collection of Swamiji’s stories collectively demon-
strates “the Hindu ascetic as simpleton, charlatan,
saint, and storyteller.” The anthropologist seeks to
understand the precise role of storytelling as an
ever-changing tool used by religious ascetics for
shifting purposes, revealing religious narrative as
an adaptive and performative art form. Her con-
cern with folklore extends to subsequent projects,
including her coedited collection Creativity/An-
thropology (1993) and a more recent work, Mon-
days on the Dark Side of the Moon (1997).
Narayan is most widely known for her novel
Love, Stars, and All That (1994), a comic coming-
of-age story largely set in Berkeley and New En-
gland. The protagonist, a graduate student named
Gita Das, receives an astrologer’s prediction that
she will meet her true love in March 1984. This
sparks a desperate, humorous, and occasionally
heartbreaking quest. A sudden marriage to faculty
member Norvin Weinstein quickly goes awry, as
his fetishization of Asian women leads him to in-
fidelity. Gita, meanwhile, moves to her first job at
Whitney College, Vermont, where she will begin to
mature as an adult woman. Narayan considers this
section a deliberate inversion of the empty “quest
narrative” of marriage that fuels so many popular
conceptions of romance. Gita will ultimately em-
bark on a relationship with Firoze Ganjifrockwala,
an old acquaintance from Berkeley. Firoze him-
self—and his positioning within the novel—recalls
the comic misadventures of Jane Austen. Narayan
acknowledges early that he “wasn’t exactly a strap-
ping hero, [but] wasn’t bad looking either.” At the
same time, while “hardly bearable on the phone,
[he] was unendurable in person.” The love be-
tween Firoze and Gita speaks, in part, to the pro-
tagonist’s willingness to give up old, naive notions
of “love, stars and all that” and to aim, instead, for
a true sense of connection. According to Narayan,
Gita “is free from the idea that romantic love will
bring her fulfillment, and comes to understand
that there are many different shades of love that
can enrich life.”
Narayan’s novel combines academic satire, dia-
sporic bildungsroman, and comedy of manners. It
is, at some level, a novel about storytelling; family
stories and fairy tales are woven together in Gita’s
imagination, themselves shifting over time and
circumstance and, ultimately, providing her with
what she needs to know about life, rather than
what she wants to believe. In this sense, the novel
reflects Narayan’s research; she asserts that her two
careers are deeply connected, symbiotically gen-
erative, and linked by her “voracious appetite for
the well-told story.”Bibliography
Salgado, Minoli. “An Interview with Kirin Narayan.”
In Speaking of the Short Story: Interviews with Con-
temporary Writers, edited by Farhat Iftekharud-
din, Mary Rohrberger and Maurice Lee. 219–228.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.
Sharma, Maya M. “Kirin Narayan.” In Asian American
Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Source-
book, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 257–260.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.
J. Edward MallotNarita, Jude (?– )
Born in the 1950s in Long Beach, California, writer
and performer Jude Narita studied acting with
Stella Adler in New York and with Lee Strasberg
in Los Angeles. In spite of her training, Narita was
frustrated by the limited roles and opportunities
available to Asian-American women. In the 1980s
she decided to remedy this situation by writing
and performing her own work that would allow
her to explore the Asian woman beyond the limit-
ing stereotypes of dragon lady and lotus flower.
Her 1985 one-woman show Coming Into Pas-
sion/Song for a Sansei was a huge success, running
for two years in the Los Angeles area. In the play,
she is a newscaster aware of violence against Asians
but unwilling to speak out or do anything about
it, preferring to be a model minority American
citizen. In her dreams, however, she experiences
the violence that had hitherto been distanced by
detachment. Among others, she becomes a nisei
(second-generation Japanese-American) woman,
whose childhood memories are of imprisonment
in relocation camps; a prostitute in Saigon dur-
ing the Vietnam War, thankful for a “good job”; a210 Narita, Jude