QUESTIONS 27 & 28

A polyphonic, multigenerational novel of the Japanese experience in America.

At the beginning of Yamashita’s latest, 17-year-old Yone “exchanges his kimono for Western attire” and, full of hope and ambition, sets off from Meiji Japan to the U.S. Elegant, learned, he finds himself washing dishes in the Bay Area. Things take a turn for the better when Yone, having become a famous poet, falls into the company—and beds—of admirers. After he returns to Japan, one of them turns up with a 3-year-old baby in her arms. Years pass and, again crossing the ocean, other Japanese land on American shores, farming, founding businesses, and becoming model citizens—until their hopes are dashed by racist laws. Some of Yamashita’s many narrative threads tend toward the fabulous, as with her shaggy-dog story of a Japanese man who lands in Mexico, dubs himself Storm, grows a thick “Mexican mustachio,” and—well, now a “Zen Zorro,” rides into a legend that “fits him like a glove.” Told in many voices and with a sprawling dramatis personae, Yamashita’s novel steps in and out of several genres in both Japanese and English: There are letters, poems, court transcripts, edicts, reproduced government documents, affidavits, footnoted historical extracts, and more. No matter how the text is constructed and where the characters are in space and time, injustice is a constant, not least in the fraught times when the title questions—distributed to Japanese in internment camps during World War II and demanding renunciation of any allegiance to Japan and its emperor—speak to a discrimination endured by no other people, at least not until the ICE age. “Answering yes-­yes makes the game shorter, but you don’t necessarily get out or win,” Yamashita writes, demanding recognition of that injustice: “What happened will be remembered, and people will learn the lessons of the past.”

An ambitious novel that spans many forms, ably crossing oceans and centuries.