Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei

by David Mura

Book Overview

A journal of discovery by a poet and third-generation Japanese-American who explores the sense of difference that haunts him both at home and in Japan. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871134314
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.3" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Honest account of self discovery

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.

Resonates with the memories of this sansei

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.

Turning a corner

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!

Mura describes in poignant detail the search for ethnicity.

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