“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, while exploring themes common to all people.
The nine stories collected here break into three groupings: one set deals with young Jo Terasaki and her family; a single story, “American Fish,” concerns an odd, chance meeting between two middle-aged women; and the last group of four stories follows an unnamed narrator as she grapples with her father’s illness from cancer and his eventual death. While each story could stand on its own (two have been previously published), the stories’ interrelationships give the collection a rich density as intriguing details unfold from one story to the next.
With a nod to Eudora Welty, the first story sets the tone for the book. Actually no more than a brief, impressionistic musing, “Another Writer’s Beginnings” describes a young, admittedly unattractive girl who nonetheless has aspirations of becoming a Mouseketeer. As the narrator explains, her older sister “had a much better sense of reality. She knew, at the age of eight, that there was no such thing as a Japanese Mouseketeer. Reality never stopped me from hoping. Had I been aware of it, it might have. But I was oblivious. That was the source of my confidence.”
The narrator finally realizes that “looks would never be my meal ticket. I would have to develop other talents.” So the writer is born.
Starting with “Ohaka-mairi,” the stories revolving around Joanne Terasaki share the sadness of a family tragedy, and the anger and bafflement of facing the racial bigotry of the hakujin, or white, outside world.
The phrase “ohaka-mairi” is not explicitly translated―as many Japanese words and phrases used throughout are not―but it soon becomes clear that it involves the ceremonial rituals of visiting a gravesite; in this case, the grave of one of Jo’s sisters, who was apparently killed in an accident. Sasaki sets up an air of ambiguity and mystery as she sketches the grief and memories as seen through Jo’s eyes.
The title story, “The Loom,” steps back farther in time, revealing more details surrounding the sister’s death, and delving into the mother’s past as the family sees a new side of her in grief. They wonder “just who was this little person, this person who was their mother?” In telling the mother’s story, Sasaki gives us a microcosm of the Nisei, or second generation of Japanese Americans. This was the generation born and raised in America of immigrant parents, and who wore “two faces … that never met; there was no common thread running through both worlds. The duality was unplanned, untaught.”
With the onset of World War II and the internment of Japanese Americans into detention camps, the mother’s family life―and of course that of thousands of other families―is devastated and irrevocably changed.
After the death of Cathy, the daughter, the mother takes up weaving. While the loom is a heavy-handed metaphor for how the mother comes to grips with the calamities of her life, it nevertheless serves to express how an individual can survive.
Only with the last Terasaki story, the brilliantly executed “First Love,” does Sasaki’s humor emerge full-blown, as we see Joanne fall in love with the irrepressible, flamboyant Hideyuki “George” Sakamoto, an F.O.B. (for “fresh off the boat”) with a personality that eludes “the cages of other people’s limited imaginations.”
Jo’s parents are taken aback by their brainy, bookworm daughter dating this strange kid, for “there was an unspoken law of evolution which dictated that in the gradual march toward Americanization, one did not deliberately regress by associating with F.O.B.’s … George, therefore, was a shock.”
The young couple eventually grows apart, as Jo becomes a serious student at the University of California at Berkeley and George attends a junior college in the city. Ironically, even while George struggles gamely with Remedial English, Jo finds herself addressed with the phrase all too commonly encountered by Asian Americans. “Your English is so good. Where did you learn it?”
In “American Fish,” the interlude piece between the two groups of stories, Mrs. Hayashi sees a “familiar-looking woman at the American Fish Market,” but she can’t quite remember the name or where she knows her from. The other woman, a Mrs. Nakamura, is in the same boat, and neither wants to admit it.
As each woman probes the other with bland comments and questions, the hilarious minuet of “American Fish” becomes a set piece of Japanese politeness amid confusion. The story plays up the kinship felt among Japanese Americans of an older generation, which continues in spite of the increasing fragmentation of the community as we all become fish out of water.
The last stories, “Wild Mushrooms,” “Driving to Colma,” and “Seattle” lack the narrative punch of the Terasaki stories, but Sasaki handles the difficult subject of slow death by cancer with an astute grace.
The narrator of these stories has spent many years living in Japan, and has come home to help her mother and sister cope with their father’s illness. She must make myriad adjustments in learning to live again in the United States, among them, resisting the pressures to move in with her mother after the father has died. “From the Japanese standpoint, it was the expected thing to do. A divorced daughter, over thirty―a mother, over sixty, left alone. I wavered.” Without reaching any final resolution, the stories end on a wistful note, emphasizing the “invisible wires that bind (families), the bond of obligation, of suffering, of love.”
Sasaki writes with confidence and grace. “The Loom” is a pleasure to read.
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