Week 14: Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka (Picador, 1996, paperback)
Just like the previous book, I came across this novel as I was looking for Asian-American novels to use in my Multicultural American literature course. I discovered, through this book and the one last week, the overlooked (at least on the mainland) of the Japanese living in Hawaii. Murayama’s book was set in the 1930s, while Yamanaka’s book is in the 1960s and 1970s.
Each novel is a coming of age story, with Murayama following a boy’s struggles with this family and Yamanaka’s presenting a young girls’ struggles with her community. Each uses Hawaii Pidgin English through their first person narrations, which gives each an authentic tone. Of the two, Yamanaka’s is far more in-depth in its exploration of the characters, while Murayama’s give us more insight into the Japanese-American (Hawaiian) culture.
This novel is a series of vignettes from Lovey, a young Japanese-American girl. The arc between these vignettes are the characters. While this vignette approach may appear, at first, to create a disjointed experience, through these isolated experiences, Yamanaka builds character depth. We feel affection for Lovey and her best friend Jerry’s attempts to find some acceptance and make connections; we can come to dislike and yet feel sympathy for Larry, the older brother of Jerry, an violent boy who at the end faces his own tragic pain; we come to appreciate Lovey’s eccentric father.
The rich details, the authentic voice and the characters draw us into this unique community. At the end, when Yamanaka weaves together the major strands of her story, I realized how much she’d quietly engaged me into her novel. This is a very good coming-of-age novel that should be read for its strength of writing as much as for its unique setting. Highly recommended.
Next week . . . Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.