cover image Trash

Trash

Amy Yamada. Kodansha America, $18 (372pp) ISBN 978-1-56836-018-8

No longer writing about Tokyo S&M clubs (the subject of her debut novel, Kneel Down and Lick My Feet, which brought her fame and critical acclaim in her native Japan), Yamada, whose short stories were introduced here in Monkey Brain Sushi, (1991), displays a bittersweet sentimentality encased in a minimalist narrative in her first novel to be published in the U.S. Koko, a Japanese woman living in New York, has the ability of the young to fall casually and deeply in love. This novel is as much about her doomed affair with Rick, an alcoholic African American, as it is about her growing friendship with Rick's adolescent son. Downplaying the themes of culture clash and racial tension, Yamada concentrates on universally confusing human emotions, but at times her symbolism is too obvious, as when she opens with Koko handcuffed to her bed, chained by love. Some acute observations (an alcoholic sensuously sucking the gin off the ice cubes in his emptied glass), as well as powerful scenes of understated violence occasionally flare up but quickly flicker out, leaving a too spare melodrama devoid of true inner illumination. Yamada's mistake may have been to choose an American urban setting for her first American novel; the Japanese setting of her earlier works seems to have served her better, at least so far. (Jan.)