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 a cemetery to visit the grave of Cathy, one of the Terasaki daughters, who died in a hiking accident several years before. Moving backward in time, the author recounts the scene when the mother first heard “the awful words, choked out like bits of shattered glass” of her daughter’s death.
Imprisoned by her own sense of decorum, the mother can only respond with a chilling rebuke: “Daddy told her not to go to the mountain … She didn’t listen.” But the mother’s own youthful exuberance―as a young girl roaming about San Francisco on skates―was cut short by the humiliation of wartime incarceration after Pearl Harbor. She can still remember the name of Eleanor Leland, her grade-school classmate, who first called her a “Jap.” The father has a different set of memories to content with: his mother was killed at Hiroshima.
As the speaker unearths her parents’ heritage, which she imagines lying “buried like a lost civilization beneath my feet,” she comes to terms with her grandparents’ adopted country and with “the invisible wires that bind” her family together: “the bonds of obligation, of suffering, of love” Sasaki’s stories mark an impressive debut.
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