In 1984, David Mura, a third-generation Japanese-American, was awarded a writing grant to live in Japan. After years of ignoring his ethnic heritage, Mura, with his wife (an American), embarked on a trip that profoundly changed his life. Turning Japanese chronicles his quest for self-knowledge and racial identity.
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.