Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei

“The poet David Mura brings an intriguing perspective to the New World quest for enlightenment from this ancient and ascendant culture” (The New York Times).

Award-winning poet David Mura’s critically acclaimed memoir Turning Japanese chronicles how a year in Japan transformed his sense of self and pulled into sharp focus his complicated inheritance. Mura is a sansei, a third-generation Japanese-American who grew up on baseball and hot dogs in a Chicago suburb where he heard more Yiddish than Japanese. Turning Japanese chronicles his quest for identity with honesty, intelligence, and poetic vision, and it stands as a classic meditation on difference and assimilation and is a valuable window onto a country that has long fascinated our own. Turning Japanese was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of an Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Book Award. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.

“A dizzying interior voyage of self-discovery and splintered identity. ” —Chicago Tribune

“There is brilliant writing in this book, observations of Japanese humanity and culture that are subtly different from and more penetrating than what we usually get from Westerners. ” —The New Yorker

“Turning Japanese reads like a fascinating novel you can’t put down … Mura’s story is a universal one, and one that is accessible to everyone, even those whose experience in the U. S. is not that of a person of color. ” —Asian Week

“[Mura] paints a portrait of Japan that is rich and satisfying … a refreshingly kindly and tolerant study, a powerful antidote to the venomous anti-Japanese mood that seems, distressingly, to be seizing some corners of the American mind. ” —Conde Nast Traveler

© 2007 Grove Press (Ebook): 9780802196026

Release date

Ebook: December 1, 2007