BOOKS: ‘Where the Body Meets Memory’ Tackles Japanese Angst

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, May 14 1996 (IPS) - There are several common stereotypes for Asian Americans: good at school, clever, repressed, asexual. Japanese-American poet and author David Mura seeks to challenge all of them.

In his new memoir, ‘Where the Body Meets Memory’ (published by Anchor, for USD 22.95), Mura creates a sincere, and often painful, portrait of his own conflicts growing up as a member of a “model minority” in the United States.

It is a story of deracination and of assimilation both: losing his links to his Japanese past — and to the internment of his grandparents in the World War II camps in California — Mura becomes caught up in the political and sexual turmoil of life on U.S. college campuses in the 1960s and 1970s.

At times, in fact, Mura’s story reads like a fairly conventional narrative of the “baby boom” generation’s travels through the turbulent sixties. He has affairs, he takes drugs, he reads Frantz Fanon and Marxist literary criticism. In many ways, that story is as common as ‘Forrest Gump’, the 1985 movie which views the 1960s from a viewpoint critical of the counter-culture.

What sets Mura’s memoir apart, however, is his intensely personal voice, and his willingness to explore all the inner conflicts created by being both Japanese and American. His project ultimately is to expose the grief that lies behind a divided consciousness — even at its most painful or unflattering.

“The gulf I write against is not just my parents’ silence, but the political and historical and cultural silence induced by the (internment) camps, a generational wound and amnesia buried in so many of the bodies and psyches of Japanese Americans,” he writes.

“America did not want to hear their tale, and told them in so many ways that it was unimportant, shameful, something to be forgotten,” he argues.

As a result, Mura does not only write about his own memories, but those of his family. He imaginatively describes the humiliating life in the internment camps, where U.S. authorities penned up all the Japanese descendants they distrusted during World War II. He muses how his own father must have been divided in the images he sought to portray to white America.

Most of all, though, Mura talks about himself, with an honesty that sometimes borders on self-loathing. Mura explains, often with an uncomfortable amount of detail, his addiction to pornography, and its linkage to the desire for white women’s bodies — and thus assimilation. He is unsparing of how damaging his behaviour has been over the years, particularly to his wife, Susie. (MORE)

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