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7 The Transnational Imagination: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange Caroline Rody A Hundred Shakuhachis On a Los Angeles freeway overpass stands a white-haired man with a raised baton, conducting the music of the traf¤c below. Depending on the time of day, traf¤c patterns, and the rhythm of peoples’ lives, the music he guides into being can be “excruciatingly beautiful.” “When it was really good,” writes Karen Tei Yamashita, “it brought tears. He let them run down his face and onto the pavement, concentrating mightily on the delicate work at hand.” Although “[t]hose in vehicles who hurried past under . . . [his] concrete podium most likely never noticed him” or felt “disconnected from a sooty, homeless man on an overpass,” the old man’s art has an unsuspected power: “[S]tanding there, he bore and raised each note, joined them, united families, created a community, a great society, an entire civilization of sound” (33–35). This conductor of community is Manzanar Murakami, a character in Yamashita ’s 1997 novel Tropic of Orange. Once a surgeon and a family man, Manzanar walked away from all that and became a homeless freeway overpass conductor for reasons he cannot explain even to himself. His name records his history as “the ¤rst sansei born in captivity”(108), a Japanese American born at the Manzanar detention camp during World War II, and so we suspect that that archetypal Japanese American trauma may be at the root of his eventual unhinging, as well as of his acute sensitivity to the sounds of our civilization. This is to say that Asian American history leaves its traces in this ambitious novel, but that Yamashita extends these traces into extravagant designs,1 designs unanticipated in Asian American novelistic tradition. Indeed, Yamashita’s account of the cultural embarrassment caused by Manzanar ’s idiosyncratic practice re®ects wryly on her own relations with the most conventional of Japanese American norms: The Japanese American community had apologized profusely for this blight on their image as the Model Minority. They had attempted time after time to remove him from his overpass, from his eccentric activities, to no avail. They had even tried to placate him with a small lacquer bridge in the Japanese gardens in Little Tokyo. But Manzanar was destined for greater vistas. He could not con¤ne his musical talents to the silky ®ow of koi in a pond, the constant tap of bamboo on rock, or manicured bonsai. It was true that he had introduced the shakuhachi and koto to a number of his pieces, but he was the sort who imagined a hundred shakuhachis and a hundred kotos. (36–37) There are ethnic artists whose eccentricity and largeness of vision strain the capacity of received forms. One such is Karen Tei Yamashita, wildly imaginative and politically engaged, brilliant and humane, Asian, American, and Latin American, a writer who seems, like her alter ego Manzanar, to view our collective life from a position of unusually expansive vistas. A Japanese American born in California, Yamashita lived for ten years in Brazil and married a Brazilian , and her ¤rst three novels span the Americas by means of startlingly unconventional narrative strategies.2 Writing in English for American audiences, Yamashita reformulates migrant stories and subjectivities, raising both dread and laughter while evoking the perils of the ethnically and nationally bounded imagination. Like her earlier work, Yamashita’s third novel, Tropic of Orange, de¤es conventional literary categorization, exceeding the boundaries of most genres or subgenres to which we might at ¤rst glance assign it: postmodern satire, magic realism, Los Angeles disaster ¤ction, Asian American ¤ction, ethnic American¤ction, Mexican ¤ction. Perhaps the most nearly adequate generic term would be “border novel,” for in its formal elements and its plots, its landscape and its characterization, Tropic of Orange is deeply informed by the effort to render what José David Saldívar has called “the discursive spaces and the physical places” of the U.S.-Mexico border, and thus participates in “an emerging U.S.Mexico frontera imaginary” in literature and culture (Border ix, xii). But if this is a text about the borderlands, then, as Claudia Sadowski-Smith puts it (in a somewhat different context), “readers of Yamashita’s work may be asking themselves : What’s Asian American about this?” (101). Yamashita’s entire oeuvre has challenged standard notions of “what’s Asian American,” taking the Asian American novel to new places and welcoming into it new kinds of characters, broadening...

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