the gender and racial oppressions that she has
encountered.
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Nan Ma
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
Karen Tei Yamashita (1990)
In this debut novel by KAREN TEI YAMASHITA, char-
acters of different talents and nationalities come
together in Brazil: a three-armed American man
called Tweep who runs a global plastic enterprise;
a Japanese man named Kazumasa who has a satel-
lite hovering over his head; and Brazilians Batista
and Tania Aparecido, who use their ability to train
carrier pigeons to mass-market their pigeons. In
the background is a story of a relationship between
humans and Mother Nature gone awry; however,
Yamashita’s satirical narrative and unusual con-
figuration of characters and landscapes render
her work different from other narratives about
humans’ relationship with nature. Her intricately
interwoven cultural symbolisms of Japan, Latin
America, and the United States produce a complex
matrix of hybrid characters and cultures that chal-
lenges readers to question and probe established
cultural norms.
Human beings and waste migrate to Brazil
as nature orchestrates a global recycling system.
The system channels industrial waste spewing
from every artificial orifice on the Earth’s surface
through the Earth’s mantle, ultimately siphon-
ing the transformed material through the Earth’s
crust as a black magnetic substance in the heart of
the Brazilian forest. With the arrival of the “Mata-
cao,” as the substance is called, it not only brings
forth new species of life whose habitat revolves
around it but it also becomes a source of global
business for Tweep, who advertises and sells the
material as a new type of plastic that is more mal-
leable and durable than any other plastic that has
ever been made. Meanwhile, Kazumasa, accompa-
nied by the satellite hovering over his head, travels
from Japan to Brazil with the initial intention of
contributing his skills to Brazil’s railway industry
only to discover his talents in winning the lottery.
Tweep and his company, GGG Enterprise, form a
business partnership with Kazumasa and his sat-
ellite; however, at the height of this thriving mix
of humans’ capitalistic drive and nature’s power
of adaptation and evolution, everything suddenly
begins to disintegrate. A new strain of bacteria
creates an epidemic and begins to destroy the
Matacao. Even the mysterious satellite that hovers
in front of Kazumasa’s head also begins to fade
away as it is discovered to have been made of the
same material as the Matacao. Ultimately, with
the destruction of the Matacao and the collapse
of GGG Enterprise, the flow of miracle-seekers
that gushed forth to pay homage to the Matacao
disappears, and peace returns to the forests of
Brazil. However, the narrator, who is indeed the
remnants of Kazumasa’s satellite, concludes that
despite the return of peace, the forest “will never
be the same again.”
The manner in which Yamashita attempts to
blur the representational boundaries among the
United States, Japan, and Brazil through her de-
pictions of hybrid characters and global com-
mercialism seems to coax a dialogue for a critical
reassessment of cultural diversity and its enabling
capacity. Therefore, her depictions of an amiable
coexistence among the multiracial characters who
gather in Brazil seem to suggest her attempt to
break away from Asian-American narratives cen-
tralized on Asian-American characters and to in-
corporate issues revolving around Latin America.
According to Rachel Lee, Yamashita’s text shows
that “Asian Americans might widen the scope of
their struggles and de-ethnicize their communal
fidelities in order to fight for the poor and op-
pressed regardless of national origins” (Bound-Through the Arc of the Rain Forest 285