Circle K Cycles

by Karen Tei Yamashita

"Yamashita is so tuned into now, she can see tomorrow."— Booklist on Tropic of Orange , starred review " Through the Arc of the Rainforest progresses toward an apocalyptic resolution that spreads out like a Bosch triptych reproduced by Gauguin. In this, her first novel, Ms. Yamashita presents a critique of human waste and stupidity that is fluid and poetic as well as terrifying."— The New York Times Book Review Yamashita’s innovative melding of fiction and essay explores issues such as labor, nationalism, and cultural diaspora. When the grandchildren of Japanese immigrants to Brazil move to Japan to assume the manual work native Japanese people no longer want, their need for cultural belonging, their homesickness for details of their birthplace, clash with the status quo. This book of hybrids—merging collage with text, story with history—opens a door onto one of the important issues of the new century. Yamashita has a powerful story to tell about a community that is globally extensive and the freedom—physical and emotional—implied by that new geography. Karen Tei Yamashita is a winner of the American Book Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Award. She is an assistant professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

Genres: Fiction, Essays, Short Stories, Japan

220 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2001

About the author

Born January 8, 1951 in Oakland, California, Karen Tei Yamashita is a Japanese American writer and Associate Professor of Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches creative writing and Asian American literature. Her works, several of which contain elements of magic realism, include novels I Hotel (2010), Circle K Cycles (2001), Tropic of Orange (1997), Brazil-Maru (1992), and Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990). Tei Yamashita's novels emphasize the absolute necessity of polyglot, multicultural communities in an increasingly globalized age, even as they destabilize orthodox notions of borders and national/ethnic identity.

She has also written a number of plays, including Hannah Kusoh, Noh Bozos and O-Men which was produced by the Asian American theatre group, East West Players.

Yamashita is a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award for I Hotel.

Reviews

[meeners · Rating 4 out of 5]

unique stories in an innovative format. karen tei yamashita is one of the few fiction writers in english to give voice to the diasporic experience of japanese brazilians (and other nikkeijin) and marginalized brazilian communities in japan. this is a slim volume of short fiction, blog entries, photographs, leaflets, and more - i only wish there were more!

[Luna Logan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yamashita does an incredible job mixing together languages, cultures, and ideas into Circle K Cycles. The Brazilian-Japanese-American relationship is complex, and this book navigates the tension between countries by recognizing the tension between homecoming and tourism that many Brazilians of Japanese descent experience. Inherently, this book is about national and personal identities, but also hits themes like xenophobia, immigrant politics, and visibility. The rhetoric isn’t difficult but the ideas are dense, so if you’re looking for a light read, this may not do the trick. If you’re Brazilian-American, Japanese-American, or all three, this book hits close to home. Worth reading twice over.

Kudos to Yamashita for including a section entirely in Portuguese and a section entirely in Japanese - without translations of each. That in itself is a statement. I was able to read the Portuguese area but not the Japanese. I wonder how much I’m missing without the language.

[Ke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was easy to read but hard to define. At times there were prose poems, blog entries, news clippings, but always a lot of pictures and photos. I found the changes in tone a bit distracting. But everything else about this book was fun.