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Weaving Traces
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20399 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1992 |
1,616 Words |
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Amy Ling
Amy Ling was a visiting professor of Asian American literature
at Harvard and Trinity College in Hartford, and in the fall
will be professor of English and director of Asian American
studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. |
THE LOOM AND OTHER STORIES
R.A. Sasaki
St. Paul. Minn: Graywolf Press, 1991
124 pp. (paper), $ 10.00
Following the tradition established by Toshio Mori and Hisaye Yamamoto of an earlier generation. R.A., Sasaki joins the distinguished ranks of Japanese American short fiction writers whose carefully wrought, sensitive stories present the complexities of life for Americans of Japanese ancestry. Sasaki, a Sansei, or a third-generation Japanese American, attended the university of Kent in Canterbury, England, and has a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University. In 1983, she won the American Japanese Literary Award; she has had stories published in Short Story Review and Making Waves: An Anthology of Writing by Asian American Women. The Loom is her first collection of stories, and it marks the fine beginning of a promising career.
Like her predecessors, Sasaki employs understatement, irony, gentle humor, memorable imagery, and lucid prose to explore a full range of subjects. Many of her stories focus on family tragedies and personal concerns. Her preface," Another Writer's Beginnings," echoing the title of Eudora Welty's autobiography, gives an account, evoking both laughter and tears, of the author's physical ugliness, which, since beauty would not be her strong card in life, forced her to develop other talents. The collection itself also ranges in tone from the tragic the death of a sister ("Ohaka-Mairi") the father's battle with cancer ("Driving to Colma"), mother-daughter differences stemming from cultural and generational clashes ("Seattle") to the comic teenage attempts at independence ("Independence") and misguided and later outgrown notions of what is attractive in the opposite sex ("First Love")
But Sasaki does not flinch at dealing with the larger, difficult issues surrounding World War II that scarred an entire people in the United States; the relocation camps and the bombing of Hiroshima. And despite the slenderness of her volume, Sasaki explores these issues in a number of stories. In the title story, "The Loom," Sasaki accurately and sensitively characterizes three generations of Japanese Americans; the issei, or first generation those who in this story; immigrated in the 1920s and '30s the nisei, or second generation those who grew up in the 1940s. And the Sansei, those who came of age in the 1960s. In contrast to these groups she adds a vivid portrait of a recent young immigrant (an FOB,
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