Category: Reviews

Multicultural Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, 1992 The Loom and Other Stories, a first collection by R. A. Sasaki, explores the lives of three generations of Japanese-Americans. Loosely connected, the nine stories that comprise the collection involve themes of loss, cultural identity, generational differences, and mother-daughter tensions. Throughout Sasaki’s work, much of the narrative […]

San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, 1992. Reviewed by Peter Handel. Add Ruth Sasaki to the growing list of talented and prolific Bay Area Asian American authors. The nine short stories collected in “The Loom and Other Stories” focus primarily on Japanese American families. They range from wryly humorous to deeply touching, as Sasaki explores the […]

“Loom weaves stories about Japanese-American Experience”, Patricia Abe, Oakland Tribune, December 8, 1991 The Loom and Other Stories, the first book by Berkeley writer R. A. Sasaki, shines with wit, insight and compassion. In a voice at once droll and straightforward, Sasaki brings to her fiction the specifics and peculiarities of the Japanese American experience, […]

New York Times Book Review, December 8, 1991 In “Another Writer’s Beginnings,” the first story in this slender collection by R. A. Sasaki, the Japanese-American narrator recalls how as a child she had entertained the vain hope of becoming a Mouseketeer. She attributes this sense of possibility to sheer obliviousness. But vigilance rather than obliviousness […]

Newsday, November 10, 1991 Although the nine separate stories comprise R. A. Sasaki’s first collection of fiction, taken together they create a single portrait of three generations of Japanese-Americans in the years before and after World War II. The first of these stories are among the last chronologically: the family is on its way to […]

Publishers Weekly, September 6, 1991 The title story of this slender debut collection serves as a metaphor for the whole. Nine loosely connected tales weave the experiences of three generations of Japanese-Americans in San Francisco into a subtle, appealing tapestry. The stories explore emotional landmarks, beginning with the death of Jo Terasaki’s sister Cathy in […]