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asianamlitfansAsian American Literature Fans Megareview for May 13, 2012: Hawaii Calling (part 2)
In this post, reviews of: Taro Yashima’s New Sun (originally published in 1943, reprint by University of Hawaii Press, 2008); In The Company of Strangers (Bamboo Ridge Press, 1999); Mavis Hara’s An Offering of Rice (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2007); Milton Murayama’s Dying in a Strange Land (University of Hawaii Press, 2008); Joe Tsujimoto’s Morningside Heights: New York Stories (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2008).
A Review of Taro Yashima’s New Sun (originally published in 1943, reprint by University of Hawaii Press, 2008).
Wow! Taro Yashima’s New Sun is definitely the most surprising read for me for this calendar year. I am continually amazed at how deep the “rabbit hole” of graphic narrative goes. Much like Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s Four Immigrants Manga, Taro Yashima’s New Sun provides us an invaluable pictorial account of an earlier historical period. In this case, Taro Yashima, who published New Sun in 1943 under a pen name, uses the graphic memoir form to represent the difficult years he spent being investigated and tortured by the Japanese secret police for his background as an artist of the progressive moment in the early 20th century. The memoir employs a more impressionistic style, no doubt the particular influence of Yashima’s painterly inspirations, which diverged from the realist traditions that predominated many of his contemporaries and certainly did not draw from radical abstract approaches of the modernist artists. The panels appear as one per page along with a handful of lines that accompany the pictures. The memoir moves quite quickly and opens ominously with the death of Taro and his wife’s child and then later their imprisonment. Taro is forced to compose his life story while he is a prisoner, which enables later chapters to narrate how Taro became part of a progressive art movement that was considered to be subversive. The representations of life in prison are appropriately and not surprisingly austere: some panels are absolutely excruciating in their level of insinuation—for instance, the panel that depicts Taro having to hear his own wife being tortured, the screams being illustrated as violent swirls that surround his head. This work reminds somewhat of Xiaoda Xiao and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians in the representations of the kinsd of traumas related to prison life and acts of brutality. Certainly, University of Hawaii press has done a tremendous job in reprinting this incredible work, one that can likely be paired alongside something like Mine Okubo’s Citizen 13660 in a course.
Buy the Book Here
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Sun-Intersections-Transcultural/dp/0824831853/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335890608&sr=8-1
A Review of Michelle Cruz Skinner’s In The Company of Strangers (Bamboo Ridge Press, 1999).
LOVE THIS COVER
I have wanted to review Michelle Cruz Skinner’s work for some time, but some of her publications (like the Mango Seasons) are only readily available in other literary markets. In the Company of Strangers is a collection of both creative nonfiction and fictional pieces, most of which are shorter sketches rather than extensively plotted narratives. Three of the stories are subtitled with the phrase, “a memoir,” and certainly possess a far more autobiographical voice than other stories. The “memoir” pieces are definitely some of the strongest and I would not be surprised if we see a longer publication in that form, as it seems to be one in which Skinner is able to reflect upon the complicated status of the Filipino diasporic subject. In the final piece, entitled, “Paper {A Memoir},” our autobiographically-inflected narrator admits: “Clearly there was a sense of paranoia over such papers. One of my friends says that there aren’t really any secrets in Filipino families. But I think there is something about growing up under martial law that made me keep my mouth shut and my papers close. Keep a close eye on anyone official. Because I never knew what might matter. And my family was never the talking type. Not when it came to truly important things anyway. I had to read about that” (169). If papers offer the Filipino subject the possibility of a kind of legitimacy, it is one that is always already tenuous. Many of the other stories thus explore the tenuousness of identity, national affiliation, and belonging. In this vein, the piece that achieves the most narrative coherence is a linked set of three stories that also doubles for the title. In “The Company of Strangers,” broken into three parts (“Yellow Jasmine,” “The Company of Strangers, and “The Exchange Rate), Skinner depicts the lives of a motley crue of Filipino diasporic service personnel working at the Filipino embassy in Italy; these include Sal, a garden, Mrs. Taguba, who loses her rosary; and Cely, a housekeeper who quits, but intends to stay in Italy despite an expired visa. Cely’s dilemma is precisely that she does not have the required papers to stay for longer than a given period and she must think carefully about who to trust. Issues of migration and legitimacy thus arc out as one short story calls out to another. My favorite story in the collection appeared early. In “Natural Selection,” Skinner experiments with form and offers a short piece written as an epistolary, focused on a man named Harry who is writing his sister, Anna—letters during the early days of the American occupation of the Philippines. The story rather inconspicuously narrates the ways in which colonizers could come to identify with local populations. Another standout story was “Second Marriage,” which focuses on a couple, Clem and Heidi, who assent to having a second wedding ceremony take place in the Philippines, one that is more lavish so that more individuals can attend. Though many of the stories might have benefitted from a carving out a stronger plotline, Skinner’s keen eye for description certainly makes In the Company of Strangers a strong collection overall, one that speaks to the heterogeneity of the Filipino diaspora.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Company-Strangers-Bamboo-Ridge-Special/dp/0910043817/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1333230409&sr=8-4
A Review of Mavis Hara’s An Offering of Rice (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2007).
Mavis Hara’s An Offering of Rice is a mixed genre collection consisting primarily of poems and short prose narratives, with a couple of illustrations included. These pieces seem largely autobiographical in tone and are roughly arranged with a chronological trajectory in mind. The first prose narratives are more historically situated, exploring issues of plantation labor and Japanese migration to Hawai’i. The tone of the collection shifts considerably with the middle section with standout stories like “Chemotherapy” and “The House.” Though the titles are relatively and admittedly generic, the stories themselves are largely reflective and very personal pieces that showcase some wonderful storytelling. “The House,” for instance follows a mother’s quandaries as she engages the adoption process, with all of the anxieties that come with it. We discover, for instance, the difficulty that she has with bonding to the baby and fears that she may never truly feel like the baby’s mother. Some of the later prose pieces focus on Japan, as the narrator—it really seems as though at some point (after the historical portions in the front) the stories are unified by a specific narrator—travels back to her ancestral homeland. The process of disorientation is made evident when she arrives only to discover her husband has been held up and cannot meet her at the airport. Later, the narrator divulges: “Tokyo made me anxious. Not only was it the largest, most crowded cit I had ever seen, many highways and train tracks rose high above the streets, while subway trains ran on multiple levels beneath the roadbeds as well. I felt that people who did not speak English were pressing in against me from all directions. I was relieved when we boarded the train back to the base” (114). The strength of this collection appears in these sorts of unadorned observations; there is a strong and meticulous narrative voice that guides us through the work. For those looking for catastrophic suspense plots, definitely look elsewhere: these are stories and poems of an understated domestic variety. Hara’s text is of course strongly rooted with respect to Hawaiian regional geographies and adds to the rich body of writing produced by Asian American writers from that state.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Offering-Bamboo-Journal-Hawaii-Literature/dp/0910043760/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336849762&sr=8-1
A Review of Milton Murayama’s Dying in a Strange Land (University of Hawaii Press, 2008).
So, I’ll admit I haven’t read Plantation Boy and Five Years on a Rock; my knowledge of Murayama’s work is limited to the canonical publication, All I Asking for Is My Body, which I have assigned in courses a couple of times. Dying in a Strange Land is the last of a quartet focused on the Oyama family. The novel is told in alternating first person perspectives. There’s Tosh who rises above the family’s plantation background to become a well-respected architect and remains the most connected to the local Hawaiian geographies that the family has known so well. Tosh is the voice that provides the most consistent narrative concerning the changes that Hawaii undergoes over the last half of the 20th century, including the demographic shifts, the shift in the economy from plantations to tourism, as well as the dynamic political climate. Sawa, the matriarch of the Oyama household, is the narrator who provides us with a sense of the generational differences, as she observes the many interracial relationships engaged by her children as well as the desire for so many of them to leave plantation work to find new occupational trajectories. She is also one of the characters who provides a more consistent link to the Japanese homeland; one chapter detailing a return visit records her own surprise at the many changes that the country has undergone and her feelings of estrangement from the so-called ancestral homeland. Kiyo is probably the most dominant narrator of the three and certainly the most connected to the arts and cultural representation. A struggling writer, he embarks on a disastrous first marriage while also attempting to pen a number of novels. He eventually settles down in a second marriage with a woman named Maud and begins to succeed in his professed career. Kiyo is the bawdiest of the narrators and his comments and observations are often unforgettable. All three narrators share a diary-like writing process, though they are distinct enough that you can see how Murayama worked to carve out personalities of their interior monologues. Sawa, for instance, is the most reserved and often employs the most interlingual registers in her storytelling. All three narrators continually give us an account of the historical events and social contexts that affect their lives over time. This particular mode of recounting, though, occasionally bordered on reportage and it was the one element that I found distracting. What is particularly impressive about this book is Murayama’s command over such a large archive of familial interrelationships. At a certain point, if you read this novel over a period of many days as I did, you will have to employ the very useful family tree that opens the novel because the Oyama family is so extensive.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Dying-Strange-Land-Latitude-Book/dp/0824831977/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1335798890&sr=8-3
A Review of Joe Tsujimoto’s Morningside Heights: New York Stories (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2008).
Joe Tsujimoto’s Morningside Heights is an interesting work to consider in relation to question of genre. Though billed as a work of “stories” as in its subtitle, one might also consider it as an episodic novel. The protagonist, Kenji, tracks throughout each story and we generally see his development over time, making this work something more akin to a bildungsroman. Besides its wide temporal arc, Morningside Heights also takes on a number of different geographic sites: the New York City neighborhood from when the title originates and where the protagonist grows up as a child; the various locations that Kenji travels to in his stint in the U.S. Air Force; and finally, Hawaii, where Kenji resides in his later life. Part of Tsujimoto’s project is clearly his investment in the historical texture of New York City in the rowdiness and political dynamism of the sixties and seventies. The “stories” open with this description of Morningside Heights: “We lived on 119th Street between Morningside Drive and Amsterdam Avenue, on the edge of Harlem, across the street from Columbia University, which would later buy up the apartment buildings in the neighborhood, virtually wiping it clean with families, middle class or otherwise. While children were anathema, whatever their color, unless strapped in carriages” (10). This opening keys us to a particular class and racial context for the work and reminds us of the way that urban spaces are swiftly changed and gentrified. The stories chronicle Kenji’s life as he bounces around from one job to another, then gets kicked out of school, enlists in the military, goes back to school, marries, suffers from a serious medical condition, and later divorces. Not surprisingly, given Kenji’s increasing interest in the arts and his occasional job as a library assistant, he finds a great love for the arts and the stories are peppered with numerous literary references. If the historical texture and literary intertextuality of the work are two of its greatest strengths, the other is Tsujimoto’s gift for dialogue. These moments often crackle off the page and Tsujimoto has an obvious ear for bringing a diverse set of characters to life through the direct speech representation. Though the title seems to suggest that Kenji thinks of Morningside Heights as home, the ending leaves us with this sentiment: “ ‘New York?—Hawaii is my home. Has been, I guess, for thirty years now. Maybe pretty soon I’ll be a local’” (227).
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Morningside-Heights-New-York-Stories/dp/0910043787/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336927715&sr=8-1-spell
A Review of R. Kikuo Johnson’s Shark King (Toon Books, 2012).
Pylduck reviewed R. Kikuo Johnson’s Night Fisher in the post found here:
http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/115393.html
I’m always excited about a new graphic novel to read and Johnson recently published Shark King, a graphic novel directed toward young readers. Johnson has a great comic drawing style and the story is in essence one that explores Hawaiian local history, myth, and what I would consider to be a metaphorical rendering of the mixed-race experience. In this case, a woman ends up marrying the mythic “shark king” and bearing him a son who is of “mixed species” background: part god, part shark, and part human (named Nanaue). Nanaue grows up to be a strong boy and part of the storyline involves how he would still the catch of other local fishermen and generally create some mischief. When he is discovered to be the source of the bad catches, Nanaue must flee his life with his mother and live out at sea. At one point, the cape that his mother used to cover the fin growing upon his back washes ashore and she knows that he is safe. A useful link involving the actual myth can be found here:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/pac/hft/hft27.htm
Apparently, the figure of Nanaue has been used in other popular culture formats, especially in the comic book world more largely. I thought Johnson’s work was both fun and informative and a very useful way for young readers to begin to inferace with issues of folktales, myth-making, and specific cultural contexts.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Shark-King-Toon-Kikuo-Johnson/dp/1935179160/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335282781&sr=8-1
In this post, reviews of: Taro Yashima’s New Sun (originally published in 1943, reprint by University of Hawaii Press, 2008); In The Company of Strangers (Bamboo Ridge Press, 1999); Mavis Hara’s An Offering of Rice (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2007); Milton Murayama’s Dying in a Strange Land (University of Hawaii Press, 2008); Joe Tsujimoto’s Morningside Heights: New York Stories (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2008).
A Review of Taro Yashima’s New Sun (originally published in 1943, reprint by University of Hawaii Press, 2008).
Wow! Taro Yashima’s New Sun is definitely the most surprising read for me for this calendar year. I am continually amazed at how deep the “rabbit hole” of graphic narrative goes. Much like Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s Four Immigrants Manga, Taro Yashima’s New Sun provides us an invaluable pictorial account of an earlier historical period. In this case, Taro Yashima, who published New Sun in 1943 under a pen name, uses the graphic memoir form to represent the difficult years he spent being investigated and tortured by the Japanese secret police for his background as an artist of the progressive moment in the early 20th century. The memoir employs a more impressionistic style, no doubt the particular influence of Yashima’s painterly inspirations, which diverged from the realist traditions that predominated many of his contemporaries and certainly did not draw from radical abstract approaches of the modernist artists. The panels appear as one per page along with a handful of lines that accompany the pictures. The memoir moves quite quickly and opens ominously with the death of Taro and his wife’s child and then later their imprisonment. Taro is forced to compose his life story while he is a prisoner, which enables later chapters to narrate how Taro became part of a progressive art movement that was considered to be subversive. The representations of life in prison are appropriately and not surprisingly austere: some panels are absolutely excruciating in their level of insinuation—for instance, the panel that depicts Taro having to hear his own wife being tortured, the screams being illustrated as violent swirls that surround his head. This work reminds somewhat of Xiaoda Xiao and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians in the representations of the kinsd of traumas related to prison life and acts of brutality. Certainly, University of Hawaii press has done a tremendous job in reprinting this incredible work, one that can likely be paired alongside something like Mine Okubo’s Citizen 13660 in a course.
Buy the Book Here
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Sun-Intersections-Transcultural/dp/0824831853/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335890608&sr=8-1
A Review of Michelle Cruz Skinner’s In The Company of Strangers (Bamboo Ridge Press, 1999).
LOVE THIS COVER
I have wanted to review Michelle Cruz Skinner’s work for some time, but some of her publications (like the Mango Seasons) are only readily available in other literary markets. In the Company of Strangers is a collection of both creative nonfiction and fictional pieces, most of which are shorter sketches rather than extensively plotted narratives. Three of the stories are subtitled with the phrase, “a memoir,” and certainly possess a far more autobiographical voice than other stories. The “memoir” pieces are definitely some of the strongest and I would not be surprised if we see a longer publication in that form, as it seems to be one in which Skinner is able to reflect upon the complicated status of the Filipino diasporic subject. In the final piece, entitled, “Paper {A Memoir},” our autobiographically-inflected narrator admits: “Clearly there was a sense of paranoia over such papers. One of my friends says that there aren’t really any secrets in Filipino families. But I think there is something about growing up under martial law that made me keep my mouth shut and my papers close. Keep a close eye on anyone official. Because I never knew what might matter. And my family was never the talking type. Not when it came to truly important things anyway. I had to read about that” (169). If papers offer the Filipino subject the possibility of a kind of legitimacy, it is one that is always already tenuous. Many of the other stories thus explore the tenuousness of identity, national affiliation, and belonging. In this vein, the piece that achieves the most narrative coherence is a linked set of three stories that also doubles for the title. In “The Company of Strangers,” broken into three parts (“Yellow Jasmine,” “The Company of Strangers, and “The Exchange Rate), Skinner depicts the lives of a motley crue of Filipino diasporic service personnel working at the Filipino embassy in Italy; these include Sal, a garden, Mrs. Taguba, who loses her rosary; and Cely, a housekeeper who quits, but intends to stay in Italy despite an expired visa. Cely’s dilemma is precisely that she does not have the required papers to stay for longer than a given period and she must think carefully about who to trust. Issues of migration and legitimacy thus arc out as one short story calls out to another. My favorite story in the collection appeared early. In “Natural Selection,” Skinner experiments with form and offers a short piece written as an epistolary, focused on a man named Harry who is writing his sister, Anna—letters during the early days of the American occupation of the Philippines. The story rather inconspicuously narrates the ways in which colonizers could come to identify with local populations. Another standout story was “Second Marriage,” which focuses on a couple, Clem and Heidi, who assent to having a second wedding ceremony take place in the Philippines, one that is more lavish so that more individuals can attend. Though many of the stories might have benefitted from a carving out a stronger plotline, Skinner’s keen eye for description certainly makes In the Company of Strangers a strong collection overall, one that speaks to the heterogeneity of the Filipino diaspora.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Company-Strangers-Bamboo-Ridge-Special/dp/0910043817/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1333230409&sr=8-4
A Review of Mavis Hara’s An Offering of Rice (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2007).
Mavis Hara’s An Offering of Rice is a mixed genre collection consisting primarily of poems and short prose narratives, with a couple of illustrations included. These pieces seem largely autobiographical in tone and are roughly arranged with a chronological trajectory in mind. The first prose narratives are more historically situated, exploring issues of plantation labor and Japanese migration to Hawai’i. The tone of the collection shifts considerably with the middle section with standout stories like “Chemotherapy” and “The House.” Though the titles are relatively and admittedly generic, the stories themselves are largely reflective and very personal pieces that showcase some wonderful storytelling. “The House,” for instance follows a mother’s quandaries as she engages the adoption process, with all of the anxieties that come with it. We discover, for instance, the difficulty that she has with bonding to the baby and fears that she may never truly feel like the baby’s mother. Some of the later prose pieces focus on Japan, as the narrator—it really seems as though at some point (after the historical portions in the front) the stories are unified by a specific narrator—travels back to her ancestral homeland. The process of disorientation is made evident when she arrives only to discover her husband has been held up and cannot meet her at the airport. Later, the narrator divulges: “Tokyo made me anxious. Not only was it the largest, most crowded cit I had ever seen, many highways and train tracks rose high above the streets, while subway trains ran on multiple levels beneath the roadbeds as well. I felt that people who did not speak English were pressing in against me from all directions. I was relieved when we boarded the train back to the base” (114). The strength of this collection appears in these sorts of unadorned observations; there is a strong and meticulous narrative voice that guides us through the work. For those looking for catastrophic suspense plots, definitely look elsewhere: these are stories and poems of an understated domestic variety. Hara’s text is of course strongly rooted with respect to Hawaiian regional geographies and adds to the rich body of writing produced by Asian American writers from that state.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Offering-Bamboo-Journal-Hawaii-Literature/dp/0910043760/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336849762&sr=8-1
A Review of Milton Murayama’s Dying in a Strange Land (University of Hawaii Press, 2008).
So, I’ll admit I haven’t read Plantation Boy and Five Years on a Rock; my knowledge of Murayama’s work is limited to the canonical publication, All I Asking for Is My Body, which I have assigned in courses a couple of times. Dying in a Strange Land is the last of a quartet focused on the Oyama family. The novel is told in alternating first person perspectives. There’s Tosh who rises above the family’s plantation background to become a well-respected architect and remains the most connected to the local Hawaiian geographies that the family has known so well. Tosh is the voice that provides the most consistent narrative concerning the changes that Hawaii undergoes over the last half of the 20th century, including the demographic shifts, the shift in the economy from plantations to tourism, as well as the dynamic political climate. Sawa, the matriarch of the Oyama household, is the narrator who provides us with a sense of the generational differences, as she observes the many interracial relationships engaged by her children as well as the desire for so many of them to leave plantation work to find new occupational trajectories. She is also one of the characters who provides a more consistent link to the Japanese homeland; one chapter detailing a return visit records her own surprise at the many changes that the country has undergone and her feelings of estrangement from the so-called ancestral homeland. Kiyo is probably the most dominant narrator of the three and certainly the most connected to the arts and cultural representation. A struggling writer, he embarks on a disastrous first marriage while also attempting to pen a number of novels. He eventually settles down in a second marriage with a woman named Maud and begins to succeed in his professed career. Kiyo is the bawdiest of the narrators and his comments and observations are often unforgettable. All three narrators share a diary-like writing process, though they are distinct enough that you can see how Murayama worked to carve out personalities of their interior monologues. Sawa, for instance, is the most reserved and often employs the most interlingual registers in her storytelling. All three narrators continually give us an account of the historical events and social contexts that affect their lives over time. This particular mode of recounting, though, occasionally bordered on reportage and it was the one element that I found distracting. What is particularly impressive about this book is Murayama’s command over such a large archive of familial interrelationships. At a certain point, if you read this novel over a period of many days as I did, you will have to employ the very useful family tree that opens the novel because the Oyama family is so extensive.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Dying-Strange-Land-Latitude-Book/dp/0824831977/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1335798890&sr=8-3
A Review of Joe Tsujimoto’s Morningside Heights: New York Stories (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2008).
Joe Tsujimoto’s Morningside Heights is an interesting work to consider in relation to question of genre. Though billed as a work of “stories” as in its subtitle, one might also consider it as an episodic novel. The protagonist, Kenji, tracks throughout each story and we generally see his development over time, making this work something more akin to a bildungsroman. Besides its wide temporal arc, Morningside Heights also takes on a number of different geographic sites: the New York City neighborhood from when the title originates and where the protagonist grows up as a child; the various locations that Kenji travels to in his stint in the U.S. Air Force; and finally, Hawaii, where Kenji resides in his later life. Part of Tsujimoto’s project is clearly his investment in the historical texture of New York City in the rowdiness and political dynamism of the sixties and seventies. The “stories” open with this description of Morningside Heights: “We lived on 119th Street between Morningside Drive and Amsterdam Avenue, on the edge of Harlem, across the street from Columbia University, which would later buy up the apartment buildings in the neighborhood, virtually wiping it clean with families, middle class or otherwise. While children were anathema, whatever their color, unless strapped in carriages” (10). This opening keys us to a particular class and racial context for the work and reminds us of the way that urban spaces are swiftly changed and gentrified. The stories chronicle Kenji’s life as he bounces around from one job to another, then gets kicked out of school, enlists in the military, goes back to school, marries, suffers from a serious medical condition, and later divorces. Not surprisingly, given Kenji’s increasing interest in the arts and his occasional job as a library assistant, he finds a great love for the arts and the stories are peppered with numerous literary references. If the historical texture and literary intertextuality of the work are two of its greatest strengths, the other is Tsujimoto’s gift for dialogue. These moments often crackle off the page and Tsujimoto has an obvious ear for bringing a diverse set of characters to life through the direct speech representation. Though the title seems to suggest that Kenji thinks of Morningside Heights as home, the ending leaves us with this sentiment: “ ‘New York?—Hawaii is my home. Has been, I guess, for thirty years now. Maybe pretty soon I’ll be a local’” (227).
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Morningside-Heights-New-York-Stories/dp/0910043787/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336927715&sr=8-1-spell
A Review of R. Kikuo Johnson’s Shark King (Toon Books, 2012).
Pylduck reviewed R. Kikuo Johnson’s Night Fisher in the post found here:
http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/115393.html
I’m always excited about a new graphic novel to read and Johnson recently published Shark King, a graphic novel directed toward young readers. Johnson has a great comic drawing style and the story is in essence one that explores Hawaiian local history, myth, and what I would consider to be a metaphorical rendering of the mixed-race experience. In this case, a woman ends up marrying the mythic “shark king” and bearing him a son who is of “mixed species” background: part god, part shark, and part human (named Nanaue). Nanaue grows up to be a strong boy and part of the storyline involves how he would still the catch of other local fishermen and generally create some mischief. When he is discovered to be the source of the bad catches, Nanaue must flee his life with his mother and live out at sea. At one point, the cape that his mother used to cover the fin growing upon his back washes ashore and she knows that he is safe. A useful link involving the actual myth can be found here:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/pac/hft/hft27.htm
Apparently, the figure of Nanaue has been used in other popular culture formats, especially in the comic book world more largely. I thought Johnson’s work was both fun and informative and a very useful way for young readers to begin to inferace with issues of folktales, myth-making, and specific cultural contexts.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Shark-King-Toon-Kikuo-Johnson/dp/1935179160/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335282781&sr=8-1
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 03:16 pm (UTC)More graphic novels!
I also need to read the rest of Murayama's quartet beyond the canonical first novel. :/
no subject
Date: 2012-05-15 05:39 am (UTC)totally hear about you murayama... stylistically, dying in a strange land is very very different from all i asking for is my body...