Kantaro’s nephew Genji Befu, whose cognitive lim-
itations result in a naïve voice. His account captures
the deteriorating conditions of Esperança between
1959 and 1976. The narrative ends with Genji’s de-
scription of a plane crash in a forest, which kills
Kantaro. In the form of an epilogue to the novel,
the fifth and final narrative is told by Guilherme
Kasai, son of Kantaro’s business associate, Shigeshi
Kasai, and the only narrator who is not a mem-
ber of Esperança. Looking back, he describes the
Esperança community as having been a “confined
world” for its Japanese members.
What begins as a successfully self-sufficient ag-
ricultural community gradually disintegrates into
a cesspool of greed, deception, and disorganization
stemming from Kantaro’s activities conducted for
his personal financial gain rather than for that of
the community. Thus, at first, Brazil-Maru seems
to be a critique of a stagnating patriarchal society.
However, more important is the underlying as-
sertion that the hyphenated Asian is not merely a
North American phenomenon. Critic Ruth Hsu
poignantly emphasizes that KAREN TEI YAMASHI-
TA’s “location of the Asian immigrant experience
in Brazil also frees that experience from what is,
at times, an oppressive rhetoric—homegrown in
the United States and Canada—on ethnicity, as-
similation, and the nature of the North Ameri-
can nationalist identity” (190). In other words,
Yamashita’s text transcends a U.S.-centric perspec-
tive to a larger context in which Latin America
serves as its focal point. In this way, Yamashita
effectively disrupts the tendency to read Asian-
American literature in relation to issues that are
specific to Asian-American communities existing
within North America.
Bibliography
Cheung, King-Kok, ed. An Interethnic Companion to
Asian American Literature. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1997.
Hsu, Ruth. Review of Brazil-Maru, Manoa: A Pacific
Journal of International Writing (1992): 188–190.
Sugano, Douglas. “Karen Tei Yamashita.” In Asian
American Novelists, edited by Emmanuel Nelson,
403–408. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
2000.
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Brazil-Maru. Minnesota: Cof-
fee House Press, 1992.
———. “Karen Tei Yamashita: An Interview.” By
Michael S. Murashige. Amerasia Journal 20, no. 3
(1994): 49–59.
Eliko KosakaBridegroom, The Ha Jin (2000)
Set in Muji City, a fictitious town in northern
China, this collection of 12 short stories explores
everyday life in the post–Cultural Revolution pe-
riod of the 1980s. This was a volatile time of social
and political transition, as the old ways clashed
with the new when China gradually reopened its
doors to foreigners. In his characteristically simple
but poetic style, Ha Jin is able to show the human-
ity of common people trying to live decent lives in
a rapidly changing world.
The stories in The Bridegroom touch upon
many of the dominant concerns in contemporary
Chinese society. Although the Cultural Revolu-
tion ended in the late 1970s, the Maoist ideology
is so pervasive that it continues to control people’s
minds. “Broken,” for example, relates the tragic
case of a female typist, who commits suicide after
she is accused of being a bourgeois for having an
affair with a married man. Similarly, in the title
story, “The Bridegroom,” the homosexual protag-
onist feels imprisoned because of his sexual ori-
entation. “An Entrepreneur’s Story” examines the
growing phenomenon of privatization in China.
It shows how, by becoming rich, an entrepreneur
wins the love of a woman who had avoided him
before and the respect of people who used to dis-
dain him. “A Bad Joke” addresses the hyperinfla-
tion at the end of the 1980s, which was one of
the causes of the Tiananmen Square Uprising. In
“After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town,” Chinese
workers vent their anger at American business
methods that are contrary to both their ideologi-
cal and cultural beliefs. Cultural conflict is even
more central to “The Woman from New York,” a
story about a woman who returns to her home-
town after living in the United States for four
years. She not only discovers that she is not ac-28 Bridegroom, The