Customer Reviews

Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I can't comment with any authority on this book regarding its literary merit. However, I can say that, having lived life as a sansei just as David Mura has, I found this book a compelling read -- a book whose feeling and emotion was/is quite consistent with mine. This is so even though for the most part we seem to have lived very different kinds of lives. Our principal commonality appears to be that a stay in Japan during young adulthood played a pivotal role in helping us learn something about ourselves. Trivial and obvious? Perhaps. Anti-white and/or anti-American (as has been stated by other readers here)? I don't think so.

I agree with the reviewers who found the book repetitive, a little boring and more about his family than Japanese culture. While he attempts to provide many insights I fear that most of them are dated now 16 years later. Also the author makes such a big deal about seeing the hometown of his grandfather and when he finally gets there after 300 pages there is absolutely no payoff.

I was drawn to this book because I'm interested in the issue of cultural identity of immigrants and their descendants. The subject of the book is an important one and I admired the author's brutal honesty. However, it has to be said that this just isn't a book that compels you to keep reading (not for me, anyway). We read about countless, mostly banale conversations in bars, and the book's 'revelatory insights' are underwhelming to say the least. There are a few interesting nuggets but they are few and far between. I'm not quite sure why I waded through the whole thing.

I appreciate Mura's contribution to Asian American literature and his courage to reveal himself, which is very atypical for Asian/Asian American men. His struggles with his racial identity and journey to find connections with his grand parents' homeland were fascinating. Being a person of Japanese ancestory, I believe Asian/Asian American men can personally relate to Mura's story. I also recommend his other book,"Where the Body Meets Memory", which reveals further on his issues and helps to complement this book.

As an Asian American who has lived in Asia, I could certainly identify with some of Mura's insights. As for his writing, he is a poet, but also an intellectual, and so his insights do at times appear to be excessive self-brooding. While I don't dislike the book, I found myself having trouble agreeing with some of his conclusions. For one, Mura links problems with his sexuality with his racial identity. Fine. But then he links it with his parents' silence in the internment camps, a more tenuous and less convincing argument. After all, many Asian American men feel anger and resentment about emasculation in society, but why does Mura focus mainly on the internment camps and not on other factors? But I'm nitpicking here. Mura is a progressive liberal intellectual who has come up with a well-written memoir. I must say that it did lose steam, however; after awhile I began to wonder if Mura spent most of his grant money going to bars and having intellectual dinner parties with his Japanese friends.

I appreciate Mura's brutal honesty. He admits his sexual frustrations and fetishes of even his white wife. At times, one might wonder why Mura feels compelled to be so revealing, but it becomes clear that it is because his pain as a racial minority has been so extreme. Interestingly, I sympathized with his parents, whom he describes as having been somewhat taken aback and hurt by his words and actions (he discusses this more in his next book). While I can understand why Mura felt he had to include the private details of his life, his parents maintain their stoic dignity. Whether you like him or not, ultimately, he writes about something few others are willing to write about. For that, this book should be given some credit.

I am a Japan-born Japanese who lives in Boston for over 10 years and it is my strong pursuit to learn cultural encountering points between East and West especially, to name, Japan and US. The book caught my eyes immediately when I first saw it in a bookstore since I thought I can read about this Japanese American who know more about US than Japan although he must have been exposed to a some level of Japanese-ism over the course of his upbringing. My expectation from the book was to see the complex mosaic of his feeling toward Japan and its culture now that he lives in the country Japan. Unfortunately, it was not what I retrieved from the book since he was rather in a rare subculture of Japan and read little about his interaction with Japanese as cultural encountering. However, it was certainly a personal memoir of an expat who lives in a foreign country but knows the intricacy of Japan. This will not be a book for those who want to read his statements of Japan. But it will certainly be an interesting reading if you want to read the life of this expat who can describe his personal experience in more Japanese familiar terms.

This is an important and honest look at the Japanese American experience in this country. As a nisei with Japanese parents, I did not experience the impact of the internments through them, but David Mura's honesty about his experience truly resonates with my experience. The negative Kirkus review of his other book "Where the body meets memory" here on Amazon makes me angry and I suspect that the person who wrote it has no understanding of the experiences of Japanese American men in the United States

The book title is what originally caught my eye. Upon reading the book, I found many similarities to my experience as a Sansei. I really enjoyed Mura's style of writing-almost like journal entries. I recommended this as required reading to my brothers, who have seldom shown interest in the fact that they are full American-Japanese

I am in the midst of Mura's book and already feel compelled to defend it. The book was a gift from a friend who attended a reading by Mura that I was unfortunately absent for. I regret not meeting him. I too lived and wrote in Japan during the same period covered by Mura, and I want to assure all readers that he is right on the money about the gaijin experience in Tokyo during the 1980s. I am not AJA, so I can't vouch for his correctness about the sansei experience, but I suspect that he is equally on the money in this regard. (I have noted the supportive reviews by other AJA male reviewers: curiously, his detractors seem not to be AJA, meaning their opinions of his experience are probably invalid.) Mura's honesty may have come as an embarrassment to the AJA community: good. The complacence of the older AJA generation needs a good shaking up. This much I feel I can say as an American. It is high time AJAs shake off the dubious honor of "model minority." As for the writing, again, Mura's detractors elsewhere in these reviews don't seem to have much of a grasp of good writing. He is eloquent, authoritative, acutely observant, relentlessly honest, and achingly authentic. I would suspect that his poetry is first-rate as well, and I intend to read it next. Thanks Dave! Wish we could have met in La Jolla. Maybe next time!

I found this book beautiful. It painted lots of pictures that have stayed with me long after reading it.