Quarterly in 1959 and well received, finding a
publisher for Murayama’s novel proved to be dif-
ficult. In the mid-20th century, publishers were
uncertain about the profitability of books about
Asian-American experiences. More specifically,
they were reluctant to publish a book that was lib-
erally sprinkled with local Hawaiian dialect. After
many years of rejection, Murayama and his wife,
Dawn, formed Supa Press and published the book
themselves in 1975. The groundbreaking novel
became a success almost immediately. Since that
time it has been re-released by the University of
Hawaii Press and anthologized several times, be-
ginning with The Spell of Hawaii (1968) and most
recently in The Quietest Singing (2000). The Before
Columbus Foundation bestowed upon Murayama
an American Book Award for his work in 1980,
and the Hawai’i Literary Arts Council conferred
the Hawai’i Award for Literature in 1991.
Bibliography
Murayama, Milton. All I Asking for Is My Body. San
Francisco: Supa, 1975. Reprint, Honolulu: Univer-
sity of Hawaii Press, 1988.
Sumida, Stephen H. And the View from the Shore: Lit-
erary Traditions of Hawai’i. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1991.
Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Mul-
ticultural America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.
Hellen Lee-Keller
All over Creation Ruth Ozeki (2003)
When retired potato farmer Lloyd Fuller ends up
in the hospital, and his wife, Momoko, begins to
show signs of schizophrenia, their neighbors, Cass
and Will Quinn, decide they have to contact Yumi,
the couple’s long-estranged daughter. Yumi, or
Yummy as she is often called, and Cass grew up
together in the small town of Liberty Falls, Idaho,
but the lives of the two women have taken differ-
ent directions. At 14, the beautiful and precocious
Yumi had an affair with her history teacher—a
scandal that led her to flee Liberty Falls for Califor-
nia. While Cass stayed and eventually settled into
a comfortable, yet childless, marriage to a local
potato farmer, Yumi survived life as a teenage run-
away, graduated from college on her own, and gave
birth to three children by three different fathers.
Although 25 years have passed since Yumi left
town, an e-mail from Cass brings her back from
her new home in Hawaii to care for her aging par-
ents. This is but the first of a series of events that
upsets life in the placid little town. Shortly after
Yumi returns, a busload of environmental activ-
ists calling themselves the Seeds of Resistance ar-
rive on the Fuller doorstep. Convinced that Lloyd
Fuller is a prophet in the war against the genetic
modification of vegetables, they decide to stay to
help Lloyd and Momoko with their seed business,
much to the chagrin of the local police. Then,
coincidentally, Yumi’s childhood seducer, Elliot
Rhodes, shows up. Currently employed by a public
relations firm on behalf of corporate agribusiness,
Elliot’s real target is the environmental activists,
but his mere presence is enough to upset Yumi’s
precarious stability.
As in RUTH OZEKI’s first novel, MY YEAR OF
MEATS, fiction and contemporary political issues
collide in All over Creation. In this novel about in-
tergenerational tensions, friendship, and aging, the
author revisits the issue of genetic modification.
Elliot’s failure to take responsibility for his actions
on a personal level mirrors his compromised eth-
ics in his career as a biotech spin doctor. Cass and
Will’s childlessness is linked to their experimenta-
tion in farming genetically modified potatoes, im-
plicitly if not explicitly. Yumi’s blindness to Elliot’s
duplicity parallels her apolitical stance on the criti-
cal issue of genetic engineering.
Some of the stylistic devices of My Year of
Meats reappear in the second novel as well. As in
the first novel, the story unfolds from multiple
perspectives. Throughout the novel, Ozeki shifts
her narrative focus to follow the stories of each of
the main characters, including Cass, Yumi, Elliot,
and the teenager Frank Perdue, a recent recruit
to the Seeds’s anti-biotech cause. As in the earlier
work, the narrative brings together various texts
including, most notably, Luther Burbank’s writ-
ing on his development of the celebrated Burbank
potato, Yumi’s letters home, and Lloyd’s newsletter
to his seed customers. Much as she did in My Year12 All over Creation