Review: Sansei and Sensibility by Karen Tei Yamashita

review by Kion You

Sansei and Sensibility
by Karen Tei Yamashita
Coffee House Press, May 2020
$16.95, 232pp
ISBN: 978-1-56689-578-1

“Japanese Americans were used to Japanese Americans,” Karen Tei Yamashita writes in her new short story collection, Sansei and Sensibility, in which she creates a world grounded in cultural intimacy. The first half of the collection, “Sansei,” referring to the label for third generation Japanese Americans, collates a half-century of Yamashita’s published work, and the second half, “Sensibility,” features short parodies of Jane Austen novels that are reframed from Japanese American perspectives.

From an author acclaimed for books like I Hotel and Tropic of Orange, works that dig into the currents of environmental destruction, multinational corporations, migratory pathways, and grassroots activism, Sansei and Sensibility circles back home to the Los Angeles ethnic enclaves in which Yamashita grew up. Yamashita illustrates a Japanese American community built on familiarity, in which food choices and immigration histories and World War II incarceration do not have to be spelled out for outsiders.

However, Yamashita also prods at the contradictions and repressions latent in such tight-knit groups, which resonate deeply with the Victorian communities Austen writes about: repressed shame, provincialism, petty grievances, and family disintegration. Such moves create a multidimensional portrait of the sansei, one that Yamashita continues to layer and complicate with each additional story. And although the stories assume a more domestic undertone, Yamashita, in her typical fashion, intermingles memoir, fiction, travelogues, recipes, cultural criticism, letters, and a historical timeline into the collection.

“Sansei” opens with the 1975 story “The Bath,” originally published in the Amerasia Journal, which focuses on twin sisters and their adolescent bathing experiences. For the young girls, bathing with their family evokes a keen bodily intimacy, but at the same time cloaks just as much as it reveals. On the naked bodies of their parents are scars from their past: “Mommy, you have a scar on your tummy? Isn’t that where I came out of you when I was a baby?” and “Daddy, you hurt your leg in the war?” the girls ask to muffled responses. The girls also watch their grandmother bathing with a tenugui, a long strip of cotton “decorated with Japanese writing and design,” which harken back to an ancestral homeland they have little conception of.

These childhood scenes introduce the reader into the sansei psyche: the twins are irrevocably wrapped up with their family, but are not privy to their parents’ repressed experience of wartime incarceration. The twins’ grandmother is even more distant, with her alien cultural practices and “bery broken Engurish.” The sansei must then make sense of their fractured histories, which the twins gesture towards by loving each other. The story ends with them exploring Japan, stuck in cabin during a violent storm: “Her twin bent over her squatting back and scrubbed [. . .] she thought of the deluge and the mass of land that might bury two naked, soapy bodies.”

Following the tone set in “The Bath,” the rest of the stories in “Sansei” continue to complicate the word’s very categorization. In the irreverent but piercing “Colono:scopy,” Yamashita shifts tone to narrates a literal colonoscopy, examining sansei complicity in the colonization of America. As a camera moves through both the narrator’s digestive tract and the geography of America, Sacagawea suddenly appears and questions the political claims of Japanese Americans. “Right there, Delta, Utah. My people were incarcerated in a concentration camp,” the narrator explains. “‘Boohoo,’ says Sacagawea. “You had no business being concentrated there in the first place.’” Yamashita questions the validity of a sansei claim on America, a country built on the foundations of genocide and mass colonization.

Yamashita’s stories warn of the repercussions of assimilationism, as Japanese Americans were popularized as a “model minority” in a watershed 1966 New York Times article headlined, “Success Story, Japanese-American Style.” Just like in the Times article, which argued that African Americans should simply follow in the footsteps of the Japanese, Yamashita argues in “Colono:scopy” that assimilation into whiteness comes at a cost to other people of color: “We’ve heard that loyalty bullshit; you’re the models that make everyone else’s lives miserable.”

Other “Sansei” stories build on a myriad of subjects and forms loosely tied to the sansei experience: “Gentlemen’s Agreement” is made up of four oral histories of Japanese American and Japanese Brazilian women; “Kiss of Kitty” works as cultural criticism self-consciously targeting white people who fetishize Japanese culture; and “KonMarimasu” is a travelogue tying together Marie Kondo’s “tidying up” with a road trip to different incarceration camps. There is even a collection of Japanese American recipes and a timeline of Japanese American history in Los Angeles.

In “KonMarimasu,” Yamashita gets to the core of the anthropological task in her writing: “To you, books and museums are much the same. Your road trip, like every other account of a road trip, is an open and physical book. You retrace the steps of others, stand in the places of their discovery, loss, and misery.” The stories in “Sansei” can be seen akin to this road trip, in which the reader is able to situate themself into a “museum” that illustrates the complexities within the Japanese American community, and goes beyond a one dimensional, trauma based historical narrative.

The second half of Sansei and Sensibility continues this metaphorical “road trip,” but veers into Jane Austen’s oeuvre. Although “Sensibility” setting, presumably Gardena, California, a prominent Japanese American enclave, remains static, Yamashita’s ethnic bubble always appears to be on the verge of bursting. Her literary neighborhood is filled with nostalgia and rebellion and chatter, and acts as an apt surrogate for Austen’s Victorian estates.

However, to the non-Janeite reader, like myself, the “Sensibility” stories often fall flat compared to their “Sansei” counterpart, mainly because they rely on a deep knowledge of Austen’s novels to fill context for every character and incident. Unlike Yamashita’s past novels I Hotel or Tropic of Orange, which run at 400 and 600 pages, respectively, and are equally overwhelming and polyvocal, “Sensibility” attempts to distill entire Austen novels into ten pages, which gives the reader inadequate time to emotionally latch onto the rotating casts of characters and numerous side plots all thrown up at once.

For example, “Monterey Park,” a spinoff of Mansfield Park, begins with the line, “Mukashi, mukashi, Mario Wada, with a diploma from Cal State L.A. in business and culinary skills learned on a summer cruise ship, met, on that same ship, the vivacious and very prosperous Tammy Wuya and fell impossibly in love.” Here Yamashita parodies the first line of Mansfield Park, a similarly zany whirlwind of a first sentence. Yet what works in Mansfield Park proves a bit too rushed in “Monterey Park”: Fanny Rice (Fanny Price) is adopted by the Wada family, and immediately becomes “some kind of human sponge, and as the years passed [. . .] Fanny either caught up or surpassed her cousins.” Then, after a few scant appearances, Fanny is shown in the last page going on to Harvard and MIT, becoming an astrophysicist, and writing a bestselling immigrant memoir.

Yet barring Yamashita’s frenetic pace, there are numerous gems in “Sensibility.” “Omaki-San,” based off of Austen’s unpublished Lady Susan, works largely because it revolves around a single woman, Omaki. Yamashita plays with the trope of the Victorian coquette, as Omaki seduces many of the men around her, but the genius of “Omaki-San” is that Yamashita does not give Omaki an actual voice, as she is only spoken for and gossiped about. Despite this impediment, however, Yamashita is able to emblazon a complex humanity onto Omaki, whether through her exoticization by American men, her difficulty as a new immigrant, or how she dealt with the Austenian contingency of tying and untying herself to family.

Other highlights come in “Emi,” based off of Emma, in which the sansei Emi Moriuchi stands up to the older generations and calls out their complicity, “In the erasure of our history [. . .] Imagine our surprise to even read that one paragraph since you, our parents, have refused to talk about the injustice done to our people.” After speaking up, Emi is humbled when she realizes how much the trauma of incarceration still impacts her elders’ lives, and how many of them remain silent not out of refusal, but out of deep-seated pain. “Giri and Gaman,” based off Pride and Prejudice, shows off Yamashita’s humor, as a white school librarian attempts to write a YA novel set in Japan solely based on her observations of Japanese American schoolchildren, who know they are being studied and recorded.

Overall, Sansei and Sensibility often brings the reader to acute moments of clarity, but at times reads as reconfigured mimicry, especially when compared to her innovative earlier novels. Nevertheless, there remains a dynamism and aliveness to Yamashita’s cast of characters, who flout and investigate every single stereotype placed upon them, ever expanding the complexities of Japanese America.

Kion You is a recent college graduate from San Diego. He enjoys writing about travel, fashion, religion, and Asian Americanness. He has been published in Sojourners, The College Hill Independent, and the Cleveland Review of Books.