The loom and other stories

R.A. Sasaki is a third-generation San Franciscan. She attended the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, has a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Winner of the 1983 American Japanese National Literary Award, she has had stories published in the Short Story Review and Making Waves: An Anthology of Writing by Asian-American Women. The Loom and Other Stories is her first published collection. She currently lives in Berkeley, California.

The nine short stories in this collection reveal a moving portrait of three generations of Japanese-Americans trying to fit themselves into the fabric of American society. The author writes: "I wandered ghostlike amidst the mainstream of America, treading unaware of the cultural amnesia inflicted on my parents' generation by the internment and the atomic bomb."

Poignant, heart-breaking, and often funny, these tales chronicle the pains and hopes of family members reaching out in individual ways to understand themselves, their families, and their community.

"Ruth Sasaki writes with great self-knowledge, with a sensitivity born of examined experience, and with a wonderfully humorous insight of the American ethnic experience."—Gus Lee, author of China Boy

"Sasaki's stories mark an impressive debut."—Newsday

"Quiet, elegiac writing that movingly celebrates the immigrant rite of passage—along with all its implicit heartaches and triumphs."—Kirkus Reviews

"Sasaki writes with great sensitivity, intelligence, subtlety and humor."—Traise Yamamoto, Multicultural Review

"Nine loosely connected tales weave the experiences of three generations of Japanese-Americans in San Francisco into a subtle, appealing tapestry . . . So sure is the author's touch that a few deft strokes serve to define a character, a moment, the tenor of a life. Sasaki's understated, cerebral prose speaks to the heart."—Publishers Weekly



Table of Contents
Another Writer's Beginnings
Ohaka-mairi
The Loom
Independence
First Love
American Fish
Wild Mushrooms
Driving to Colma
Seattle