American culture. As in many Japanese-American
families, the pain of internment and the urgings of
groups like the Japanese American Citizens League
caused Mura’s family to assimilate by disavowing
Japanese cultural heritage and adopting “Ameri-
canized” habits. Mura at first identified closely
with European culture, refusing to see himself as
an ethnic writer. By rediscovering his issei (first-
generation Japanese-American) paternal grandfa-
ther’s history, however, Mura later finds his identity
and voice as a Japanese-American man.
In 1984, while working as an arts administra-
tor for the Minnesota Writers-in-the-Schools pro-
gram, Mura was given a US/Japan Creative Artist
Exchange Program fellowship. On returning from
Japan, Mura published his first memoir, TURNING
JAPANESE: MEMOIRS OF A SANSEI (1991) detailing his
experiences in Japan, which won the Oakland PEN
Josephine Miles Book Award and was listed among
the New York Times Notable Books of the Year.
Mura’s second memoir, Where the Body Meets
Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality & Identity
(1996), discusses the limitations of his family’s as-
similation and the loss of familial history. Growing
up, Mura is allowed to perform specific roles such
as scholar and athlete, but racial difference pre-
vents full access to the privileges of whiteness. The
self-hatred generated by the association of beauty,
desirability, and power with racial whiteness, cou-
pled with his family’s complicity with internment
and racism, fuels Mura’s early obsessive desire for
white women expressed through pornography ad-
diction and sexual promiscuity.
Mura’s poetry deals with a broad range of sub-
jects surrounding racial identity and desire. After
We Lost Our Way (1989) was selected by Gerald
Stern as a winner of the National Poetry Series.
The Colors of Desire (1995) deals more specifically
with racial and sexual identification through his
personal battles with pornography addiction and
infidelity. Conscious of recent work in postcolo-
nial studies, Angels for the Burning (2004) is an
historical investigation of the web of fatherhood
and cultural memory, from immigrant experience
in the late 19th century, through internment and
assimilation, into contemporary Asian-American
experience. Mura has also written and performed
in film and stage productions, most notably with
African-American writer Alexs Pate in Slowly, This,
broadcast on the PBS series Alive TV.Bibliography
Mura, David. “David Mura.” Interview by Lee Rossi.
Onthebus 2/3 (1990/91): 263–273.
Xiaojing, Zhou. “David Mura’s Poetics of Identity,”
MELUS 23 (1998): 145–166.
John PinsonMurayama, Milton A. (1923– )
Author of the ground-breaking ALL I ASKING FOR
IS MY BODY (1975), Murayama was born in the
coastal town of Lahaina, Maui, to Japanese im-
migrants from Kyushu, Japan. In the sixth grade,
his family relocated upcountry to the Pioneer Mill
plantation camp town in Pu’ukoli’i. His childhood
experiences would provide the foundation for his
novels.
After graduating from Lahainaluna High
School in 1941, he enrolled at the University of
Hawai’i. However, the bombing of Pearl Harbor
on December 7, 1941, prompted him to enlist in
the Territorial Guard, where he served briefly until
he and other Japanese Americans were summarily
discharged. Undeterred by this setback, Murayama
volunteered in 1944 for the U.S. Army’s Military
Intelligence Service, for which he acted as an in-
terpreter in China and India. After World War II,
Murayama returned to the University of Hawai’i
to earn a double B.A. in English and philosophy
in 1947, and later an M.A. in Chinese and Japa-
nese from Columbia University. He worked at the
Armed Forces Medical Library in Washington,
D.C., from 1952 to 1956, then at the U.S. Customs
Office in San Francisco. He currently lives in San
Francisco with his wife, Dawn.
Murayama simultaneously completed his mas-
ter’s thesis and a short story, which would subse-
quently become the first chapter of All I Asking for
Is My Body, a novel that follows the struggles of a
Japanese-American boy growing up in the Hawai-
ian plantation system during the interwar years.
In 1975 he and his wife founded Supa Press and204 Murayama, Milton A.