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"Akasegawa is the kind of artist who inspires everybody every time he makes a new piece of art." -Yoko OnoIn the 1970s, estranged from the institutions and practices of high art, avant-garde artist and award-winning novelist Genpei Akasegawa (1937-2014) launched an open-ended, participatory project to search the streets of Japan for strange objects which he and his collaborators labeled "hyperart," codifying them with an elaborate system of humorous nomenclature.Along with "modernologists" such as the Japanese urban anthropologist Kon Wajiro and his European contemporary, Walter Benjamin, Akasegawa is part of a lineage of modern wanderers of the cityscape. His work, which has captured the imagination of Japan, reads like a comic forerunner of the somber mixed-media writings of W.G. Sebald, and will appeal to all fans of modern literature, art, artistic/social movements and writing that combines visual images and text in the exploration of urban life.In this revised edition, Matthew Fargo's original US translation of Akasegawa's hilarious, brilliantly conceived exercise in collective observation is accompanied by reflections from noted scholars Jordan Sand and Reiko Tomii, as well as a new essay by Akasegawa scholar William Marotti and a reflection on Akasegawa's legacy as a teacher by writer, artist and composer Masayuki Qusumi, a former student of Akasegawa's.

Until his death in 2012 at age 100, legendary filmmaker Kaneto Shindo was a living link to more than 70 years of Japanese cinema history. Screenwriter of more than 200 films and director of more than 40, Shindo earned international praise for his masterpieces Children of Hiroshima and The Naked Island, and for the fantastical proto-horror film, Onibaba. In this volume, Shindo narrates his career, from his beginnings as an art director and fledgling screenwriter in the 1930s and 1940s, to his collaborations with such luminaries as Kenji Mizoguchi, Kon Ichikawa and Kinji Fukasaku, to his breakout into independent filmmaking in the 1950s and beyond. This first-ever English language book on Shindo's work is a stunning introduction to one of film's great overlooked masters. It includes the full screenplay of The Naked Island and a foreword by Benicio del Toro.

A memoir about the lingering racial trauma of America's concentration camps, from the author of Fox Drum Bebop"Can one wreak vengeance against oneself?" This anguished question hangs over Gene Oishi's powerful memoir about his lifelong struggle to claim both his Japanese and American identities in the aftermath of World War II, when he and more than 120,000 other Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in America's concentration camps. From the moment he and everyone like him on the West Coast is deemed a threat to national security by President Roosevelt's infamous Executive Order 9066, Oishi finds himself trying to distance himself from his Japanese heritage even as he questions whether he will ever truly be accepted as fully American. Throughout his return to California as a teenager, his postwar service in the US Army and his subsequent career in journalism and politics, the deep wounds caused by the trauma of incarceration continue to fester. In Search of Hiroshi, originally published in 1988 and long unavailable, is republished in a new edition in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of EO 9066.Gene Oishi (born 1933), former Washington and foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, has written articles on the Japanese American experience for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post and Newsweek. His novel Fox Drum Bebop was published in 2014 and won the Asian American Studies Association Book Prize in 2016. Now retired, he lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

A coming-of-age tale of dislocation and inherited trauma from the acclaimed young French Vietnamese novelistFrench Vietnamese writer Line Papin's stunning English-language debut, The Girl Before Her offers a window onto the existential anguish of displacement as experienced by a child on the cusp of becoming a woman. Uprooted without explanation from the sunshine and chaos of Hà N?i at the age of ten, the narrator finds herself adrift in the unfamiliar, gray world of France and grappling with a deep sense of uncertainty about who she is and where she belongs. Lacking the words to express her growing sense of alienation, she stops talking, then eating. She is hospitalized and almost dies from anorexia. Part meditation, part family history, part message in a bottle to her younger selves, Papin's lyrical work of autofiction explores what it takes to embrace one's multiracial, transnational self by making peace with the generations of women who've come before. The Girl Before Her is the first book to be published by Ink & Blood, a new joint imprint from Kaya Press and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network (DVAN), which aims to bring Vietnamese literary voices from across the globe to English readers.

An experimental memoir from an acclaimed Bay Area social-practice artist and activistIn this innovative rethinking of the artist monograph, Oakland-based artist, educator and activist Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik (born 1981) captures conversations with the people who shaped her creative practices and helped her map the tools that are most important to her: wonder, intuition, criticality and belonging. Bhaumik's work has been celebrated by the San Francisco Chronicle and other media for using art as a strategy to connect memory and history with the urgent social issues of our time, as in her 2016 installation Estamos Contra El Muro / We Are Against the Wall, in which she collaborated with artists, makers and community members to recreate (and then smash) the US/Mexico border wall out of brick-shaped piñatas. We Make Constellations of the Stars interrogates not only what makes an artist an artist, but how connection is crucial for personal and political transformation as an artist of color.Visionary and historian Jeff Chang (author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation) writes: "Thoughtful, engaged and bold, Sita Bhaumik stares down trauma, cruelty and injustice, but always leads us towards wonder, joy and hope. By drawing connections and making meaning of seemingly unrelated points of light, she reveals new pathways toward belonging and freedom for all. She is one of the most insightful and inspiring artists of our time."

Jenny Liou's debut poetry collection conjoins the world of cage fighting and the traumas of immigrationIn Muscle Memory, Washington-based poet Jenny Liou grapples with violence and identity, beginning with the chain-link enclosure of the prizefighter's cage and radiating outward into the diasporic sweep of Chinese American history. Liou writes with spare, stunning lyricism about how cage fighting offered relief from the trauma inflicted by diaspora's vanishing ghosts; how, in the cage, an elbow splits an eyebrow, or an armbar snaps a limb, and, even when you lose a fight, you've won something: pain. Liou places the physical manifestation of violence in her sport alongside the deeper traumas of immigration and her own complicated search for identity, exploring what she inherited from her Chinese immigrant father--who was also obsessed with poetry and martial arts. When she finally steps away from the cage to raise children of her own, Liou begins to question how violence and history pass from one generation to the next, and whether healing is possible without forgetting.Jenny Liou (born 1983) is an English professor at Pierce College and a retired professional cage fighter. She lives and writes in Covington, Washington.

Faith and the Japanese American World War II Incarceration. A visual history of the role that religious teachings, practices and communities played in the WWII Japanese American experience, with essays by leading scholars

Introducing English readers to the speculative fiction of pseudonymous author Djuna, whose writings and interventions into internet culture have attracted a cult following in South Korea The stories brought together in this collection introduce for the first time in English the dazzling speculative imaginings of Djuna, one of South Korea's most provocative SF writers. Whether describing a future society light years away or satirizing Confucian patriarchy, these stories evoke a universe at once familiar and clearly fantastical. Also collected here for the first time are all six stories set in the Linker Universe, where a mutating virus sends human beings reeling through the galaxy into a dizzying array of fracturing realities.Blending influences ranging from genre fiction (zombie, vampire, SF, you name it) to golden-age cinema to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Djuna's stories together form a brilliantly intertextual, mordantly funny critique of the human condition as it evolves into less and more than what it once was.Film critic and speculative fiction writer Djuna, who first appeared as an online presence in the early 1990s, has steadfastly refused to confirm any personal details regarding age, gender or legal name, or even whether they are one person or multiple. Djuna is widely considered one of the most prolific and important writers in South Korean science fiction. They have published nine short story collections, three novels, and numerous essays and uncollected stories.

"Truong Tran's provocative collection of poetry, prose and essays is a stunning rebuttal to the idea of anti-Asian racism as a victimless crime. Written with a compulsion for lucidity that transforms outrage into clarity, Book of the Other resists the luxury of metaphor to write about the experience of being shut out, shut down and othered as a queer, working-class teacher, immigrant and refugee."--Publisher.

First published in 1941 and long unavailable, this work tells the true story of Korean revolutionary Kim San (Jang Jirak), who left colonized Korea as a teenager to fight against Japanese imperialism and fought alongside Mao's Red Army during the Chinese Revolution. This remarkable memoir brings to vivid life some of the most dramatic events of the period.

The debut English-language collection of one of South Koreas most distinctive and accomplished sci-fi authors

Gravestones hatch political critiques and tomatoes resist being eaten in the wildly surreal and funny stories of Genpei Akasagawa, a giant of the Japanese avant-gardeThere is a small but potent club of authors‿Miranda July and Patti Smith are both members‿who were renowned artists long before they became writers. Genpei Akasagawa was already a giant of the Japanese contemporary art world when he began writing these stories, which earned him Japan‿s two most prestigious book awards. In these stories, ostensibly quiet tales of a single dad in 1970s Tokyo, a doorknob practices radical politics, a peeled tomato smarts in pain, raw oysters tick like time bombs and gravestones provide a critique of capitalism. After reading I Guess All We Have Is Freedom, you will never be able to look at a sliding door, a rubber band or a plastic gutter the same way again. In spite of their suburban settings, the stories here are more radical than the most cosmopolitan contemporary art. Or as the protagonist puts it: “The whole art thing is a little played out at this point. Nowadays, it‿s all about buying gutters. Going out to buy a gutter on a sunny day.â€?Genpei Akasegawa (1937-2014) was a rare phenomenon, an artist who successfully transitioned from the avant-garde to the larger realm of popular culture. Akasegawa emerged on the Japanese art scene around 1960, starting in the radical Anti-Art movement and becoming a member of the seminal artist collectives Neo Dada and Hi Red Center. The epic piece Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident (1963-74), which involved a real-life police investigation and trial, cemented his place as an inspired conceptualist. Hyperart: Thomasson (Kaya Press, 2010), a collection of musings on art that the city itself makes, marks a crucial turning point in his metamorphosis from subculture to pop-culture status. Also an accomplished author writing under the penname Katsuhiko Otsuji, in 1981 he won Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, for his story “Dad's Gone,â€? translated into English here for the first time in this volume.

"Both playful and wryly observant, Ed Lin's YA-debut explores coming-of-age in the Asian diaspora while navigating relationships through race, class, and young love. David Tung, our nerd-hero, is a Chinese American high-school student who works in his family's restaurant, competes for top grades at his regular high school located in an upscale, Asian-majority New Jersey suburb, and attends weekend Chinese school in NYC's working-class Chinatown. While David faces parental pressures to get As and conform to cultural norms and expectations, he's caught up in the complicated world of high school love triangles--and amid these external pressures is the fear he will die alone, whether he gets into Harvard or not!"--

The film Kiku and Isamu (1959) was one of the first cinematic depictions of mixed-race children in postwar Japan, telling the story of two protagonists facing abandonment by two different Black GI fathers and ostracism from Japanese society. Bringing together studies of the representations of the Hapa Japanese experience in culture, Hapa Japan: Identities & Representations (Volume 2) tackles everything from Japanese and American films like Kiku and Isamu to hybrid graphic novels featuring mixed-race characters. From Muslim Japanese-Pakistani children in a Tokyo public school to "Blasian" youth at the AmerAsian School close to a US military base in Okinawa, the Hapa experience is multiple, and its cultural representations accordingly are equally diverse. This anthology is the first publication to attempt to map this wide range of Hapa representations in film, art and society.

In Accomplice to Memory, Q.M. Zhang pieces together the mystery of her father's exodus from China to the US during the two decades of civil and world war leading up to the 1949 revolution. But after a lifetime of her father's secrets and lies, Zhang's efforts to untangle the truth are thwarted by the distance between generations and her father's growing dementia. One day, late in his life, Zhang's father tells her a story she never heard before, and suddenly, all of his previous stories begin to unravel. Before she can get clarity on the new information, her father is hospitalized. Armed with history books and timelines, Zhang sits at her father's bedside recording accounts of love, espionage and betrayal, attempting to parse out the truth. Part memoir, novel and historical documentary, this hybrid text explores the silences and subterfuge of an immigrant parent, and the struggles of the second generation to understand the first.

Follows the lives of Filipino youth in a downtrodden immigrant neighborhood in 1970s Hawaii.

In locations ranging from the archives of Imperial China to a rare book shop in Mexico City, a Chinese American historian discovers six anonymous documents in Spanish and Chinese, and constructs them into a years-long correspondence between the Chinese Emperor Wanli and Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote. Utilizing his vast historical knowledge and linguistic abilities, the historian draws connections across the disparate geography of the 17th century. As in his acclaimed previous novel, The Beginning of the East, Max Yeh remaps literary conventions, sending ripples through the idea of historical fiction in the vein of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Max Yeh (born 1937) has taught at the University of California, Irvine, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and New Mexico State University. He lives in the New Mexico mountains with his wife and daughter, where he works on a wide range of subjects including literary theory, linguistics, art history and science.

Described by Bob Holman as "Li Po in drag, the voice of New America," Koon Woon exploded onto the poetry scene in the late 1990s. Largely self-taught, and struggling with both mental illness and homelessness, Seattle-based Woon wrote about the back alleys and tenement rooms on the margins of immigrant culture. His first collection, "The Truth in Rented Rooms "(included in this volume), won a PEN poetry prize and earned praise from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Garrison Keillor. "Water Chasing Water" is Woon's second collection, and continues his exploration of loneliness and memory with poems and essays that seek out "This light / Without which existence is not detectable."

"Lament in the night (originally published as: Yoru ni nageku, by Sodosha in Los Angeles, California)"--T.p. verso.

Hari Alluri has been described by US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera as a writer who "carries a new, quiet brush of multi-currents, of multi-worlds to paint this holographic life-scape." In The Flayed City, he offers an intimate look into the lives of city dwellers and immigrants in a collection of charged poems that sweep together "an archipelago song" scored by memory and landscape, history and mythology, desire and loss. Driven by what is residual--displacement, family, violent yet delicate masculinity, undervalued yet imperative work--Alluri's lines quiver with the poet's distinctive rendering of praise and lament steeped with "gravity and blood" where "the smell of ants being born surrounds us" and "city lights form constellations // invented to symbolize war." The Flayed City offers a powerful glimpse into a secondary world whose cities, cultural histories and trajectories are hybrids or "immigrated" versions of this one.

Capturing the 1990s independent film scene and art world through a collection of interviews and writings by Roddy Bogawa along with photographs and other artifacts from his archiveIf Films Could Smell is at once an assemblage of interviews and writings by Roddy Bogawa (born 1962) from his nearly 30 years as a filmmaker and artist, and a time capsule of the independent film scene and art world of the 1990s as told through artifacts, diary entries, letters, emails, photographs, script notes and assorted bric-a-brac from Bogawa's archives. As with many of Bogawa's films, it's a collage that doesn't try to hide its seams, a jumble of ideas both realized and unrealized, an exploded diagram and a manifesto. The title conveys his interests in personal and cultural memory, and how these intersect with one's identity. Bogawa's work has been variously described as "experimental," "Asian American" and "independent cinema." This volume lays out these labels and dissects them, sometimes humorously. Straddling genres, If Films Could Smell is a document of possibility and provocation.

Kazim Ali's wildly inventive novel The Secret Room asks: how does one create a life of meaning in the face of loneliness and alienation from one's own family, culture or even sense of self? In the space of a single day, the lives of four people converge and diverge in ways they themselves may not even measure. Sonia Chang, a violinist, prepares for a concert. Rizwan Syed, a yoga teacher, makes one last panicked attempt at reconciliation with his family. Jody Merchant tries to balance a stressful work life with a dream she abandoned long ago. Pratap Patel trudges through his life trying to ignore the pain he still feels at old losses. The experiences of these four characters, woven together in the manner of a string quartet, together create a raw, fluid composition. Kazim Ali (born 1971) is an American poet, novelist, essayist and professor. Born in the UK to parents of Indian descent, and raised in Canada and the US, Ali is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. He cofounded the independent press Nightboat Books.

Hiroshi Kono is eight years old and only just beginning to question the racial and economic inequities he sees around him, when he and his family--along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans--are packed off to a concentration camp run by the US government. The harsh and barren world of the Arizona desert where Hiroshi and his family find themselves sets sibling against sibling, parent against child and neighbor against neighbor in a complex grappling with duty and disappointment that will reverberate through the ensuing decades. Sexual initiation, kabuki tales, jazz clubs and alcoholism form the backdrop against which Hiroshi, his siblings and his parents struggle to define themselves. Whether describing Hiroshi's tumultuous postwar coming of age or excavating generational grievances exacerbated by internment, Gene Oishi gives heartbreaking and at times humorous context to the life of a family set adrift by its wartime experiences.

It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor and even cheaper entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Catherine Liu's 1997 novel "Oriental Girls Desire Romance"--now reprinted by Kaya Press--is a young Chinese-American woman who skirts the edges of New York privilege. A refugee both from her Ivy League education and a family of Maoist ideologues, she navigates the city as a slacker, temp and exotic dancer, outmaneuvering the ever-present lure of Prozac. Liu's debut novel recalls the seedy street atmosphere of Bette Gordon's 1984 film "Variety" through a narrator that is perceptive, funny and unhinged.

Glimmering with candor and dead-on humor, this memoir tells the story of the meteoric rise of Japanese American filmmaker Jon Moritsugu (born 1965), from 1980s teenage delinquent in Honolulu to Ivy League slumster to take-no-prisoners movie auteur with a serious attitude problem.

Coming from a country renowned for its hi-tech industry and ultraspeed broadband yet mired in the unfinished Cold War, South Korean science fiction offers us fresh perspectives on global technoindustrial modernity and its human consequences. The book also features a critical introduction, an essay on SF fandom in South Korea, and contextualizing information and annotations for each story.

Twenty-one years after Kaya Press first published Sesshu Foster's City Terrace Field Manual, a powerful collection of prose poems that map the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Foster's childhood, comes a new collection of poetry and prose that takes on gentrification, modernization and globalization, as told from the same corner of this rapidly changing metropolis.Winner the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, 2019 These poems are, in the poet's words: "Postcards written with ocotillo and yucca. Gentrification of your face inside your sleep. Privatization of identity, corners, and intimations. Wars on the nerve, colors, breathing. Postcard poems of early and late notes, mucilage, American loneliness. Postcard poems of slopes, films of dust and crows. Incarceration nation 'Wish You Were Here' postcards 35 cents emerge from gentrified pants. You can't live like this. Postcards sent into the future. You can't live here now; you must live in the future, in the City of the Future."Poet, teacher and community activist Sesshu Foster (born 1957) was born and raised in East Los Angeles. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and returned to LA to continue teaching, writing and community organizing. His third collection of poetry, World Ball Notebook (2009), won an American Book Award and an Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. Foster is the author of the speculative-fiction novel Atomik Aztex (2005), which won the Believer Book Award and imagines an America free of European colonizers.