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Circle K Cycles

Circle K Cycles by Karen Tei Yamashita; Coffee House Press, 220 pages, $16.95

By Roy Osamu Kamada

In her fourth and most boldly experimental book to date, Karen Tei Yamashita blurs the boundaries of genre, ethnicity, and national identity in a new collection of essays and stories. Taking license with form as well as content, Yamashita’s new book mixes text with visual collage, essay with story, and explores the evolution of the transnational, postcolonial, migrant global Asian. She represents the Pacific Rim in the 21st century: imagined and caught in a continuous mobius strip of transformation and perpetually subjected to the transnational forces of global capitalism. The characters in her stories and essays are the children of the Japanese diaspora come home to be confronted by economic and cultural displacements that force them to question who they are and where they come from.

And yet for all of the far-reaching cultural and economic implications that Yamashita’s book has, she never loses sight of the impact these forces have on the individual. In an early passage she asks, “What could it mean to be a ‘pure Japanese’?” She notes her own performance of Japanese mannerisms as part of her conscious attempt “to pass, to belong.” And yet, while she might perform and mimic the behavior of a Japanese woman born in Japan, her own distinction and difference are enforced in other ways. In a particularly poignant autobiographical passage, she notes that while her previous books have been translated into Japanese, her name has not been written in the kanji characters of the Japanese language, but rather “Yamashita” is written in katakana, the Japanese script normally reserved for words of a foreign origin (hambaga written out in these characters would mean hamburger, as kohi would mean coffee). She writes, “it hurts me to see that my last name Yamashita is not written in kanji...it’s all been reduced to that block lettering [katakana], a phonetic approximation that designates my foreignness, facilitates my illiteracy, sends a textual signal to the reader.” For Yamashita, a sansei (third generation) from California, her name being written in katakana designates the kind of homelessness that pervades her book. Her foreignness is literally inscribed.

She focuses largely on the experience of the dekasegi in Japan, the children of Japanese immigrants to Brazil who have come to Japan seeking work. Yamashita, sharply critical of the ways in which global capital exploits international labor, cites a law passed by the Japanese government in 1990 that allows nisei and sansei (2nd and 3rd generation foreign-born Japanese) to gain work visas for unskilled labor. She writes that “both government and business hoped to find a way to replenish the loss of unskilled factory labor; but in doing so to also replace non-Japanese foreign workers with the more familiar faces of Japanese descendants who should, it was thought, integrate more easily into Japanese life and society.” Yamashita chronicles the lives of these postmodern migrant workers; she notes how they have built, in just 10 short years, a community and a community-based infrastructure complete with “soccer teams, internet cafes, and samba schools.”

With the same sense of quirky humor that pervades her other works, Yamashita lists, in Japanese and English, the imaginary cultural rules that govern the Japanese, Brazilian, and American cultures. For the Japanese, “Remove your shoes..., Avoid the number four, for the same work: Pay men 1,200 yen per hour; pay women 900 yen per hour.” For the Brazilians, “there are no rules, nothing is sacred: tell a joke, taking advantage of a situation is not necessarily stealing, since nothing works, doing nothing may be the best approach.” And for the Americans, “speak English, just do it, we are the world, we are the happiest place on Earth, we accept American Express, Mastercard or Visa.” In listing these various rules, Yamashita points to the core differences that exist between these three cultures, and yet at the same time she suggests the possible ways in which individuals might circumvent such rules and write their own destinies.

Karen Tei Yamashita has written an unusual book that defies convention even as it attempts to accurately represent and chronicle the lives of the forgotten. She has sought to give voice to the voiceless and maintain throughout the same humor that readers have appreciated in her other works. She makes clear a potent and tragic political and social situation, while never loosing sight of the human aspect. She has written a complex, tragic, compassionate, and slightly strange book and I would heartily recommend it.