I am a cross-genre reader and writer. I find fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction equally full of enchantment. Lately, I’m engrossed in short fiction, not only for the entertainment value, but also with hope that the magic on the page will somehow transform my own writing of short fiction.

I look to many authors for inspiration, but today I will look at Franz Kafka’s short story, “A Hunger Artist.”

 I must confess that it was the title that drew me to this story out of all of them in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. It is like that with short fiction: the title, especially in a large collection of stories, is critical. And so I was drawn as an artist—often hungry—to this particular story.

            I laughed at the first line: “During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished.” It drew me right in, as the first line to a short story must, into Kafka’s world of dark and brutally honest irony.

As the story unfolds, the reader is all but shoved into a metaphysical cage with the main character, the hunger artist, to witness inhumanity ruminate outside his cage. The hunger artist becomes a commodity for the public who “pretend to admire him,” but are “in reality so cruel.” Members of the public, “usually butchers,” are elected to govern over the hunger artist’s consumption. It is their responsibility to watch the hunger artist day and night to be sure he is not sneaking nourishment. Kafka writes “This was nothing but a formality, instituted to reassure the masses.”

 All of the characters in this story are generic representations of society, and their behavior reflects a generic order of society. Yet despite the lack of character description and development, as well as other missing details commonly employed in fiction, Kafka manages to evoke a powerful emotional impact. It is through these generalities that Kafka creates empathy for the hunger artist—for any artist—and disgust with the social order that harbors an ideology that is very much anti-artist.

The public view the hunger artist with suspicion, and even think “he had discovered a way of making it easy.” Only the hunger artist knows differently: he does this because he has to.

You would think that the pitiful existence of the hunger artist could not worsen, but it does. The crowds eventually turn their attention away from the hunger artist in favor of “the menagerie,” and the hunger artist becomes “an artist past his prime.”  

There are innumerable ways to interpret Kafka’s work, but I chose to interpret this story as an artist: at metaphysical face value. To me, Kafka wrote “A Hunger Artist” as a bitter tribute to the profession of the artist. It is passion for truth that fuels the artist—even in hunger—to complete his work.

I like to think that Kafka himself is in this story, lashing out at society for their casual disregard for art and the artist. Interestingly enough, this story was published in 1922, a time in history when the motion picture industry developed the technology to add sound to film. Could this be the menagerie, or circus that led the public away from books, from artists such as Kafka?  

It is not a light or happy read to be sure, but it is timeless in its philosophical glance at the artist and society, one that I will not forget.

I am a cross-genre reader and writer. I find fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction equally full of enchantment. Lately, I’m engrossed in short fiction, not only for the entertainment value, but also with hope that the magic on the page will somehow transform my own writing of short fiction.

I look to many authors for inspiration, but today I will look at Franz Kafka’s short story, “A Hunger Artist.”

 I must confess that it was the title that drew me to this story out of all of them in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. It is like that with short fiction: the title, especially in a large collection of stories, is critical. And so I was drawn as an artist—often hungry—to this particular story.

            I laughed at the first line: “During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished.” It drew me right in, as the first line to a short story must, into Kafka’s world of dark and brutally honest irony.

As the story unfolds, the reader is all but shoved into a metaphysical cage with the main character, the hunger artist, to witness inhumanity ruminate outside his cage. The hunger artist becomes a commodity for the public who “pretend to admire him,” but are “in reality so cruel.” Members of the public, “usually butchers,” are elected to govern over the hunger artist’s consumption. It is their responsibility to watch the hunger artist day and night to be sure he is not sneaking nourishment. Kafka writes “This was nothing but a formality, instituted to reassure the masses.”

 All of the characters in this story are generic representations of society, and their behavior reflects a generic order of society. Yet despite the lack of character description and development, as well as other missing details commonly employed in fiction, Kafka manages to evoke a powerful emotional impact. It is through these generalities that Kafka creates empathy for the hunger artist—for any artist—and disgust with the social order that harbors an ideology that is very much anti-artist.

The public view the hunger artist with suspicion, and even think “he had discovered a way of making it easy.” Only the hunger artist knows differently: he does this because he has to.

You would think that the pitiful existence of the hunger artist could not worsen, but it does. The crowds eventually turn their attention away from the hunger artist in favor of “the menagerie,” and the hunger artist becomes “an artist past his prime.”  

There are innumerable ways to interpret Kafka’s work, but I chose to interpret this story as an artist: at metaphysical face value. To me, Kafka wrote “A Hunger Artist” as a bitter tribute to the profession of the artist. It is passion for truth that fuels the artist—even in hunger—to complete his work.

I like to think that Kafka himself is in this story, lashing out at society for their casual disregard for art and the artist. Interestingly enough, this story was published in 1922, a time in history when the motion picture industry developed the technology to add sound to film. Could this be the menagerie, or circus that led the public away from books, from artists such as Kafka?  

It is not a light or happy read to be sure, but it is timeless in its philosophical glance at the artist and society, one that I will not forget.

Since Susan did such an amazing job capturing the essence of this novel, I’ll focus on other messages I dredged from this text, one of the most compelling being the divide and conquer theory of colonialism, and how this has affected the African American community. Throughout the first half of the text Morrison speaks to the damaged psychological condition of African Americans as the direct result of slavery. In the second half, she introduces the relationship between the psychologically damaged African American within their community and how a divided community further deteriorates the African American experience.

In the first half, Sethe is described as being unusually strong in the face of atrocities she has known in her life as a slave. When Paul D. shows up, Denver sees a new side of her, a more vulnerable side that is not the “queenly woman” who “never looked away, who when a man got stomped to death by a mare right in front of Sawyer’s restaurant did not look away…” Sethe is aware of her image as a strong woman and believes others are threatened by it. As she walks to the fair with Paul D. and Denver, she thinks the members of the community will think she is “putting on airs,” that she is “tougher, because she could do and survive things they believed she should neither do nor survive.” In the second half of the novel, however, she begins to unravel, as she finally faces her past head-on. She is no longer able to fend off her memories, and she lets go of her final thread of sanity.

It turns out that Sethe’s assumptions about her community were correct, “Just about everybody in town was longing for Sethe to come on difficult times. Her outrageous claims, her self-sufficiency seemed to demand it…” Although the people in her community are aware of the strangeness of her isolation, and even believe that the house is haunted, they are not satisfied. They refuse to acknowledge the link between the violence of slavery and Sethe’s condition. Beloved becomes a conduit of the divide and conquer notion because her presence both divides Sethe from her community (and even Paul D.) and eventually conquers her sanity.

Although Stamp Paid seems to understand the link between slavery or “white folks” and Baby Sugg’s mental deterioration, he struggles with the link between the violence against African Americans and Sethe. As he walks home from 124, he thinks about the violence, “Eighteen seventy-four and white folks were still o the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults…” It seems that there is some part of him that tries to understand the link between violence against African Americans and Sethe, but he is more influenced by the attitudes held by the majority of his community and is therefore unable to reconnect with Sethe.

Paul D. admits “He can’t put his finger on it, but it seems, for a moment, that just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses.” This double-edged blade, Morrison seems to be shouting, speaks to the importance of community among African Americans in the face of the larger evil, which is slavery and racism.

As a mother, I happen to know firsthand that the likelihood of finagling yourself a prince to ever share air with you, let alone marry you, is beyond reality (and I’m fairly optimistic). I worry about my daughter’s leeching urgency for all things princess in toy stores, bookstores, and while watching commercials. I’ve decided to be supportive of her natural inclinations, even though the whole princess thing is anything but natural. It’s a force that is clubbed over little girls’ heads these days, and truthfully, it’s foreign to me. Growing up, my family was VERY low tech. We had a black & white television that only picked up 3 channels from our rural lakeside residence. My father was a saver not a spender, meaning I didn’t get all the fancy new stuff. So other than fairytales, my life was void of the princess phenomena.

What does any of this doing in a review, you might ask? I should have warned you from the beginning that this might turn into what I’ve termed a “ressay” (the merging of essay with review), but all of this will make sense once I delve into the particulars that draw me to this book.

The story centers around main character, Frances, and her first encounter with The Boys’ Club. It’s about being a true friend and introduces the gender roles that society has already started teaching to Frances. Poor Frances just wants to play baseball with Albert and Harold, but they want nothing to do with her. I relate to Frances. This same thing happened to me all the time growing up, once the two boys on my street figured out I was a girl. Suddenly I was shunned, forced to play with the only other girl on the street who was 4 years my junior, or play alone.

What I like about this book is that the illustrator has created androgynous characters. True, they are raccoons (or bears?) but the girls do not wear frilly dresses. There is no way to tell who is whom from looking—other than Gloria, who is the littlest one. The mother, however, is sporting an apron, but I’ll forgive this horrific image since it was written in 1969.

The author and illustrator were attempting to address gender role conditioning, most of which I’m quite pleased with, although not entirely. The real treat is the humor in the writing. Here’s an example

“Can I wander with you?” asked Frances.

“I only have one lunch,” said Albert.

“I’ll bring my own,” said Frances.

“I’ll run home an get it right away.”

“No,” said Albert. “I think I better go by myself. The things I do on my wandering days aren’t things you can do.”

“Like what?” said Frances.

“Catching snakes,” said Albert. “Throwing stones at telephone poles. A little frog work maybe. Walking on fences. Whistling with grass blades. Looking for crow feathers.”

“I can do all that,” said Frances, “except for the frog work and the snakes.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Albert. “I’d have to ruin the whole day, showing you how. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Then Albert went off to wander, and Frances walked slowly home with her bat and ball, singing:

Fat boys that each too much lunch

Can’t do a thing but munch and crunch

And play with snakes and frogs.

Later in the story, Frances decides to picket with Gloria (ERA, anyone?) against the segregated baseball situation. They have planned a much more elaborate “outing” than Albert’s banal “wandering,” that not only incorporates fine food neatly packed in an attractive wicker basket, but thanks to Gloria’s pension for frog catching, they plan for a frog-jumping contest, too. I won’t spoil the story by revealing the outcome because I know—again, firsthand—that parents often enjoy these stories as much as their children, but I will offer that the gender roles are somehow rolled together in a kind of symbiotic fashion, and there are absolutely no dreadful weddings at a castle.

I recommend this one for parents of both sexes.

Krik? Krak! is a collection of short stories that explores the horrific, turbulent years of the 1980s in Haiti and the immigrant experience in New York City. Although each story stands alone, there are repeated images, themes, and characters that connect the stories, creating a short story cycle. For the sake of the book club’s discussion questions, I will not go into a lot of detail here about some of these connections, other than to express my appreciation for the way in which these stories interrelate and my deep admiration for the piece as a whole.

Danticat masterfully depicts the humor, tragedy, and beauty of Haitian cultural traditions and attitudes. I especially enjoyed her treatment of voodoo and magic throughout the text:

"The old man was handsome in an odd kind of way, with a gray steak running though the middle of his hair. He sat outside of the cockfights every day, listening as though it were a kind of music, shooing away his wife with spells that never worked."

And

"She’s probably one of those stupid people who think that they have a spell to make themselves invisible and hurt other people. Why can’t none of them get a spell to make themselves rich? It’s that voodoo nonsense that’s holding us Haitians back."

The stories range in severity, from the first story about a Haitian rebel afloat the Atlantic ocean in a tiny boat stuffed full of people facing imminent death, to a story about a woman who follows her mother and discovers her secret nanny job on the Upper West side of Manhattan. Despite the varying degrees of heartbreak throughout the text, Danticat’s prose is consistently fresh, concise, and powerful.

I highly recommend this book; it’s one of my all-time favorites. It’s the kind of book that, regardless of your nationality, reminds you of the sobering human condition, for both its beauty and its pain.

Loving a lot about Ana Menendez’s First Novel, Loving Che 

I became a fan of Ana Menendez after reading her first published book, In Cuba I was a German Shepard, a collection of short stories written about the Cuban immigrant experience in Miami. Because I was so enchanted with her first book, I quickly purchased her first novel, Loving Che.

           

Menendez continues to traverse the terrain of her Cuban heritage in her second book, covering many of the same issues: exile, love, family, politics, and Miami, but this time she abandons magical realism, opting for a more traditional narrative.

 

            The story is told in two voices: that of the main character, an adult woman who is haunted by her mother whom she has never met, and diary accounts from Teresa de La Landre, a woman who describes her passionate affair with revolutionist Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and whom the daughter believes is her mother.  The voice of the unnamed main character is less poetic, more reporter-like, while the voice of Teresa gushes with romantic turmoil:

 

“I remembered another night when the wind sang with ghosts. He lay beside me in the dark, listening. Memory, he’d say, is a way of reviving the past, the dead.”

 

            Growing up in Miami under the care of her grandfather, the young woman is given little to no information about her mother. Her grandfather, it seems, has fallen into a quiet avoidance of his past, of his life as a Cuban exile in Miami separated by miles of water from his disowned daughter.

 

 It is only after she has gone on to college that the grandfather finally shares a cryptic poem written by her mother that was pinned to her sweater as a baby: “Farewell, but you will be/ with me, you will go within/a drop of blood circulating in my veins.”

 

Soon after the woman begins her own search for her mother, she receives a mysterious package on her doorstep filled with old photographs, letters, and diary entries about an illustrious affair with Che Guevara. After carefully studying the contents of the package, the woman becomes obsessed with finding out if Teresa de La Landre is in fact the mother she never knew.

 

To me, the whole concept of portraying the romantic life of a revolutionist is a fascinating premise for a novel. Instead of politics and gore, Menendez decides to portray Che as an ordinary man, to reveal his lust, his vulnerability. What unravels is a torrid and steamy account of bodily exchanges between these two lovers, mixed with Teresa’s obsessive yearning:

 

“I sit in bed, all heaviness gone from my head, and watch a flock of white birds fly past the window. And beyond the birds the green leaf of the ceiba and beyond that the blue sky that cradles the clouds and arches over the world and whispers to me a sharp and infinite rebuke to my secret longing.”

 

I’m not at all saying that I didn’t enjoy reading some of these erotic passages; however, I couldn’t help but notice an unbalanced connection between Teresa and Che. After a while it seemed unnatural to me that a woman would focus purely on the physical aspects of the affair, with little to no emotional or intellectual exchange between the lovers. Although this may sound like a criticism, in the end, Menendez had me thinking this was all part of her grand scheme, and that she managed to sneak in some magical realism after all, and that there was a method to what seemed like a hopelessly mad love affair.

 

But I’m not going to elaborate on these suspicions for fear of robbing the reader of the discovery of yet another pocket on that moon we call “soul”.          

 

I type a sentence. My three-year-old daughter brings her princess dress over to me and asks me to put it on her. Happy in her gown, she saunters off to find a prince at the bottom of her toy box. I type another sentence. She’s back. This time she wants me to put a puzzle together with her.

“How about if you sit right there on the floor next to mommy and try to do it all by yourself. I’ll help you if you get stuck,” I tell her.

Parked at my feet, she works through her puzzle singing a song she learned at preschool. I stare blankly at my screen, filled with both annoyance at my inability to sustain my earlier sense of inspiration and guilt for not sitting on the floor next to her.

Adrienne Rich abandoned her poetry for a long time in the early years of her marriage, raising young children. Sylvia Plath suffered. Even Virginia Woolf, who never had children, struggled to find her place in art. I’m certainly not putting myself in league with these women, other than in a place of understanding. There are days that I envy women who seem enraptured by motherhood, to whom motherhood is an art—their only art. Their world spins around domesticity, not words. How nice it must feel, I often think, to be so focused.

There are essays I need to write, I tell myself almost daily, about this struggle I feel. I’ll get around to it one day and cause a revolution. Until that day arrives, luckily there are women who have already started to write their way out of bondage, and "Mamaphonic" is a collection of their words.

It’s not just a book about writers, but a collection of essays written by women attempting to balance (as if on a tight-rope) motherhood and art from a variety of fields, such as music, dance, and visual art.

In her essay, “Spaced Out,” Dewi Faulkner recalls her journey as a writer and mother from her beginning cramped in a tiny apartment, when “it made sense that I had to use the space under my desk if I needed to get in a little writing time.”

Later, after moving into a larger space where there are actual rooms she can retreat to in privacy, she says “I call myself a writer, even though secretly I fear I’m a spoiled housewife with an expensive hobby. I try to think like an artist, but I’m not very good at it. Sometimes thinking like an artist feels diametrically opposed to thinking like a mother.”

Rose Adams writes about being temporarily separated from her son while she takes a drawing class in Florence:

My lines that day shy,

My stomach and hand still moving in circles.

Later, alone, taking a cab north,

I discover the large playground

with a carousel spinning around

and around that my son searched for the whole week

when he was here.

Fiona Thompson admits “I didn’t get enough hours of work in for the day. I don’t have the energy to make dinner. The house is a fucking sty. I have dozens of phone calls to return. I just got a notice that I bounced another check. I think our house has rats again. I can’t find my date book so I have no idea if I missed any appointments today.”

Other women in the collection manage to blend their art with motherhood, such as Ayun Halliday, creator of The East Village Inky, a hand drawn and written magazine that captures mothering in her neighborhood. After an afternoon outing with her baby, she says, “I raced back to our 340-square-foot apartment, eager to reunite with the paper and marker. I scribbled furiously while she slept, as if the public was starving for want of our published adventures.”

After reading these women’s stories, I’m not sure I feel any better about the struggle that women like us face. It’s reassuring to know that I’m not alone out there, or in here, caved at my desk, yet I wish I could have found The Answer. By sheer design women are built to carry this burden, this diametric weight, if you’re a women who happens to need to create not only life, but art. Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book. It’s a great read, chock full of humor, frustration, and love.

I read Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage in graduate school. Unlike many of the other books I suffered through from required reading lists, Middle Passage blew my mind. Rather than book, it should be called prism, cubist art, or perhaps a religious experience. I ended up writing my research paper on this book and honestly believe if I were going on for a PhD, I could write an entire book on this book.

On the surface it’s a story about an African American man, Rutherford Calhoun, who accidentally finds himself aboard an illegal slave trade ship. He’s running from bill collectors and a woman. As simple as this type of predicament could be, Johnson complicates the plot at every turn.

After looking at this book through a microscope like I did, it seemed that Johnson hand selected every word as if sifting for gems in a hay pile, or with the kind of wisdom that transcends mortals, as if Buddha or some otherworldly power whispered the answers into his ear as he typed. Of course my research filled in the blanks about Johnson’s background, which explained a lot. His first passion is philosophy. He was influenced by minds like Prosper Mérimée, Derrida, and was a dedicated student of Buddhism.

So what makes this book so complicated? Where to start. Well, I could start by mentioning the layers of symbolism in the story. From my research I concluded that the most significant symbols of the text include: the ship, the sea, Captain Falcon, Rutherford, Isadora, Jackson, papa Zeringue, the Allmuseri, and the Allmuseri god. The ship, for example, represents the nation, or in particular, America. It is the vessel that transports the ideology of imperialism. Aboard the “Rebublic” Calhoun explores the connection that exists between power, race, violence, identity, and freedom.

In fact all of the characters in the story represent some aspect of society. While Calhoun is a rogue, Isadora and Calhoun’s brother, Jackson, each represent the idealized and socially assimilated African American citizen. Captain Falcon represents a number of power structures in place within a capitalistic society. Not only is he the leader or captain of the ship, at the top of the economical and racial chain of command, he sets out to purchase slaves from Africa. Thus, by removing the Allmuseri (natives who are bought to become slaves) from their culture, Falcon becomes a colonizer. By contrast, the Allmuseri live by a code of behavior that echoes Buddhist philosophy.

In simple terms, the book reveals Western ideology as a machine that severely impacts the freedom of both the white and the African American and offers a solution, which is a more Eastern, or enlightened approach to life. But this is not even skimming the tip of the iceberg that is this story. This is a densely constructed beast, like a French meal, rich and compact. In 209 short pages, Johnson manages to sort out the difficulties of our society. Although it seems that a book of such complexity would require some fancy degree or a soundproof room in order to read it, tis not the case. No, Johnson’s language is clear and approachable and not nearly as complex as its meaning.

I challenge you to read this book, this Mount Everest—climb it! Tell me what you see from the top.

No-No Boy is about main character, Ichiro’s experience in a Japanese Internment camp during WWII, and his struggle to put his life back together following this nightmare. That is the basic plot, which makes this interesting historical fiction. But more than that, the story is a thought-provoking glimpse of America that captures not only the immigrant perspective, but translates to all of humanity.

The American Dream is often simplified to the single desire of obtaining a home surrounded by a white picket fence. Now that I think about it, this simple desire is quite ironic considering our founding fathers were running away from moat-surrounded monarchies and other forms of elitist superiority. In No-No Boy, John Okada taps into this fence fascination and adds his own perceptive spin to it. In theory, a fence is an encapsulating unit that surrounds and protects, keeps out strangers. Okada refers to fences in only a few discrete places in the text, yet the idea of the fence resonates as the overall message of his book. Beyond the obvious uses of the fence in his book, such as the internment camps and the prison in which the main character spends two years, Okada observes the many ways in which humanity tends to utilize the fence.

To Okada, America seems to be divided by fences. On one side you’ll find the Asian American and any other form of brown people, and on the other side you’ll find the white people. Keep the fence in mind as you read this passage from the book, where two of the characters, Ichiro and Kenji, explore the Asian American section of Seattle:

“They walked down the ugly street with the ugly buildings among the ugly people which was a part of America and, at the same time, would never be wholly America.”

Fences, Okada demonstrates, are not put up solely to keep out strangers. The fence theory can be applied to the great divide that existed between the Japanese American community as well, between those who were willing to denounce their Japanese citizenship to fight in the war for America, versus those who were unwilling to give up their heritage: “They rolled down the alley, clawing at each other and straining muscles to seek a victory in the senseless struggle.” The “senseless struggle,” of course, depicts the no-win situation this divided Asian American community experienced at this time.

There is also the suggestion of a fence that Japanese Americans put around themselves to keep out America, to hold onto their culture, rather than submitting to American culture. Kenji says to Ichiro: “I got to thinking that the Japs were wising up, that they had learned that living in big bunches and talking Jap and feeling Jap and doing Jap was just inviting trouble.” Here, Okada suggests that the fence around their community could somehow contribute to the racial divide and feeling of otherness.

Of course there is also the generational fence in the story, between parents and their children and their differing opinions on assimilation into American culture. Okada writes: “Ichiro was young and American and alien to his parents, who had lived in America for thirty-five years without becoming less Japanese and could speak only a few broken words of English and write not at all.”

Toward the end of the book, Ichiro finds himself freed from the fence that his mother attempted to force around him, but witnessed many people who were still fencing themselves in. He rationalizes, “it was a free world, but they would have to make peace with their own little world before they could enjoy the freedom of the larger one.”

No-No Boy is about main character, Ichiro’s experience in a Japanese Internment camp during WWII, and his struggle to put his life back together following this nightmare. That is the basic plot, which makes this interesting historical fiction. But more than that, the story is a thought-provoking glimpse of America that captures not only the immigrant perspective, but translates to all of humanity.

The American Dream is often simplified to the single desire of obtaining a home surrounded by a white picket fence. Now that I think about it, this simple desire is quite ironic considering our founding fathers were running away from moat-surrounded monarchies and other forms of elitist superiority. In No-No Boy, John Okada taps into this fence fascination and adds his own perceptive spin to it. In theory, a fence is an encapsulating unit that surrounds and protects, keeps out strangers. Okada refers to fences in only a few discrete places in the text, yet the idea of the fence resonates as the overall message of his book. Beyond the obvious uses of the fence in his book, such as the internment camps and the prison in which the main character spends two years, Okada observes the many ways in which humanity tends to utilize the fence.

To Okada, America seems to be divided by fences. On one side you’ll find the Asian American and any other form of brown people, and on the other side you’ll find the white people. Keep the fence in mind as you read this passage from the book, where two of the characters, Ichiro and Kenji, explore the Asian American section of Seattle:

“They walked down the ugly street with the ugly buildings among the ugly people which was a part of America and, at the same time, would never be wholly America.”

Fences, Okada demonstrates, are not put up solely to keep out strangers. The fence theory can be applied to the great divide that existed between the Japanese American community as well, between those who were willing to denounce their Japanese citizenship to fight in the war for America, versus those who were unwilling to give up their heritage: “They rolled down the alley, clawing at each other and straining muscles to seek a victory in the senseless struggle.” The “senseless struggle,” of course, depicts the no-win situation this divided Asian American community experienced at this time.

There is also the suggestion of a fence that Japanese Americans put around themselves to keep out America, to hold onto their culture, rather than submitting to American culture. Kenji says to Ichiro: “I got to thinking that the Japs were wising up, that they had learned that living in big bunches and talking Jap and feeling Jap and doing Jap was just inviting trouble.” Here, Okada suggests that the fence around their community could somehow contribute to the racial divide and feeling of otherness.

Of course there is also the generational fence in the story, between parents and their children and their differing opinions on assimilation into American culture. Okada writes: “Ichiro was young and American and alien to his parents, who had lived in America for thirty-five years without becoming less Japanese and could speak only a few broken words of English and write not at all.”

Toward the end of the book, Ichiro finds himself freed from the fence that his mother attempted to force around him, but witnessed many people who were still fencing themselves in. He rationalizes, “it was a free world, but they would have to make peace with their own little world before they could enjoy the freedom of the larger one.”