A young relative recently graduated from middle school, and I was stumped as to what kind of gift might be suitable. I am not great at gift-giving, being borderline phobic about shopping and not being a craft-advantaged person who can whip up quirky home-made items that people would not immediately regift or donate to a […]
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Author: Ruth Sasaki
R. A. Sasaki is the author of The Loom and Other Stories (Graywolf Press, 1991). She is a third-generation San Franciscan (although she now lives in the East Bay).
For my dad on Fathers’ Day
We will not say “sayonara” to you; we will not let go of the small, good things you taught us to love, like the sound of the river, the buzz of a fishline spinning out after a fat, freckled trout. Or cold, dark mornings when you lured us from sleep with a single, whispered word: […]
My mother’s kimono
This week my place is a kimono museum. For the past five years, since we started clearing out my mom’s house, a pile of Japanese kimono* that belonged to my mom and aunt have been sitting on my childhood bed, neatly folded and wrapped in a cotton sheet, while I tried to figure out what […]
Working at Christmas
When I was a child, I was eager to work. It seemed like a “grown-up” thing to do. I helped at my dad’s wholesale business, first on Columbus Avenue, and later, on Bryant Street. I put stamps on envelopes and got rides on the handtruck when my sisters were around. (In reality, my dad was […]
Chinatown
It was a gorgeous April day in San Francisco, so I took BART into the city and walked all the way up Grant Avenue, through Chinatown, to Live Worms Gallery in North Beach, where my brother-in-law Paul was having a show. Although I’ve spent most of my life in San Francisco and the East Bay, […]
Writing “American Fish”
“American Fish” was initially written as a scene in a play. I was taking a playwriting class from Ed Bullins, African-American playwright, and we were assigned to write one scene per week. I wrote it in 1985, so I honestly can’t say that I remember what inspired the scene. I thought it would be very […]
Tsukuba Monogatari
In September of 1989 I took an assignment to work onsite at a foreign-capital company in Tsukuba, Japan for three months—a short-term assignment that would eventually stretch to five months. I had been conducting management development training in California for “high-potential” Japanese managers from The Company since 1987, so I knew quite a few people […]
Bridging cultures
In 2000, students at the American School in Japan read The Loom and Other Stories and had the following questions, which I responded to by e-mail two hours after landing in Tokyo from California (and it was around 4 am California time): 1. How much of the book is autobiographical? I would say that many […]
Where stories come from
In 2001, a young woman in Florida wrote, asking if I would answer some questions about my writing. I said I would be happy to (and refrained from adding, although I wanted to, “…if you’ll answer some of MY questions about what the heck is going on with voting in Florida!”) She and her friends […]
Japanese-American
A Japanese-American is someone who has been trained in the Japanese ways of ultimate courtesy, but who has a quite independent and secret American sensibility locked into that pleasant and self-effacing exterior—like a bonsai. A tree trying to grow, but forced, through clipped roots and wired branches, into an expected shape. Like bonsai, a Japanese-American […]