"Circle K Cycles" by Karen Tei Yamashita

When second-generation Japanese-Brazilians emigrate to Japan to assume the manual work its citizens no longer want, their need for cultural belonging, along with their homesickness for the food, culture, and language they left behind is exacerbated by Japan’s reverence for all things “purely Japanese.” This stunning book of hybrids merges fiction, essay, and pop culture collage to illustrate a global society that resists heritage-by-hyphenation and opens the door onto important issues of the new century: global labor, transnationalism, and cultural appropriation.

In the short stories, we meet Miss Hamamatsu ’96—a Eurasian beauty who covets the Miss Nikkei pageant crown; conwoman Marie Madalena and her ad scams and phone sex business; Zé Maria, embroiled in a sinister labor debacle, and other unique characters enmeshed in a Brazilian Japanese employment venture and its unsolved, deadly outcome.

Interspersed between these tales are Yamashita’s personal essays that detail the Asian American author’s travels to Japan with her Brazilian husband and family—a time spent straddling the fence between boisterous Brazilian customs and conservative Japanese tradition.

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Widely praised for her visionary societal observations, Yamashita’s stories and essays display a pan-Asian consciousness that spans the Pacific to tell a funny, wrenching, and provocative story about new social and emotional borders that are erected once a community has left its physical geography.

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