![]() The twins’ grandmother is even more distant, with her alien cultural practices and “bery broken Engurish.” The sansei must then make sense of their fractured histories, which the twins gesture towards by loving each other. These childhood scenes introduce the reader into the sansei psyche: the twins are irrevocably wrapped up with their family, but are not privy to their parents’ repressed experience of wartime incarceration. The girls also watch their grandmother bathing with a tenugui, a long strip of cotton “decorated with Japanese writing and design,” which harken back to an ancestral homeland they have little conception of. On the naked bodies of their parents are scars from their past: “Mommy, you have a scar on your tummy? Isn’t that where I came out of you when I was a baby?” and “Daddy, you hurt your leg in the war?” the girls ask to muffled responses. For the young girls, bathing with their family evokes a keen bodily intimacy, but at the same time cloaks just as much as it reveals. “Sansei” opens with the 1975 story “The Bath,” originally published in the Amerasia Journal, which focuses on twin sisters and their adolescent bathing experiences. And although the stories assume a more domestic undertone, Yamashita, in her typical fashion, intermingles memoir, fiction, travelogues, recipes, cultural criticism, letters, and a historical timeline into the collection. Such moves create a multidimensional portrait of the sansei, one that Yamashita continues to layer and complicate with each additional story. However, Yamashita also prods at the contradictions and repressions latent in such tight-knit groups, which resonate deeply with the Victorian communities Austen writes about: repressed shame, provincialism, petty grievances, and family disintegration. Yamashita illustrates a Japanese American community built on familiarity, in which food choices and immigration histories and World War II incarceration do not have to be spelled out for outsiders. The first half of the collection, “Sansei,” referring to the label for third generation Japanese Americans, collates a half-century of Yamashita’s published work, and the second half, “Sensibility,” features short parodies of Jane Austen novels that are reframed from Japanese American perspectives.įrom an author acclaimed for books like I Hotel and Tropic of Orange, works that dig into the currents of environmental destruction, multinational corporations, migratory pathways, and grassroots activism, Sansei and Sensibility circles back home to the Los Angeles ethnic enclaves in which Yamashita grew up. “Japanese Americans were used to Japanese Americans,” Karen Tei Yamashita writes in her new short story collection, Sansei and Sensibility, in which she creates a world grounded in cultural intimacy. ![]()
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