asianamlitfans | A Review of Kimiko Guthrie’s Block Seventeen (Blackstone Publishing, 2020)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

So, this review is going to be a very short one for Kimiko Guthrie’s Block Seventeen (Blackstone Publishing, 2020). A different student wanted to read this book with me, so I am reviewing it just to give a little bit more coverage to independent and smaller presses. Blackstone’s history, which you can find out about it by clicking on the link below and browsing around the site, is an interesting one, and I’m always impressed by the ways that independent presses manage to grow and thrive. Let’s let the official marketing description move us along: “Akiko ‘Jane’ Thompson, a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian woman in her midthirties, is attempting to forge a quietly happy life in the Bay Area with her fiancé, Shiro. But after a bizarre car accident, things begin to unravel. An intruder ransacks their apartment but takes nothing, leaving behind only cryptic traces of his or her presence. Shiro, obsessed with government surveillance, risks their security in a plot to expose the misdeeds of his employer, the TSA. Jane’s mother has seemingly disappeared, her existence only apparent online. Jane wants to ignore these worrisome disturbances until a cry from the past robs her of all peace, forcing her to uncover a long-buried family trauma. As Jane searches for her mother, she confronts her family’s fraught history in America. She learns how the incarceration of Japanese Americans fractured her family, and how persecution and fear can drive a person to commit desperate acts.”

I found this novel pretty frustrating, even though the general conceit is interesting and the political dynamics of it are quite compelling. Guthrie’s part of a really talented generation of writers mining the incarceration experience in that latent way that comes with the territory of something traumatic being repressed. In this sense, we can add this work to other fictions produced by a bevy of writers, including but in no way limited to Julie Otsuka, David Mura, and Karen Tei Yamashita, who have explored the legacy of incarceration as it moves through time and impacts successive generations. This aspect of the novel is its most important. At the same time, readers may find themselves stymied by the slow progression of Jane’s self-awareness. Indeed, at times, I felt sometimes a couple steps ahead of her and wished that she would begin to fill in the dots that Guthrie makes already quite evident via the use of italics sections that take place in the distant incarceration past. The hallmark of Toni Morrison’s Beloved is all over this text, but Guthrie is hamstrung by Jane’s general malaise, which ultimately causes the narrative to burn more slowly than it should.

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