![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
pylduck.livejournal.com2008-02-28 04:49 pm
R.A. Sasaki's The Loom and Other Stories
As I played hooky from teaching today (I've got a cold, *cough cough*), I read R.A. Sasaki's 1991 collection The Loom and Other Stories, published by Saint Paul's own Graywolf Press.
I liked the collection okay, and it's pleasantly short. The first half of the collection consists of stories centering on one Japanese American family in San Francisco, and the remaining half drifts off into other families and characters, also centered in San Francisco. It definitely feels like a text from the late '80s, early '90s. The stories tread the ground of generational differences, the huge impact of internment on Japanese American families, and particularly the perspectives of daughters (in relation to their mother, father, sisters, and so on). The stories generally have a sort of autobiographical feel to them, whether or not they have a first-person narrator. My favorite story is "First Love," told in the third-person perspective. The story centers on Jo Terasaki and her relationship with FOB George Sakamoto in high school and college. I like how the story represents George both as someone who rubs against the American sensibilities of JAs and as someone who deliberately pushes against what others expect of him, in almost reverse-chameleon-like ways.
I liked the collection okay, and it's pleasantly short. The first half of the collection consists of stories centering on one Japanese American family in San Francisco, and the remaining half drifts off into other families and characters, also centered in San Francisco. It definitely feels like a text from the late '80s, early '90s. The stories tread the ground of generational differences, the huge impact of internment on Japanese American families, and particularly the perspectives of daughters (in relation to their mother, father, sisters, and so on). The stories generally have a sort of autobiographical feel to them, whether or not they have a first-person narrator. My favorite story is "First Love," told in the third-person perspective. The story centers on Jo Terasaki and her relationship with FOB George Sakamoto in high school and college. I like how the story represents George both as someone who rubs against the American sensibilities of JAs and as someone who deliberately pushes against what others expect of him, in almost reverse-chameleon-like ways.