Circle K Cycles

The graphic memoir Circle K Cycles is very experimental in its use of collage to convey in this case the feeling of disjunction that accompanies a search for identity. In the beginning the use of the medium produces a scrapbook effect. The diary entries read like a travel journal, in that scattered among the text are found objects, photos, newspaper articles, maps, flyers, magazine covers, posters, graphs, advertisements, charts, recipes, origami instructions, signs, guidelines, puzzles, comics, manga, Japanese characters, and other items that make up a collection belonging to someone, of some value. We know as readers that this collection belongs to the author because of the nature of memoir, but also because of the photo booth snapshots on the final page of the novel. 

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On page 32, in the diary entry for Saturday, April 19^th, the narrator comments on the “beauty” of trash, which for me immediately conjured the saying, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Yamashita explains that, “waste represents jobs.” The amount of packaging and waste that one amasses is representative of their ability to afford luxury and to maintain “full employment.” Status is bound up in consumerism. The differentiation among status and proof of racial “purity” rests on one’s means by which to buy into consumer culture. Moreover, wastefulness is aligned with being “true” Japanese, whereas dumpster diving and reuse identifies an individual as Brazilian or a migrant worker, a term that has inherited a slew of negative stereotypes. So if all of the "trash" displayed in the book belongs to the narrator, what does that make her?

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Circle K Cycles, with its appropriative objective, juxtaposes a range of perspectives representative of a specific milieu that is strictly divided. The short stories that comprise the text are interpolated by personal essays and diary entries of the author, who comes to represent a mestica figure, in that her husband is Brazilian and she is Nikkei. The author prefaces her attempt to demonstrate the difference, by herself admitting on page 14 that she struggles to “represent the lives and experiences of so many who have become so different and yet so purely Japanese” through any one image. She sets forth to tell the stories of Miss Nikkei, Marie Madalena and Ze Maria, Mario and Fatima, Cida, Sergio, Alice, the couples, and so on, in an attempt to encapsulate the essence of their shared, but somehow vastly different realities. The shifting points of view on pages 115-127 are bookended by eerie vignettes entitled “The Tunnel” in an oubapo-esque use of the palindrome (if we can say that each vignette represents a panel.) Ultimately these stories serve to shatter a lot of stereotypes. 

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The author touches a lot on the appropriation of all things American on Japanese culture. I find it really interesting what Yamashita is saying about Katakana, and the perpetually growing dictionary of new/foreign words that is being sparked by the influence of American fashions, to the point where globalization and consumerism trump tradition and “nothing is sacred” (86). The influence of America and English is especially highlighted in the section that begins on page 45 entitled “May: Touch Your Heart Circle K”: “Your heart will dance to/ Sincerity American style” (47) being one obvious example. In the end, Yamashita claims that she is Nikkei, but Nikkei is "on the move" (147). Nikkei is always changing and forever resisting being pinned down. 

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Half-thoughts- Some other themes/motifs in Circle K Cycle containing appropriative valence worthy of discussion could be the business of producing bootleg copies of television shows, translations of words and footnotes that explain phrases, local versus imported goods, the concept of expendable workers and the favoring of technology over manual labor, the progression of toilets, etc.