of Texas, Austin. She lives in the Elysian Park/Echo
Park section of Los Angeles.
Samuel ParkTurning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei
David Mura (1991)
Part memoir and part travelogue, Turning Japa-
nese: Memoirs of a Sansei is DAVID MURA’s ex-
tended analysis of his time in Japan. In 1984
Mura was awarded a U.S./Japan Creative Artist
Exchange Program fellowship to stay in Japan for
one year. Assimilated into the mainstream culture
in America, identifying closely with European cul-
ture, having an antipathy to travel, and seeing little
connection to the culture of Japan, Mura initially
viewed the fellowship as an opportunity to write
while studying contemporary Japanese art. The
travel, however, effected him in ways he never an-
ticipated, as chronicled in Turning Japanese.
While in Japan, Mura becomes a Butoh dance
student under Kazuo Ono and studies the Noh
theatre. He also meets members of the political
left and participates in a major political demon-
stration. Possessing rudimentary skills in the Japa-
nese language, Mura falls in with a small circle of
friends through which Mura describes cultural dif-
ferences in art, relationships, gender and sexuality.
Mura discovers that many of the differences he has
attributed to himself are legacies of his Japanese
ancestry, yet he realizes that he is clearly very dif-
ferent from the Japanese.
This new knowledge of Japanese culture forces
Mura to confront his own identity as a Japanese
American whose family had assimilated. Like
many nisei (second generation) families, they had
repressed their Japanese heritage and silently bore
the indignities of racism to prove their American-
ness and gain acceptance into mainstream Amer-
ica in the years after internment. More specifically,
Mura looks to his paternal grandfather, whom he
knows primarily through the stories told by his
aunt Ruth, as a role model of masculinity who did
not entirely submit to the demands of racism. This
grandfather, though deeply affected by internment,
never shunned his racial difference and eventually
returned to Japan.
During a dinner honoring a visiting Italian
critic, Mura realizes the culturally paternalizing
attitudes of European scholars. As a foreigner and
guest, the critic is treated deferentially, but this
show of humility is mistaken by the guest as an
open acknowledgment of his cultural superiority.
This exchange makes Mura conscious of his posi-
tion as an outsider to the European culture with
which he had closely identified. To the West, Mura
is always a cultural upstart, a mere curiosity rather
than a serious contributor. From this, Mura real-
izes that he must write out of this sense of plural-
ity and multiple identifications at the margins of
European and American culture.
Turning Japanese won the Oakland PEN Jose-
phine Miles Book Award and was listed among the
New York Times Notable Books of the Year.Bibliography
Franklin, Cynthia. “Turning Japanese/Returning to
America: Problems of Gender, Class and Nation
in David Mura’s Use of Memoir.” Literature Inter-
pretation Theory 12 (2001): 235–265.
Mura, David. Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei.
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991.
Taylor, Gordon O. “ ‘The Country I Thought Was My
Home’: David Mura’s Turning Japanese and Japa-
nese-American Narrative Since World War II.”
Connotations 6 (1997): 283–309.
John PinsonTyau, Kathleen (1947– )
Kathleen Tyau, who is of Chinese-Hawaiian lin-
eage, was born in California. She lived in Waikiki
as a child, and when she was a teenager, moved
with her family to Pearl City Heights, a suburb
built in the sugarcane fields above Pearl Harbor.
After graduating in 1965 from Saint Andrew’s Pri-
ory, a private Catholic girls’ school in Honolulu,
Tyau moved to Portland, Oregon, to attend Lewis
and Clark College. She received a B.A. in English
from Lewis and Clark in 1969 and has lived inTyau, Kathleen 293