In the past year or so I’ve tried to expand my reading horizons. Instead of only reading mysteries, I’ve started to be more open to and accepting of other genres and authors. For the most part it’s going well, but also in the last year I’ve discovered an author whose works I just don’t connect with. That author, sadly, is the much loved Karen Tei Yamashita. When I reluctantly share that Yamashita isn’t one of my favorites I’m met with disbelief. It’s often assumed that I don’t like her works because I don’t like their genre of Magical Realism (MR). That definitely isn’t the case. I’ve tried to read Tropic of Orange and Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, and had a difficult time with both.
I’ve read and appreciated MR for almost a decade now (Salmon Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are great places to start) and I understand how Yamashita is MR, so the genre classification of the works themselves isn’t my issue. When I first read Orange I was utterly lost, which I think caused me to not invest in the characters. It kills me when I don’t care about a story’s characters because without them is there even a point? I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t even get halfway through Orange before I gave up. Many of my friends have read it all the way through and love it, so I’m thinking I’m the problem.
Thankfully, my experience with Rain Forest was a bit more positive. Although I skipped a few chapters in the middle, I did read the novel’s end. I thought Rain Forest is an odd story, but I could follow it much better than I could Orange. What I did like about my second attempt at Yamashita’s is I was able to read an ecocritically-minded novel that also dealt with immigration/emigration issues. Although I didn’t think that its narrative is as disjointed as that of Orange, Rain Forest was still, at times, hard for me to follow. I cared a bit about these characters, but not enough to stay consistently interested.
So, even though I haven’t had the best experience with Yamashita’s works and I’ve decided they’re not for me, I don’t hate what she does. I felt pretty much nothing but confusion when I read Orange and Rain Forest, but I see how those two books have positively impacted others. Even though Yamashita isn’t my favorite author, she’s still one I encourage you to try. Who knows, you may really love her works, but you’ll never know unless you give her novels a chance.
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