SANSEI AND SENSIBILITY BY KAREN TEI YAMASHITA
In her collection Sansei and Sensibility, Karen Tei Yamashita blurs the genre lines between essay and story, between fiction and nonfiction. All the while, she draws new lines for her readers— lines of connection, roads that twist and turn between the Japanese American neighborhoods of the mid-twentieth century and the Georgian drawing rooms of Jane Austen’s England. Sansei and Sensibility is divided into two distinct parts: a Sansei half that is dedicated to particular aspects of the Japanese American immigrant and descendent experiences, and a Sensibility half that explores these cultural realities through the use of rather satirical Austen pastiches.
The Sansei portion of the collection shifts between short stories and personal essays without warning, barring the occasional footnote. “But never mind arguing whether fiction is true or not,” as Yamashita says in one story-essay, “… it is the speculative aspect of the anthropological project here that intrigues me, how in fact an investigation of culture might predict human reactions and outcomes.” And indeed, Yamashita’s dizzying amalgamation of fiction and history results in something that is both speculative and truthful. This feeling is not disrupted, but rather expanded, by the inclusion of the collection’s Sensibility half, which offers such Sansei/Janeite delights as an LA County Mansfield Park, a 1960s Emma with revolutionary inclinations, and a Lady Susan consisting of post-war postcards and aerograms between Tokyo and California. All in all, Karen Tei Yamashita’s latest is a gratifying jigsaw puzzle of a book, certain to enrapture readers with both its individual pieces and the larger picture those pieces create.
—Review by Lily Buday
