Sansei and Sensibility

by Karen Tei Yamashita

Overview

Generations of Japanese Americans merge with Jane Austen’s characters in these lively stories, pairing uniquely American histories with reimagined classics.

In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance—familial, cultural, emotional, artistic—really means. In a California of the sixties and seventies, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L.A., bake sales replace ballroom dances, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with wit and humor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566895866
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	05/05/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	19 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently Letters to Memory, all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor Emerita of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Table of Contents

(Note to Janeite readers in search of Jane Austen: kindly skip to part II)

I Sansei

The Bath 3

The Dentist and the Dental Hygienist 21

A Gentlemen's Agreement 33

Bombay Gin 43

Borges & I 55

Kiss of Kitty 61

Indian Summer 69

Colono:Scopy 81

KonMarimasu 87

Sansei Recipes 97

A Selected L.A./Gardena J.A. Timeline 101

II Sensibility

Shikataganai & Mottainai 115

Giri & Gaman 123

Monterey Park 133

Emi 143

Japanese American Gothic 153

The PersuAsians 165

Omaki-san 177

J.A. Cheat Sheet 205

Afterword: Sansei Janeite 207

Stories/Essays Previously Published 211

Acknowledgments 213

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Sansei and Sensibility

Longlisted for the 2020 Believer Book Award in Fiction
A Kirkus Best Fiction of 2020
A Poets & Writers New and Noteworthy Book of 2020
An Esquire Best Book of Spring 2020
A Salon Must Read Book of Spring 2020
A Refinery29 Best Spring Book of 2020

“The range of characters, sparkling humor, connective themes, and creative ambition all showcase Yamashita’s impressive powers.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“An elegantly written, wryly affectionate mashup of Jane Austen and the Japanese immigrant experience. . . . Yamashita’s reimagining of Austen is sympathetic and funny—and as on target as the movie Clueless.” —Kirkus, starred review

“Sansei and Sensibility challenges and delights, while laying bare the familial loyalties we work to preserve and eschew.” —The Boston Globe

“As gently humorous and entertaining as it is innovative and thought-provoking, Sansei and Sensibility is full of truths universally acknowledged, delivered in one of the most astute, idiosyncratic and important voices writing in America today.” —The Star Tribune

“A dazzling array of short stories. . . . Yamashita explores the question of inheritance—of how and what we inherit from our cultures, families, and histories—with poignant insight and humor.” —Preety Sidhu and Jae-Yeon Yoo, Electric Literature

“Yamashita’s writing echoes the pain and strength of the Japanese American experience. A potent mashup of Austen and Japanese American culture, Sansei and Sensibility is both entertaining and profound.” —BookPage

“Ironic, wry, playful, with bright, shimmering surfaces and undercurrents strong and political.” —Ariel Djanikian, The Rumpus

“Definitely the best Austen adaptation since Clueless.” —Refinery29

“Karen Tei Yamashita is one of America’s great unsung geniuses . . . Here she’s mapped a series of stories onto the plots of Jane Austen novels, telling the tales of Japanese immigrants to the United States through the lens of their shared themes: inheritance, marriage, familial heritage. Yamashita is writing some of her finest stories yet.” —Literary Hub

“The range of characters, sparkling humor, connective themes, and creative ambition all showcase Yamashita’s impressive powers.” —Buzzfeed

“Yamashita seamlessly incorporates the Sansei experience into all seven of Austen’s timeless stories, and the result is brilliant, impactful, and of course, hysterical. . . . An unmissable work.” —Paperback Paris

“Dazzling. An extraordinarily inventive collection of short stories that takes us from Japan to Brazil to the fractured heart of suburban postwar Japanese America. Whether she is riffing on Jane Austen, channeling Jorge Luis Borges, or meditating on Marie Kondo, Yamashita is a brilliant and often subversive storyteller in superb command of her craft.”—Julie Otsuka

“Sansei and Sensibility offers a unique and necessary perspective of what it means to be the aging grandchild of Asian immigrants, wondering what you will leave behind for the next generation. As in all of her books, Yamashita deconstructs form and genre to create a work that both delights and challenges." —Naomi Hirahara

“This capacious collection is witty, sharp—funny at times, angry at times—always amazing, and never, never dull. I think Jane Austen would be surprised, but delighted. I surely am.” —Karen Joy Fowler

From the Publisher

★ 2020-03-02
An elegantly written, wryly affectionate mashup of Jane Austen and the Japanese immigrant experience.

Yamashita, author of the brilliant experimental novel I Hotel (2010), here delivers a book of stories in many voices. The first set is told, usually matter-of-factly, by sansei, third-generation Japanese Americans who often have only tenuous connections with the mother country. In the first, a sansei visits Kyoto, “cold with a barren sense of an old winter,” and there becomes part of a story within a story that revolves around bathing—but with many twists and turns, involving people made slow by old age, captured by terrorists, and lashed by typhoons, and all in the space of 17 pages. The closing line is a droll, note-perfect commentary on what has happened before. A more straightforward story, punctuated by haunting photographs from the early years of the last century, turns on certain differences between the descendants of Japanese immigrants to the U.S. and to Brazil (“What was a sansei? I was a figment of their imaginations”) but closes with the gently perceptive reminder that while it is winter where the narrator lives, north of the Equator, it is summer to the south. The second set of stories brings Jane Austen into the picture, she serving as the putative author of a book of stories whose characters “represent the minutiae of sansei life as it once existed in a small provincial island in an armpit of postwar sunshine.” Those stories share the once-upon-a-time incantation “mukashi, mukashi,” but they’re altogether modern, with Regency carriages giving way to gold Mercedes sedans and Fitzwilliam Darcy taking the form of one Darcy Kabuto II, football hero, class vice president, and best-looking member of his class, “which meant he looked like he was the son of Toshiro Mifune.” Yamashita’s reimagining of Austen is sympathetic and funny—and as on target as the movie Clueless.

A humane vision of people and their stories traveling, learning, sometimes suffering, and always changing.

Kirkus Reviews