The country I have thought was my home": David Mura's Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei

Abstract

Home functions ideally as an anchor, our most familiar and predictable place. What happens, however, when one discovers at the heart of this safe haven (indeed, at the heart of one's identity) a feeling of "not being at home"? Or when the home (and homeland) one lays claim to requires constant proof of the right to belong? With these questions in mind, the article examines the problematic notions of "home" and (ancestral) "homeland, " and their implications for the ethnic individual as articulated in the partly fictional autobiography Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (1991) by Japanese American author David Mura.