Sansei and Sensibility: Stories

Written by Karen Tei Yamashita

Narrated by Cindy Kay

In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance—familial, cultural, emotional, artistic—really means. In a California of the sixties and seventies, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of LA, bake sales replace ballroom dances, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Dec 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781696602860

Karen Tei Yamashita

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books (including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently Sansei and Sensibility), all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and a United States Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Reviews for Sansei and Sensibility

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Karen Tei Yamashita's book of short stories is two collections in one. The first half concerns itself with sansei, the grandchildren of Japanese emigrants. In these stories, they live mainly in an affluent Japanese-American community in California. And there are essays from topics ranging from prominent women of Japanese heritage to the WWII internment camps in isolated locations and how they are being preserved.

The second half of the book is a series of stories in which the familiar characters and plots of [[Jane Austen]]'s novels are placed in that same Californian Japanese-American community and altered for our modern age, so that Mr. Collins is a high school librarian and Mrs. Bennett is the president of the PTA. These stories require a familiarity with Austen's novels, but that's probably a given for readers of Yamashita's collection.

I picked up this book because of the Austen stories, but much preferred the first section, especially the essays, which brought to life the Japanese-American experience and that of being the grandchildren of immigrants. The first story, of two sisters visiting Japan for the first time and of looking like they belong, while still being outsiders, was also fascinating.

[ecataldi-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I liked the scope and uniqueness found in these short stories; from powerful grandmothers, to bathtubs, to dental hygienists who know too much, to interment camps this book has a bit of everything in it. The first half of the short stories aren't related to Jane Austen but are still profound and enjoyable. The second half of this collection turns each classic Jane Austen novel on it's head and gives it a Japanese American twist. I don't want to give anything away, but I will say they were very clever and were the most unique takes on Jane Austen that I've read in ages! Filled with beautiful prose; these unique short stories are worth a read!