Introducing Karen Tei Yamashita

Karen Tei Yamashita is one of the most distinguished Japanese American magic realists endowed with a planetary imagination. Born in 1951 in Oakland, California, she grew up in Los Angeles and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Carleton College in Minnesota, after spending a year at Waseda University in Tokyo. While studying in Japan, she conducted extensive research on her maternal grandparents Kitaichi Sakai and Tei Imai, natives of Nagano prefecture who immigrated to San Francisco, the setting of Karen’s fifth novel I Hotel (2010), where they opened Uoki Fish Market in the wake of the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906. Deep interest in Japanese immigration further induced her to live for nine years in São Paulo, the source of inspiration for her second novel Brazil-Maru (1992), where she met her future husband Ronaldo Lopes de Oliveira, a Brazilian architect, with whom she had two children, Jane and Jon. It is during her Brazil years that Karen started writing fiction, especially “Asaka-no-miya,” the 1979 winner of the first place of the James Clavell American Japanese Short Story Contest. Moving back to Los Angeles together with her family, she expanded her field of writing and published many plays, screenplays, poems and short stories, culminating with her first novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest (Coffee House Press, 1990). This novel bravely explores the mystery of the force controlling the whole planet, qualifying the author to be compared with Herman Melville, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon. Her second novel Brazil-Maru could well be interpreted as another diaspora narrative; in it, she deconstructs the boundary between the Japanese Brazilians and the Native Americans. And her third novel Tropic of Orange (1997) attempts to displace the Tropic of Cancer and the Monroe Doctrine’s order of hemispheres. Now let us listen to her radical critique of the concept of “pure Japanese” in her fourth novel Circle K Cycles (2001): “What could it mean to be a ‘pure Japanese’? I felt hurt and resentment. I came from a country where many people, including my own, had long struggled with the pain of racism and exclusion. Purity of race was not something I valued or believed to be important, and yet, in Japan, I was trying so hard to pass, to belong” (12).

I believe Karen’s constructivist and even planetary view of ethnicity could have been well shared by a couple of Melville’s transpacific contemporaries:

John Manjiro, a.k.a. Manjiro Nakahama, a Japanese castaway who was to be educated in the United States a dozen years before the advent of Commodore Perry’s black ship in 1853 and Ranald McDonald, a half-Chinook, half-Scot North American castaway who considered his ancestors to be Japanese so as to weave his own Japanese Dream, ending up by becoming the first teacher of English in Japan. Karen Tei Yamashita’s global literary practices and views of ethnicity make her a perfect keynote lecturer at this first-ever International Melville Conference in Asia.