J-Sei’s Virtual Book Club: Lament in the Night

J-Sei’s Virtual Book Club: Lament in the Night

by | Jan 4, 2021 | Classes & Events, JSei Book Club, Lament in the Night

Meet Translator Andrew Way Leong

On Wednesday, January 13, at 4:00pm, Professor Andrew Way Leong, translator of Lament in the Night, will visit with us live on Zoom to launch this season’s Book Club. Prof. Leong will introduce Nagahara’s work and describe how he came to discover and translate this buried literary treasure. RSVP with “Book Club – Leong” in the subject line to receive the Zoom link. Please join us!

“Lament in the Night is a heartrending gift from the past… Little Tokyo in the 1920s—its bars, gambling, and social exchanges in an era of Prohibition—comes vividly to life in these stories, revealing the real and psychic underbelly of daily lives that have been erased and forgotten.
Andrew Leong’s patient and careful translation makes a lost world known to us again.”
— Karen Tei Yamashita, author of I-Hotel and Sansei and Sensibility

Join the Club, Buy the Book

Happy new year! The J-Sei Virtual Book Club continues in 2021 with another discussion-worthy selection. Book Club Format: We’ll follow a suggested reading schedule, although of course you are welcome to read at whatever pace works best for you. On the secure J-Sei Book Club webpage we’ll have weekly postings and encourage you to contribute your own thoughts about the reading. Also scheduled will be online guest appearances and a live Zoom meeting so we can get together to discuss the book. Sign up for the Book Club and be added to the Book Club mailing list.

J-Sei Book Club Pick: Lament in the Night by Nagahara Shoson

Our latest book actually consists of two novellas, originally published in 1925, presented together in one volume. The first, titled “Lament in the Night,” follows a migrant worker who wanders the streets of an unnamed city in search of food, work, and self-worth. The second and longer novella, “The Tale of Osato,” portrays a young woman struggling to survive a series of hardships after marrying and moving to California. Both works are remarkable in showing the seamy, hardscrabble life of Japanese immigrants in early 20th-century America. Nagahara’s works languished in obscurity until uncovered by scholar Andrew Way Leong, who translated them from their original Japanese into English while working on his Ph.D. The resulting translation was published by Kaya Press in 2012 and includes notes, background, and supplemental information as well as illuminating historical photographs.

Join J-Sei’s Book Club and connect with fellow book lovers as we explore this major achievement in Japanese American literature.

Nagahara Shōson was the pen name of Nagahara Hideaki, who was born in 1901 in a small village in the northeastern corner of Hiroshima Prefecture. In 1918, he emigrated to the United States at age 17. In 1920, Nagahara resided in a boarding house in Los Angeles and listed his occupation as “railroad worker,” but he also published several novels, stories, and plays in the Los Angeles area, though not all his works have survived. Nagahara may have returned to Japan in late 1927 or early 1928. The date and location of his death are currently unknown.

Andrew Way Leong is Assistant Professor of English at U.C. Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty, Prof. Leong was an assistant professor at Northwestern University. In addition to translating Lament in the Night, which won the 2014 Outstanding Book Award—Creative Writing, Assoc. of Asian American Studies, he is presently completing a book manuscript entitled A Queer, Queer Race: Origins for Japanese/American Literature.

Photo: Yanina Gotsulsky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AMERICAN HARVEST, a book talk with Marie Mutsuki Mockett

AMERICAN HARVEST, a book talk with Marie Mutsuki Mockett

by | Sep 26, 2020 | American Harvest, Classes & Events

American Harvest, a book talk with Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Wednesday, September 30th, 4 pm

An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains

We welcome Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye, who will join J-Sei once again to share her recent journey through the harvest in the heartland of America.  The JSei Book Club will share reflections from their deep dive into the book and pose questions to spark dialogue with author Marie Mockett.

For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it.

In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds.

Please RSVP for the link to the book talk. If you are interested in making a donation for the program or purchasing a copy of the book, see the  form below.

American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.

 

 

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of a novel, Picking Bones from Ash, and a memoir, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award. She has written for numerous publications and has been a guest on The World, Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered on NPR. She is a core faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop and a Visiting Writer in the MFA program Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California.