Truth in Circle K Cycles

I found myself questioning the decisions of Karen Tei Yamashita as an author and/or designer of Circle K Cycles.  Perhaps she did not have a lot to do with the design of the book.  I questioned why she chose to present her columns interspersed with fiction, particularly when the fiction did not seem to be related to the journalistic pieces.  I think she was trying to illustrate what she is saying about the oppression of Brazilian Japanese people in Japan, but sometimes the fiction pieces felt like very simple writing exercises that were poorly placed.  For example, "Jorginho had big plans.  Well, they all had big plans" (21).  I do not understand how those two sentences got past an editor.  It seems they'd be more at home in a short story that was written by a teenager, or perhaps a bad noir writer.  "She sighed.  Being beautiful was a full-time job" (25) is another example.  Are readers supposed to empathize with the character here?  Or are we meant to feel that the character is shallow and not worthy of our attention?  If the latter was the intention, Yamashita succeeded, at least in the case of this reader.

  Perhaps she was going for a Gloria Anzaldua approach...something of a patchwork quilt, with fiction and non-fiction pieced together.  That would also explain her use of various (untranslated) languages: the alienation the reader feels after reading or ignoring sections of various languages is akin the the alienation the Japanese-Brazilian feels most of the time. Maybe she was attempting to present the dekasegi as Anzaldua presented the mestiza:  as someone living in the Borderlands, straddling cultures, and not really feeling as if she belonged to any of the three cultures that are present in her life.  A major difference is that the patches Anzaldua presents are fairly easy to stitch together to form a unified whole.  I can't make a whole of Yamashita's work.  The pictures in the book often seem to have nothing to do with the text.  Besides their assumed irrelevancy, they are generally so tiny that readers cannot see the subjects of the pictures. Because there are no captions or notes, one cannot tell what the pictures have to do with the story.  Who are the people in the pictures?  Are they relevant to the story?  Why even bother to include pictures that seem like their only purpose is to separate chapters, especially when they are not used to separate chapters?   The smiley faces that sometimes separate sections of the book make less sense than anything else.  Seriously, why is there a smiley face after the following sentence:  "Maybe he was just pretending that nothing had happened at all, the way Iara pretended that what her mother said was true, that her father had died before she was born" (95)?  No matter how I read that, the smiley face seems almost surrealistically out of place there.  

Reliability was a problem in the case of the narrator throughout the book.  The narrator was so vague that I did not believe much that she said.  "Cars are sawed in half, sent in containers, and welded together upon arrival" (31).  I'm no mechanic, but I am aware that one cannot saw a car in half and weld it together and expect it to work.  Perhaps more detail, or less, even, would be more effective here.  

There are many more examples:  "Someone produced the incredible statistic that Japan throws away imperfect vegetable and fruits in quantities that equal the weight of the total production of rice each year (82).  Really?  Who produced that statistic?  Specificity can give the impression of reliability, but Yamashita does not provide that.

"I imagine okazu is an old term, not used much in Japan today" (85).  She imagines that?  Did she not care enough to do the research to determine if it's an old term or not?  She goes on to say, "I don't know if anyone has ever done a study of the origins of the pastel in Brazil" (85).  I realize that Circle K Cycles is not an academic essay, but a little research goes a long way.   I would be more likely to believe the author if she stated facts here and there, in place of the vagueness that seems omnipresent.  "An Okinawan nutirionist"(86), "a Brazilian cook" (86), "A Nikkei" (86) leave me wondering if these people exist.  If Yamashita included names, I'd be more likely to believe that she did not make up people to support her claims.  She continues the vagueness on the same page when she refers to "some California company" and "another company," "A Hawaiian outfit," and "some Brazalian women."  Did she not care enough to look up specifics?  None of the phrases above encourages my confidence that the narrator knows what she is talking about.  Did she make a conscious choice to be vague or is she just lazy?  Either way, I find myself not believing her.  Some of what she says reads like a report on Fox News:  "SOME say..."  It's too easy to dismiss such sloppiness.  Please, tell me who "some" are.  I don't care if she imagines that okazu is an old term; I want to know if it is.  Has there been a study on the origins of pastel in Brazil?  It can't be that difficult to find out.  If you care enough to mention it in your book, please care enough to look it up before you publish the book.  Naming names helps, too.  Even if a name is not the actual name of the person to whom you're referring, if you include a name, the person becomes more real, and the narrator becomes more reliable.  The absence of this kind of "evidence" left me not believing anything else she said.