TURNING JAPANESE: Memoirs of a Sansei ...

TURNING JAPANESE: Memoirs of a Sansei by David Mura (Anchor: $12). A Sansei, or second-generation Japanese-American, David Mura came to the year he spent in Tokyo with a great deal of cultural and emotional baggage. The stories of the Japanese grandparents he never knew, who regarded their time in America as an exile, clashed with the memories of his Nisei parents, who tried to become 100% American--and spent World War II in internment camps. Equally uncomfortable with this muddled heritage and the anti-Asian prejudices of many Americans, Mura offers an engrossing account of his search for the roots of his identity: “I saw my sense of homelessness and my defiance of limits as intimately related to my reaction to stereotypes. If American culture wanted to see me solely as Mr. Moto or the bucktoothed gardener, I wanted to outplay, to leap beyond the bounds of, other people’s conceptions of me.” Although his appearance enabled to him to “pass” in Tokyo--at least until his accent or manners betrayed him--Mura soon learned he could never experience Japan as the Japanese do. Many aspects of the culture fascinated and charmed him, but he remained an outsider, impatient with the sexism, wastefulness and conformity of contemporary Japanese culture. Mura’s intelligent and well-written account of his experiences reveals that a hyphenated American, however alienated from the mainstream culture, is an American still.