Famous suicides of the Japanese empire : a novel

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Title:

Famous suicides of the Japanese empire : a novel

Author:

Mura, David author.

ISBN:

9781566892155

Edition:

1st ed.

Publication Information:

Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2008.

Physical Description:

269 p. ; 22 cm.

Subject Term:

Japanese American families -- Fiction.

Japanese Americans -- Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945 -- Fiction.

Suicide -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction.

Genre:

Bildungsromans.

Summary:

Third-generation Japanese-American Ben Ohara is haunted by the legacy of the WWII internment camps. Both of his parents were detained, and his father, Takeshi, was a No-No Boy whose refusal to join the armed forces planted the seed of his miserable demise by suicide. Now a 40-something itinerant historian, Ben receives a postcard sent 10 years earlier from his troubled younger brother, Tommy, shortly before he disappeared in the Mojave Desert. The long-delayed message revives Ben's interest in his unfinished book. Ben delves into his family's past in an attempt to understand what happened to his father and brother--Publisher.

Holds:

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury)	FICTION MUR	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

"There is no writer that dives deeper (or more bravely) into the chasm that is the human heart. [David Mura's] first novel is a tour de force: luminously written and by turns crafty, tough, wise, and joyful."--Junot Díaz

Ben Ohara is the sole surviving member his family. A troubled and brilliant astrophysicist, Ben's younger brother has mysteriously vanished in the Mojave Desert. His father, one of a small group of WWII draft resisters (known as the No-No Boys) during the internment of Japanese Americans, committed suicide when Ben was young. And his mother, whose wish to escape the past was as strong as his father's ties to it, has died with her secrets.

Now struggling to support his wife and children and under pressure to complete his historical study, Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire , Ben realizes that the key to unlocking the future lies in reassessing the past.

As Ben vividly recalls a childhood colored by the tough Chicago streets, horror movie monsters, sci-fi villains, Japanese folktales, and TV war heroes, he begins to understand the profound difference between coming of age and becoming a man. And by retracing his brother's footsteps and returning to the site of the Heart Mountain Internment Camp, Ben uncovers a truth that has the power to set him free.

An acclaimed memoirist, poet, and playwright, David Mura is one of America's most insightful cultural critics. His memoirs, Turning Japanese and Where the Body Meets Memory , along with his poems, essays, plays, and performances, have won wide critical praise and numerous awards. Visit his website at www.davidmura.com.

Author Notes

David Mura is a poet, memoirist, essayist, playwright, writer of fiction, performance artist , and literary critic.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this uneven debut novel from poet and memoirist Mura (Turning Japanese), third-generation Japanese-American Ben Ohara is haunted by the legacy of the WWII internment camps. Both of his parents were detained, and his father, Takeshi, was a No-No Boy whose refusal to join the armed forces planted the seed of his miserable demise by suicide. Now a 40-something itinerant historian, Ben receives a postcard sent 10 years earlier from his troubled younger brother, Tommy, shortly before he disappeared in the Mojave Desert. The long-delayed message revives Ben's interest in his unfinished book, a project that betray[s] my lifelong fascination with the origins of my family's grief and madness. Ben delves into his family's past in an attempt to understand what happened to his father and brother, and while the novel's first half vividly recounts Ben's childhood in Chicago's rough Uptown neighborhood, the second half sees the narrative losing energy as it becomes more contemplative and big family secrets are blandly revealed. Mura writes beautiful sentences, but the story becomes more slack just as it should be intensifying. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Ben Ohara grows up tough in a tough Chicago neighborhood, driven to extremes by his father's unspoken anguish and unexplained absences, his mother's fierce pragmatism, and the certainty that his younger brother, Tommy, is much smarter than he is. Ben lands in reform school, while Tommy is on his way to becoming an astrophysicist. Ultimately, Tommy's study of the cosmos does not help him here on earth, while Ben becomes a high-school history teacher attempting to write a history of Japanese suicides. Memories of his difficult boyhood and his brilliant but doomed brother interleave with Ben's mordant and penetrating ruminations on the underlying connections between ritual suicides, samurai, the atomic bomb, Godzilla, the shameful internment of Japanese Americans, and the draft resisters known as the No-No Boys. Memoirist (Turning Japanese, 1991) and poet Mura manages rather spectacularly to bring a light touch to his intense first novel, a crepuscular tale of one man's struggle to decipher his poisonous legacy of sorrow, shame, and prejudice; refuse the narcotic of forgetting; and pursue the bracing clarity of truth and remembrance.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist

Library Journal Review

This debut novel by a recognized nonfiction author and poet is presented as the memoir of Japanese American Ben Ohara, who is married and has two sons. After the sudden disappearance of his younger brother Tommy, who abandoned a career as a brilliant scientist and fell into drug addiction and gambling, Ben attempts to come to terms with his past. Ben relates his childhood in the Chicago slums, where a street fight results in his arrest and incarceration in juvenile detention; the suicide of his father, a draft resister, or No-No Boy, during World War II (who never adjusted after his years in an interment camp); and his mother, who assimilated successfully into a post office career and remarried a Caucasian after her husband's death. Intermixed with these recollections are stories from Ben's unfinished dissertation of famous Japanese suicides. Ben discovers that by focusing on his past, he is like "someone other than who I'm supposed to be" and eventually commits himself to his family and the present. Despite the distinct stories about suicides and the Japanese internment camps, the novel is more like a patchwork of fiction and historical facts that does not hold together well. For larger collections only.--David A. Berona, Plymouth State Univ., NH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Booklist Review

Library Journal Review

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