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Circle
K Cycles
Short
Stories by
Karen Tei Yamashita
When
second-generation Japanese Brazilians emigrate to
Japan to assume the manual work its citizens no longer
want, their need for cultural belonging, along with
their homesickness for the food, culture, and language
they left behind is exacerbated by Japan's reverence
for all things “purely Japanese.” This
stunning book of hybrids merges fiction, essay, and
pop culture collage to illustrate a global society
that resists heritage-by-hyphenation and opens the
door onto important issues of the new century; labor,
nationalism, and cultural assimilation.
In
the short stories, we meet Miss Hamamatsu '96—a
Euro-Asian beauty who covets the Miss Nikkei pageant
crown, conwoman Marie Madalena and her ad scams and
phone sex business, Zé Marias as he is embroiled
in a debacle with a sinister employment agency, and
other unique characters who are somehow enmeshed in
a Japanese Brazilian employment scam and its unsolved,
deadly outcome. Interspersed within these tales are
Yamashita's personal essays that detail the Asian American
author's travels to Japan with her Brazilian husband
and family—a time spent straddling the fence between
boisterous Brazilian customs and the conservative Japanese
tradition.
Also
by this author:
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