In “June: Circle K Recipes,” incorporating a food, particularly rice, into one’s interiors is a way of consuming value: “Everything is measured against it.  Legal tender…The gold standard was abolished years ago, but not the rice standard” (Yamashita 83).  If “[e]verything is measured against it,” then people certainly are, both in what they eat, how they eat it, and in what ways they are consumed as commodities by others.  “One eats the purity of it,” and one should be “mattaku Japanese” to have that honor, to digest that “purity.”  As for “the long-grain rice of Thailand,” which is “cheap,” “just a food sample from a poor country,” perhaps even tainted by insect parts, it’s not “legal tender,” in part because: “Who’s eating it now?  Probably the Brazilians” (Yamashita 82).  Whether insulated from insect parts or human parts, the standard for “[l]egal tender” must be “purity.”  Gold is irrelevant; what and who is eaten, imagined, and fucked must be narrated, must be contained, must be reiterated.

In other words, narrative is essential to “[l]egal tender,” and narrative must be “tender,” of value, soft, “sticky,” and comfortingly streamlined.  It must use tropes that cohere, that are “sticky” and juicy.  Miss Hamamatsu has to love novelas and movies, she’s got to be mestiça, and those novelas and movies have to provide narratives for her family history in “What if Miss Nikkei Were God(dess)?”: “She felt it was her story, too, the story of her Italian side.  Imagine” (Yamashita 23), “A romantic story based on our history” (Yamashita 24), “she could become the Queen of Beef” (Yamashita 26).  The invocation of imagination is a command, out to the reader and to herself, but readers have only their imaginations to project onto whatever narrative she “imagines.”  Alluding to a genre that uses tropes, the narrator calls attention to the packaging of “her story,” “the story of her Italian side,” “a romantic story based on our history,” and “Queen of Beef” as tasty narratives that are easy to swallow, ways of swallowing Miss Hamamatsu as beef, as the body parts by which she is characterized.  You want to consume her, you have to consume her narrative, but it was never really hers, was it?  “She would be the Japanese mestiça Patricia Pillar, the righteous and beautiful Luana” (Yamashita 27).  The premise is that this is already not her story: “She would be” someone else; “would” is quite distinct from “is.”  Her value is premised on narrative value, so that narratives tropes have to “sell,” as novela plots, as body parts, as beef.

“Zero Zero One-derful” brings selling ads, “my story,” and “Me naked” syntactically close: “Alice, I’ve already sold several pages of ads today.  But, back to my story.  Me naked running around crazy.  No escape” (Yamashita 74).  There’s “[n]o escape” from the idea of narrative; it always has to circle back to “my story.”  Through implicit thought progression (i.e. phone conversation), several tangents come together as if conceptually invoking one another: selling, stories, and nudity.  Feel free to remove the commas.  While this phone conversation plays with the interplay between large categories and “I,” what’s narrated is narrative structure, rather than the tropes themselves, which frequent the page.  “In this underworld inside Japan, I learned to live Japanese,” comments the voice that tells Alice about “the Brazilians” and “the Japanese,” accentuating the idea of generalization (Yamashita 77).  Describing Japan as “what you don’t see and what you see,” she invokes what both in “this underworld inside Japan”: the term “underworld” is campy, as is the insinuation that something is “inside” or hidden within.  Think of a trope, any trope, all the movies you’ve seen.  That’s not it, but it is.  “It’s what you don’t see and what you see.”  It’s the lurid fascination with something imagined that you don’t see, with something unimaginable, with the possibility that all those tropes are true.  And she would know; she “learned to live Japanese.”  She’s not like all those other Brazilians who never get the hang of it.  “He thinks that what he sees is the thing itself,” perhaps a little like readers outside of the memoir’s context (Yamashita 77).  Mistake the trope for realism, mistake realism for a trope, think that they can’t be both, realize that you’re “like a fish swimming in a school of surfaces” (Yamashita 77).  Just remember, she never said that she was Japanese or Brazilian; she says that she “learned to live Japanese” and calls herself “I.”  On the other hand, her dialogue sells ad space to Alice through a series of “bootstraps” tropes that de-individualize and commodify her story: she came naked (Don’t you desire her), she made it (she’s exceptional but proof that you just have to work hard), and she’s ready to share that salability with Alice (ad space).  It goes without saying that it’s circular.  Maybe the narrative has a truth, that truth is attainable, and that truth has value, but the trope is worth just as much: “Everything has a true inside and a front that covers it” (Yamashita 77).  After all, mestiça exoticism hinges on a narrative of impurity, of “red red lipstick,” of “something pink and very transparent,” of a transparent trope, of another imagined narrative, “Me naked” and selling stories (Yamashita 72).  Watch out for that non-Japanese rice; you might enjoy it, and it might remind you of everything else that you eat, but don’t you enjoy the privilege and the danger of extending what has value?  “My desire reaches into his pants, and he thinks about nothing but sex and money.  If he could have me, it’s true, he could have the world: honne/tatemae: Now you see me, now you don’t” (Yamashita 80).  Surface is visible; what’s under is elusive: “Now you see me, now you don’t.”  That’s part of the allure, and part of the deception of tropes.  They promise a truth (“it’s true, he could have the world”) that may not be there (“now you don’t”) and bank on an essentialism that is usually racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and much, much more.

Rice ends up in many bellies, although “cheap” Thai rice is distinguished from Japanese rice in part through who consumes it, or who consumes it according to the trope that Brazilians eat what “mattaku Japanese” can afford not to, probably in part economic reality and in part a circular nationalist-xenophobic idea about impure food belonging in impure bodies and about the mutual exposure to impurity reinforcing already essential impurity.  Invoking tropes (“It’s a Creole thing”), the text destabilizes notions of purity: “Everybody is making okazu.  Everybody is making mistura” (Yamashita 85, 86).  The parallel structures in the two sentences about “[e]verybody” emphasize sameness as they invoke tropes about difference and hybridity.  It's notable because of xenophobic tropes around "purity" that "[e]verybody" is eating Japanese, Brazilian, and Japanese-Brazilian food.  “It’s a Creole thing” is a dismissive phrase that embodies a refusal to elaborate on anything categorized (Oh, it's a "Creole thing," case closed), but the dismissal is dismissed when “[e]verybody” is eating what is, according to trope, food only eaten by some.  The trope doesn’t account for what’s happening: people are eating food that is Japanese, Brazilian, Japanese-Brazilian, and made by anyone.  “I heard some Brazilian women have used the rice cooker to bake cakes.  Nothing is sacred.  Your tradition is someone else’s originality” (Yamashita 86).  This is emphatically hearsay (“I heard”), it perpetuates anonymity within generalized categories (“some Brazilian women”), and it invokes purity (“sacred”).  Perhaps it uses the structure of a trope to parody those tropes: the possibility of purity in the xenophobic sense (of bodies and of food) and the commodification of tropes (in the same discussion of marketing food).  By calling attention to the tropes that structure narratives, Circle K Cycles questions how much a narrative exposes, contests, or perpetuates.

(I'm assuming that the text uses irony, but given the power vested in these kinds of tropes, I find the text's specific characterization of mestiça women as conniving, manipulative, etc. disturbing.  Yes, there is a purpose in telling readers what they want to hear for the sake of exposing the problematic implications of what they want to hear, but it would have been nice to meet people that didn't seem like plot devices.  Yes, I realize that the text addresses navigating economic marginalization, including on the part of the author and her family, but her position in what she writes is obfuscated.  This makes it an interesting read, and it also makes me wonder what everyone else thought of it).