Rezension zu David Mura's 'Turning Japanese Memoirs of a Sansei'

Literature Review from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: B, San Francisco State University (Ethnic Studies), course: AAS 833 Asian American Family and Identity, language: English, abstract: In his book Turning Japanese. Memoirs of a Sansei, David Mura writes about his one year long stay in Japan, the country of his ancestors. He talks about how this experience has changed his view on his own country, the United States, and Japan. He writes in a postmodernist way, juxtaposing fragments of text dating back to different points in time. Some were written during his actual stay in Japan, with several pieces looking back at his and his family's past, and some were written after his stay when putting together his novel. The former look back at the United States from Japan, the latter look back to Japan from the United States. Postmodernism is also an element in so far as the author uses a lot of irony and as it becomes clear how futile his efforts of finding his own identity are. In this existentialist search for who he is, Mura jumps back and forth in place and time. However, I had the feeling that the insights he arrives at with his writing are derived from only very few passages. In other words, these insights are framed by many useless pieces of text which kind of made me feel lost in a nebulous sphere in between the past and the present, Japan and the United States.

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