Karen Tei Yamashita

In these buoyant and inventive stories, Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance—familial, cultural, emotional, artistic—really means. In a California of the ’60s and ’70s, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives’ freezers, tape-record high-school locker-room chatter, or collect a community’s gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L.A., bake sales replace balls, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with wit and humor.

Sansei and Sensibility

Beginning in 1968, a motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs from San Francisco's Chinatown make their way through the history of the day, becoming caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies andpersonal turmoil that culminate in their effort to save the International Hotel--epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement.

I Hotel

Gabriel, a news reporter in L.A., follows leads in which seemingly unrelated events mysteriously unite as the homeless take up residence in abandoned Mercedes, lowriders, and Cads, and an aged Asian American sansei conducts symphonies from a freeway overpass

A Novel

Tropic of Orange

In the style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, five characters converge on a magical Brazilian plain in the heart of the rain forest. Their fates are entwined with this phenomenal expanse, which transforms their lives, raising them to the heights of wealth and fame, before carrying them to the brink of disaster.

Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

This dive into the Yamashita family archive and Japanese internment runs a documentary impulse through filters that shimmer with imagination.

Scintillations

Brazil-Maru

An epic journey through one of America's most transformative decades via the stories of the activists, laborers, and students who shaped it.

With skill, imagination, and wit, Yamashita defines an emerging challenge of twenty-first century global society.

Circle K Cycles

Giant foam rubber sushi and cyborg kungfu fighters populate performances that reflect questions of gender, identity, orientalism, and racial politics.

Fictions of Performance

Anime Wong

"I Hotel" is the third novella of I Hotel, a National Book Award finalist and epic of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Yamashita’s cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, caught in riptides of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil.

1970: "I" Hotel

Japanese immigrants in Brazil build an isolated communal settlement in the rain forest, prey to the charisma of one man.

An “immensely entertaining” historical novel about Japanese immigrants and their struggle to make a home in a Brazilian rainforest (Newsday). In 1925, a band of Japanese immigrants arrive in Brazil to carve a utopia out of the jungle. Yamashita conjures “an intricate and fascinating epoch” (San Diego Review) where the dream of creating a new world, the cost of idealism, the symbiotic tie between a people and the land they settle, and the changes demanded by a new generation all collide in a “splendid multi-generational novel . . . rich in history and character” (San Francisco Chronicle). “Warm, compassionate, engaging, and thought-provoking.” —The Washington Post “Yamashita’s heightened sense of passion and absurdity, and respect for inevitability and personality, infuse this engrossing multigenerational immigrant saga with energy, affection, and humor.” —Booklist “Poignant and remarkable.” —Philadelphia Inquirer “With a subtle ominousness, Yamashita sets up her hopeful, prideful characters—and, in the process, the entire genre of pioneer lit—for a fall.” —Village Voice “Full of sad and poignant scenes and some hilarious ones, too.”—Star Tribune “Historically informative and emotionally complex.” —Bloomsbury Review “Unique and entertaining.” —International Examiner “Particularly insightful.” —Library Journal “Informative and timely.” —Kirkus Reviews

The first of ten novellas in the National Book Award Finalist I Hotel, following San Francisco’s Asian-American community through the civil rights era. Centered around the International Hotel, a historic low-income residence in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the ten novellas of Karen Tei Yamashita’s epic are each devoted to a single year in one of America’s most transformative decades. This multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins a kaleidoscopic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights, all played out among Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs. In 1968: Eye Hotel, the residents of I-Hotel live through some of the most significant changes of the mid-twentieth century as they try to make sense of their own lives. It’s the Year of the Monkey, and as every kid in Chinatown seems to be orphaned, survival means everything from protest gatherings to a late-night quest for the city’s best bowl of noodles.

Karen Tei Yamashita

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