By Dan Read
Jane Austen famously wrote that the focus of her books was limited: “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.” Karen Tei Yamashita, in Sansei and Sensibility, explores the connection between Austen’s work and the “very confined and provincial space in which our social contracts and our relationships were all contained within [the] Japanese American community.”
Sansei are second-generation Japanese-Americans (J.A.—nice coincidence) (Nisei are first-generation). Sansei born in the baby boom generation, the subject of this book, grew up in a traumatized culture of repressed emotions and shame from the internment during the war. Sansei were just supposed to get it when they were born, says Yamashita. Just as in Austen novels there are many unspoken social conventions that dictate behavior and are struggled against. In the United States of the 1960s, of course, rebellion and escape are much more possible and do happen in these stories.
The title alone of this book was enough to grab my attention and get me to read it. It is not all Austen related: the first half of the book is short stories about Japanese immigrants in the United States and Brazil and you don’t get to the Jane Austen stuff until the second half. Yamashita has seven stories, each riffing off the novels, including Lady Susan. For example, Persuasion becomes The PersuAsians, about how Anne is persuaded not to go with Fred’s J.A. rock band on tour and instead goes off and gets her PhD. Eight years later the band assembles for a reunion and old love reignites.
The book is not just about Austen. I learned a lot about J.A. society and conventions and the racism the immigrants experienced in the American West and even in Brazil. This made it well worth reading. A true Janeite (Yamashita’s sister, for example, whose passion for Jane got her started on this book) can just read the second half and enjoy that.
Dan Read is a member of JASNA-North Carolina and an attorney in Durham.