What makes Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World (1989) an interesting text of analysis in this paper is that it introduces an “other” kind of Japanese American family. Asian
American literature has long been noted for its preoccupation with the establishment of families and homes in the United States. Building up a family symbolizes Asian Americans’
successful integration into the American society. It helps the immigrant individuals and their offspring to confirm their identity and secure their genealogy in the land they choose, though for different reasons, to stay. And this desire to set up one’s own family could be especially intense in the case of post-internment Japanese Americans. After the traumatic relocation and the disruption of their community during World War II, Japanese Americans crave to
re-establish their families, preferably in the model of American bourgeois household. One obvious example can be found in John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), in which the
protagonist-narrator Ichiro dreams to purchase a house and build a family marked by paternity and progeny:
In time, [. . .] there will [. . .] be a place for me. I will buy a home and love my family and I will walk down the street holding my son’s hand and people will stop and talk with us about the weather and the ball games and the elections. (52)
Similarly, in his memoir, Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity (1996), David Mura vividly describes how, after the internment, his Nisei father moves every seven years, from the city to the “calm suburban world” in order to build a typical American bourgeois household that is free from his Japanese American history (18).
Both examples demonstrate the post-war Japanese Americans’ strong desire to be assimilated into the mainstream American society. It seems that the possession of a suburban domicile—a
“typical” nuclear bourgeois household—that separates the family from the world and the history provides an important way for Japanese Americans to sustain the self-enclosed stability of their identities. Also set in the post-war socio-historical context, Kadohata’s The Floating World, however, tells a different story.
Indeed, the “unconventionalities” of The Floating World have been widely noted ever since its publication.51 Among them, what concern my discussion in this paper are primarily two points. First, instead of writing to secure a stable home and a self-enclosed family for her Japanese American characters, Kadohata launches them into multiple traveling routes across the 1950s United States. The delineation of a type of Japanese American family that is usually on the way and ceaselessly moves toward the outside and the other restores our imagination of
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51 Yogi, for example, reads The Floating World as conveying “a sense of rootlessness and randomness” (147).
He attributes Kadohata’s “hypnotic, sparse prose style” and “cinematic narrative structure” not as much to Japanese American literary tradition as to the South American magic realist writers (147). Other critics comment on the unconventional contents of the novel. Sarkar asserts that The Floating World presents “alternative stories”
of Japanese Americans (80). Some other reviewers further point out that the characters in the novel are “not acting Japanese enough” (qtd. in Pearlman 117). Some even accuse this novel of not being “angry enough” and
Japanese American families to their multiple images and functions. Besides, I am interested in what some reviewers claim to be the “unconventional” Nikkei characters created by the novel.52 Among them, the most notorious is the protagonist-narrator Olivia’s Issei
grandmother, Obāsan, who marries “three times” (2) and is still “consumed with an affair” at the age of seventy-six (13). Besides, Olivia’s mother marries Charlie-O when she is “eight months pregnant” with Olivia (39) and has a series of extramarital affairs. Added to this list of
“unconventional characters” is Olivia herself. She, together with her mother and her maternal grandmother, Obāsan, complicates the patrilinear order and genetic unity of traditional families. In one way or another, The Floating World displaces the Asian American search for a self-enclosed, patrilinear household with its portrayal of traveling “unhome(s)” and
makeshift families.
Here, the word “unhome” is chosen to indicate the multiple layers of Japanese
Americans’ experiences with family and home. In its most obvious sense, the prefix “un” of
“unhome” negates the idea of “home.” The “unhome” is “not” a “home,” or, more precisely, not a “home” in its traditional sense of providing spatial moorings and stable identity. If an idealized “home” is noted by its privacy and self-enclosure, an “unhome” could be extroverted, pointing to the alien and the unfamiliar. To move from “home” to “unhome,” one is, in a sense, exiled from a stable, fixed, and self-enclosed place called “home” upon which one’s identity is embedded.
In light of this interpretation of “unhome,” the movement and travels of the post-war Japanese Americans in The Floating World could be easily attributed to the forced dispersion of Japanese Americans immediate after the Second World War. As Sheila Sarkar makes clear, the years-long travels of Olivia’s family in Oregon, Wyoming, California, and Washington reflects “the forced dispersion of many Japanese Americans” after their relocation during World War II (84) and “the temporary jobs that Olivia describes among the Japanese
American community” point to “the economic instability for many Japanese Americans at the time because their own property and financial means of survival had been taken away during internment” (83). Similarly, You-me Park and Gayle Wald read the three reasons Olivia mentions for her family’s constant movement—the bad luck of her father, the fact of their being Japanese Americans, and the problems of her parents’ marriage—as coinciding with
the difficulties Japanese immigrants had to deal with in postwar America: the economic crisis brought on by slower economic growth, the racializing nationalist
not “talk[ing] enough about the camps” (qtd. in Pearlman 116, 117).
52 See note 7.
discourse that defined Japanese Americans only as Japanese, and the reconfiguring of gender relations within the family. (626)
Except reflecting “the reconfiguring of gender relations,” the Japanese American “unhomes”
are generally the result of racism that still permeates the post-war United States. Japanese Americans are exiled from “homes.” Their “unhomely” situation bears witness to their falling victims to socio-political persecutions.
Undoubtedly, Kadohata has taken the post-war Japanese American situation as the historical backdrop of her writing. I also agree that Olivia and her family members are to a certain extent victims of racial discrimination and economic exploitation. They are not able to establish a “normal” household partly because they cannot afford a house.53 What makes Kadohata’s writing truly “unconventional,” however, is that The Floating World does not describe this historical dispersion of Japanese Americans as a completely negative situation, which one had better leave behind in order to move into a brighter future. Instead of taking Japanese Americans’ “unhomely” experiences as something Japanese Americans need to outgrow as quickly as possible or considering their “unhomeliness” a mere prelude from which one can project unto the future an unproblematic Japanese American “homecoming,”
The Floating World seems to dawdle over these “unhomely” moments, treating them sometimes as valuable or even productive. In Olivia’s words,
It was always hard to leave our homes, but once we started traveling, a part of me loves that life. All the packing and moving was especially hard on my parents, but I think even they enjoyed some of the long drives [. . .]. I remember how fine it was to drive through the passage of light from morning to noon to night. (4)
The joy of travel is worth the pain of leaving home. Or, as Olivia’s mother admits, “[i]t’s always nice when we start out somewhere, then it’s less nice when we’re almost there” (41).
To be on the way, to move toward somewhere new, could be better than facing the end of one’s journey. Indeed, Olivia never considers the possession of an “idealized” domicile the goal of her travels and movement. Even after Charlie-O finally purchases a garage in Arkansas and becomes a property owner, Olivia still decides to leave behind her Arkansas home—despite its “neatly trimmed lawn in front and a swing set in the large backyard”
(120)—for the uncertainties of further movement:
My family has lived many places, and traveled many places. I thought then that Arkansas was the most beautiful place I had ever been in, yet I wanted badly to
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53 Olivia narrates her family’s difficulties in purchasing a house: Her parents look around model homes, each one
“more beguiling than the one before,” but the fact is that they “couldn’t really afford a house” (148).
leave, and I knew that [. . .] someday I would have that freedom. (110-111)
Life on the road features something to be privileged. The “unhome” in The Floating World is not necessarily an inferior home; it could be “better” in that it provides more living
opportunities.
Here, by recasting the post-war Japanese American dispersion into an experience with positive prospects, Kadohata teases from “unhome” another layer of significance. “Unhome”
does not simply denote a lack of home. It rather indicates an “other” kind of home, which is noted not as much by its self-enclosed boundary as by its extroverted tendency towards the open road. Rather than being a mark of “lack,” the prefix “un” here indicates the act to move
“out” of a territorially self-confined home. To be “unhomed” is not “without” home, but to stay in the without, to be unbounded by a “home.” It is clear that Olivia cannot tolerate a life of self-imprisoned stasis. Her sense of “home” is attributed a least in part to her physically being away from home. When staying in Arkansas, for instance, she prefers sleeping in the living room or wandering in the woods at night because she “wanted to feel separate from [. . . her] normal life yet protected within it” (71). When she turns fourteen, she begins to have
“two lives”—her life at home and her life with her friends (72). Moreover, she likes her apartment in Los Angeles because it gives her the “old feeling of being displaced and safe at the same time, like when [. . . she] used to play in the small woods back of [. . . her] house at night” (126). Like her younger brother’s caterpillars that would still venture into an open space even though they are well-fed in a glass jar, Olivia prefers “unhome” to a traditional
“home” because the former challenges the segregation of the public and domestic spaces. It conjoins her sense of familial belongings to the freedom provided by the world outside a
“home.”
Implicit in an “unhomely” situation is thus the intervention of the domestic and the private into the public. Indeed, most characters in The Floating World are not passively
“homeless” despite their “unhomeliness.” Kadohata’s writing at this point bears strong echo to Homi Bhabha’s famous rendition of the “unhomely: “To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the unhomely be easily accommodated in that familiar division of the social life into private and the public spheres” (445). Reading the “unhomely” not simply as paradigmatic of the postcolonial situation but as prevalent in all socio-historical conditions of cultural
differences and power negotiations, Bhabha further points out that the “unhomely” features the space of “cultural dissensus and alterity,” the space not yet accommodated by the calcified dominant (usually national) spatialization (449). The “unhomely” as such could be understood as the “meeting place” or as the “contact zone” between the domestic and the public, the
everyday (un)home and the regulating nation-state. It is where the traumatic, psychic, personal, and ethnic experiences emerge to inscribe their symbolic presence. In Bhabha’s own words, the domestic ”unhomely” usually turns into “sites for history’s most intricate invasions”
(445).
Blurring the line between the world and the (un)home, The Floating World presents many textual examples to manifest the apparition of Japanese American communities from their “unhomely” travels, movement, and transgression. When Olivia’s family sets up households among “gas station attendants, restaurants, the jobs [. . . it] depended upon, the motel towns floating in the middle of fields and mountains” (2), it becomes not clear whether one should mourn for their “homelessness” or acclaim their intrusion into multiple public spaces. Although at the most pessimistic moment of her life Olivia compares the migrant Japanese American farmworkers to “animals migrating across a field [. . . ,] moving from the hard life just past to the life, maybe harder, to come” (149), in most places The Floating World describes these migrant Japanese Americans as being able to exert agency in the mapping of America. Olivia, for example, does not consider herself “floating”: the world is
“floating,” but her self is “stable, traveling through an unstable world” to test the various possibilities of dwelling and forming communities (3). The novel’s description of the Japanese American chicken sexers in Arkansas further brings forth a close-knit Japanese American community out of the seeming absence of Japanese Americans in the U.S. public.
Moreover, it is not without significance for Olivia to inherit from her real father, Jack, not a
“home” but a vending-machine route. In appearance, Jack fails to establish a “home” to hand it down to his daughter; he remains frequently “unhomed,” tending a vending-machine route that runs across California, Arizona, and Nevada. It turns out, however, several home-communities have grown along his vending-machine route. When Olivia services the route in her own turn after Jack’s death, she realizes that she has inherited from her father home-communities that crop up along the route:
A couple of the most out-of-the-way places were tiny offices for which Jack had simply laid out candy on shelves, with no machines, and the office workers paid on the honor system. He’d gotten to know the people in those offices better than the people at his more profitable locations. I thought maybe he’d told some of those smaller customers about me, maybe showed them picture, if he carried any. In any case, “Jack’s girl” is what a couple of them called me. (157-158)
And Jack is not the only one who inscribes his Japanese American presence into the U.S.
public sphere by owning and servicing a route. In another significant passage, Olivia describes
how the migrant ethnic workers form “three main rivers” in the United States: “I read once that there were three main rivers in the country, one on the West Coast, one on the East, and one in the Midwest. The rivers, made up of migrant farmworkers, traveled down the country every year during the growing season” (146). Constituting a major part of these migrant farmworkers, Japanese Americans re-write the American landscape in spite, or because, of their “unhomeliness.”