774 The American Century: Literature since 1945Much of that music in prose over the last two decades has been produced
by Japanese-American women. There have been autobiographical narratives,
developing the conventions of Nisei Daughter: among them, Talking to High Monks
in the Snow: An Asian American Odyssey (1993) by Lydia Minatoya (1950–) and The
Dream of Water: A Memoir (1995) by Kyoko Mori (1957–). There has also been a
steady stream of fiction. In Women of Silk (1991), Gail Tsukiyama (1950–) writes
about girl laborers; in A Bridge Between Us (1995), Julie Shigekuni (?–) concerns
herself with the interwoven lives of four generations of Japanese-American women.
More remarkably still, Cynthia Kadohata (1956–) explores the experience of
Japanese immigrants in the 1950s in The Floating World (1989). She then carries the
action forward to 2052 in her second novel, In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992),
a complex dystopian narrative about a Japanese-American woman’s efforts to make
sense of a world gone insane. The Floating World, in particular, may be the most
important book written by a Japanese-American since The No-No Boy. It embraces
three generations of Japanese-Americans, Issei, Nisei, and Sansei (the Japanese terms
for first, second, and third generation immigrants), as it tells the story of one family
and its search for America. The narrator is Olivia Osaka, or Livvie, who is 12 when
the novel opens and 21 when it ends. What she recalls, as she tells us right at the
beginning, is that her family “traveled a lot.” Among those she recalls, in particular,
is her grandmother, Hisae Fujitano or Obasan: a powerful woman who has had
three husbands and several lovers, and is the initiator of the family odyssey.
Toughened by her passage from Japan to Hawaii then to the mainland, Obasan
instils in her family the habit of movement and the myth of the floating world. The
floating world, the grandmother tells the family, “was the gas station attendants,
restaurants, and jobs we depended on, the motel towns floating in the middle of
fields and mountains.” In “old Japan,” she adds, it “meant the districts full of brothels,
teahouses, and public baths, but it also referred to change and the pleasures and
loneliness change brings.” As an adult, Livvie remains faithful to this vision of
immigrant rootlessness, which she sees as the essence of the American character and
landscape. It is what maps America. “I read once that there were three main rivers in
the country, one on the West Coast, one on the East, and one in the Midwest,” she
explains. “The rivers, made up of migrant farmworkers, traveled down the country
every year during the growing season.” Eventually her parents settle down,
comfortably assimilated. Livvie, however, continues to live a life on the move that
seems to connect her with both her Japanese past and her American future. She
floats, just as her “tormentor,” her tyrannical grandmother did, between cultures
and identities, pursuing the elusive promise of America and performing, revising,
and remaking herself in their fluid environment from day to day.
Like the Japanese, many Korean immigrants traveled initially to Hawaii, escaping
first from Japanese aggression at the beginning of the twentieth century and then,
between 1930 and 1945, from Japanese occupation. Something of what Koreans had
to contend with, during the years of occupation, is revealed in Comfort Woman
(1997) by Nora Okja Keller (1965–). The novel is narrated from the perspective of
Akiko, a Korean refugee who has fled to the United States, and her daughter by anGGray_c05.indd 774ray_c 05 .indd 774 8 8/1/2011 7:31:44 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 44 PM