This time, I would like to focus on Karen Tei Yamashita, a Japanese-American artist with a particularly unique talent.
Karen Tei Yamashita Photo by Mary Uyematsu Kao.
Karen Tei Yamashita was born in Oakland, California in 1951 as a third generation Japanese. She majored in English and Japanese literature at Carleton College in Minnesota, but in 1971, she studied at Waseda University as an exchange student for a year and a half to study Japanese culture and literature. In 1975, she received a scholarship to travel to São Paulo to study Japanese immigrants in Brazil, where she stayed for 10 years. During her stay in Brazil, she married a Brazilian, started a family, and began writing short stories and plays. After returning to the United States in 1984, she continued to write, writing many plays for East West Players (EWP), an Asian theater company in Los Angeles. During this time in Los Angeles, I saw Yamashita's play Hiroshima Tropical at EWP, which was then located on Santa Monica Boulevard. With a strong interest in Japan, she incorporates elements of Noh, Kabuki, and even Butoh into her performances.
Since 1990, Yamashita has published five books and currently teaches creative writing and Asian American literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Her middle name, Tei, is her grandmother's name, and is written in hiragana. She would like her name to be written as "Karen Tei Yamashita," a mixture of katakana, hiragana, and kanji, but in this article I would like to use katakana.
Sympathy for a utopia and questioning civilization
Beyond the Rainforest
In 1990, Yamashita published Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, a small publisher in Minnesota called Coffee House, and in 1992, Brazil-Maru. Both books are based on her experiences in Brazil, but the former is a novel with a bizarre concept, in which the protagonist is a sphere attached to a human named Kazumasa Ishimaru. Other characters appear, including one with three arms and one with three breasts, and they become embroiled in a conflict over the mineral resources of the land called Matakan. Eventually, the Matakan civilization, which was built on the foundations of mineral resources, collapses, but the forest begins to regenerate. She wrote the novel out of her desire to save the rainforest.
Meanwhile, "Brazil Maru" depicts the Christian socialists who migrated from Japan to São Paulo on the "Brazil Maru" in 1925 in pursuit of a utopia. Although it is a history of immigration to Brazil, these are not simply immigrants who went abroad to earn money and make a name for themselves in the hope of returning home with glory, but immigrants who had aspirations and wanted to settle in Brazil, making them a unique group among Japanese immigrants.
There was a similar immigrant group in North America. The disciples of Christian Iguchi Kigenji, who founded Kensei Gijuku in Azumino, Nagano Prefecture, migrated en masse to Seattle in the 1910s in an attempt to create a utopia. Their aspirations are expressed in the title of the fanzine they founded, Shin Furusato (New Hometown), and their goal can be seen in the farm they started, Kyodoen. One of the sons of Hirabayashi Shungo, one of the founders of Kyodoen, was Gordon Hirabayashi, who is known for refusing to be sent to internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. Other Kensei Gijuku graduates include Tojo Takashi, founder of the Ginza Washington Shoe Store, and Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, a journalist known for his work Dark Diary.
In "Brazil Maru," the utopia is a place called Esperança (Hope) deep in São Paulo. The family of the protagonist, Ichiro Terada, is from Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, which is probably a reference to Yamashita's own roots, but coincidentally is close to where Kensei Gijuku was located. Ichiro is portrayed as a person with a new sensibility who has no sense of belonging to Japan. Also, Kantaro Uno, the eldest son of the Uno family, an immigrant family that appears in the book, is a charismatic businessman who later becomes successful at a chicken farm and creates an egg kingdom. There is a scene where he is engrossed in reading the works of the Russian literary giant Tolstoy and the Japanese writer Mushanokoji Saneatsu. Mushanokoji Saneatsu was not only a writer, but also a social activist who founded a community called "New Village" in Miyazaki Prefecture in 1918. The same can be said of Tolstoy. I feel that Yamashita's thoughts on society and his sympathy for utopia can be seen in such places. Kantaro's Egg Kingdom is eventually destroyed due to his dictatorial nature, and he ultimately loses his life in a plane crash.
"Beyond the Rainforest," which is said to be a work of magic realism or surreal fantasy, and "Brazil Maru," which depicts a group of immigrants, give off quite a different impression, but they ask the same question: what remains and what will people do after a civilization has flourished and fallen? The latter also features characters with various backgrounds, including not only Ichiro and Kantaro, but also Genji, who has an intellectual disability. In that respect, too, they share a commonality. I have heard that "Brazil Maru" is being translated by Takuo Asano. I look forward to the publication date.
*This article is a reprint of the 13th installment of the column series "From the Perspectives of Two Countries" in Renso Publishing 's online magazine "Kaze," which features information about new books, such as articles linking new books to current issues and daily topics, as well as monthly bestsellers and review columns on new books.
© 2010 Association Press and Tatsuya Sudo
