karen Shimakawa

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National Abjection

The Asian American Body Onstage

By: Karen Shimakawa

National Abjection explores the vexed relationship between "Asian Americanness" and "Americanness” through a focus on drama and performance art. Karen Shimakawa argues that the forms of Asian Americanness that appear in U.S. culture are a function of national abjection—a process that demands that Americanness be defined by the exclusion of Asian Americans, who are either cast as symbolic foreigners incapable of integration or Americanization or distorted into an “honorary” whiteness. She examines how Asian Americans become culturally visible on and off stage, revealing the ways Asian American theater companies and artists respond to the cultural implications of this abjection. Shimakawa looks at the origins of Asian American theater, particularly through the memories of some of its pioneers. Her examination of the emergence of Asian American theater companies illuminates their strategies for countering the stereotypes of Asian Americans and the lack of visibility of Asian American performers within the theater world. She shows how some plays—Wakako Yamauchi’s 12-1-A, Frank Chin’s Chickencoop Chinaman, and The Year of the Dragon—have both directly and indirectly addressed the displacement of Asian Americans. She analyzes works attempting to negate the process of abjection—such as the 1988 Broadway production of M. Butterfly as well as Miss Saigon, a mainstream production that enacted the process of cultural displacement both onstage and off. Finally, Shimakawa considers Asian Americanness in the context of globalization by meditating on the work of Ping Chong, particularly his East-West Quartet.

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